RACIAL

CASTRA-
TION
 PE R VE R S E

M O DE R N I TI E S

A series edited by

Judith Halberstam

and Lisa Lowe

RACIAL
CASTRA-
TION
MANAGING

MASCULINITY

IN

ASIAN AMERICA

DAVID L. ENG

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Durham and London

2001
 © 2001 Duke University Press
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Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan
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 CONTENTS

preface, vii

introduction, 1
Racial Castration

one, 35
I’ve Been (Re)Working on the Railroad:
Photography and National History in
China Men and Donald Duk

two, 104
Primal Scenes: Queer Childhood in
‘‘The Shoyu Kid’’

three, 137
Heterosexuality in the Face of Whiteness:
Divided Belief in M. Butterfly

four, 167
Male Hysteria—Real and Imagined—in
Eat a Bowl of Tea and Pangs of Love

epilogue, 204
Out Here and Over There: Queerness and
Diaspora in Asian American Studies

notes, 229

bibliography, 267

index, 283
 PREFACE

Arnold Genthe was a German doctor of philosophy who immigrated to

the United States in 1895 and settled in San Francisco as the tutor to the
son of a wealthy baron. An avid photographer, Genthe took hundreds of
photos on glass negatives of San Francisco’s Chinatown before the dev-
astating 1906 earthquake and fires leveled it to rubble and ashes. Indeed,
Genthe’s well-known images of Chinatown’s ‘‘bachelor society’’ helped
to establish his long and prosperous career as an acclaimed landscape
and portrait photographer. Ross Alley, or ‘‘The Street of Gamblers (by
day),’’ the cover image of Racial Castration, might be said to describe an
encounter between two immigrant groups in America: the German doc-
tor from Hamburg and his anonymous Chinese male subjects. In this
encounter between the photographer and the photographed a world ap-
pears. This world emerges in the instant of a flash—in the image of a
photograph captured for history and preserved for time. Racial Castra-
tion explores the creation and management of images—visual and other-
wise—that configure past as well as contemporary perceptions of Asian
American male subjectivity.

This book has had numerous supporters to whom I owe much grati-
tude. First, I would like to thank those family, friends, colleagues, and
mentors whose limitless generosity, warmth, kindness, humor, and bril-
liance provide an enabling supply of personal inspiration and intellec-
tual support: Bernard Arias, Christina Bernstein, Judith Butler, Deborah
Cheung, Lily Chinn, Deborah Dowell, Connie Eng, Carolina González,
Elizabeth Grainger, Shinhee Han, David Hirsch, Alice Y. Hom, Michele
Hong, JeeYeun Lee, Lisa Lowe, Sanda Lwin, Farhad Karim, David Kazan-
jian, Holly Kim, Sharon Liebowitz, John Martin, Susette Min, Rob
Miotke, Mae Ngai, Judith Oh, Catherine Prendergast, Eric Reyes, James
Runsdorf, Teemu Ruskola, Josie Saldaña, Tazuko Shibusawa, Kaja Sil-
verman, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Kendall Thomas, Sophie, Leti, and
Serena Volpp, Priscilla Wald, Eric Wallner, Dorothy Wang, Timothy Wat-
son, Deborah White, Sau-ling C. Wong, and Stephen Wong.
At Columbia, I have a remarkable group of colleagues whose encour-
agement makes my daily work not just possible but enjoyable: Rachel
Adams, Victor Bascara, Ritu Birla, Marcellus Blount, Julie Crawford,
David Damrosch, Suzanne Daly, Jewelnel Davis, Gina Dent, Ann Doug-
las, Robert Ferguson, Joan Ferrante, Gayatri Gopinath, Joy Hayton,
Ursula Heise, Robert Hanning, Jean Howard, David Kastan, Karl Kroe-
ber, Amy Martin, Martin Meisel, Jodi Melamed,Christia Mercer, Edward
Mendelson, Michael Mallick, Rosalind Morris, Zita Nunes, Gary Oki-
hiro, Robert O’Meally, Margaret Pappano, Sonali Perera, Julie Peters,
Kate Ramsey, Chandan Reddy, Jim Shapiro, Sandhya Shukla, Isabel
Thompson, Cynthia Tolentino, Elliott Trice, Gauri Viswanathan, and
Alan Yang.
I am lucky to be part of several inspiring community-based and politi-
cal organizations in New York City, among them the Asian American
Writers’ Workshop (aaww) and the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies
(clags). In addition, I have the remarkable good fortune to belong to
an enchanting downtown queer reading group, whose members include
Henry Abelove, Ed Cohen, Douglas Crimp, Ann Cvetkovich, Lisa Dug-
gan, Licia Fiol-Matta, Beth Freeman, Phillip Brian Harper, Janet Jakob-
sen, Martin Manalansan, Anna McCarthy, José Muñoz, Ann Pellegrini,
and Patricia White. Finally, I would like to thank some wonderful inter-
locutors for their sustaining conversations in in-between spaces: Mark
Chiang, Yvette Christiansë, Jeffrey Fort, Judith Halberstam, Grace
Hong, Anne McKnight, Linda Norton, Karen Su, and Eric Zinner.
I am grateful for the excellent research assistance of Nick Boggs,
Judith Goldman, Ziv Neeman, and Naomi Reed, who also prepared the
index, as I am indebted to Esra Ackan and Jack Tchen for their help with
the images for this book. Chapter three and the epilogue were published
previously in different forms. Chapter three appeared in Q & A: Queer in
Asian America, edited by David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1998): 335–65; and the epilogue appeared in
Social Text 52–53 (fall-winter 1997): 31–52. In addition, a small portion of
chapter two appeared in Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian American Cul-
tural Criticism 1.2 (spring 1994): 65–83. I thank Temple University Press,
Social Text, and Critical Mass for allowing me to include this revised ma-
terial, as well as the Columbia University Council for Research in the
Humanities, which provided a summer grant toward the completion of
this book. Finally, I would like to thank my editors at Duke University
Press, Ken Wissoker, Katie Courtland, and Jon Director, for piloting this
project, as well as Amy Ruth Buchanan for her beautiful design and Jan
Opdyke for her meticulous copyediting. This book is dedicated to my
parents, Philip B. and Lucy W. H. Eng, for their love and support of my
scholarly dispositions.

viii preface
 INTRODUCTION
Racial Castration

I am an Oriental. And being an Oriental,

I could never be completely a man.

song liling, M. Butterfly

Being Oriental: the antithesis of manhood, of masculinity? So declares

Song Liling to the judge, to the law, under oath, and in a suit.The derobed
Chinese opera diva/transvestite/spy attempts to explain to the pontifi-
cating bureaucrat how it is that Gallimard, the white male diplomat, can
mistake him less for a rug than a woman: ‘‘The West thinks of itself
as masculine—big guns, big industry, big money—so the East is femi-
nine—weak, delicate, poor.’’ 1 Such is the particular crossing of sexual
and racial fantasy that compels Gallimard’s colonial world order, a fan-
tastic reality in which the Oxford English Dictionary would define Orien-
tal as ‘‘submission,’’ as ‘‘weakness,’’ as ‘‘woman.’’ Such is the fantasy that
makes Oriental and masculine antithetical terms in Gallimard’s universe,
a place in which an ‘‘Oriental . . . could never be completely a man.’’ In
such marvelous narratives of penile privilege, the Westerner monopo-
lizes the part of the ‘‘top’’; the Asian is invariably assigned the role of
the ‘‘bottom.’’ For twenty-five years, Aiiieeeee! editors Frank Chin, Jeffery
Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong have bemoaned the
predicament of Asian American masculinity in similar terms: ‘‘It is an
article of white liberal American faith today that Chinese men, at their
best, are effeminate closet queens like Charlie Chan and, at their worst,
are homosexual menaces like Fu Manchu.’’ 2 In ‘‘Looking for My Penis,’’
Richard Fung summarizes the phenomenon even more bluntly: ‘‘Asian
and anus are conflated.’’ 3
Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America explores
this conflation of Asian and anus through a group of cultural produc-
tions—literature, drama, and film—focused on representations of Asian
American masculinity. Investigating the intersection of racial and sexual
differences, stereotypes, and fantasies, this book considers from numer-
ous angles the impact of gender and sexuality on the racial formations of
Asian American men. Even more, it insists that sexual and racial differ-
ence cannot be understood in isolation. What the example from David
Henry Hwang’s 1988 Tony-award-winning drama M. Butterfly so inci-
sively illustrates is the impossibility of thinking about racism and sex-
ism as separate discourses or distinct spheres of analysis. Rather, Song’s
statement insists that racial fantasies facilitate our investments in sexual
fantasies and vice versa. As such, they must be understood as mutually
constitutive, as drawing their discursive legibility and social power in
relation to one another.
Racial Castration—the book’s title derives from my reading of M.
Butterfly—brings together analyses of masculinity in Asian American
literary and cultural productions with psychoanalytic, feminist, queer,
postcolonial, and critical race theories. This book analyzes the various
ways in which the Asian American male is both materially and psychi-
cally feminized within the context of a larger U.S. cultural imaginary. In
his 1927 essay ‘‘Fetishism,’’ Freud states that the man, traumatized by
the sight of female difference—of castration—creates a fetish—a surro-
gate penis—and projects it onto the female body in the guise of a sub-
stitute object: a plait of hair, an undergarment, a shoe.4 From a slightly
different perspective, fetishism describes a psychic process whereby the
man attempts to obviate the trauma of sexual difference by seeing at the
site of the female body a penis that is not there to see.
A psychoanalytic reading of M. Butterfly would seem, then, to insist
upon an analysis of the drama through the logic of fetishism. While Gal-
limard’s misrecognition of Song’s anatomy indicates the white diplo-
mat’s abiding psychic investment in the protocols of the fetish, Hwang’s
drama also resists, reverses, and ultimately revises Freud’s traditional
paradigm by opening it upon a social terrain marked not by singular dif-
ference but by multiple differences. That is, rather than seeing at the
site of the female body a penis that is not there to see, Gallimard re-
fuses to see at the site of the Asian male body a penis that is there to
see. The white diplomat’s ‘‘racial castration’’ of Song thus suggests that
the trauma being negotiated in this particular scenario is not just sexual
but racial difference. As such, Gallimard’s psychic reworking of fetish-
ism challenges our conventional interpretation of the Freudian model
by delineating a crossing of race with what is traditionally seen only as
a paradigm of (hetero)sexual difference.

2 racial castration
Figure 1 Not a rug but a woman: B. D.Wong and John Rubenstein in David Henry
Hwang’s M. Butterfly

Through this racial castration, Gallimard need not see Song as any-
thing other than a woman. Through this distinct refashioning of fetish-
ism, an Oriental ‘‘could never be completely a man.’’ And through this
elaborate exercise of mental gymnastics Gallimard can strive to main-
tain the tenuous boundaries of his own assaulted white male (hetero)-
sexuality (fig. 1). Hence, in Gallimard’s orientalist world fetishism can-
not be understood as a scandalous perversion of the social order. Indeed,
fetishism is naturalized, functioning as a normative psychic mechanism
by means of which a ubiquitous sexualized and racialized vision of the
feminized Asian American male emerges and takes hold.
Racial Castration investigates the numerous psychic and material
crossings—the various political, economic, and cultural conditions—
that solicit our view of Asian American masculinity in these particu-
lar and constrained ways. Especially focused on the critical intersection
of psychoanalysis and Asian American studies, this book examines the
less apparent and visible aspects of sexual and racial identifications that
come together not only to construct Asian American male subjects but
also to produce against these particularized images the abstract national
subject of a unified and coherent national body. From another angle,
then, Racial Castration might be described as a theoretical project exam-
ining the numerous ways in which articulations of national subjectivity
depend intimately on racializing, gendering, and sexualizing strategies.

introduction 3
 Analyzing critical works by Freud and Lacan in relation to cultural
productions by Hwang, Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank Chin, Lonny
Kaneko, Louis Chu, David Wong Louie, Ang Lee, and R. Zamora Lin-
mark, among others, Racial Castration focuses primarily on Chinese
American and Japanese American texts. I do not, however, want these
particular readings to be construed as a universal prototype for Asian
American male subjectivity. Indeed, the experiences of Asian American
men are not easily homogenized. At times, they are seen as analogous
(e.g., as racialized, exploitable, noncitizen labor), but in other historical
moments they are configured as singular (e.g., Japanese internment dur-
ing World War II).5 As the individual chapters of this book illustrate, con-
ceptions of Asian American masculinity are historically and psychically
bound by the particularities of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexuality,
gender, class, and age. I hope that the analyses I pursue here between
specific Asian American cultural productions and particular psychoana-
lytic paradigms will serve as a modest albeit critical model for the con-
tinued interrogation of the commonalities that support, as well as the
dissonances that qualify, coalitions among Asian American men.
Focusing primarily on the domain of the specular and the role of the
imaginary, Racial Castration investigates both the psychic and the ma-
terial limits circumscribing Asian American male subjectivity. More-
over, it undertakes a crucial examination of the numerous ways in which
subjects, both mainstream and minority, remain invested in the norma-
tive identifications, stereotypes, and fantasies that maintain the domi-
nant social order. It is, after all, only through Gallimard’s sustained
identifications with and Song’s sustained investments in conventional
stereotypes and fantasies of the Oriental geisha that Hwang’s drama can
unfold to its pitiable end. And it is only through a critical investigation
of the production, dissemination, and reinscription of these sexual and
racial identifications, stereotypes, and fantasies that we can begin to ex-
amine the ways in which Asian American cultural productions also help
us to expose, confront, and dispute these significant representational
burdens.

