Beyond #OscarsSoWhite and the Gaysian/Geisha Invective

In the weeks leading up to the Eighty-Eighth Academy Awards ceremony, industry pundits, critics, and bloggers alike took to the trending hashtag #OscarsSoWhite to protest the egregious exclusion of actors and artists of color in key categories. Though the celebration of white artistic genius was an annual occurrence, the broader “diversity” problem in Hollywood seemed too much to handle in 2016. As prominent black actors and creatives called for a boycott, the Twittersphere and other mainstream media outlets were abuzz with heated discussions about race, equity, and representation. Host Chris Rock began the highly anticipated evening with a blistering attack on the industry’s racialized erasures, using his signature humor to deliver sharp critiques of Hollywood’s privileged blind spots. For the Asians and Asian Americans in the audience, however, the award ceremony became another kind of lightning rod, as they found themselves channeled ever so casually as the Asian Joke by Rock and another presenter, Sacha Baron Cohen. Ironically, the casual reiteration of racial stereotypes producing the condition of visibility for Asians as “very hardworking little yellow people with tiny dongs. You know—the Minions” or as the infantilized model minority (represented by three adorable Asian kids standing in for adult accountants from PricewaterhouseCoopers) exemplified the very blind spot about race with which Hollywood was charged. Why was the evening’s racial squirm-fest staged by Rock for white Hollywood so off the mark around Asians even with the heightened consciousness around race?

The “Asian fiasco” at the Oscars, or the use of pernicious Asian stereotypes with a cute cover as an emollient for Hollywood’s racial injury, is a lesson in the form of racial performativity at the heart of C. Winter Han’s Geisha of a Different Kind: Race and Sexuality in Gaysian America. Han’s background in journalism and graduate training in sociology, anthropology, and social welfare shine through in this highly readable monograph about the vicissitudes of life in contemporary gaysian (gay and Asian) America. The book uses an innovative combination of primarily empirical methods that include participant observation and autoethnography (involving Han himself as one of the very subjects in question), as well as cultural analyses of relevant media, images, and texts that include television shows, plays, and magazines like Advocate and Out. At once an anthropological, archival, and analytical effort, it weaves a story of transnational and diasporic gaysian lives in a distinctively US context.

With questions of gaysian abjection and agency hovering over the project, Han interrogates how Asian masculinity is consistently mediated by Western power, particularly around what he argues is the compulsory and historic feminization of Asian men (both gay and straight). In the provocative terms of the book’s title, “we” are all “geishas of a different kind.” To prove the claim that the legacy of “western domination and control” (17) continues to rear its ugly, orientalist head around popular representations of Asian masculinity, the book provides a wide range of evidence that often has the effect of indicting the social and cultural economy of its racism or unconscious bias. The deep-seated perception of the gaysian or straight Asian male who cannot be anything but a feminine bottom or an ethnic caricature is a key example.

For readers who are either oblivious to or incredulous about gay and Asian denigration, many of Han’s critiques—already so familiar to scholars in the fields of queer, Asian/American, and postcolonial studies—will be eye-opening, particularly given the book’s sociological heft. In this regard, as disheartening as it is to reencounter scene after scene of everyday subjection, the book’s strategy of inundation about gaysian pain has the rhetorical effect of making what seems so obvious and overwritten the basis for revelation and critique. Thus, the centrality of gay and Asian predicaments in Geishas serves as a corrective to the racial blind spot that Asian and Asian Americans occupy in the national body politic of the United States, which...