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Reviewed by:
  • Geisha of a Different Kind: Race and Sexuality in Gaysian America by C. Winter Han
  • Shinsuke Eguchi
Geisha of a Different Kind: Race and Sexuality in Gaysian America By C. Winter Han New York University Press. 2015. 256 pp. $26 paper.

CWinter Han examines negotiations of identity and practices of belonging among gay Asian American men in a book titled Geisha of a Different Kind: Race and Sexuality in Gaysian America. Han critiques the idea that the ideological and historical effects of Orientalism—subordinating, domesticating, and differentiating Asian people, cultures, and traditions—are the core of (re) producing discursive and material conditions of men who identify with gay and Asian in US America. Han also pays attention to the particular and nuanced complexity of gay Asian American men navigating multiple cultural spaces, including mainstream US America, LGBT (lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender) America, and Asian America. I believe that Han makes important contributions to the interdisciplinary developments of Asian queer studies as he explicates the racialized, gendered, sexualized, and classed knowledge embedded in the material realities of gay Asian American men. Simultaneously, there yet remain multiple intellectual holes that require additional investigations. Therefore, I share my careful review of this book next.

Han argues that Asian American men are historically situated as feminine, wifey, and foreign Others in the gay sexual marketplaces, which value Whiteness, able-bodied muscle physiques, youthfulness, and hypersexual activity. Consequently, Asian American men are always seen as sexually unattractive and undesirable in the dominant community. Even when some of them try to dismantle the stereotypes through the hypermasculinization of their Asian bodies, the dominant gay community negatively evaluates their counter-performances as not White enough. However, the dominant gay community only demands the hyperfeminized performances of gay and Asian as a fetishized subcultural category for the older male seeking a younger male. I can personally, intellectually, and politically relate to this line of Han's argument about being gay and Asian.

Still, I wonder whether this argument may also be limited. I maintain that sexuality is multiple, unstable, and fluid across other social positionings, such as race/ethnicity, nationality, class, language, coloniality, and body in the historical and ideological contexts. From this perspective, I call into question the seemingly [End Page 1] singular, stable, and essentialized notion of a gay–straight binary surrounding Han's theorizing of being gay and Asian. Some queer-of-color-studies scholars, such as Roderick A. Ferguson, Jose E. Muñoz, Jeffery McCune, and Marlon B. Ross, critique that the notion of coming out is the western/US American/White paradigm and modernity of (homo)sexuality. Accordingly, I question whether Asian American men engaging in male same-sex sexual desires could be easily assumed to adapt the label "gay" to name their queer sexual identities and experiences.

The omission of considering this question is a consequence of Han's theoretical assumption that everyday performances of being gay and Asian are only (re) produced for the White homonormative phallic economy of desire. More precisely, Han pays specific attention to the ways in which queer erotics of Asian–White sexual encounters impact gay Asian American identifications and subjectivities. However, there have always been complex and alternative forms of queer intercultural relationality in which Asian American men actually participate. I have personally encountered various forms of intercultural, interracial, interethnic, and/or international mixings, such as Asian–Asian, Asian–Black, Asian–Latino, and Asian–Middle Eastern. These relational mixings offer a site of potentiality in which queer erotics of Asian–White sexual encounters can be intellectually and politically rewritten and remade in the gay sexual marketplaces.

For example, Han mentions that most Asian American men competitively seek the small numbers of White men who admire being gay and Asian. To counter-identify with the phenomenon, Han introduces some Asian American men who prefer not to participate in the gay sexual competitions driven by internalized desires for Whiteness. They engage in Asian–Asian relationality to resist the historical racializations of Asian bodies in the gay sexual marketplaces. I argue that this shifting attention is an important subject that must be carefully unpacked further. The concept of Asian America is complex, multiple, and dynamic. Various identity...

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