Psychoanalysis and Race in Asian America

From an alternate perspective, Racial Castration might be considered an
extended theoretical meditation on the following question: can psycho-
analysis be as useful to Asian American and ethnic studies as it has
been to feminist and queer studies? Until recently, the answer to this
query would have been an emphatic ‘‘no.’’ 6 Detractors of psychoanalytic
theory have justifiably noted that, in its insistent privileging of sexu-

4 racial castration
ality as the organizing principle of subjectivity and loss, psychoanalysis
has had little to offer to the study of race or processes of racialization.
Indeed, psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theories traditionally have
had the same conceptual blind spot: these are all critical discourses that
emphasize sexual difference over and above every other type of social
difference. Yet we need to ask whether (hetero)sexual difference is the
only and primary guarantor of loss structuring our psychic lives. Is it
(hetero)sexual difference that gives legibility to—indeed, sanctions the
emergence of—our subjectivities?
Psychoanalytic theorists have been slow to consider the ways in which
diverse social categories underpin, intersect, disturb, or disrupt their in-
vestigations of sexuality and sexual difference. Alternative markers of
difference—race, ethnicity, class, nationality, language—are often un-
critically subsumed into the framework of sexual difference. It is in-
dispensable to incorporate socially and historically variable factors into
what hitherto has been rather ahistorical and essentializing psychoana-
lytic formulations of the construction of subjectivity. This incorporation
allows us to consider the ways in which multiple forms of difference
underpin the genesis of subjectivity. How, for example, are racial bound-
aries secured or contested through symbolic norms as well as prohi-
bitions on sexuality and sexual practices? How does the social regula-
tion of sexuality produce—and how is it produced by—race? This type
of critical inquiry advances an understanding of how psychoanalysis
as a philosophical body of thought helps authorize and reinforce the
(re)production of social hierarchies, such as sexuality and race, as the
essentialized and naturalized order of things.
As our example from M. Butterfly unequivocally illustrates, we are
at one and the same time, to borrow a phrase from Norma Alarcón,
multiply interpellated subjects.7 M. Butterfly underscores the fact that
sexuality and race, often seen as disparate or independently articulated
domains, are mutually constitutive and constituted. Gallimard’s man-
agement of sexual difference through his exploitation of the fetish is a
management of racial difference as well. In this regard, the sexual effects
of the fetish are also racial effects, a reiterated racializing practice. Sexual
and racial difference are legible—indeed, they are derived—in relation
to one another. Hence, M. Butterfly not only suggests that castration is
always a racial castration, but it also insists that the traditional ways in
which scholars in feminist and queer studies have deployed psychoana-
lytic theory to deconstruct naturalizing discourses of sexual, and in par-
ticular heterosexual, difference must be rethought to include viable ac-
counts of race as well.
This constitutive crossing of sexual and racial difference is not just

introduction 5
found in Hwang’s contemporary drama. Significantly, this crossing
traces its critical genealogy to the psychoanalytic project itself. Any care-
ful investigation of Freud’s oeuvre reveals the numerous ways in which
a racialized account of subjectivity is constitutive of the psychoanalytic
project. From its very inception, psychoanalysis has systematically en-
coded race as a question of sexual development. As the privileged epis-
teme of psychoanalytic theory, sexuality often comes to stand for—and
serve as a displaced category of—racial difference in Freud’s writings.
At the same time, racial difference repeatedly operates as a proxy for
normative and aberrant sexualities and sexual practices. Before moving
on to a discussion of the status of sexuality in Asian American studies,
I would like to illustrate briefly an emblematic instance of this consti-
tutive crossing of sexuality and race in psychoanalytic theory: the con-
vergence of two ‘‘pathological’’ Freudian characters, the figure of the
primitive in Totem and Taboo (1912–13) and the figure of the homo-
sexual in ‘‘On Narcissism’’ (1914).Commenting on the writings of Frantz
Fanon, the black Algerian psychoanalyst, Diana Fuss writes in Identifi-
cation Papers that ‘‘Fanon’s remarks on homosexuality, while failing to
challenge some of Freud’s most conventional and dangerous typologies
of sexuality, simultaneously question, at least implicitly, the ethnologi-
cal component of psychoanalysis that has long equated ‘the homosexual’
with ‘the primitive’ ’’ (155). I would like to trace explicitly the theoretical
and political stakes of this conflation.
Totem and Taboo, a speculative treatise on the relationship between
‘‘primitive’’ sexual practices and ‘‘civilized’’ neuroses, provides a compel-
ling account of the ways in which Freud’s psychoanalytic project man-
ages racial difference through a discursive strategy configured as the
teleological evolution of normative sexual practices and ‘‘pathological’’
sexual perversions. Freud opens this volume by centering his discussion
on the figure of the primitive. With the expressed purpose of tracing the
‘‘dark origins’’ of the contemporary European psyche, Freud writes in
the opening pages of Totem and Taboo that primitive man

is known to us through the inanimate monuments and imple-

ments which he has left behind, through the information about
his art, his religion and his attitude towards life which has come
to us either directly or by way of tradition handed down in le-
gends, myths and fairy tales, and through the relics of his mode
of thought which survive in our own manners and customs. But
apart from this, in a certain sense he is still our contemporary.
There are men still living who, as we believe, stand very near to
primitive man, far nearer than we do, and whom we therefore re-

6 racial castration
 gard as his direct heirs and representatives. Such is our view of
those whom we describe as savages or half-savages; and their men-
tal life must have a peculiar interest for us if we are right in seeing
in it a well-preserved picture of an early stage of our own devel-
opment.8

‘‘Savages’’ and ‘‘half-savages,’’ standing in close proximity to primitive

man, can be observed because they exist during Freud’s time. However,
these racially other savages and half-savages do not exist in Freud’s time.
Instead, they are securely positioned as temporally other to modern
European man. That is, these contemporaneous savages not only exist
in an indeterminate premodern past from which present-day European
society has decisively emerged, but they are psychically frozen in this
indeterminate past.
For Freud, white European man represents civilized man, or what he
suggests to be primitive man’s unrealized psychic potential. In insist-
ing that there ‘‘are men still living who, as we believe, stand very near to
primitive man, far nearer than we do, and whom we therefore regard as
his direct heirs and representatives,’’ Freud implies that these present-
day savage races have fallen outside the chain of psychic evolution and
human development. That is, these racialized groups are savage (and not
only primitive) because they are not (nor can they ever be) in any pro-
cess of psychic or social advancement. Locked in time, they are preindi-
viduals and maldeveloped groups, undeveloped and undevelopable. This
temporal congealing of Freud’s figure of the savage with the primitive is
evident in his assertion that in their mental life we see an atavistic image,
a ‘‘well-preserved picture of an early stage of our own development.’’ If,
for Freud, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, then the development of
the individual recapitulates the development of civilized mankind not
only through a specifically sexualized form but through a specifically
racialized valence.
The teleological evolution into and the claiming of civility by mod-
ern European man thus rely on the presumed incivility of the figure
of the primitive who underpins the ‘‘dark origins’’ of Freud’s narrative
of white racial progress. If the figure of the primitive attests to a cer-
tain analytic transparency for Freud, this transparency is the result of
an unquestioned faith in the steady progress of European civilization. It
is crucial to point out that the primitive’s presumed incivility is symp-
tomatized by Freud precisely as a problem of sexual development. Freud
focuses much of Totem and Taboo on an extended discussion of the mul-
tiple sexual prohibitions against incest found in primitive societies. He
concludes the first chapter by stating that it is ‘‘therefore of no small im-

introduction 7
portance that we are able to show that these same incestuous wishes,
which are later destined to become unconscious [in us], are still regarded
by savage peoples as immediate perils against which the most severe
measures of defence must be enforced’’ (17).
Further honing what exactly constitutes the limits of the primitive
psyche, Freud states that the primitive has no unconscious to speak
of, that his thoughts and motivations are eminently one-dimensional,
present, and transparent. Even more, Freud contends that what marks
the primitive psyche as such, beyond all other distinguishing character-
istics, is its propensity for sexual impropriety:

We should certainly not expect that the sexual life of these poor
naked cannibals would be moral in our sense or that their sexual
instincts would be subjected to any greater degree of restriction.
Yet we find that they set before themselves with the most scrupu-
lous care and the most painful severity the aim of avoiding incestu-
ous sexual relations. Indeed, their whole social organization seems
to serve that purpose or to have been brought into relation with
its attainment. . . . It must be admitted that these savages are even
more sensitive on the subject of incest than we are. They are prob-
ably liable to a greater temptation to it and for that reason stand in
need of fuller protection. (2, 9)

Freud’s racial certainty forecloses the figure of the primitive from the
category of the unconscious. Unable to banish forbidden sexual im-
pulses to this inaccessible domain, primitive peoples are thus liable to
the horrible seductions of incest. This foreclosure of the unconscious
is symptomatized precisely as the failing of sexual decorum, the fall-
ing into excessive sexual temptation, represented by incest. For Freud,
the fact that primitive societies have scrupulously regulated their sexual
impulses does not function as collateral for their social restraint or as
evidence of their civil progress. Rather, he reads this heightened sexual
regulation back into primitive societies as pathognomonic of their sus-
ceptibility to such temptations and consequently as further proof of their
incivility.
Freud hypersexualizes the primitive, racialized body. What emerges
most clearly from this linking of the sexually voracious primitive with
the failure of the incest taboo, then, is the inseparability of racial from
sexual identity. By invoking the ‘‘dark origins’’ of these primitives, Freud
clearly connects the savage tribes under discussion in Totem and Taboo
with a type of visual darkness—with a type of visual marking, that of
being dark-skinned. Yet, the legitimate mark and proof of racialization
is ultimately to be found neither in the register of pigmentation nor in

8 racial castration
any system of visual authentication. To the contrary, this proof is estab-
lished through Freud’s depiction of the sexual practices and pathologies
of primitive peoples.
In delineating the figure of the primitive in this particular manner,
Freud thus links an explicitly psychosexual discourse with a Western
anthropological tradition bound to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
epistemologies of European dominance and colonial expansionism. In
‘‘Notarizing Knowledge,’’ David Kazanjian points out that the ‘‘argument
that non-Europeans were pre-modern and atavistic was, of course, one
of the most important justifications for many Euro-American colonialist
and, later, imperial enterprises, because it allowed colonial and imperial
exploitation to proceed under the guise of economic and/or cultural
‘modernization.’ ’’ 9 Indeed, Totem and Taboo might be seen as a para-
digmatic treatise on this sanctioning of colonial exploitation through a
rhetoric of modernization—a rhetoric that takes the specific form of the
regulation of sexual practices and propriety. In this regard, Freud’s psy-
chical theories of sexual development express what Fuss, in Identifica-
tion Papers, describes as one of psychoanalysis’s less studied historical
genealogies, that of colonial imperialism. Writing about Fanon’s investi-
gation of the neurotic structure of colonialism, Fuss states that ‘‘Fanon’s
investigation of the dynamics of psychological alterity within the his-
torical and political frame of colonialism suggests that identification is
neither a historically universal concept nor a politically innocent one.
A by-product of modernity, the psychoanalytic theory of identification
takes shape within the larger cultural context of colonial expansion and
imperial crisis’’ (141–42).
Freud concludes Totem and Taboo with an expanded discussion on the
question of the unconscious and the manner in which the thoughts of
the primitive are directly transformed into actions and deeds. Excluded
from the repressive forces of the unconscious—its exacting symbolic
norms and prohibitions—their thoughts assume a kind of omnipotent
pretension: ‘‘Primitive men . . . are uninhibited: thought passes directly
into action. With them it is rather the deed that is a substitute for the
thought. And that is why, without laying claim to any finality of judge-
ment, I think that in the case before us it may safely be assumed that ‘in
the beginning was the Deed’ ’’ (161; emphasis in original). Alongside the
argument that the primitive lacks mental complexity and an adequate
moral framework is this more pernicious, yet fundamental, conflation
of sexual perversions with racial difference, a constitutive crossing moti-
vated precisely by the absence of unconscious regulation. This merg-
ing of sexual and racial difference not only subtends Freud’s account of
the progressive evolution of European society from its ‘‘dark origins’’; by

introduction 9
embedding this racial narrative into his theory of the unconscious, the
convergence of sexuality and race also comes to penetrate the central
metapsychological structure of the psychoanalytic project itself.
Freud does nothing to problematize his observations on this privi-
leged coupling of European racial progress with the advancement of
normative sexual practices and the repressive standards of unconscious
regulation. Throughout Totem and Taboo, Freud invokes his observa-
tions on the figure of the primitive with a positivist self-confidence
not evident in his other writings. Freud’s assertions that certain non-
European savage tribes—the Akamba, Australian Aborigines, Barongos,
Battas, Malays, Maori, Melanesians, Polynesians, Ta-Ta-thi, Zulas, and
so on—have attained a level of sexual, psychic, and social development
equivalent to that of the ancient ancestors of Europe are not based on
firsthand observations. To the contrary, they are gleaned from a variety of
secondary anthropological sources and written accounts by anthropolo-
gists such as J. G. Frazer, Anthony Lang, John Lubbock, E. B. Tylor, and
Wilhelm Wundt. For this reason, Kazanjian observes, critics have often
dissociated Totem and Taboo from the Freudian oeuvre proper as an un-
fortunate, but anomalous, foray into bad anthropology. In the same logi-
cal breath, the figure of the primitive is also disregarded as an incidental
effect of this bad anthropology.
Although it clearly participates in a quotidian racist discourse of white
superiority, the racial logic embodied in Totem and Taboo should not be
dismissed as an aberrant example of a poor psychosocial analysis. In-
stead, the racial logic found in Totem and Taboo must be recognized as
one that comes to inhabit and embed itself within the organizing struc-
ture of Freud’s metapsychological theories—as a logic indicative of a
problematic internal to the ‘‘proper’’ Freudian oeuvre itself. Attention
to the bridging of this racial logic has far-reaching implications. It facili-
tates a more thorough understanding of the ways in which racial differ-
ence is both constitutive of and managed in the production of modern
liberal subjectivity. At the same time, it forces us to consider the various
ways in which race implicitly underpins the more explicit narratives of
sexual development that permeate the psychoanalytic canon.
I conclude this section on psychoanalysis and race by turning to ‘‘On
Narcissism: An Introduction,’’ which was published one year after the
appearance of Totem and Taboo. In this well-known essay—a cornerstone
of Freudian metapsychology on individual development from narcissis-
tic to ‘‘proper’’ anaclitic love attachments—Freud initially isolates the
figure of the homosexual as an exemplary model of a stalled and patho-
logical narcissism. He goes on to elaborate his observations on narcis-
sism in terms of a libido theory that he connects to the mental lives of

10 racial castration
both children and primitive peoples. ‘‘In the latter,’’ Freud observes, ‘‘we
find characteristics which, if they occurred singly, might be put down
to megalomania: an over-estimation of the power of their wishes and
mental acts, the ‘omnipotence of thoughts,’ a belief in the thaumaturgic
force of words, and a technique for dealing with the external world—
‘magic’—which appears to be a logical application of these grandiose
premises.’’ 10 Notions of the primitive—those whose mental thoughts
pass directly into action—developed in Totem and Taboo return here em-
bedded within the metapsychological narrative of ‘‘On Narcissism.’’ Un-
like children, who according to Freud naturally develop out of their nar-
cissism during the process of psychic maturation, the primitive remains
interminably trapped within a narcissistic loop, locked in an atavistic
temporal prison.
Freud concludes ‘‘On Narcissism’’ by observing that

[T]he ego ideal opens up an important avenue for the understand-

ing of group psychology. In addition to its individual side, this ideal
has a social side; it is also the common ideal of a family, a class or
a nation. It binds not only a person’s narcissistic libido, but also
a considerable amount of his homosexual libido, which is in this
way turned back into the ego. The want of satisfaction which arises
from the non-fulfillment of this ideal liberates homosexual libido,
and this is transformed into sense of guilt (social anxiety). Origi-
nally this sense of guilt was a fear of punishment by the parents,
or, more correctly, the fear of losing their love; later the parents
are replaced by an indefinite number of fellow-men. (101–2)

Freud’s extension of the libido theory produces such a rich understand-

ing of the ego ideal as the central mechanism of sexual regulation that
‘‘On Narcissism’’ ultimately concludes by expanding its claims beyond
individual psychology and the Oedipal family romance to an analysis of
group psychology and the emergence of the social sphere. The transfor-
mation of homosexual libido into heterosexual identification and esprit
de corps—the turning back of homosexual desire as conscience and
guilt—allows for the formation of a legible and legitimated heterosexual
identity supported by parents and community (‘‘an indefinite number
of fellow-men’’) alike. The formation of a legitimated heterosexual iden-
tity through the sublimation of homosexuality into a sense of custodial
dread is, according to Freud, essential to the advent of ‘‘the common
ideal of a family, a class or a nation.’’ This sublimation is governed by an
exacting ego-ideal organized by a heterosexual imperative and its con-
comitant homosexual prohibition. In other words, the formation of the
normative Freudian (male) ego depends upon the elimination of homo-

introduction 11
sexuality. Desire for the father must be transformed into a desexualized
identification with him.11
It is important to emphasize that Freud’s formulation of modern
psychic life and sociality through mechanisms of heterosexual produc-
tion and homosexual interdiction are sanctioned in part by his initial
observations on the narcissistic, stalled mental life of savages. How-
ever, while Freud’s children have grown up to be functioning adults,
the figure of the primitive has vanished by the conclusion of this essay,
has fallen through, as it were, the cracks of Freud’s civilized polity. Only
the figure of the homosexual remains—remains, that is, to be banished.
In ‘‘Notarizing Knowledge,’’ Kazanjian notes that Freud’s vision of this
social formation ‘‘is not that of ‘primitive peoples,’ however, but one
in which a paranoia like Schreber’s [the repressed homosexual Senats-
präsident] can exist and, presumably, can be resolved—that is, a ‘civi-
lized’ social. Freud thus claims that modern, ‘civilized’ European politi-
cal formations like family, class, and nation can be understood, in part,
on the basis of the study of colonized subjects figured as pre-modern
‘primitives.’ Although they function as objects readily available to obser-
vation and interpretation, these ‘primitive peoples’ are excluded from
the social formation they somehow inform’’ (104). As excluded native-
informant, the primitive secures the fantasy of Freud’s civilized Euro-
pean sociality. This is a civilized sociality that can seemingly exist and
be (sexually) analyzed independent of colonialism and racial problemat-
ics. Constituting the external, atavistic prehistory of this civilized Euro-
pean sociality, primitive peoples, in their brief appearance on the scene
of ‘‘On Narcissism,’’ authorize and underwrite the analysis of homo-
sexuals, children, and narcissism in its multiple psychic forms. Through
exclusion, the banished figure of the primitive is thus positioned as the
limiting condition of possibility for a psychoanalytic project that tracks
the development of narcissistic subjects into functional, socialized, and
neurotic citizens.
We might understand the proscription on homosexuality in ‘‘On Nar-
cissism,’’ then, as also coming to signify this expunging of racial differ-
ence. Freud’s management and erasure of the figure of the homosexual
are a simultaneous management and erasure of the figure of the primi-
tive. As such, the sublimation of homosexual desire upon which Freud
focuses in his concluding remarks to ‘‘On Narcissism’’ is itself predi-
cated on the simultaneous sublimation of racial difference. The man-
agement and erasure of ‘‘primitive’’ sexual impulses are no longer fig-
ured here as the threat of incest but as the threatened return of same-sex
desire. In this regard, a displaced racial otherness is made legible in the
lexicon of pathological (homo)sexuality.12

