UC San Diego

This dissertation examines the uneasy fit between geography and racialized, gendered laboring bodies across Global Asias, with a focus on Hong Kong, Singapore, and mainland China. Rather than treating Asia as a flat territorial surface, I approach it as a 3-D, volumetric formation expanding across land, water, air, and digital axes. This geo-technological expansion depends on migrant and diasporic laboring bodies, whose varied forms of work shape how they move through, inhabit, and sense the landscape. Yet they are rendered a sliding anomaly: indispensable to urban ideals of hygiene, order, and progress, but readily recast as disorderly, contagious, or threatening, their position shifting across this broad spectrum as conditions demand. I theorize this unstable body–space relation as a geo-somatic misfit, in which bodies and landscapes alternately align and misalign, revealing multiple sensory, affective, and material relations to place.Drawing on urban planning maps, literature, film, and visual art, I trace laboring bodies and body–space misfits from the 1970s into contemporary and speculative futures. Across three chapters, I move through interconnected sites in Global Asias. Chapter 1 examines Hong Kong’s urban mythology of gong tau, or Southeast Asian sorcery, and the rise of erotic hex cinema from the 1970s to the 2000s. I situate this occult imaginary within Hong Kong’s changing architecture and cross-border ethnosexual economies, tracing a geospatial morphology that binds migrant sex workers to evolving building forms and public health discourses of disease. Chapter 2 turns to Singapore’s reclaimed landscapes and migrant construction workers’ remapping practices as forms of counter-volume. Chapter explores speculative Asian geographies, from a fused robotic Asia to expanding cyberspace, and the multiplication of labor across organic, synthetic, and digital bodies. These sites are not isolated dots but nodes within broader misfit geographies, where laboring bodies expose the uneasy fit between local landscapes and Global Asia.