Mademoiselle Lychee: Postcolonial hybridity, the posthuman and the postbabe

In Aya Nakamura’s delectable 2013 burlesque performance Mademoiselle Lychee, Lychee, who billed as ‘probably’ the world’s smallest burlesque dancer, lip-synchs to a Japanese ode to love while performing a striptease that reveals her curvaceous–and in theoretical terms–babelicious form. Nakamura is performing as Lychee, and yet it is not her curves that the viewer witnesses.

Lychee is a humanette, a kind of hybrid puppet combining the performer’s head with the puppet’s body. Lychee’s face is Nakamura’s own, Lychee’s body and hair are not. Aya is Japanese, Lychees title is French and she is named after a Chinese fruit. She is strawberry blonde, while her curves might recall curvaceous American pinup ideals. As a constructed, idealised babe, Lychee might be understood as a pneumatic embodiment of a certain kind of colonial and racial hybridity (Bhabha, 1994). But what transgressive potential might dwell in this playful construction of the ideal babe and its racialised aspects? What light might her material construction shed on cultural constructions of babeness?

In this paper I will explore Lychee’s slippery, juicy racial and cultural coding. While we might see Lychee as playing on both Western colonial fetishizations of the Asia, and Asian fetishization of the West, I read a critical potential in how the performance plays with these fetishizations through the impossible figure of the tiny humanette. flirting with cyborg theory (Haraway, 1985) to elucidate the various potentialities of Lychee as cyborg babe. If we understand the concepts of hunkness and babeness in part as technologies by which bodies are disciplined into specific cultural and economic functions, often along racialised, classed and gendered axes, I suggest that this delectable example of humanette babe burlesque might offer a kind of unruly counterpoint, a body which is not a body, a babe who is not a babe. What if Lychee is not only a performance of the posthuman, but also a performance of the postbabe?