12 racial castration
 In crossing Totem and Taboo with ‘‘On Narcissism,’’ we witness a
convergence of homosexuality with racial difference, a coming together
of the homosexual and the primitive as pathologized, banished figures
within the psychic landscape of the social proper. In this merging, the
figure of the homosexual is racialized as the figure of the primitive is
(homo)sexualized. To approach this issue from a slightly different angle,
we come to understand that the troping of racial difference in Totem
and Taboo as pathological sexual practices is reformulated in ‘‘On Nar-
cissism’’ as the sublimation of a pathologized racial difference into a
normative theory of (hetero)sexual development. It is through this man-
agement and erasure of racial difference that sexuality—specifically, a
system of compulsory heterosexuality—gains its hold within psychoana-
lytic theory as a universal and ahistorical principle. Resisting this uni-
versalizing impulse, we must recognize that any discussion of sexuality
within psychoanalytic theory not only signifies sexuality per se but nec-
essarily accounts for racial difference as well.
Judith Butler remarks in Bodies That Matter that ‘‘it seems crucial to
rethink the scenes of reproduction and, hence, of sexing practices not
only as ones through which a heterosexual imperative is inculcated, but
as ones through which boundaries of racial distinction are secured as
well as contested. Especially at those junctures in which a compulsory
heterosexuality works in the service of maintaining hegemonic forms
of racial purity, the ‘threat’ of homosexuality takes on a distinctive com-
plexity’’ (18). Butler challenges us to question the ways in which sym-
bolic prohibitions against homosexuality and nonwhiteness secure the
very boundaries by which subjects are granted a social legibility and cul-
tural viability. In light of our present discussion, Butler’s statement not
only emphasizes the fact that a theory of heterosexual development can-
not be easily dissociated from racial regulation but also suggests that
heterosexuality gains its discursive power through its tacit coupling with
a hegemonic, unmarked whiteness. At the same time, I would suggest,
the ‘‘distinctive complexity’’ arising from the ‘‘threat’’ of homosexuality
necessarily entails restoring to the psychoanalytic project its ‘‘dark ori-
gins’’: the return of the ‘‘threatening’’ racialized figure of the primitive,
the return of race to psychoanalysis, and the return of psychoanalysis
to race.
The investigation of the figure of the homosexual and the primitive
underscores the theoretical necessity of further exploring the intersec-
tion of sexual and racial difference in psychoanalytic theory. It insists
that we examine how one category cannot be constituted save through
the other. It asks us to consider how the assumption of a normative so-
cial identity requires a heterosexualizing imperative bound to a hege-

introduction 13
monic structure of whiteness—how the assumption of a ‘‘pathological’’
social identity is circumscribed by a homosexual prohibition bound to a
racialized position. How might we understand homosexuality and race
to converge at the outside limits of the symbolic domain governed by
norms of heterosexuality and whiteness? These questions are especially
relevant to our investigation of Asian American masculinity. If Asian
American male subjectivity is psychically and materially constrained by
a crossing of racial difference with homosexuality—what Fung describes
as the conflation of ‘‘Asian’’ and ‘‘anus’’—then its relation to these domi-
nant social norms and prohibitions takes on a distinctive critical cast and
an urgent critical dissonance. What types of identificatory routes—what
types of ambivalent psychic detours—are impressed upon the Asian
American male psyche to bring it to this particular social destination?
My examination of Asian American masculinity in terms of sexu-
ality and race works against contemporary claims that dismiss the ap-
plicability of psychoanalysis to critical race studies. Moreover, it resists
modern theories of self that configure subjectivity as a type of essential-
ized sexual subjectivity. As Ann Pellegrini notes in Performance Anxieties,
feminist (and I would argue queer) projects aimed at analyzing the com-
plex crossings of multiple social differences are implicated, for better
and for worse, in psychoanalysis. Pellegrini writes that the solution to
this theoretical impasse ‘‘is not to abandon psychoanalytic categories or
theory—as if psychoanalysis (and Freud) could be so easily bracketed
from the narrative frame of modernity and postmodernity’’ (3). Instead,
as I have been arguing, we must recognize that psychoanalytic narra-
tives are not only integral to but also are integrated into our contempo-
rary sense of self as modern liberal (sexualized as well as racialized) sub-
jects. As one of the most significant intellectual and cultural influences
of the twentieth century, Pellegrini concludes, psychoanalysis provides
‘‘patterns of order and interpretation for telling, retelling, and making
sense of life experiences, and this is no less the case when the story told
emerges in reaction against psychoanalysis.’’ What is called for ‘‘is the
engagement of psychoanalysis on very altered terms’’ (3).
Psychoanalytic theory can help us understand the important lesson
that sexuality is not natural—that it is resolutely cultural and con-
structed. We need to expand this valuable axiom into the field of Asian
American and ethnic studies to insist that psychoanalysis also and at
once describes, marks, and produces social differences other than sexu-
ality. Feminism and queer studies—as both intellectual and political
projects—cannot proceed without an active reengagement of psycho-
analysis on these radically and racially modified terms. In this new form,

14 racial castration
psychoanalytic theory might provide a rich set of conceptual paradigms
for the investigation of Asian American racial formation in relation to
specific epistemologies of sexuality and sexual development. To bring
the discourse of psychoanalysis to the field of Asian American studies
is to consider explicitly questions of sexuality and gender as they im-
pact the formation of Asian American male subjectivity. As one of the
premier theories exploring the relationship between gender and sexu-
ality, and between identifications and desires, psychoanalysis provides
a set of critical paradigms that helps us to understand not only the mul-
tiple ways in which sexual and racial difference intersect to configure
the Asian American male psyche but also the significant material effects
of these productions. To account for the production of race, processes of
racialization, and the naturalization of racism in psychic terms would be
to provide potentially transformative methods of exploring how Asian
American men are managed by, and in turn manage, their masculinities.

Sexuality in Asian America

The broadening of the psychoanalytic project to encompass a serious
analysis of racial difference is imperative. However, insofar as psycho-
analytic theory and criticism must be reexamined in relation to social
formations other than sexuality, I might also stress with equal insistence
that the investigation of racial formation in Asian American studies
must include a systematic consideration of sexuality. Scholars in Asian
American studies have typically paid great critical attention to the ways
in which Marxist analyses of class underpin the emergence of racial iden-
tity.13 Yet, to the extent that sexuality has been theorized in this field, it
has often been seen as additive or adjunct and not primary in the con-
stitution of Asian American racial formation.14
Moreover, while there has been substantial research done in Asian
American studies—in both the humanities and the social sciences—on
female subjectivity and gender, mother-daughter relations, and ques-
tions of feminism, less critical attention has been paid to the topics of
masculinity and sexuality.15 Racial Castration extends important scholar-
ship in Asian American and women’s studies on female subjectivity and
gender to think specifically about the formation of Asian American male
subjectivity and, in particular, homosexuality. In ‘‘The Woman Warrior
versus The Chinaman Pacific,’’ King-Kok Cheung evaluates from a fresh
perspective the historical conflicts between seemingly divergent agen-
das of feminism and heroism in Asian American studies. Cheung ob-
serves that ‘‘the racist treatment of Asians has taken the peculiar form

introduction 15
of sexism—insofar as the indignities suffered by men of Chinese de-
scent are analogous to those traditionally suffered by women.’’ 16 Hence,
she admonishes, Asian American activists and critics must refrain from
seeking antifeminist solutions to predicaments of Asian American mas-
culinity. To do otherwise would reinforce not only patriarchy but white
supremacy. Precisely because the feminization of the Asian American
male in the U.S. cultural imaginary typically results in his figuration as
feminized, emasculated, or homosexualized, we must vigilantly pursue
the theoretical connections between queer studies—with its focus on
(homo)sexuality and desire—and women’s studies—with its focus on
gender and identification—in relation to the production of Asian Ameri-
can male subjectivity.17
In the field of Asian American studies, the recent work of Lisa Lowe
helps us to underscore the disparate ways in which race, gender, and
sexuality come together in various configurations to secure and orga-
nize a genealogy of Asian American male subjectivity. Rehearsing the
lengthy history of U.S. legal definitions of citizenship, Chinese immigra-
tion, naturalization, exclusion, detention, national antimiscegenation
laws, and legislative bans on the entry of Chinese wives into the United
States, Lowe observes in Immigrant Acts that collectively these juridi-
cal practices produced a ‘‘technology’’ of simultaneous racialization and
gendering of the Asian American male subject (11). That is, for Asian
American men racial identity was—and continues to be—produced, sta-
bilized, and secured through mechanisms of gendering.
Lowe observes, for instance, that the rapidly industrializing U.S.
nation-state in the nineteenth century required a cheap, abundant labor
force for the construction and maintenance of a growing national infra-
structure. The construction of the transcontinental railroad entailed the
recruitment of over ten thousand Chinese male immigrant laborers
for the completion of the western portion of its track. Commenting
on the contradiction that emerged between the U.S. nation-state’s eco-
nomic imperative to procure cheap, flexible, Chinese immigrant labor
and its political refusal to enfranchise these male workers as full citizen-
subjects, Lowe concludes that

[R]acialization along the legal axis of definitions of citizenship has

also ascribed ‘‘gender’’ to the Asian American subject. Up until
1870, American citizenship was granted exclusively to white male
persons; in 1870, men of African descent could become natural-
ized, but the bar to citizenship remained for Asian men until the
repeal acts of 1943–1952. Whereas the ‘‘masculinity’’ of the citizen
was first inseparable from his ‘‘whiteness,’’ as the state extended

16 racial castration
 citizenship to nonwhite male persons, it formally designated these
subjects as ‘‘male,’’ as well. (11) 18

Lowe analyzes the juridical exclusions through which Chinese Ameri-

can male immigrant laborers were barred, at once, not only from in-
stitutional and social definitions of maleness but from normative con-
ceptions of masculinity legally defined as ‘‘white.’’ In this particular
crossing, let me emphasize that the nation-state’s sustained economic
exploitation, coupled with its political disenfranchisement, of the Asian
American male immigrant is modulated precisely through a technology
of gendering not adjunct but centrally linked to processes of Asian
American racial formation. Indeed, Lowe concludes, there is no social
contradiction that is not simultaneously articulated with other social
contradictions. In this respect, Asian American male identity is histori-
cally and increasingly characterized by critical intersections in which
racial, gendered, and economic contradictions are inseparable. They are
mobilized by means of and through one another. Put another way, it
might be said that the acquisition of gendered identity in liberal capital-
ist societies is always a racialized acquisition and that the exploitation of
immigrant labor is mobilized not only through the racialization of that
labor but through its sexualizing. Acknowledging these mutual imbri-
cations is to understand the social emergence of masculinity and femi-
ninity as dependent on these fundamental constitutive intersections and
crossings.
From another historical vantage point, the high concentration of
Asian American male immigrants in what are typically thought of as
‘‘feminized’’ professions—laundries, restaurants, tailor’s shops—fur-
ther illustrates a material legacy of the intersectionality of gender and
race.19 Collectively, these low-wage, feminized jobs work to underscore
the numerous ways in which gender is mapped as the social axis through
which the legibility of a racialized Asian American male identity is con-
stituted, determined, rendered coherent, and stabilized. Popular stereo-
types connecting past and present Asian American male laborers to
these types of professions are succinct and compelling illustrations of
the ways in which economically driven modes of feminization cling to
bodies not only sexually but also racially.20
Finally, important lessons from Asian American history teach us that
the antimiscegenation and exclusion laws that interdicted, for example,
the entry of Chinese wives into the United States (such as the Page
Act Law of 1875) worked to produce Chinatowns as exclusive ‘‘bache-
lor communities,’’ which exerted great influence on questions of sexu-
ality.21 The particular historical configuration of the bachelor society in-

introduction 17
sists that we extend our theoretical study of the intersectionality of race
and gender for Asian American male subjects into the domain of homo-
sexuality. Physically, socially, and psychically isolated, these segregated
bachelor communities might easily be thought of as ‘‘queer’’ spaces insti-
tutionally barred from normative (hetero)sexual reproduction, nuclear
family formations, and entitlements to community. Collectively, these
material and social conditions provide a compelling argument for the
relevance of queer critiques of the normative and the deviant in formu-
lating questions of Asian American historiography and epistemology.22
Collectively, these numerous historical examples—of the legal defini-
tions of citizenship, of the economic imperatives of professions, of the
institutionalized productions of social space—link racial, gendered, and
sexual constructs. Considered in relation to one another, they encourage
us to understand that critical discourses on ‘‘deviant’’ sexuality do not
affect merely those contemporary Asian American subjects who readily
self-identify as queer, gay, or lesbian. Rather, discourses on deviant sexu-
ality describe and encompass a far larger Asian American constituency
whose historically disavowed status as full members of the U.S. nation-
state renders them queer as such.
Lowe concludes her juridical critique of citizenship—its racial and
gendered productions—with an observation on Chinese American male
subjectivity before and after the Magnuson Act repealed immigration
exclusion in 1943.23 She notes that Chinese American male immigrants
prior to this historical moment can be said to have occupied a ‘‘femi-
nized’’ position in relation to the universalized national white male citi-
zen and after this historical moment a ‘‘masculinity’’ whose ‘‘racializa-
tion is the material trace of the history of this ‘gendering’ ’’ (11–12). Lowe’s
provocative statement insists that we investigate the ways in which the
racialization of Asian American masculinity functions as an opaque
screen. This screen obscures the complex histories of social organiza-
tion through which categories of sexuality and gender gain their co-
herence and symbolic significance. From this particular angle, Asian
American masculinity must always be read as an overdetermined symp-
tom whose material existence draws its discursive sustenance from mul-
tiple structures and strategies relating to racialization, gendering, and
(homo)sexualizing. In this regard, uneven national histories of anti-
Asian discrimination might be described not only as being turned into
the subject but also as being repressed and erased through the abstrac-
tion of that turn, the subjection of that subject. Disavowed histories
turned inward are internalized in—and as—Asian American male sub-
jectivity.
In our contemporary context, we cannot think of race as a fixed or

18 racial castration
singular essence; instead, we must view it as a constitutive formation
in which multiple social contradictions converge to organize a socially
dominant view of Asian American male identities. In other words, the
conceptualization of racial and sexual difference as if they were dis-
tinct categories of analysis is a false construction that serves the political
power, economic interests, and cultural hegemony of a mainstream so-
cial order. We cannot isolate racial formation from gender and sexuality
without reproducing the normative logic of domination that works to
configure these two categories as opposed, independent discourses in
the first instance. Thinking about the ways in which gender and sexuality
are inflected by race, and vice versa, Racial Castration brings together two
fields of study—psychoanalytic theory and Asian American studies—
that are typically seen as disparate in the humanities. This unorthodox
pairing encourages not only a more comprehensive analysis of the psy-
chic valences and material dimensions by means of which Asian Ameri-
can male subjectivity is constituted and sustained but also a more ade-
quate understanding of the critical importance of sexuality and sexual
difference to Asian American racial formation.

