T Boy Maid Cafe
2025 - ongoing. In collaboration with my friend and filmmaker Grace Zhang, T Boy Maid Cafe is an exploration of the politics embedded in space and how such space negotiates the conditions of intimacy. Taking a queer and trans departure from the Japanese maid cafes that popped up in the early 2000s, we wanted to think about the neoliberal structures that forclose public space, access to green space, and how space is multiuply class/gendered/raced. If Japanese maid cafes were a transformation of intimacy in response to financial recession and isolating effects of internet culture, then how can we resuscitate intimacy from such strictures? We take denaturalizing the body as a starting point for denaturalizing prescribed social codes that govern how we move about space. We will have our cake and eat it too 🤩
![]()
photo courtesy of Jenevieve Ting
2025 - ongoing. In collaboration with my friend and filmmaker Grace Zhang, T Boy Maid Cafe is an exploration of the politics embedded in space and how such space negotiates the conditions of intimacy. Taking a queer and trans departure from the Japanese maid cafes that popped up in the early 2000s, we wanted to think about the neoliberal structures that forclose public space, access to green space, and how space is multiuply class/gendered/raced. If Japanese maid cafes were a transformation of intimacy in response to financial recession and isolating effects of internet culture, then how can we resuscitate intimacy from such strictures? We take denaturalizing the body as a starting point for denaturalizing prescribed social codes that govern how we move about space. We will have our cake and eat it too 🤩
