Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian AmericaRacial 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. |
Contents
1 | |
Photography and National History in China Men and Donald Duk | 35 |
Queer Childhood in The Shoyu Kid | 104 |
Divided Belief in M Butterfly | 137 |
Four Male Hysteria Real and Imagined in Eat a Bowl of Tea and Pangs of Love | 167 |
Queerness and Diaspora in Asian American Studies | 204 |
Notes | 229 |
Bibliography | 267 |
283 | |
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Ah Goong Aiiieeeee Amerasia Journal Ameri American male subjectivity Asian American cultural Asian American identity Asian American male Asian American studies Bowl of Tea boys Butterfly Chin's China Chinatown Chinese American Chinese American male citizenship critical critique David discourse displaced dominant Donald Duk dreams dreamwork Eat a Bowl exclusion fantasy female Feminism fetishism Frank Chin Gallimard gender given-to-be-seen global Goong hetero heterosexuality and whiteness homosexual Hwang hysterical identification immigrant Itchy Japanese American labor Lacan Lawson Fusao Inada look Louie's Loy's mainstream male body male hysteria Maxine Hong Kingston mirror stage model minority narrative nese normative Pangs of Love penis phallus photograph political primal scene Promontory Summit psychic psychoanalytic queerness and diaspora race Racial Castration racial difference racism railroad reality Routledge sexual and racial sexual difference Shawn Wong Shoyu Shoyu Kid Sigmund Freud Silverman social Stat stereotype symbolic theory tion U.S. nation-state unconscious vision white male Wong York