Stranded Identifications
Considering Asian American studies and psychoanalytic theory together
yields a more comprehensive understanding of the historical intersec-
tions of race, gender, and sexuality that produce a dominant image of
the Asian American male subject in the U.S. cultural imaginary. In addi-
tion, a critical focus on the vocabulary of psychoanalysis offers a com-
pelling theory of identification that allows us to delineate the specific
psychic processes by means of which the Asian American male sub-
ject internalizes these dominant images as processes of self-regulation.
While Asian American studies has not widely embraced or acknowl-
edged psychoanalytic theory as a viable or necessary discourse, I would
like to point out that throughout the historical development of the Asian
American studies movement numerous scholars and activists have bor-
rowed critical concepts and vocabulary from psychoanalysis to describe
the psychological predicaments, social parameters, and internal dimen-
sions of Asian American identity. As a result, these critics stress, and
even inadvertently argue for, the need for a more in-depth understand-
ing of the processes of identification that both produce and constrain
the psychic limits of Asian American male subjectivity.
Various contemporary critics of Asian American and ethnic studies
lament the field’s historical reliance on the social sciences and its ex-
clusively materially based analyses of Asian American identity. These

introduction 19
critics argue that Asian American studies’ sociological emphasis on the
‘‘quantifiable’’ aspects of racism curtail the ability of scholars in the field
to confront the more immaterial and psychological aspects of race and
racism. This criticism is certainly nothing new. It was precisely those
‘‘qualities which are incapable of objective management’’ that formed
the basis for the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Educa-
tion (1954) to abolish racial segregation in education.24 Material consider-
ations alone did not—and still do not—adequately encompass the full
effects of race and racism, for, as the Supreme Court held in this land-
mark decision written by Earl Warren, they cannot capture ‘‘intangible
considerations.’’ Furthermore, while material considerations might be
remedied, the Supreme Court believed that these intangible consider-
ations affected the racialized subject psychologically ‘‘in a way unlikely
ever to be undone.’’ Yet, despite such passionate arguments, a divide re-
mains between the psychoanalytic and the sociological.
Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen, the editors of
the recent Female Subjects in Black and White, point out that if ‘‘psycho-
analysis has entered and been reconstituted within the academy under
the aegis of the humanities, ‘race’ has been institutionally positioned as
an object of primarily sociological inquiry’’ (5). I resist, along with these
editors, any false opposition between the ‘‘psychological’’ trajectory of
the humanities and the ‘‘material’’ emphasis of the social sciences. In-
stead, I argue that our conception of the real and the ‘‘reality’’ of race
occurs not on one side of the psychic or on the other side of the material
but at its very intersection.25
Let me note further that from the early days of the Asian Ameri-
can movement scholars and activists committed to material analyses of
U.S. racism stressed the need to explore the psychological dimensions
of Asian American identity. In the 1973 preface to Aiiieeeee! An Anthology
of Asian-American Writers, for instance, the editors emphasized the ne-
cessity of thinking about the ways in which ‘‘legislative racism and eu-
phemized white racist love have left today’s Asian-Americans in a state of
self-contempt, self-rejection, and disintegration.’’ 26 In this manner, the
Aiiieeeee! editors insisted on an understanding of the complicated ways
in which the external conditions of race and racism—material structures
productive of contempt and rejection by mainstream society—are inter-
nalized by Asian Americans and transformed through this movement
from outside to inside as feelings of ‘‘self-contempt, self-rejection, and
disintegration.’’ 27
In the example drawn from the Aiiieeeee! editors it is important once
again to point out a continual and circular process of internalization and
externalization, the ways in which internalized racial feelings of self-

20 racial castration
contempt, self-rejection, and disintegration are reexternalized, trans-
formed, and displaced in the process as a war between the sexes. In
their obsessive focus on—in their incredible anger over—the femini-
zation, emasculation, and homosexualization of the Asian American
male, the Aiiieeeee! editors advance an untenable solution for the redress
of these exclusions. They argue that the rehabilitation of Asian Ameri-
can masculinity depends on the programmatic reification of a ‘‘pure’’
Asian martial tradition. Paradoxically, this reification of a strident cul-
tural nationalism, with its doctrine of compulsory heterosexuality and
cultural authenticity, mirrors at once the dominant heterosexist and
racist structures through which the Asian American male is historically
feminized and rendered self-hating in the first place. Not to question
cultural nationalism’s heterosexist discourse of authenticity, in other
words, reinscribes the same mechanisms of identification that support
oppression in the first instance.
This heralding of an Asian American cultural nationalist project
often engenders displaced masculinist attacks against Asian American
women socially for their ‘‘treasonous’’ romantic filiations with white
men and politically for their lack of racial ‘‘authenticity.’’ 28 This argu-
ment, indeed, establishes the political parameters of the enduring de-
bate between Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston over authenticity
and fakeness. This see-saw between psychic forms of internalized self-
hate and their externalized material effects raises yet again the issue of
the intersectionality of race and gender. That is, racial problems con-
sistently manifest themselves in questions of sexual relations between
Asian American men and women, with the figure of the Asian Ameri-
can homosexual entirely banished from this heterosexual landscape. In-
deed, Asian American cultural nationalism posits a slippery equation
of homosexuality instead of a virulent homophobia with white racist
agendas. As such, the Aiiieeeee! group obviates the possibility of under-
taking an antiracist and antihomophobic agenda at once. This is a dy-
namic that lends an uncanny racial valence to Freud’s provocative state-
ment, slightly altered here, that—for Asian American men and women
and Asian American straights and queers—‘‘love is a phase apart.’’ 29
Writing in the same historical period as the Aiiieeeee! editors, but
from the perspective of clinical psychology, Derald and Stanley Sue pre-
figure many of the political and social lamentations of the Aiiieeeee! edi-
tors in their concept of the ‘‘Marginal Man.’’ In 1971, in the early pages
of the new Amerasia Journal, the Sue brothers defined the ‘‘Marginal
Man’’ as an Asian American male subject who desires to assimilate into
mainstream American society at any cost (the psychological equivalent
of the sociological phenomenon of the ‘‘Banana’’). The Sues point out

introduction 21
that this type of assimilation is purchased only through elaborate self-
denial on the part of the minority subject of daily institutionalized acts
of racism directed against him. In ‘‘Chinese American Personality and
Mental Health,’’ the two write about the complex psychological defenses
that the Marginal Man must necessarily employ in order to function
within a racist American society. The Marginal Man finds it ‘‘difficult
to admit widespread racism since to do so would be to say that he as-
pires to join a racist society.’’ 30 Caught in this untenable contradiction,
the Marginal Man must necessarily become a split subject, one who ex-
hibits a faithful allegiance to the universal norms of abstract equality and
collective national membership at the same time that he displays an un-
comfortable understanding of his utter disenfranchisement from these
democratic ideals.
Ultimately, the untenable predicament of wanting to join a main-
stream society that one knows clearly and systematically excludes one-
self delineates the painful problem of becoming the instrument of one’s
own self-exclusion. This psychological paradox comes to mark not only
Asian American male subjectivity but also all minority subjectivities in
varying degrees of severity. Here, as Fuss points out in Identification
Papers, the work of Frantz Fanon is particularly relevant: ‘‘Fanon asks us
to remember the violence of identification, the material practices of ex-
clusion, alienation, appropriation, and domination that transform other
subjects into subjected others. Identification is not only how we accede
to power, it is also how we learn submission’’ (14). A fuller understand-
ing of this model of conflicted identifications requires, I argue, a more
nuanced psychoanalytic vocabulary of repression, disavowal, and era-
sure. In other words, the minority subject must, in the vein of the fe-
tishist, simultaneously recognize and not recognize the material contra-
dictions of institutionalized racism that claim his inclusion even as he
is systemically excluded. This formulation provides a rich psychologi-
cal model for evaluating the contemporary model minority stereotype
(a project I undertake in chapter four).
In this respect, I am not interested in psychoanalysis as some urtext
of universal human development, pure individual truth, or absolute de-
scriptive reality. Instead, I am interested in the ways in which it might
be creatively deployed to leverage a more thorough understanding of
the psychic burdens and material costs imposed on the Asian American
male subject who aspires to assimilate into mainstream society. What is
psychically required of the Asian American male subject who desires to
be part of the dominant mainstream society? How is the Asian Ameri-
can male subject encouraged or coerced to see himself in a social order

22 racial castration
governed by race and racism? How does he unconsciously or unwittingly
contribute to the perpetuation of his already contested existence?
The circular conflict traced here between external and internal and
material and psychic contradiction is not dissimilar to Althusser’s de-
scription of ideology as representing ‘‘the imaginary relationship of indi-
viduals to their real conditions of existence,’’ a theoretical elaboration of
Marx’s notion of the ways in which estranged labor is lived out subjec-
tively as alienation and assimilation into ideals of the dominant class.31
In ‘‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,’’ Althusser points out
that it is on the level of the ‘‘imaginary,’’ in the sense of both the psycho-
logical and the fictional, that the contradictions between the psychic and
material are alternately negotiated, denied, and managed. Thus, for ex-
ample, the ideology of American liberal pluralism posits an analogical
identification between the individual and the democratic state. In light
of American rhetoric of equality and freedom, questions of systematic
exclusion are especially inadmissible, albeit widespread in all aspects of
American political, economic, and cultural life. As we see through our
discussions of the Marginal Man, the identifications of the particular,
marked individual with the abstract national universal body require a
continual, repressed recognition of difference and exclusion. While the
formation of the minority Asian American subject takes place on the ma-
terial terrain of disparate social relations, the processes through which
the marked Asian American male subject is interpellated and stitched
into the national fabric are sustained through the register of an imagi-
nary whose force of seduction and lure of fantasy create a fiction of iden-
tification as seamless equivalence. This fiction of identification, Lowe
points out in Immigrant Acts, ‘‘reveals and sutures the gap in the lived
misidentification of difference as the same, [and] is responsible for the
production of universalities, harmonies, and gratifications’’ (151).
While the Aiiieeeee! editors, the Sues, and Lowe all acknowledge the
ways in which psychoanalytic theories of identification, and misidenti-
fication, might help us understand the ways in which Asian Americans
live out imaginary relationships of equivalence to the otherwise unbear-
able contradictions of their everyday material lives, none of these critics
pursues the development of a sustained psychoanalytic model.While the
rhetoric of equality in American representational democracy suggests
that all individuals, despite their particular circumstances and material
situations, have equal access to political, economic, and cultural repre-
sentation, the degree to which differential inequities continue to exist,
particularly for the racially marked populations to whom that notion
holds out the promise of national membership, is especially prevalent.

introduction 23
The color line, as W. E. B. Du Bois predicted at the turn of the last cen-
tury, endures as the national predicament of this century.32
More work needs to be done in the field of Asian American studies
in particular and ethnic studies in general to elaborate and specify the
imaginary aspects of racial identification, the ways in which the more
immaterial, invisible, or unconscious effects of racism are internal-
ized by the minority subject as a social system of self-regulation and
self-domination. Racial Castration takes up this project by isolating, in
the key Asian American texts it analyzes, specific moments of lived
(mis)identifications in which the fantasy of abstract equivalence breaks
down and disintegrates for the Asian American male subject. More-
over, considering Asian American male subjectivity not only in rela-
tion to gender and (homo)sexuality but also in terms of black and white
racial and sexual ideals helps us to triangulate what is admittedly still
a national landscape of Manichean race relations. This analysis of the
racialization of Asian Americans—a group alternately seen as the most
foreign, racialized, and unassimilable in the era of exclusion (the myth
of yellow peril) and the most invisible, colorless, and compliant in the
post-1965 era (the model minority myth)—in the greater landscape of
American race relations remains crucial. Such an investigation provides
a better understanding of the Constitution and the continual project of
U.S. nation building on the uneven liberal capitalist terrain of a sexually
and racially diverse society.

Impossible Origins
Psychoanalysis provides us with a compelling theory with which to ex-
plore how marginal subjectivities are constituted across lines dividing
outside from inside, abstract from particular, group from individual, and
public from private. It allows us to explore, as Homi Bhabha observes,
what is private in the public and what is public in the private.33 This idea
underscores a notion evident in our discussion of the Marginal Man:
the individual subject can never be a fully autonomous or private ‘‘I.’’
The I, in other words, is the result of hybrid mixing. Like Bhabha, Maxine
Hong Kingston’s narrator in The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood
among Ghosts also points to the impossibility of fully separating what
is private and particular from what is public and intrinsic to society at
large. ‘‘Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in
you are Chinese,’’ Kingston’s narrator asks in a famous passage, ‘‘how do
you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, to insanities, one
family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what
is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?’’ 34 The

