Empress Wu (aka MJ Tom)’s Living Document (2021-present) is an ongoing love poem to her partner, another Asian sex worker. Carved line by line into the bodies of her friends, lovers, clients, and Wu herself, the work utilizes the queer leathersex practice of cutting and scarification to explore queer love through a syntax of poetry and violence. As an Asian American scholar and former sex worker, I have been writing about Wu’s work since 2020. I performed Living Document with Wu in November 2024 at the Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association in Baltimore. Taking on the persona of the Researcher with Wu performing as the Subject, the performance consists of me cutting a line of the poem into their body under their instruction while an academic audience observed the scene.

In Living Document, I enacted what many would consider harm, but which was intended as a literalization of the wounding that can occur in the study of minoritized subjects. Wu’s wound is also a material metaphor for the shared histories and traumas that bond them to other Asian American sex workers. Yet the physical wound she bore in Living Document did not demand that she reveal her personal investments in these histories and traumas. Instead, it drew attention away from her, the subject, and instead toward me, the researcher, and toward the intentions of the academy.

Rather than critiquing academic extractivism or healing its wounds, Living Document considers how such a wound might be a productive space of ethical experimentation. By involving myself in the precise queer Asian performance practice I study, Living Document lured me to the ethical limits of embodied scholarship, opening up questions of complicity, risk, consent, and reciprocity in research.  

With thanks to Kassandra Sparks, who chaired this session at ASA, and to our respondents Avgi Saketopoulou and Eng-Ben Lim.