Cultural Studies

Committee Members: Sylvia Chong, Susette Min

Winners:

The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene, by Celine Parrenas Shimizu

Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, by Jasbir Puar

We chose both the Shimizu and the Puar books as the winners for this year’s AAAS Cultural Studies Book Award. Both texts offer important topical and theoretical contributions to the field of Asian American studies and represent new directions in the field of Asian American cultural studies. Both authors focus on sexual representations and their political effects, and more specifically employ sexuality as an analytic conduit to examine forms of racialization. They demonstrate the critical importance of sexuality in critiquing racism, sexism, and nationalism within contemporary political contexts.

Shimizu’s text offers an important intervention into discourses and debates around the “hypersexualized” Asian female body. Building on the body of feminist critique in Asian American studies, Shimizu rereads familiar objects of inquiry (Miss Saigon and Anna May Wong) and introduces provocative material (stag films and gonzo pornography) to explore the bind of Asian female hypersexuality. Her book complicates understandings of pornography as expressive or public fantasy, the formation or status of Asian/American feminism, and the nature of sex work. Shimizu defies a liberal moralism/moral panic by confronting sex, and by doing so engages Kandice Chuh’s directive for Asian American studies to probe the contours of subjection and to claim a “political productive perversity.” Going beyond textual analyses, Shimizu employs ethnographic investigation, archival research, and interviews to offer a multisited and multisituated investigation of Asian female representations in film. One powerful aspect of the text lies in her ability to offer close readings of representations of sex acts, and to write about such representations with the knowledge of a filmmaker and critic. Shimizu goes beyond interpreting the filmic qualities of sex acts to rehearsing politically informed readings of texts to center “race-positive readings.” In this way, Shimizu’s text operates as a pedagogical work that demonstrates how such texts might be read, and displays the numerous possibilities for investigating and thinking about erotic representations. The text exists as an important document of film history, and we believe it will prove to be an essential part of curricula in Asian American studies and gender studies.

Puar’s text engages timely questions about how liberal multiculturalism functions within a post–September 11 United States to create a regime of state violence against brown Muslim-looking bodies. Puar draws from queer theory, feminist theory, and postcolonial theory to offer an important critique of the discourses of Orientalism that queer brown bodies, and how these discourses reinstall a national exceptionalism based around racial exclusion. Her work on homonormative nationalism, or homonationalism, extends Duggan’s coining of the term by figuring in the terrorist as the queered and racialized South Asian/Muslim/Arab American. Puar’s text offers provocative suggestions for how Asian American studies might engage in critiques of nation through critical readings of racialized sexualities, and suggests an approach that refuses essentialist categories. Puar highlights the struggles within Asian American studies to evaluate its own definitions and disciplinary/historical boundaries as it tries to account for South Asian American issues and complexities without simply assimilating it to another flavor of the preexisting definition of Asian American. Her text suggests a move away from identity politics to retain the importance of queerness as social critique, dissent, and resistance.