Lady Trieu, The Matter of Memory, And the Feminist Work of The Surface in Watchmen (2019).

This essay pursues an analysis of form through Lady Trieu, theVietnamese American villain of Damon Lindelof’s hit HBO show Watchmen(2019). I argue that a formal reading of Lady Trieu and her mother/daughterBian reframes the Asiatic woman’s complicity and injury within the violentmachinations of the U.S. state by pivoting from a politics of presence to ametacritique of historical narration. Rather than theorize an ontology forAsiatic femininity, I argue that the Asiatic woman’s recalcitrant materiality—highlighted by Trieu’s gleaming, brittle bodily surface and circulargenealogy—is the mark of an ontological indeterminacy that unsettlesWatchmen (2019)’s at- tempt to absorb the Vietnam War within its reparativenarrative ofU.S. empire. By attending to the specificities and recursions of loss, Asiaticfemininity’s aporetic materiality endeavors in the interpretive task ofspeculating another world, a hermeneutic labor that conditions the creativereproduction of memory. In, with, and on the Vietnamese American woman,this essay argues, the long and slow violences of the American War in Vietnamreturn as the trace of the mother: unforget- table, treacherous, undoing theimage from its edges. This would be the feminist work of the surface, theformal aesthetic strategy of an insistently materialist Asiatic femininity.