24 racial castration
quest for pure origins—for an unpolluted vision of Chinese tradition—
compels Kingston’s narrator to question the dream of authenticity, the
impossible quest for a pure self.
Taken together, Bhabha and Kingston underscore the impossibility
of purity for the individual subject. The clear understanding, then, that
Asian American male subjectivity is the hybrid result of internalized
ideals and lived material contradictions that were once external allows
us a compelling qualification to historical debates about authenticity—
realness and fakeness—in Asian American studies. Moreover, it forces
us to make an explicit distinction between subjectivity and agency in
Asian American politics. While questions of subjectivity preoccupy the
theoretical project of psychoanalysis, the identity politics of race are his-
torically more ‘‘thoroughly examined in terms of domination and agency
rather than subjectivity.’’ 35 They have, in other words, been predomi-
nantly motivated by questions of domination and agency as well as au-
tonomy and self-will.
Our psychoanalytic discussions about the impossibility of purist sub-
ject positions warn us that the quest for a self-willed—an autonomous
and transparent—subjectivity is an illusory goal. ‘‘Why on earth should
we be on that impossible ahistorical quest for purist positions, that’s
about as non-materialist as could be,’’ Gayatri Spivak contends: ‘‘Isn’t it
autonomy that is suspect?’’ 36 We must understand, in other words, that
the subject is not the agent, that the two are never fully in alignment,
and that the notion of a pure political agency is itself questionable. ‘‘If
we persist in reductively defining black subjectivity as political agency,’’
Claudia Tate suggests in Psychoanalysis and Black Novels, ‘‘we will con-
tinue to overlook the force of desire in black texts as well as in the lives
of African Americans’’ (10). Departing from Tate, I might add that if we
persist in reductively defining a ‘‘progressive’’ Asian American male sub-
jectivity as pure political agency we will continue to overlook the vexing
question of conflicted and stranded identifications in both Asian Ameri-
can politics and movements for social justice.
From a psychoanalytic point of view, the distinction between the sub-
ject and the agent might be usefully rethought of as the gap between
identification and identity. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the
Ego (1921), Freud suggests that collective political action pivots on the
individual’s ties to the social group. To the extent that social groups are
constituted through identifications between their individual members,
through psychic bonds formed by the perception of common interests,
ideas, and values, identification is a prerequisite for political action. Yet,
as Fuss warns, our social ‘‘identity is continually compromised, imper-
iled, and one might even say embarrassed by identification’’ (10; Fuss’s

introduction 25
emphasis). Our psychic identifications, in other words, never quite align
with our political or politicized identities.
In Asian American political struggles it is thus crucial that we do
not conflate our conflicted identifications with our desired identities.
To understand this distinction—to understand that identification is the
mechanism through which dominant histories and memories often be-
come internalized as our own—is to understand that we are all borrow-
ers and thus not pure. It is to underscore that our social identities as well
as our political intentions are not irreproachable, that political agency
while a necessary goal must be continually interrogated for its slippages,
thought of more as a variable process than a permanent position. To
acknowledge that our identifications come from elsewhere—from over-
lapping and opposing communities—is to understand that our seem-
ingly voluntary and self-willed political agendas are sometimes mis-
aligned, compromised, or curtailed. As the subject can never be aligned
with the agent, so, too, identity and identification never quite meet. All
identifications are inevitably failed identifications, a continual passing as
a coherent and stable social identity. Even the most orthodox of subject
positions, finally, are ambivalent and porous.
To espouse such an understanding of subjectivity and agency, identi-
fication and identity, is not to place the politics of Asian American iden-
tity in the discourse of fracture—the discourse of injury and victimiza-
tion that compels, as Wendy Brown points out, the identity politics of
race and ressentiment in the late twentieth century.37 Equally important,
it is not to place the politics of Asian American identity in opposition
to poststructuralist theory. Rather, it is to think of the two fields in a
dialectic tension. Too often debates in social sciences and humanities as-
sume the position that scholars in ethnic studies desire to recuperate a
naive notion of wholeness and a pure ethnic identity that has been sup-
pressed by mainstream racism. These debates often configure scholars
in poststructuralist theory as having moved beyond this naive position to
deconstruct the constructed notions of a pure and whole identity.38 Put
another way, the latter is all about abstraction and philosophical ques-
tions of being while the former is about a materiality based in transpar-
ent notions of experience. To cast the debate in these terms is to ignore
the significant work of past and present Asian American activists and
critics, in both the humanities and the social sciences, who have theo-
rized the question of the autonomy of the subject in relation to abstract
conditions and material concerns. It is also to place entirely at the door-
step of ethnic studies questions of purity, wholeness, and self-will. Let us
remember that these concepts also trace their genealogy to discourses of
universalism, Enlightenment theories, and the legacies of abstract lib-

26 racial castration
eral humanism that impose the burden of authenticity and essentialism
upon racialized subjects even as they exclude and erase them.
To espouse an understanding of the distinction between subjectivity
and agency, between identification and identity, is to understand struc-
tures of domination that inform and constrain our ability to act politi-
cally. We need to transpose this useful distinction to rethink not merely
the limitations of our political agency but also the new political possibili-
ties that this knowledge generates for the Asian American movement. At
the very least, an understanding of the decentered subject allows us to in-
terrogate the exclusionary mechanisms of our own identitarian claims.
To approach for a moment this issue from the point of view of queer
studies, let us turn to Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter. As Butler writes
of queer activism’s desire to resignify a term of shame and degradation
against its constitutive history of injury,

if the genealogical critique of the subject is the interrogation of

those constitutive and exclusionary relations of power through
which contemporary discursive resources are formed, then it fol-
lows that the critique of the queer subject is crucial to the con-
tinuing democratization of queer politics. As much as identity
terms must be used, as much as ‘‘outness’’ is to be affirmed,
these same notions must become subject to a critique of the ex-
clusionary operations of their own production: For whom is out-
ness a historically available and affordable option? Is there an un-
marked class character to the demand for universal ‘‘outness’’?
Who is represented by which use of the term, and who is excluded?
For whom does the term present an impossible conflict between
racial, ethnic, or religious affiliation and sexual politics? What kind
of policies are enabled by what kinds of usages, and which are
backgrounded or erased from view? In this sense, the genealogical
critique of the queer subject will be central to queer politics to the
extent that it constitutes a self-critical dimension within activism,
a persistent reminder to take the time to consider the exclusionary
force of one of activism’s most treasured contemporary premises.
(227; Butler’s emphasis)

How might we appropriate the premises of poststructural theory not

to oppose and deconstruct but to strengthen and democratize the com-
munity we claim under the label ‘‘Asian American’’? As we must exam-
ine the ways in which a resignified and affirmative view of queerness
presents ‘‘an impossible conflict between racial, ethnic, or religious af-
filiation and sexual politics,’’ those of us working in Asian American
studies must also consider the consequential operations of our own ex-

introduction 27
clusions. As vital a term as ‘‘Asian American’’ has become in affirming a
necessary political identity in the late twentieth century, it is imperative
that we continue to examine the difficult definitions and tenuous coali-
tions of Asian American identity—the ways in which it is constructed
and self-constructed, the ways in which it circulates and is sustained. If
we cannot construct a political platform exclusively around the notion
of a pure Asian American ‘‘I,’’ we must adopt other strategies of commu-
nity building, projects based on goals and participation, on becoming,
rather than on exclusive notions of being. As the interrogation of the
queer subject reveals a set of impossible identity conflicts relating to
race, the interrogation of the Asian American subject, I have been argu-
ing, reveals a set of impossible identity conflicts relating to gender and
(homo)sexuality. What other exclusions might we interrogate?
Here we are back on the sticky terrain with which I began this intro-
duction: the vexed crossing of sexual and racial difference in M. Butterfly.
We must think of the political necessities for claiming Asian American
identity. At the same time, we must also consider responsible methods
of bringing together Asian American studies and psychoanalytic (and
poststructuralist) theory to examine the ways in which their dialectic
combination might yield a strengthened rather than a diminished sense
of Asian American identity and community as well as Asian Ameri-
can coalitions and movements for social transformation. I do not think,
in other words, that psychoanalytic theory and Asian American studies
need to be thought of as mutually exclusive or opposed. In this sense,
my specific focus in this book on psychoanalysis and the intersections of
racial and sexual difference that form our conceptions of Asian Ameri-
can male subjectivity might be thought of as one particular study meant
to open these larger and more pressing questions.

Managing Masculinity in Asian America

Racial Castration is a project at once descriptive and political: descriptive
because it presents through psychoanalytic theory a method of analyz-
ing the ways in which Asian American male subjectivity is formed, cir-
culated, and sustained; and political because it is with this understand-
ing that we are able both to reformulate and to transform the conditions
under which we claim our identities and communities. In this manner,
Racial Castration takes seriously the fact that we are both objects and
subjects of racism, that we both manage and are managed by our mas-
culinity. In other words, while we are continually subjected to institu-
tional structures of material and psychic domination, we can also assert

28 racial castration
our rights as racialized subjects to contest and to alter these significant
conditions.
The book is divided into four subsequent chapters and an epilogue.
Chapters one through four focus on particular historical events or rup-
tures—the building of the transcontinental railroad, the internment of
Japanese Americans during World War II, the era of cold war diplomacy,
and the rescinding of immigration exclusion and the liberalization of
immigration policy from 1943 to 1965—that have worked to shape a
mainstream perception of the Asian American male as what Frank Chin
derisively calls the ‘‘emasculated sissy.’’ These chapters dialectically pair
canonical and noncanonical Asian American texts focused on mascu-
linity with several traditional psychoanalytic paradigms: photography
and the dreamwork, the mirror stage and the primal scene, fetishism
and the signification of the phallus, and male hysteria. Throughout Rac-
ial Castration, I pay particular attention to the influential status of the
image and the ways in which visual representations significantly con-
stitute our sense of everyday reality. In our current age of technology,
these images and representations assume a ubiquitous power in their
now global dissemination and speed. This project insists that psycho-
analytic theory can teach us useful methods of reading to understand
and to contest the ideologies of the dominant image-repertoire.
In this sense, I am less interested in the new historicist approach to
psychoanalysis that reads its theoretical discourse as an anthropologi-
cal chapbook on colonialism. Rather, I am interested in analyzing, de-
constructing, and revising several major psychoanalytic paradigms in
order to proffer some productive ways to read the intersection of race and
racialization with gender and (homo)sexuality. If these Asian American
literary texts seem to call for a psychoanalytic frame of reference, I sug-
gest, they simultaneously demand a revision of psychoanalytic theory
along very altered lines of racial difference. As such, I isolate not only
textual moments in which the Asian American male subject is coerced
and held to certain (de)idealized sexual and racial identifications but also
instances when these identifications fail or threaten to break down. Col-
lectively, then, these chapters trace the psychic methods as well as the
material practices with which we attempt to manage, misremember, or
forget historical events configuring Asian American male subjectivity in
ways that challenge the exceptionalist American ideology of liberty, its
rhetoric of abstract equivalence, and its convictions of integration and
inclusion.
Chapter one, ‘‘I’ve Been (Re)Working on the Railroad: Photography
and National History in China Men and Donald Duk,’’ begins with an

introduction 29
exploration of the relationship among Asian American masculinity, the
photograph, and history. Pairing Maxine Hong Kingston and Frank
Chin, two authors who initially seem to be unlikely critical bedfellows,
I argue that both writers rework dominant narratives of national his-
tory through an emphatic shifting of the visual image. Photography’s
‘‘reality effect,’’ its status as transparent historical record and ‘‘truth,’’ is
insistently challenged. In China Men and Donald Duk, both Kingston
and Chin critique the now infamous 10 May 1869 photograph taken at
Promontory Summit, Utah. Commonly referred to as the ‘‘Golden Spike
Ceremony,’’ this photograph depicts the joining of the Central Pacific
and the Union Pacific Railroads, often described as this nation’s greatest
technological feat of the nineteenth century. While more than ten thou-
sand Chinese American male laborers were exploited in the building of
the western portion of the Central Pacific track, not one appears in the
photograph commemorating its completion.
For both Kingston and Chin, the irony of their visual project is this:
there are no pictures of their railroad ancestors to be seen; ‘‘there is no
record of how many died building the railroad.’’ 39 Seeking a historical
narrative for these men—fighting for those images that would ‘‘threaten
to disappear irretrievably’’—thus entails for Kingston and Chin radical
new methods of looking.40 Focusing on memory and the dreamwork—
on the unconscious aspects of looking—Kingston and Chin teach us
how to resist what Lacan terms ‘‘the given-to-be-seen’’ of the visual order
so as to see something else: a history, an image, a historical reflection of
Chinese America that should not be regarded as lost to itself. In its atten-
tion to the status of the visual image and history, chapter one not only
begins, as it were, at the beginning of Asian American literary studies
with a critical reading that brings together the matriarch and patriarch
of Asian American literature; it also establishes a particular structure of
vigilant looking that continues to be developed through the remainder
of the chapters.
Chapter two, ‘‘Primal Scenes: Queer Childhood in ‘The Shoyu Kid,’ ’’
explores the identificatory limits in Lonny Kaneko’s short story of
Japanese American male subjectivity during wartime internment. As
opposed to the invisibility of the Chinese laborer during the nineteenth-
century railroad building project, this chapter explores the hypervisi-
bility of the Japanese American body during World War II. The need to fix
and repeat hypervisible images of disloyal Japanese Americans—what
Homi Bhabha describes as the paralyzing fixity of the stereotype—dur-
ing World War II underwrote a national project in which media repre-
sentations played an increasingly ascendant role. The lives of these Japa-
nese American internees (two-thirds of whom were American citizens),

30 racial castration
nominally recognized as citizens yet dispossessed of constitutional free-
doms and personal property, find their specular correlation in the in-
ability of the Japanese American male to find or create a jubilant image
of self with which to identify.
Kaneko’s short story follows the lives of four young Japanese Ameri-
can boys interned in the Minidoka concentration camp, one of whom—
the Shoyu Kid—is molested by a camp guard. The story is obsessed with
the psychic effects and seductions that normative white male hetero-
sexual images exert upon the sexual and racial identifications of these
young boys. Ultimately, ‘‘The Shoyu Kid’’ presents a dense psychologi-
cal commentary on these Japanese American boys’ inability to main-
tain a coherent ego and thus a stable image of self. Their frustrated
attempts to change ‘‘face,’’ to mimic and incorporate psychically those
idealized male images of ‘‘heterosexuality’’ and ‘‘whiteness’’ to which
they pay such great obeisance, resolutely fail. These images remain stub-
bornly exterior to them. Chapter two analyzes two fundamental mecha-
nisms of psychic identification within the visual domain: Lacan’s mirror
stage and Freud’s primal scene. Placing these theories in critical dia-
logue, I analyze Itchy’s witnessing of the Shoyu Kid’s molestation by
a white soldier as a ‘‘sodomitical’’ primal scene. This reconfigured pri-
mal scene is one that ultimately encloses these young boys not within
a normative and jubilant identification with heterosexuality and white-
ness but within a profoundly negative identification with homosexuality
and Japaneseness. This is a historical condition that clearly results in, to
return to the vocabulary of the Aiiieeeee! school, destructive feelings of
‘‘self-contempt, self-rejection, and disintegration.’’
Chapter three, ‘‘Heterosexuality in the Face of Whiteness: Divided
Belief in M. Butterfly,’’ the play by David Henry Hwang with which
we began our discussion, shifts its focus from the formation of Asian
American male subjectivity to consider the limits of conventional white
male heterosexuality during the era of cold war diplomacy. The chap-
ter investigates how symbolic norms of whiteness and heterosexuality
coerce the material and psychic allegiance of Gallimard, the white male
diplomat from France, to these impossible paternal ideals. Analyzing
these patriarchal norms—what Lacan describes as the ‘‘Name-of-the-
Father’’ 41 in his essay on the signification of the phallus—in relation to
Gallimard’s utter failure to approximate them discloses the inability of
even the most conventional of white male subjects to align securely their
identifications with their desired identities.
Hwang’s drama ultimately exposes the production of whiteness as
a universal norm that attempts to project the burden of racial differ-
ence onto the Asian American male body. Moreover, it reveals how

introduction 31
this production of an unmarked and invisible whiteness is achieved
only through its complicit intersection with a system of compulsory
heterosexuality. Focusing on fetishism—perhaps Freud’s most privi-
leged visual mechanism for the management of sexual difference—I re-
figure this psychic category in terms of a racial castration, one demand-
ing serious reconsideration of Freud’s psychoanalytic paradigm along
the lines of race. In the process, it becomes clear that Gallimard’s ap-
propriation of the fetish is meant to protect the integrity of heterosexu-
ality and whiteness. Ultimately, the diplomat’s failed attempt to arrest
the trauma of (hetero)sexual difference commemorates the unsuccess-
ful management of racial difference as well.
Chapter four, ‘‘Male Hysteria—Real and Imagined—in Eat a Bowl of
Tea and Pangs of Love,’’ delivers what is conventionally viewed as a female
malady to the doorstep of the Asian American male. Given the long and
formidable history of female hysteria, contemporary critics have been
at a loss to account for a theory of male, or for that matter racial, hyste-
ria. However, even the most cursory glance at Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of
Tea and David Wong Louie’s short stories in Pangs of Love suggests the
need to account for their male characters’ recurring physical impotence
through this locus of psychic trauma. How might we explain the shift
of hysterical symptoms from the female body to the Chinese American
male body? How might we explain the recurrence of Asian American
male hysteria across two historical periods—the post–World War II late
1940s and the multicultural 1980s—before and after the easing of im-
migration exclusion, before and after desegregation and the civil rights
movements, before and after the rise of the ‘‘model minority’’ stereo-
type, before and after the renewal of Chinatowns as dying bachelor com-
munities?
Collectively these questions raise issues of sickness and health in rela-
tion to Asian American assimilation. As the state legally transforms the
Asian alien into the Asian American citizen, it institutionalizes the dis-
avowal of its history of racialized exploitation and exclusion through the
promise of freedom, abstract equality, and inclusion in the nation-state.
Placing illness and dis-ease, then, in the context of Asian American im-
migration, assimilation, and racialization opens up new ways of consid-
ering not only the limits of a teleological narrative of American progress
but also the limits of Asian American male subjectivity in the age of
citizenship and multiculturalism. Reworking Freud’s theory of hysteria
across lines of sexual and racial difference, this chapter considers the
ways in which Asian American male subjectivity remains haunted by
the enduring regulations of ghostly racial and sexual norms.
The epilogue, ‘‘Out Here and Over There: Queerness and Diaspora

