301 pages

English

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Racial Castration , livre ebook

Duke University Press - Eng David L. Eng

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301 pages

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Racial Castration, the first book to bring together the fields of Asian American studies and psychoanalytic theory, explores the role of sexuality in racial formation and the place of race in sexual identity. David L. Eng examines images-literary, visual, and filmic-that configure past as well as contemporary perceptions of Asian American men as emasculated, homosexualized, or queer.Eng juxtaposes theortical discussions of Freud, Lacan, and Fanon with critical readings of works by Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Lonny Kaneko, David Henry Hwang, Louie Chu, David Wong Louie, Ang Lee, and R. Zamora Linmark. While situating these literary and cultural productions in relation to both psychoanalytic theory and historical events of particular significance for Asian Americans, Eng presents a sustained analysis of dreamwork and photography, the mirror stage and the primal scene, and fetishism and hysteria. In the process, he offers startlingly new interpretations of Asian American masculinity in its connections to immigration exclusion, the building of the transcontinental railroad, the wartime internment of Japanese Americans, multiculturalism, and the model minority myth. After demonstrating the many ways in which Asian American males are haunted and constrained by enduring domestic norms of sexuality and race, Eng analyzes the relationship between Asian American male subjectivity and the larger transnational Asian diaspora. Challenging more conventional understandings of diaspora as organized by race, he instead reconceptualizes it in terms of sexuality and queerness.

Sujets

États-Unis

Ethnic studies

USA

Sociologie, société et politique

Informations

Publié par	Duke University Press
Date de parution	20 mars 2001
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780822381020
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1448€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

RACIAL CASTRA-TION

P E R V E R S E

M O DE R N I T I E S

A series edited by

Judith Halberstam

and Lisa Lowe

RACIAL CASTRA-TION M A N AG I N G

M A S C U L I N I T Y

I N

A S I A N A M E R I C A

DAVID L. ENG

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Durham and London 

Typeset in Scala by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

appear on the last printed

page of this book.

CONTENTS

,vii

, Racial Castration

, I’ve Been (Re)Working on the Railroad: Photography and National History in China MenandDonald Duk

, Primal Scenes: Queer Childhood in ‘‘The Shoyu Kid’’

, Heterosexuality in the Face of Whiteness: Divided Belief inM. Butterﬂy

, Male Hysteria—Real and Imagined—in Eat a Bowl of TeaandPangs of Love

, Out Here and Over There: Queerness and Diaspora in Asian American Studies

,

,

,

PREFACE

Arnold Genthe was a German doctor of philosophy who immigrated to the United States in  and settled in San Francisco as the tutor to the son of a wealthy baron. An avid photographer, Genthe took hundreds of photos on glass negatives of San Francisco’s Chinatown before the dev-astating  earthquake and ﬁres leveled it to rubble and ashes. Indeed, Genthe’s well-known images of Chinatown’s ‘‘bachelor society’’ helped to establish his long and prosperous career as an acclaimed landscape and portrait photographer. Ross Alley, or ‘‘The Street of Gamblers (by day),’’ the cover image ofRacial Castration,might be said to describe an encounter between two immigrant groups in America: the German doc-tor from Hamburg and his anonymous Chinese male subjects. In this encounter between the photographer and the photographed a world ap-pears. This world emerges in the instant of a ﬂash—in the image of a photograph captured for history and preserved for time.Racial Castra-tionexplores the creation and management of images—visual and other-wise—that conﬁgure past as well as contemporary perceptions of Asian American male subjectivity.

This book has had numerous supporters to whom I owe much grati-tude. First, I would like to thank those family, friends, colleagues, and mentors whose limitless generosity, warmth, kindness, humor, and bril-liance provide an enabling supply of personal inspiration and intellec-tual support: Bernard Arias, Christina Bernstein, Judith Butler, Deborah Cheung, Lily Chinn, Deborah Dowell, Connie Eng, Carolina González, Elizabeth Grainger, Shinhee Han, David Hirsch, Alice Y. Hom, Michele Hong, JeeYeun Lee, Lisa Lowe, Sanda Lwin, Farhad Karim, David Kazan-jian, Holly Kim, Sharon Liebowitz, John Martin, Susette Min, Rob Miotke, Mae Ngai, Judith Oh, Catherine Prendergast, Eric Reyes, James Runsdorf, Teemu Ruskola, Josie Saldaña, Tazuko Shibusawa, Kaja Sil-verman, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Kendall Thomas, Sophie, Leti, and Serena Volpp, Priscilla Wald, Eric Wallner, Dorothy Wang, Timothy Wat-son, Deborah White, Sau-ling C. Wong, and Stephen Wong. At Columbia, I have a remarkable group of colleagues whose encour-

