The Power of Sexuality

When considering Asian American studies as an intellectual and political tradition, the title of this article takes on a three-fold meaning. The power of sexuality names at once the pervasive discourse of sexuality within this tradition, the dialectical relations between that discourse and other structures of power, and the utility of the category “sexuality” for analysis. The field organizes a vast array of knowledge through sexuality. This is not a recent development; since the founding of the field, Asian Americanists have made sexuality part of the way they think and write about the way power is organized, exercised, and lived in the United States. However, while the economic, political, and social conditions of Asian America have changed over the past thirty years, the framework for thinking about sexuality has not. Today’s Asian Americanists continue to think about sexuality in terms developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in the writing of the Asian American movement. ¹ This striking continuity is a problem for the field — a dated yet familiar politics of sexuality is both widely available in Asian American studies and dangerously unacknowledged.

In the sense developed by feminists, queer studies scholars, and historians of sexuality, the term “sexuality” is the name of a category. ² The things so categorized and the categorizing scheme itself vary among cultures and over time. Power operates in part by dividing the world into sexual life and non-sexual realms of life, erotic and non-erotic bodies, deviant and normal desires, privileged and penalized sexual activities. ³ Although often represented as inevitable, apolitical, and transhistorical, a culture’s particular organization of sexuality is constructed in and through social, political relations; so too are these relations shaped by sexuality. ⁴ From this point of view, the politics of sexuality are not limited to the restriction, denial, or freedom of one’s sexual preferences; sexuality is thoroughly political. The parts of the body considered sexy, the behaviors considered sexual activity, the people and objects with which one performs sexual activities, the places in which sexual activities may acceptably be performed, or the impact of sexual activities on one’s economic or political life — in the culture of the United States, these aspects of sexuality are part of the social relations of production. ⁵ Articulated with systems of race and class, with logics of nation, and with the organization of gender, contemporary sexuality is organized to produce “the social” and to reproduce capitalist divisions of labor and profit. ⁶ As a category for analysis, sexuality enables a fruitful examination of the way power works and of the kinds of change imaginable.

Yet too often the word “sexuality” is used in Asian American studies as a euphemism for something else: orgasm, vaginal-penile intercourse, homosexual existence, sexual identities. Within the more rigorous framework I wish to develop, this use of the term as a euphemism or code word for any single thing naturalizes other aspects of sexuality and obscures their political work. For example, the assertion that Asian Americans don’t write or talk about sexuality implies that discussions of immigration and marriage, anti-miscegenation laws, dating and socialization, prostitutes, political eunuchs, and standards of beauty are not also, to some degree, discussions of sexuality. ⁷ It also implies that the field’s impressive research and writing about orgasms, vaginal-penile intercourse, homosexual existence, and sexual identities is, somehow, not Asian American. We can get farther by acknowledging that Asian American studies invests this category with a great deal of power when using it as problem, explanation, and metaphor than we can by considering sex as a taboo, broken by those who have it. It is time to think about the political work sexuality does and has done for the field.

This essay is part of a larger project on sexuality, writing, and racial formation. It has three parts. First, I outline one possible use of the category of sexuality for Asian American studies by pointing to the unremarked abundance of writing about sexuality in the movement press. I argue that this writing was crucial to the emergence of an Asian...