32 racial castration
in Asian American Studies,’’ shifts the book’s emphasis from the do-
mestic to the diasporic. In the process, it serves to bring the project
of Asian American cultural politics to new locations outside the immedi-
ate borders of the U.S. nation-state. The psychoanalytic readings I under-
take in the four previous chapters focus largely on stereotypical repre-
sentations and images of a feminized and emasculated Asian American
masculinity within the domestic borders of the United States. However,
the question of how queerness and diaspora impact new formations of
Asian American identity must be explored in our increasingly transna-
tional era of global capitalism. Might Asian American identity be con-
sidered more appropriate to diasporic discourses of exile and emergence
than domestic ideals of immigration and settlement? 42
Beginning with a historical analysis of Asian American cultural na-
tionalism’s claiming of the domestic landscape through naturalized
structures of compulsory heterosexuality, I argue for a new pairing of
queerness and diaspora in a globalized age. Through a reading of queer
diasporic immigrants in Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet and R. Zamora
Linmark’s Rolling the R’s, I suggest that the popular presumption in both
Asian American and American studies that our intrinsic fields of inquiry
are necessarily grounded in one location—limited to the domestic space
of the United States—merits reconsideration through the lens of a more
spatially and sexually encompassing theoretical framing. How might we
theorize queerness and diaspora against a historical legacy that has un-
relentingly configured Asian Americans as exterior or pathological to
the U.S. nation-state? How might queerness and diaspora provide a criti-
cal methodology for a more adequate understanding of Asian American
racial and sexual formation as it is shaped in the space between the do-
mestic and the diasporic? What enduring roles do nations and national-
ism play in the delineation of such a critical project? What new forms of
community, identities, and representations emerge through a diasporic
and queer challenge to the linking of home and the nation-state in an
age of globalized sexual and racial formation?
Examining literature, drama, film, and other representations of Asian
American masculinity, Racial Castration takes seriously the relationship
between cultural production and the nation’s political landscape. That is,
it takes seriously the intimate connection between aesthetics and poli-
tics. Precisely because culture in our postmodern era of what Fredric
Jameson has called ‘‘late capitalism’’ has been especially burdened with
managing the contradictions of the nation-state, it is often on the ter-
rain of culture that discrepancies between the individual and the state,
politics and economics, and the material and the imaginary are resolved
or, alternately, exposed.43 The distance at which Asian American cul-

introduction 33
tural production is often positioned from the national culture consti-
tutes it as an alternative location for political formation and resistance,
with Asian American male subjectivity as an especially contradictory
identity within discourses of national citizenry. Rather than constituting
a ‘‘failed’’ integration of Asians into the American political, economic,
or cultural spheres, this distance preserves the creative works of Asian
America as an alternative site where, as Lowe suggests, ‘‘the palimpsest
of lost memories is reinvented, histories are fractured and retraced, and
the unlike varieties of silence emerge into articulacy’’ (Immigrant Acts,
6). Thus, we begin our critical excavation of Asian American cultural
politics, a psychoanalytic project in which race and sexuality are inte-
gral and integrated, challenging and deconstructing the assumptions of
Being Oriental.

34 racial castration
 ONE
I’ve Been (Re)Working on the Railroad:

Photography and National History in

China Men and Donald Duk

The replicants are perfect ‘‘skin jobs,’’ they look like

humans, they talk like them, they even have feelings and

emotions. . . . What they lack is a history. For that they have to be

killed. Seeking a history, fighting for it, they search for their

origins, for that time before themselves. Rachel succeeds.

She has a document—as we know, the foundation of

history. Her document is a photograph.

giuliana bruno, ‘‘Ramble City:

Postmodernism and Blade Runner’’

Ah Goong does not appear in railroad photographs.

maxine hong kingston, China Men

Reviewers of Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men (1980) and Frank

Chin’s Donald Duk (1991) typically point out the authors’ attempts to
challenge and rework dominant historical narratives that exclude Chi-
nese American men.1 David Leiwei Li, for instance, notes that ‘‘Kingston
has unfolded in China Men more than a century of Chinese American
experience and constituted an oppositional voice to official American
history.’’ 2 Commenting on the ‘‘satisfying’’ resolution of Donald Duk,
Tom De Haven writes in a review of Chin’s novel that ‘‘Donald and his
pal Arnold Azalea . . . storm back into history class and fortified with
documentary evidence, set the record straight. Better late than never.’’ 3
Indeed, by giving ‘‘voice’’ and visibility to generations of unrecog-
nized Chinese American laborers who worked on the construction of
the transcontinental railroad, on the sugar plantations of Hawai‘i, in the
canneries of Alaska, and in the laundries and restaurants of America’s
Chinatowns, China Men and Donald Duk collectively dispute the popular
notion of democratic membership underpinning discourses of Ameri-
can exceptionalism.4 Kingston’s and Chin’s focus on the disavowed, re-
pressed, and invisible histories of Chinese American men from the mid–
nineteenth century to the present day insistently critiques the striking
contradiction between the U.S. nation-state’s economic need to recruit
cheap and exploitable Chinese immigrant labor and its political refusal
to enfranchise these racialized laborers as citizens—to recognize them
as ‘‘proper’’ subjects of the nation-state.5 While I am certainly in agree-
ment with these critical assessments of Kingston’s and Chin’s literary
projects, in this chapter I focus on a thematic issue that has gone largely
unremarked in the commentaries generated by these authors: that is,
their efforts to rework dominant history through an emphatic shifting
of the visual image.
In China Men and Donald Duk, photography’s ‘‘reality effect’’—its
status as transparent historical record and ‘‘truth’’—is insistently chal-
lenged. Both Kingston and Chin critique the now infamous 10 May 1869
photograph taken at Promontory Summit, Utah (fig. 2).6 Commonly
known as the ‘‘Golden Spike Ceremony,’’ this photograph depicts the
joining of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads, often described
as the nation’s greatest technological feat of the nineteenth century.
While more than ten thousand Chinese American male laborers were
exploited for the building of the western portion of Central Pacific track,
not one appears in the photograph commemorating its completion.
Roland Barthes tells us in Camera Lucida that history is constituted
‘‘only if we look at it.’’ 7 The past, Walter Benjamin earlier observed, is
‘‘seized only as an image that flashes up at the instant when it can be rec-
ognized and is never seen again.’’ 8 Yet for Kingston and Chin the irony
of their situation is this: there are no pictures of their railroad ancestors
to be seen; ‘‘there is no record of how many died building the railroad.’’ 9
Like the replicants of the film Blade Runner, these Chinese American

36 racial castration
Figure 2 The greatest technological feat of the nineteenth century: the ‘‘Golden
Spike’’ ceremony, Promontory Summit, Utah, 10 May 1869 (photo by C. R. Sav-
age; Union Pacific Museum)

male laborers lack official documentation—a history of visible images—

a lack that threatens to consign their existence to oblivion. Seeking a
history for these men—fighting for those images that would ‘‘threaten
to disappear irretrievably’’—thus entails for Kingston and Chin radical
new methods of looking.10
This chapter begins with a discussion of writings by early and con-
temporary critics of photography. Collectively, these writings question
the photograph’s impulse toward a mimetic realism and historical
truth. This chapter explores how Kingston and Chin resolutely work
against notions of mimetic realism so as to look awry at what the visible
image would have us most readily apprehend. That is, they train us to
look askew at what Lacan labels as the ‘‘given-to-be-seen’’ of the visual
domain and what Homi Bhabha describes as the paralyzing fixity of the
stereotype. Focusing on personal memories and the dreamwork—on
the unconscious aspects of looking—Kingston and Chin teach us how
to resist both the given-to-be-seen and the stereotype in order to see
something else: an image, a history, a reflection of Chinese America that
should not be regarded as lost to itself.

(re)working on the railroad 37

 A Mimetic Ideology of Realism
Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner,
a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.
rol and barthes, Camera Lucida

Early critics of photography describe its departure from other mediums

of art—its singularity as a ‘‘realist’’ form—in terms of unprecedented
technological mastery over the visual domain. ‘‘Originality in photog-
raphy as distinct from originality in painting,’’ André Bazin writes in
1945 in What Is Cinema? ‘‘lies in the essentially objective character of
photography.’’ 11 Unlike painting, which depends upon the presence and
literal hand of the artist, Bazin asserts, photography’s uniqueness lies in
the fact that for ‘‘the first time, between the originating object and its
reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving
agent’’—the mechanical apparatus of the camera (13).
Bazin thus attributes to photography a certain ontological status,
arguing that the photograph ‘‘affects us like a phenomenon in nature,
like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an
inseparable part of their beauty’’ (13). Bazin claims a privileged, essen-
tial connection between the photograph and the object it depicts, a phe-
nomenal relationship he describes as sharing ‘‘a common being, after
the fashion of a fingerprint’’ (15). This evidential quality of the photo-
graph as fingerprint leads Bazin to insist that the viewer of a snap-
shot must necessarily ‘‘accept as real the existence of the object repro-
duced’’ (13).
Writing more than thirty years later in Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes
also draws an analogy between photography and evidence, likening the
photograph to a ‘‘certificate of presence’’ (87) and the photographer’s
show to that of a ‘‘police investigation’’ (85). He contends that the diffi-
culty of penetrating beyond the photograph’s connection with the ‘‘real’’
lies in the seductive allure of its evidential force. Barthes observes that
‘‘in the Photograph the power of authentication exceeds the power of rep-
resentation’’ (89) and describes it as a literal ‘‘emanation of the referent,’’
suggesting that the photograph serves as an ‘‘umbilical cord link[ing] the
body of the photographed thing to my gaze’’ (81).
In a 1985 essay entitled ‘‘Photography and Fetish,’’ Christian Metz
elaborates upon this phenomenological aspect of the photographic
image, invoking a metaphor of surgical penetration.12 Metz describes the
relationship between the photograph and the object it depicts as ‘‘a cut
inside the referent’’ (158), as an incision and subsequent abduction of a
piece of the real. Metz thus reprises Walter Benjamin’s suggestive com-

38 racial castration
parison of the photographer with the surgeon in ‘‘The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction.’’ While ‘‘the painter maintains in his
work a natural distance from reality,’’ Benjamin writes in this famous
1936 essay, ‘‘the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web.’’ 13
I offer this quick theoretical survey of photography as evidence and
the photograph as ‘‘a cut inside the referent’’ in order to illustrate a brief
critical history of photography’s impulse toward what Eduardo Cadava
describes as a ‘‘mimetic ideology of realism.’’ 14 This ideology under-
writes the popular belief that the photographic image comes about only
by seizing upon a piece of the real. The singularity of photography thus
lies in the perception that it is a medium in which the distance between
the referent and its signifier is collapsed. This is a medium, in other
words, in which the boundary separating representation and ‘‘reality’’
blurs.

Deconstructing the Photograph

Early in Camera Lucida, Barthes describes the joining of signifier and
referent in photography as a process of lamination: ‘‘The Photograph be-
longs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be sepa-
rated without destroying them both’’ (6). Barthes emphasizes through-
out Camera Lucida the inseparable quality of these two laminated leaves:
of the photograph and the real. We might note, however, that by de-
scribing this lamination process as a fatal one in which the two leaves of
image and object cannot be ‘‘separated without destroying them both,’’
he also offers us a way of deconstructing the photograph’s mimetic im-
pulse toward reality. The lamination process, Barthes insists, enacts an
inevitable destruction of the image and object, which ultimately encour-
ages us to think of the photograph not as an ontological incision into
the real but as a representation of the real.15 How might we deconstruct
photography’s reality impulse both temporally and spatially?
Temporally, we must keep in mind, the photographic image is se-
cured only by arresting the object in time. If the photograph captures
a piece of the real it does so only by freezing and fixing the object in a
moment irretrievably past. The successful lamination of image and ob-
ject, Barthes reminds us, is the joining together of two leaves that finally
presupposes the untimely destruction of the referent. Barthes describes
this temporal event as a kind of improper death: ‘‘For the photograph’s
immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two
concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been
real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, be-
cause of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolutely

(re)working on the railroad 39

superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past
(‘this-has-been’), the photograph suggests that it is already dead’’ (79). If
‘‘reality’’ implies an eternal, interminable, present, the temporal ‘‘this-
has-been’’ aspect of the photograph tells us that reality is no longer with
us, that the real—the live—of the photograph is impossible, that it has
slipped away and is no longer. Barthes labels this process the ‘‘mortify-
ing effect’’ of photography, suggesting that the abduction of the object
by the camera lens—its memorialization through the representational
frame of the photographic image—results not in its final capture but in
its ultimate loss.
Rather than faithfully and perfectly giving the viewer the moment it
depicts, the photographic image thus presents the ‘‘posthumous charac-
ter of our lived experience.’’ 16 Thus, we might consider the two leaves of
Barthes’s lamination process not just as the joining together of signifier
and referent but temporally as the instantaneous capture and destruc-
tion of the referent. It is this simultaneous, paradoxical preservation and
annihilation of the object through its photographic memorialization that
leads Barthes to declare photography a ‘‘bizarre medium,’’ one that nego-
tiates between two phases of time, and a ‘‘mad image, chafed by reality’’
(115; Barthes’s emphasis). According to Barthes, to believe in the reality
of a photo is finally to buy into a type of ‘‘temporal hallucination,’’ for
‘‘whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is
always invisible: it is not it that we see’’ (6).
Not only does the temporal convergence of the ‘‘past this-has-been’’
with the present reality of liveness at the site of the photographic image
work to confuse the status of the medium as decisively representational,
but the mimetic allure of the photograph also involves a spatial mis-
recognition as well. It is important for us to remember that the ‘‘reality
effect’’ of the photographic scene that unfolds before our eyes depends
on the collapse of a three-dimensional object into a two-dimensional
plane. In this regard, Barthes’s lamination metaphor also suggests
the flattening of the three-dimensional space of reality into the two-
dimensional space of representation. Lamination thus becomes a pro-
gressive attempt to close the gap between these two domains by sear-
ing them together. While lamination suggests the spatial convergence
of object and image, this process is finally an impossible project. The
two leaves of signifier and referent exist in parallel universes. As closely
aligned as they might be in the photograph, there will always remain a
space between image and object that can never be entirely eliminated.
Furthermore, as viewers of the photograph, we, too, must establish a
certain distance from it in order to apprehend its contents. It is crucial
to note that the reality of the scene that unfolds before our eyes in the

40 racial castration
photograph depends, like cinema, upon our stereoscopic vision being
aligned with the monocular camera lens. Theorists of the cinema de-
scribe this process of joining (and flattening out) as ‘‘suture.’’ 17 Elabo-
rating upon the viewer’s identification with the perspective of the cam-
era lens, Kaja Silverman observes that the ‘‘camera designates the point
from which the spectacle is rendered intelligible, [and] the maintenance
of perspectival illusion is assumed to depend on a smooth meshing
of the spectator with that apparatus.’’ 18 An unconscious identification
with the filmic apparatus, in other words, positions the viewer in an
ideal spatial location from which the contents of the photograph can
then, and only then, be mastered. To apprehend—to ‘‘get’’—the pic-
ture, the spectator must necessarily occupy what in the eleventh semi-
nar Lacan calls a pregiven ‘‘geometral point,’’ that location designated
by the lens of the camera from which a photograph’s contents are most
easily perceived.19 And, as many critics of the visual image have ob-
served, photography’s geometral point—the one given over most readily
to the photograph’s mimetic ideology of realism—is based upon the
laws of Renaissance perspective and the optical tenets of the Cartesian
cogito.20
Theorists of suture in film repeatedly point out the viewing pleasure
afforded to the subject who identifies with the camera lens.21 By uncon-
sciously occupying the camera’s pregiven geometral point of view, this
stitching together—this lamination—of the human and mechanical eye,
the subject gains illusory control over the field of vision. Primary identi-
fication with the camera lens, and with the reality it depicts, thus places
the spectator in a pleasurable but dependent relationship with the appa-
ratus. Hence, the reality of the visible field that seems to appear effort-
lessly before the spectator’s eyes is only possible through the subjugation
of the human eye to the camera lens. Epistemological mastery over the
field of vision lies not intrinsically within the capacity of this eye but only
in the eye’s unconscious alignment with and subjection to the photo-
graphic apparatus as its functionary. In this respect, the geometral point
of the photograph determines the spatial positioning that the spectator
must necessarily occupy as much as any personal point of view that the
spectator might bring to the visual image. Photography’s impulse toward
a mimetic ideology of realism consequently demands from the viewer a
particular concession, a particular self-placement, and a particular geo-
metral point of view—one given in advance, more determining of the
spectator than determined by the spectator.
Earlier in this discussion, I set the words reality and real in quota-
tion marks, for what our critique of the photograph’s mimetic ideology
of realism shows is that, far from being an absolute phenomenon di-

(re)working on the railroad 41

rectly accessible to an all-seeing Cartesian subject, reality is a process
properly belonging to the realm of representation and perception. In the
photographic apparatus, our apprehension of reality lies not intrinsically
within our selves—in an all-powerful I/eye—but externally in a social re-
lation between this I/eye and the placement of the camera lens. Hence,
the ideal geometral point from which we perceive reality is not merely a
physical but an ideological positioning. How does the imperative to see
the world from a particular temporal, spatial, and ideological location—
to accept its reality from a particular social point of view—intersect with
the domain of history?

