Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias by Eng-Beng Lim (review)

Eng-Beng Lim’s book Rice Queens and Brown Boys concerns the persistence and resonance of transactions (artistic, economic, and sexual) between rice queens (older Western men with a preference for younger Asian men) and brown boys (those younger Asian men): It is, Lim says, “The white man/native dyad that organizes the production and reception of Asian performance writ large” (p. 4). Lim follows this duo in its various literal and metaphorical iterations from Bali in the 1930s to contemporary Singapore and finally to the United States. Perhaps best viewed as a postcolonial fantasia on the meaning and importance of the dyad, the book situates itself at the intersection of history, gender studies, theatre criticism, and performance studies, moving freely among these fields (as well as anthropology and tourism studies). In its scope and denseness, Lim’s book is by turns fascinating, frustrating, liberating, and short-sighted.

The first chapter of Lim’s book focuses on Bali, specifically the dance form kecak and the role that gay German expatriate painter Walter Spies and other gay Western artists played in its creation. Many writers, including Adrian Vickers, Unni Wikkan, Kathy Foley, and the current writer, have traced the development of Bali as a perceived paradise through the years and its subsequent influences on performance, as well as the dissonances between Bali’s image and its reality. Because of the early and influential involvement of such gay artists as Walter Spies and the composer Colin McPhee, the island has also been regarded as something of a locus of queerness, and it is this element of Bali’s image that Lim foregrounds. In focusing on “the colonial dyad” (p. 41), Lim supplants the more traditional notion of Bali as an exotic woman (limned, for example, by Adrian Vickers). Returning to the kecak, Lim finds in the dance an inescapable gay erotics: “Within the communal, concentric circles, bare-chested young men enact variations of sensuous bodily movements, from subtle, rhythmic throbs to sudden, jostling strokes. … There is palpable vigor as heated, tactile male bodies pulsating without end channel the vibrations of each others kinetic emissions” (p. 65). Like many before him, Lim eroticizes Balinese dance in heated prose, but in a queer context, in order to bring out the schema of native dancer and his white exploiter.

Perhaps in fact kecak was put together under Spies’s curatorship (as well as that of his Balinese collaborators) as a deliberate display of homoeroticism (although that seems doubtful), and obviously some homoerotic elements remain. More likely, he did so in an attempt to create something he thought an audience would find entertaining. But today these elements seem nearly irrelevant, and perhaps they always were. Certainly there are still a lot of topless Balinese men in kecak, yet there is more going on than mere sweaty homoerotic display. Equally compelling (for instance) are the all-female versions of kecak performed weekly in Ubud, presenting a sort of counternarrative to Lim’s thesis. And even the all-male versions of kecak are hardly showcases for attractive young men, including as they do older men, plump men, bald men—in short, a cross section of Balinese men without shirts, rather than the young, wordless, agencyless native boys Lim imagines. As with other dances, kecak also plays an important economic function, sometimes involving all male residents of the village, with performance revenue used for temple upkeep.

Lim’s point is to restore the importance of the rice queen/brown boy in the creation of kecak: “An understanding of Asian encounters in a colonial transnational frame is not merely incomplete but lacking in its central substance if it does not take account of queer couplings exemplified by the white man/native boy’s conceptual, historical, and sexual couplings” (p. 8). And yet, Lim’s approach seems to me narrow, not only because of its highly speculative nature, but because of its limited view of Balinese...