how to hobble a young horse

 

"In staged absences of a Chinese cowgirl I create and take on the persona of a Chinese American cowgirl avatar—a figure I perform in spaces steeped in U.S. Western frontier mythology. The American West as a space of expansionist transition has provided much of the resonant images and rhetoric for Americanness, the American cultural imaginary, colonialist tropes, and the continued political exploitation of such discourses. Having lived in Marfa, Texas as the only full-time resident of Chinese descent for almost three years, I have a history of situating myself within the mythological West. My time in the American West steered me towards reckoning with harmful historical and residual racial traumas that prompted further dissecting of the construction of racialized exclusion within the American West." - stephanie mei huang