The Given-to-Be-Seen
More urgently than other early theorists of the visual image, Siegfried
Kracauer and Walter Benjamin challenge us to think about the ways in
which photography functions as both a system of representation and a
network of material practices. Observing that the rise of modern photog-
raphy and the academic discipline of history coincide with the ascension
of capitalism, Kracauer notes that photographic and historical reality are
both a means of alienation for the masses.22 He writes in History: Last
Things before the Last that one ‘‘may define the area of historical reality,
like that of photographic reality, as an anteroom area. Both realities are of
a kind which does not lend itself to being dealt with in a definite way. . . .
They share their inherently provisional character with the material they
record, explore and penetrate.’’ 23 Together, photography and history are
implicated in their mutual task of creating an entire temporal and spa-
tial course of events meant to sustain the prevailing political beliefs of
the time. ‘‘Historicism,’’ Kracauer writes, ‘‘is concerned with the photog-
raphy of time.’’ 24
Elaborating upon the erroneous ways in which photography under-
writes a privileged historical narrative of capitalism and fascism, Ben-
jamin warns us that there ‘‘is no document of civilization which is not at
the same time a document of barbarism’’ (‘‘Theses,’’ 256). While ‘‘noth-
ing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history’’ (254),
Benjamin laments, the ‘‘true picture of the past flits by’’ (255). Histori-
cism, the tool of the ruling class, invariably supports the historical nar-
ratives of the victor. To reformulate Kracauer’s and Benjamin’s concerns
in terms closer to our present discussion: how might the pregiven geo-
metral point from which a spectator ideally views a photograph exist not
only as a spatial location but as an ideological point of view? How does
the representational logic of the photograph intersect with the dominant
historical conditions of its time?

42 racial castration
 To explore these issues, I suggest we turn to the Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, in which Lacan delineates three categories:
gaze, look, and screen.25 In this eleventh seminar, Lacan insistently sepa-
rates the look from the gaze, placing the latter on the side of Otherness
and unapprehensibility while attributing the former to the human eye,
to the activity of seeing, to desire, to memory, and to lack (83). Like lan-
guage, the gaze not only exceeds all human subjectivity but it provides
the imaginary camera click necessary for the conferral of that subjec-
tivity. Lacan writes that ‘‘in the scopic field, the gaze is outside, I am
looked at, that is to say, I am a picture. . . . What determines me, at
the most profound level, in the visible, is the gaze that is outside. It is
through the gaze that I enter light and it is from the gaze that I receive
its effects. Hence it comes about that the gaze is the instrument through
which light is embodied and through which—if you will allow me to use
a word, as I often do, in a fragmented form—I am photo-graphed’’ (106;
Lacan’s emphasis). Lacan suggests that it is the function of the gaze to
put me in the ‘‘picture.’’ It is through the imaginary click of the cam-
era that I am not only ‘‘photo-graphed’’ and symbolically ratified as a
subject but also given a particular set of specular coordinates through
which I am constituted and apprehended as a social subject within the
visible field.
While it is through the metaphor of the camera that Lacan most con-
sistently delineates his concept of the gaze, he is quick to emphasize that
the gaze or camera in and of itself does not determine how the subject
will ultimately be seen, or what form he or she will assume as a pic-
ture within the field of the visible. The gaze or camera, in other words,
determines neither how the subject will apprehend his or her reality
nor under what material conditions. For this process, Lacan reserves
the category of the screen—the field of representations and the image-
repertoire of visual perceptions. Intervening between the human look
and the gaze, the screen is comprised of ideologically marked and pre-
given images through which the subject is captured as a picture within
the visual domain. It is these pictures, from television, cinema, and print
media, that permit subjects to assume their social—for example, racial,
sexual, economic, and national—identities (97). If I am anything, Lacan
insists, it is in the form of the screen.
Lacan goes on in this eleventh seminar to connect the images of the
screen with a category he labels the ‘‘given-to-be-seen.’’ The given-to-be-
seen is that group of culturally sanctioned images against which subjects
are typically held for their sense of identity (80). Like the spatial point
of view from which a photograph’s contents can most easily be viewed,
the screen images of the given-to-be-seen provide the ideological point

(re)working on the railroad 43

of view from which the spectators are encouraged to identify with those
pregiven representations that would most easily accord with the domi-
nant sociopolitical ethos of their time. (In our present era, the given-to-
be-seen would most clearly be those visual images affirming the tenets
of whiteness, heterosexuality, and liberal capitalism.) It is at the level of
given-to-be-seen that our normative sense of reality is established.
The frozen images of the given-to-be-seen not only provide the main-
stream viewer with a sense of identificatory pleasure and psychic sta-
bility over time, but they are also foundational to the formation of puni-
tive and static stereotypes of the other. These mortifying images are
what Homi Bhabha describes as one of the prevailing features of colonial
discourse and an example of its ‘‘dependence on the concept of ‘fixity’
in the ideological construction of otherness.’’ 26 Like Lacan and Bhabha,
Barthes focuses on the collective power of these generalized images,
concluding Camera Lucida with the observation that ‘‘ ‘nowadays the
images are livelier than the people.’ One of the marks of our world is per-
haps this reversal: we live according to a generalized image-repertoire’’
(118)—the laminated object, the given-to-be-seen, the stereotype. The
fixity of these pictures—of the various representations comprising the
given-to-be-seen—establishes reality by providing a dominant image-
repertoire through which individuals are repeatedly encouraged over
time and space to ‘‘see’’ not only themselves but others.
Since the given-to-be-seen from which the viewer most easily appre-
hends the image is based on a temporal and spatial hallucination, this
perceived reality is always already overwritten by an ideological and a so-
cial positioning. Kaja Silverman warns us in Male Subjectivity at the Mar-
gins that it is crucial to ‘‘insist upon the ideological status of the screen by
describing it as that culturally generated image or repertoire of images
through which subjects are not only constituted, but differentiated in
relation to class, race, sexuality, age, and nationality. The possibility of
‘playing’ with these images then assumes a critical importance, open-
ing up as it does an arena for political contestation’’ (150). How might
a spectator play with the images of the screen? How might the viewer
contest the dominant historical view of the given-to-be-seen?
It is crucial to point out that the reality of the given-to-be-seen is
neither inevitable nor inviolable. The given-to-be-seen is ultimately de-
pendent upon collective affirmation of those images comprising it. Far
from being absolute or static, the given-to-be-seen is finally dependent
on widespread ratification of its repertoire of conventional images. De-
spite the normative allure of the given-to-be-seen, how might individual
viewers withhold their visual sanctioning of its pregiven images? How,

44 racial castration
in other words, might the spectator look awry at the given-to-be-seen of
the photograph, look away from the dominant historical narrative that it
proffers to be validated? I turn to China Men and Donald Duk in order to
investigate the methods by which Kingston and Chin teach us to resist
a given-to-be-seen that would obliterate the existence of their Chinese
immigrant ancestors.

China Men and Cultural Vision

The men posed bare-chested, their fists clenched,
showing off their arms and backs. The artists sketched them
as perfect young gods reclining against rocks, wise expressions on
their handsome noble-nosed faces, long torsos with lean stomachs,
a strong arm extended over a bent knee, long fingers holding a pipe,
a rope of hair over a wide shoulder. Other artists drew faeries with
antennae for eyebrows and brownies with elvish pigtails; they
danced in white socks and black slippers among
mushroom rings by moonlight.
maxine hong kingston, China Men

In an article focusing on photography in China Men, Carol E. Neubauer

observes that it is through looking at the family photo album that Kings-
ton ‘‘achieves a final synthesis that captures the truth of her family’s im-
migration to and life in America.’’ 27 While it is certainly the case that
the author of China Men constantly turns to both personal and historical
photographs as a source of creative provocation, far from giving Kings-
ton the truth of her family’s experience in America, these images present
her with a stream of continual doubts: the photographs constantly dis-
play uncertainties about the visual reality they ostensibly portray.
For instance, Kingston writes about relatives in the United States and
China whose exchanges of photographs and poses in front of the camera
are meant to portray for the faraway viewer a certain type of reality: the
scholar father who dons expensive suits and hats so as to present a false
sense of affluence in America, one that belies his lowly status as laun-
dry man (64); Mad Sao’s mother and Ah Po in China, who send their
emaciated snapshots (doctored by venal Communists?) as testimonies
to their poverty so as to demand that hard currency be remitted at once
(172, 249). Throughout China Men, Kingston presents us with a battery
of visual images whose mimetic authority she continually challenges
through her critical attention to the fixing of the pose. Once ‘‘I feel myself
observed by the lens, everything changes,’’ notes Barthes: ‘‘I constitute

(re)working on the railroad 45

myself in the process of ‘posing,’ I instantaneously make another body
for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image’’ (10).
Kingston not only questions the truth of the pose in personal photo-
graphs that are consciously manipulated to achieve a certain affect. She
also notes how larger social differences—racial and sexual—often over-
determine the ways in which we are given-to-be-seen. In a chapter en-
titled ‘‘The Brother in Vietnam,’’ she writes about an ophthalmology
student, ‘‘an American of Japanese Ancestry,’’ who is stationed on the
brother’s battleship. Surprisingly, this student of scientific vision does
not espouse any absolute optical tenets; instead, he advocates a philoso-
phy of visual relativity, one resolutely tied to racial difference. Speaking
proudly of his epicanthic fold, he tells the narrator’s brother that ‘‘ethnic
Asians have a naturally faraway focus’’:

‘‘If we lived in Asia,’’ he said, ‘‘where everything is arranged ac-

cording to our eyesight, we wouldn’t need glasses.’’ Clarity was
a matter of preference and culture. ‘‘Americans zone cities and
make billboards for Caucasian eyes,’’ he said. ‘‘Blackboards are set
so many feet from the students’ desks, traffic signals at such a size
and distance, newspapers and books in a certain size type. If we
aja’s [Americans of Japanese ancestry] with our epicanthic eyes
and peculiar focus went back to Japan, we wouldn’t need glasses
any more.’’ The brother had American 20–20 vision, but didn’t
notice things getting either blurrier or sharper in Taiwan. That eye
doctor trainee was a crackpot. (294–95)

In his comments on the epicanthic fold of ajas, the ophthalmology stu-

dent’s opinions may seem initially to veer toward an essentializing ge-
netic determinism. Kingston, however, refuses to associate the student’s
‘‘crackpot’’ views with any absolute biologism about Asians or Cauca-
sians. The brother, who has American 20/20 vision, sees as clearly on
one side of the Pacific as on the other. Here, perhaps, the category ‘‘Asian
American’’ serves to resist the absolute division of cultures—Asian or
American, East or West—calling attention to the mobility of cultures as
well as the relational basis of the concept ‘‘20/20’’ itself.
Kingston thus places the crackpot student’s theory of optics squarely
within the realm of social construction—‘‘Clarity was a matter of pref-
erence and culture’’—as well as within the shifting spatial locales of
Asia and America. Nevertheless, by pointing out how billboards, black-
boards, traffic signals, newspapers, and books in the United States are
made for Caucasian eyes this passage speaks to a given-to-be-seen that
is racially motivated. It suggests that the dominant visual images cre-
ated and manufactured in the United States are culturally targeted to

46 racial castration
white consumers, just as those in Asia are produced and marketed for
the specific audiences there. The fact that the brother in Vietnam is able
to see both sides clearly not only indicates the presence of multiple and
conflicting bodies of images and ideologies but also points to his over-
lapping identifications with them.
In addition, Kingston implies that our perception of ‘‘reality’’ not
only depends on our racial backgrounds but on a deliberate material
racism that underpins the visual domain itself. In an earlier interchapter
entitled ‘‘The Wild Man of the Green Swamp,’’ she reveals a given-to-
be-seen that is motivated by virulent and willful racism. She writes of
two ‘‘wild men’’—one Chinese, the other black—who are described by
the authorities as dangerous and insane. The Chinese wild man, who
‘‘terrorized’’ residents on the edge of Green Swamp, Florida, for eight
months and ‘‘made strange noises,’’ is at first not seen at all by the officers
of the law but labeled a mass hallucination and thus rendered altogether
absent from the visual domain (221). Upon his capture, the police dis-
cover that the strange noises are in fact Chinese and his burlap bag is
neither a bag nor burlap but ‘‘a pair of pants with the legs knotted,’’ (222).
The wild man is merely a homesick sailor stuck on a Liberian freighter
as low-wage transnational labor.When told by the U.S. Border Patrol that
he will be sent back to China, he commits suicide.
Kingston describes his photograph as it appears in the tabloids: ‘‘In
the newspaper picture he did not look very wild, being led by the posse
out of the swamp. He did not look dirty, either. He wore a checkered
shirt unbuttoned at the neck, where his white undershirt showed; his
shirt was tucked into his pants; his hair was short. He was surrounded by
men in cowboy hats. His fingers stretching open, his wrists pulling apart
to the extent of the handcuffs, he lifted his head, his eyes screwed shut,
and cried out’’ (223). The narrator’s perception of the visual object of the
‘‘wild man’’ clearly diverges from the dominant picture of him painted
by the authorities—his shipmates, the residents of Green Swamp, the
fish and game wardens, the sheriff ’s deputies, the medical doctors and
psychiatrists, and the Border Patrol. Collectively, their elaborate, fanci-
ful, and alarming speculations contradict the mundane self-descriptions
he offers to the authorities upon his apprehension: ‘‘He said that he was
thirty-nine years old, the father of seven children who were in Taiwan.
To support them, he had shipped out on a Liberian freighter’’ (222).
Here Kingston offers two incommensurate versions of reality. These
opposing realities hinge upon a racist failure to read correctly certain
cultural codes such as the Chinese language, a type of ‘‘reverse halluci-
nation,’’ a refusal to see what is obviously there to be seen.28 Moreover,
this misreading of the Chinese language extends beyond the immedi-

