The Hapacalypse?: Gendered Anxieties and Paranoid Essentialism Before #MeToo
The Hapacalypse?: Gendered Anxieties and Paranoid Essentialism Before #MeToo
An investigation into the political, aesthetic, and affective tensions that surround mixed race identity and interracial desire, Torn: Asian/white Life and the Intimacy of Violence (Duke University Press, 2026) traces the ways Asian Americans have either sought to or failed to contend with US imperialism and its unrelenting violence.
In this talk, Professor Anna Storti will read excerpts from Torn, focusing specifically on the Hapacalypse, a theory speculating that Asian/white people in the 21st century will commit apocalyptic levels of violence. The theory originated on the subreddit r/hapas in the mid-2010s, just before the #MeToo Movement went viral and after the larger public learned of serial rapist Daniel Holtzclaw, incel and school shooter Elliot Rodger, and two sexual assault survivors and feminist artists-activists, Chanel Miller and Emma Sulkowicz. Asian Americans with white heritage, all four figures were largely deracinated in public coverage. By refusing that erasure and tracing the imperial residue in each of their stories, the talk frames the Hapacalypse around a larger historical context of multiracial white supremacy, its investment in obscuring legacies of violence, and feminist opposition to that violence.
Anna Storti (PhD ‘20) is Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University where she also teaches in the Asian American and Diaspora Studies Program. She holds a PhD in Women's Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park.