agement makes my daily work not just possible but enjoyable: Rachel Adams, Victor Bascara, Ritu Birla, Marcellus Blount, Julie Crawford, David Damrosch, Suzanne Daly, Jewelnel Davis, Gina Dent, Ann Doug-las, Robert Ferguson, Joan Ferrante, Gayatri Gopinath, Joy Hayton, Ursula Heise, Robert Hanning, Jean Howard, David Kastan, Karl Kroe-ber, Amy Martin, Martin Meisel, Jodi Melamed, Christia Mercer, Edward Mendelson, Michael Mallick, Rosalind Morris, Zita Nunes, Gary Oki-hiro, Robert O’Meally, Margaret Pappano, Sonali Perera, Julie Peters, Kate Ramsey, Chandan Reddy, Jim Shapiro, Sandhya Shukla, Isabel Thompson, Cynthia Tolentino, Elliott Trice, Gauri Viswanathan, and Alan Yang. I am lucky to be part of several inspiring community-based and politi-cal organizations in New York City, among them the Asian American Writers’ Workshop () and the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (). In addition, I have the remarkable good fortune to belong to an enchanting downtown queer reading group, whose members include Henry Abelove, Ed Cohen, Douglas Crimp, Ann Cvetkovich, Lisa Dug-gan, Licia Fiol-Matta, Beth Freeman, Phillip Brian Harper, Janet Jakob-sen, Martin Manalansan, Anna McCarthy, José Muñoz, Ann Pellegrini, and Patricia White. Finally, I would like to thank some wonderful inter-locutors for their sustaining conversations in in-between spaces: Mark Chiang, Yvette Christiansë, Jeﬀrey Fort, Judith Halberstam, Grace Hong, Anne McKnight, Linda Norton, Karen Su, and Eric Zinner. I am grateful for the excellent research assistance of Nick Boggs, Judith Goldman, Ziv Neeman, and Naomi Reed, who also prepared the index, as I am indebted to Esra Ackan and Jack Tchen for their help with the images for this book. Chapter three and the epilogue were published previously in diﬀerent forms. Chapter three appeared inQ & A: Queer in Asian America,edited by David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, ): –; and the epilogue appeared in Social Text– (fall-winter ): –. In addition, a small portion of chapter two appeared inCritical Mass: A Journal of Asian American Cul-tural Criticism. (spring ): –. I thank Temple University Press, Social Text,andCritical Massfor allowing me to include this revised ma-terial, as well as the Columbia University Council for Research in the Humanities, which provided a summer grant toward the completion of this book. Finally, I would like to thank my editors at Duke University Press, Ken Wissoker, Katie Courtland, and Jon Director, for piloting this project, as well as Amy Ruth Buchanan for her beautiful design and Jan Opdyke for her meticulous copyediting. This book is dedicated to my parents, Philip B. and Lucy W. H. Eng, for their love and support of my scholarly dispositions.

viii



INTRODUCTION

Racial Castration

I am an Oriental. And being an Oriental,

I could never be completely a man.

 ,M. Butterﬂy

Being Oriental: the antithesis of manhood, of masculinity? So declares Song Liling to the judge, to the law, under oath, and in a suit. The derobed Chinese opera diva/transvestite/spy attempts to explain to the pontiﬁ-cating bureaucrat how it is that Gallimard, the white male diplomat, can mistake him less for a rug than a woman: ‘‘The West thinks of itself as masculine—big guns, big industry, big money—so the East is femi-1 nine—weak, delicate, poor.’’ Such is the particular crossing of sexual and racial fantasy that compels Gallimard’s colonial world order, a fan-tastic reality in which theOxford English Dictionarywould deﬁneOrien-talas ‘‘submission,’’ as ‘‘weakness,’’ as ‘‘woman.’’ Such is the fantasy that makesOrientalandmasculineantithetical terms in Gallimard’s universe, a place in which an ‘‘Oriental . . . could never be completely a man.’’ In such marvelous narratives of penile privilege, the Westerner monopo-lizes the part of the ‘‘top’’; the Asian is invariably assigned the role of the ‘‘bottom.’’ For twenty-ﬁve years,Aiiieeeee!editors Frank Chin, Jeﬀery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong have bemoaned the predicament of Asian American masculinity in similar terms: ‘‘It is an article of white liberal American faith today that Chinese men, at their best, are eﬀeminate closet queens like Charlie Chan and, at their worst, 2 are homosexual menaces like Fu Manchu.’’ In ‘‘Looking for My Penis,’’ Richard Fung summarizes the phenomenon even more bluntly: ‘‘Asian 3 and anus are conﬂated.’’ Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian Americaexplores