UCLA

How to Build a Better Body is a collection of four short stories that explores intimacies of the queer mixed race body through magical, speculative, and fabulist forms—or weirdness. Each of the stories—“1,000-Year-Old Ghosts,” “Real Bodies,” “A Slow Connection,” and “Hunted”—interrogates the complexities of mixed race tropes such as the promise of a post-racial future and the intersections of a queer and mixed race identity. The project as a whole is interested in the interaction between creative and scholarly work, and what possibilities weird or non-normative forms and genres create.