lightning pitch

Using a text analysis of Mitski’s discography, interviews, and social media presence (or lack thereof), I hope to analyze patterns of grief, loss, and loneliness that are tied to her artistry. In conversation with Summer Kim Lee’s “Staying In: Mitski, Ocean Vuong, and Asian American Asociality” (2019), I’m interested in how Mitski constructs an asocial performativity as a refusal to be legible within hegemonic categorization. Similarly, I will employ Vivian Huang’s notion of Asian American inscrutability (Surface Relations, 2022) to illuminate how minoritarian artists create alternative ways of being and belonging. Moreover, I want to investigate how this asociality does not preclude kinship ties but rather resists conventional/neoliberal definitions of relationality. To this end, I also want to run another text analysis for themes of love, community, family, and hope. Set athwart each other, I hope to unravel how Mitski’s artistic embodiment can help us rethink identity construction, hegemonic relationality, and societal representation.

In addition, in intertwining academic research and popular culture, I seek to parse out dynamic and ever-expansive modes of engagement between the two spheres. For this project overall, I’m interested in accessibility, openness, and care.