Q & A: Queer in Asian America (review)

Q & A: Queer in Asian America. Edited by David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. Pp. xii + 445. $69.95 (cloth); $27.95 (paper).

I must admit being a bit daunted when Q & A: Queer in Asian America arrived on my desk. It is a substantial book, three years in the making, with twenty-six chapters and more than four hundred pages of text. It has an unconventional style. In some sections, interviews are used verbatim, together with personal testimonies, fiction, art, and more conventional academic prose. However, most chapters are supplemented with adequate and sometimes large accompanying sets of notes and bibliographies, and the collection closes with a select bibliography and a resource guide to queer Asian American organizations in the USA.

As the Asian American experience is necessarily diverse, it is sometimes difficult to discern an overall theme in the contributions, but on closer inspection a unifying argument appears. The dominant theme is the failure of queer theory and activism, which privileges Caucasian sexuality, to incorporate the alien "other" into its rhetoric. The result is an excellent and finely nuanced book that extends considerably the way we think about race and sexuality. The creative shifting of perspective, chapter by chapter, provides the necessary diversity to emphasize that there is neither a single sense of queer nor a single notion of queer Asian America. There are multiple interpretations. To read gay, lesbian, transgender, queer studies too narrowly--through "white" eyes only--misses the essence of contemporary queer thought.

In their Introduction, the editors, David Eng and Alice Hom, challenging the normative boundaries of mainstream queer identity, discuss the Asian American activists and organizations that have emerged since the 1970s. They deconstruct racial theory, questioning the heterosexual assumptions in queer identity, which have provided erroneous models for Asian American identity. The editors state that queer Asian Americans need to articulate a new conception of racial identity, stressing its "heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity," without bifurcating their identities into the racial and the sexual. Eng and Hom suggest that the Asian American studies movement of the 1990s stands in a similar place to second-wave feminism and lesbian/gay activism in the 1960s and '70s. The Asian American image is in part a creation of legal and cultural discourses from the American nation, relating to earlier immigration policies and privileging of dominant sexualities. Elements from the 1980s--"gender studies, AIDS activism, divestment, and multi-culturalism"--have been useful for transforming Asian American studies. These, along with interdisciplinary studies and sharper theoretical foci, have brought queer Asian America to a new level of activism. Just as homosexuality is not simply about sex or sexuality, queer is more than opposition to a compulsory heterosexual matrix. By considering racial difference at the same time as queer politics, normalizing aspects can be challenged and overturned.

Q & A is divided into six parts: "Working Out," "Im/Proper Images," "Keeping Records," "Closets/Margins," "Paternity," and "Out Here and Over There." "Working Out" examines queer Asian American political practices and movements for social justice. The chapters deal with community building, stressing the necessity of developing unifying goals and objectives. Two events featured are the protests against the musical Miss Saigon and California's Proposition 187. "Im/Proper Images" addresses the manner in which normative visual images can both sustain and undercut the ways in which queer Asian Americans identify. Richard Fung's fascinating chapter on the eroticized Asian in gay porn videos best expresses the message of Q & A. Asian men and women are largely absent from the commercial or political imagery of the mainstream gay and lesbian community. In gay porn videos the Asian male is desexualized, usually stereotyped as the passive, submissive geisha, and on the rare occasion when an Asian man fucks a Caucasian, the white man's pleasure is privileged over that of the Asian male. Fung nicely terms this the conflation of "Asian and Anus." These sexual...