(re)working on the railroad 47

ate jurisdiction of the U.S. authorities to affect even distant homelands.
The ultimate reason for the wild man’s suicide is questionable. Perhaps
his life as an illegal immigrant and fugitive in the Florida swamps drives
him insane, or perhaps his death is the result of a poor translation. His
family, he tells us, is after all in Taiwan. Yet twice the authorities insist
that they will return him to China. Kingston suggests that this confla-
tion of Taiwan and China as one and the same—a spatial version of ‘‘all
Asians look alike’’—leads to the Chinese man’s vertiginous loss of self-
control: ‘‘They had driven him to the airport, but there he began scream-
ing and weeping and would not get on the plane. . . . He became hysteri-
cal. That night, he fastened his belt to the bars, wrapped it around his
neck, and hung himself ’’ (222–23). Indeed, something is always lost in
translation.
Whatever the source of his ‘‘madness,’’ this we know: the China man
from Taiwan begins his quest for economic survival aboard a Liberian
freighter and ends his life on the Gold Mountain as a ‘‘wild man,’’ a
barbarian, an escaped lunatic, a swamp dweller.29 (That he was on a Li-
berian freighter is ironic. Liberia, established as an independent state in
1847, began as a settlement for freed American slaves, who continued
to migrate there until the end of the American Civil War.) Looking at
the newspaper picture, the narrator insists that the wild man ‘‘did not
look very wild’’ at all. Kingston presents the unequivocal material conse-
quences of these two opposing visual regimes: death. In this particular
example, the Taiwanese sailor’s literal demise is one that precedes the
narrator’s witnessing his capture and death within the celluloid frame
of representation. For Kingston, the mortifying newspaper snapshot as-
sumes an emphatic racial valence, an emphatic racial violence.
Kingston ends ‘‘The Wild Man of the Green Swamp’’ with a short
paragraph that brings him closer to events at home: ‘‘There was a Wild
Man in our slough, too, only he was a black man. He wore a shirt and no
pants, and some mornings when we walked to school, we saw him asleep
under the bridge. The police came and took him away. The newspaper
said he was crazy; it said the police had been on the lookout for him for a
long time, but we had seen him every day’’ (223). Again, there is a visual
disjunction between what the narrator sees on a daily basis—a home-
less man asleep under a bridge—and what the dominant eyes of the law
and the newspaper are able or willing to perceive—a crazy and elusive
fugitive. In these two examples of ‘‘wild men,’’ racial difference becomes
that privileged category through which a punitive visual reality is con-
stituted. Far from being neutral, these pictures of the Chinese and black
wild men assume the frozen immobility of the stereotype. That is, the

48 racial castration
images fix the ways in which these two minority fugitives will be appre-
hended and emasculated as less than men—both unable to wear pants—
by the authorities in comparable ways. Once again, the black wild man’s
racialized reality has tangible and predictable effects. Like his Chinese
counterpart, the homeless black man not only is deemed insane but also
taken away and incarcerated by the police, his freedom and perhaps his
life duly compromised through this visual ordering.
It is crucial to note that there is nothing absolute, inevitable, or intrin-
sic about the ways in which the dominant eyes of the law categorize these
two men. Indeed, the punitive visual ordering that freezes and arranges
both the authorities’ and mainstream public’s tarnished views of the Chi-
nese and the black man is constructed through the arrangement of a
number of arbitrary images and unrelated documents—police records,
public testimonies, medical records, and newspaper stories, images, and
captions—into a unified and naturalized totality. Collectively, these ran-
dom images and documents are organized by a logic that attempts to
form a coherent whole and to frame a fixed historical narrative. This
organizing of disparate components into a narrative totality forms what
Michel Foucault describes as the structure of the modern archive. The
document, Foucault writes in The Archaeology of Knowledge,

is no longer for history an inert material through which it tries to

reconstitute what men have done or said, the events of which only
the trace remains; history is now trying to define within the docu-
mentary material itself unities, totalities, series, relations. History
must be detached from the image that satisfied it for so long, and
through which it found its anthropological justification: that of an
age-old collective consciousness that made use of material docu-
ments to refresh its memory; . . . history is one way in which a
society recognizes and develops a mass of documentation with
which it is inextricably linked.30

In bringing together a mass of unrelated documentation, the archive

constructs a historical narrative—a historical alibi—that comes to as-
sume the status of an inviolable statement. The very condition of pos-
sibility for this transformation of random material into an enunciative
statement lies not in the intrinsic nature of its elements but in the
method of its arrangement—that is, in the organizing of these elements
into unities, totalities, series, and relations. ‘‘A series of signs,’’ Foucault
insists, ‘‘will become a statement on condition that it possesses ‘some-
thing else’ . . . a specific relation that concerns itself—and not its cause,
or its elements’’ (89). The possibility of this reinscription and transcrip-

(re)working on the railroad 49

tion, Foucault adds, lies not in the realm of ontology but in the order of
material institutions (103).
What is strikingly clear, then, about the archive that is constructed
around these two wild men is its relational arrangement through a par-
ticularized racial logic that finds its material expression in legal insti-
tutions such as the police, medical institutions such as the clinic, and
social institutions such as the newspaper. If the archive does not merely
record identities already in existence but rather creates them through
a performative act of cataloging and camouflaging, then Kingston’s ex-
ample of these two men works to undo what hides beneath such natu-
ralized manifestations. In the process, it exposes the racist logic through
which cataloging and camouflaging are mobilized.
Throughout China Men, Kingston points out the cultural variables
and material dangers underpinning the spectator’s relationship to the
discursive power of the dominant given-to-be-seen and the archive.
However, she is not content with ascribing a wayward process of look-
ing merely to racial difference. She also illustrates how sexual difference
comes to affect the visual domain and the cataloging of its images. For
example, in an interchapter entitled ‘‘On Mortality,’’ Kingston writes of
Tu Tzu-chun, who is given three white pills by a Taoist monk:

‘‘Swallow these,’’ he said, pouring him a cup of wine. ‘‘All that you’ll
see and feel will be illusions. No matter what happens, don’t speak;
don’t scream. Remember the saying ‘Hide your broken arms in
your sleeves.’ ’’
‘‘How easy,’’ said Tu as he swallowed the pills in three gulps of
wine. ‘‘Why should I scream if I know they’re illusions?’’ (119–20)

As Tu descends into the various levels of hell, he is presented with horri-

fying visual images: decapitations, the torturing of his wife, and even his
own bodily dismemberment. Throughout the ordeal, he neither speaks
nor screams, reminding himself that what he sees as the reality before
him is only a hallucinatory illusion.
As his journey through hell continues, Tu is reborn as a deaf-mute
female. It is at this point in his journey that his perception of the same
illusory images he had earlier viewed as a male suddenly changes. Mar-
ried to a man who tires of his silence, Tu is threatened by the hus-
band, who demands that he speak. Threatening to dash their child’s head
against the rocks, the husband picks up the infant and swings:

Tu shouted out, ‘‘Oh! Oh!’’—and he was back with the Taoist, who
sadly told him that at the moment when she had said, ‘‘Oh! Oh!’’
the Taoist was about to complete the last step in making the elixir

50 racial castration
 for immortality. Now that Tu had broken his silence, the formula
was spoiled, no immortality for the human race. ‘‘You overcame
joy and sorrow, anger, fear, and evil desire, but not love,’’ said the
Taoist, and went on his way. (121)

As a female, Tu’s perception of visual reality and illusion are reversed.

Finding the vision of his child being killed too cruel and all too real, Tu
protests with a short ‘‘Oh! Oh!’’ and thus condemns the human race to
death. The ostensible moral of the traditional Chinese fable upon which
‘‘On Mortality’’ is based blames the female sex for the loss of immor-
tality. It configures woman as the weaker sex due to her inability to main-
tain silence. However, as King-Kok Cheung points out, for ‘‘a mother to
scream at the wounding of her child is hardly a weakness . . . [for] the ma-
ternal anxiety [Tu] experiences attests to the superiority of human love
over the abnegation of [male] emotion.’’ 31 As such, not only is the visual
reality and superiority of Tu’s male world questioned from an alternative
female viewing position but the relational logic of the dominant patriar-
chal norms and mores underpinning this gendered order are exposed,
critiqued, and rendered illusory from Tu’s female perspective.
While Kingston emphasizes that racial and sexual difference greatly
influence the ways in which the viewing subject perceives reality, she
also stresses in the examples of the ophthalmology student, the wild
men, and Tu Tzu-chun that it is possible to look awry at the given-to-
be-seen each time one apprehends its visual images. It is possible, as
Foucault writes, that ‘‘each discourse contains the power to say some-
thing other than what it actually says’’ (118). For instance, even though
the ‘‘brother in Vietnam’’ thinks the relativizing optical philosophy of the
ophthalmology student is crackpot, his own relationship to a group of
photographs presented before his departure for the Vietnam War belies
a constant visual flux that defies any stable notion of reality. Showing to
his five classes the slides of a former student who is now fighting in the
Vietnamese jungles, the brother can neither understand nor reconcile
how the horror he experienced upon his first viewing of these images—
‘‘puff of orange smoke . . . row of tanks . . . and shit-colored helicopters’’—
can give way to visions of happiness and contentment upon later view-
ings of the same photographs: ‘‘The third of fourth time around, the
pictures seemed very happy, very attractive: Alfredo, grown, not lonely,
almost married to a large and happy leopard-skinned wife. The sun shin-
ing orange in their cottage. Smoking an after-dinner cigarette while chil-
dren played at his feet. Children laughing around his head, all their
faces catching the light. Many friends, compadres. In winter Alfredo had
jungles, not leafless trees in concrete. Even the prisoner was smiling.

(re)working on the railroad 51

A lovely day. Sunshine and palm trees. The old woman held up half a
potato and laughed’’ (282).
The very orange puffs of artillery fire that horrify the brother in his
initial examination of Alfredo’s snapshots become brilliant orange sun-
sets in his third and fourth viewings, a serene Asian landscape unsullied
by the ravages of modernization,Western neo-imperialism, and military
conflict. The sullen Vietnamese prisoner of war inexplicably becomes a
jolly comrade, an amiable native informant and cultural tour guide. Ter-
rorized children amid a heinous military invasion become kids laughing
and playing at the feet of American gis, a veritable ‘‘Kodak moment.’’
What Kingston illustrates through these various examples are the
shifting realities that the viewer of the photograph invariably detects—
perhaps desires to detect—every time he or she looks at the visual image.
In China Men, racial and sexual differences serve to position Kingston’s
spectators in a dissonant relationship with a dominant society’s given-
to-be-seen. In each instance, however, these various spectator’s looks
and personal points of view also oppose through their visual wanderings
what would pass as pregiven reality. This errancy of the human look, in
other words, equips the spectator with the capacity to view with suspi-
cion what the dominant society would proffer as real. What allows the
human look to wander in such a manner?

Unreliable Memory and the Given-to-Be-Seen

In a chapter entitled ‘‘The Making of More Americans,’’ Kingston de-
scribes an ‘‘uncle, a second or third cousin maybe, who went back to
China to be a Communist’’ (189). Uncle Bun—whose name could be
a pun in Chinese, meaning ‘‘Uncle Stupid’’—is extremely talkative and
quick to point out that not only do ‘‘white demons’’ oppress Chinese
immigrants in the United States, but also ‘‘upper-class Chinese made
their money off lower-class ones’’ in Republican China (192). Through
his critical views of American as well as Chinese society, Uncle Stupid
(as he is sometime called by his relatives) clearly stands outside the con-
ventional point of view of both the Western free market system and the
eastern ‘‘feudal’’ order.
Uncle Bun’s unorthodox views extend beyond the realm of politics
and economics. Suspicious of the nutritive value of ‘‘white’’ foods—
eggs, bread, milk, vanilla ice cream, flour, sugar, and white beans—all
of which he believes to be poisonous, Uncle Bun eats only wheat germ
(that brown embryo of the wheat kernel used as a concentrated source
of vitamins before it is polished into the artificial whiteness of flour).

52 racial castration
He espouses its digestive merits and even connects its salubrious quali-
ties to communism, a somewhat comical linking of the corporeal body
with the body politic (‘‘Amazing! His two big ideas—wheat germ and
Communism—connected’’ [194]).
Kingston’s vignette leaves us with a serious lesson in the ramifica-
tions of moving away from the dominant given-to-be-seen—Uncle Bun’s
‘‘stupid’’ resistance to and departure from the dominant political views of
American as well as Chinese society. Considered mad by his relatives, he
is ostracized by his own immigrant community, prevented from enter-
ing their houses, and more often than not ignored by their children.
Furthermore, he is under suspicion by authorities of the Immigration
and Naturalization Service for supporting Red China.
From her own liminal point of view, Kingston’s narrator remains un-
certain about Uncle Bun’s insanity, pointing out the virtues of his uncon-
ventional political beliefs and his decision to return to China: ‘‘He talked
about how he was using only a part of his money for passage and giving
the rest to new China. If they were suspicious of his years in America and
did not let him in, he would sneak in from Hong Kong’’ (200). As thou-
sands of Chinese refugees flee the Communist regime by escaping into
Hong Kong and Taiwan, Uncle Bun makes the opposite journey back to
mainland China, challenging again the Western anticommunist political
sentiments of the time.
It is crucial to note that Kingston’s narrator connects Uncle Bun’s un-
conventional politics with the notion of a questionable return to China:
‘‘ ‘Returning’ is not to say that he necessarily had ever been there be-
fore’’ (200). This return is not only an uncertain physical journey back
to a mainland China no longer the same, a China under Communist not
Republican rule; it is also an uncertain psychic journey whose final des-
tination is punctuated by the unreliability of personal memory. ‘‘The day
he left,’’ Kingston writes of Uncle Bun,

he spoke to my youngest sister, who was about three years old.

He bent over so that she could hear and see him very well. ‘‘Don’t
forget me, will you?’’ he asked. ‘‘Remember I used to play with
you. Remember I’m the man who sang songs to you and gave you
dimes. What’s my name?’’ She laughed that he would ask her such
a silly, easy question. Of course, she knew his name. He coaxed
her to say it several times for him. ‘‘You won’t forget? Tell me you
won’t forget.’’
‘‘I won’t forget,’’ she said. He seemed satisfied to leave, and we
never saw him or heard from him again.
For a while I reminded my sister, ‘‘Do you remember Uncle

(re)working on the railroad 53

 Bun, the bald fat man who talked a lot? Do you remember him
asking you not to forget him?’’
‘‘Oh, yes, the funny man, I remember.’’
I reminded her periodically. But one day, I noticed that I had
not asked her for some time. ‘‘Do you remember the funny man
who talked a lot, the one who smuggled himself into Red China?’’
‘‘Who?’’ she asked.
‘‘Uncle Bun. Remember?’’
‘‘No,’’ she said. (200–1)

With this closing ‘‘no,’’ the narrator not only marks her younger sister’s
faulty memory of Uncle Bun but simultaneously ends her own uneven
recollection of the uncle ‘‘who went back to China to be a Communist.’’
By concluding her reminiscence of Uncle Bun—alternately described
as the funny, bald, and fat man—on this note of unreliability, Kingston
thus connects his unorthodox political views with a certain errancy of
personal memory.
Uncle Bun’s unusual return to China provides a larger lesson in how
to read the visual images of China Men. To stand in a position out-
side conventional society’s given-to-be-seen necessarily entails a certain
lapse of memory, an acceptance of its unreliability, an embracing of its
wayward impulses. In Camera Lucida, Barthes writes about the ‘‘punc-
tum,’’ the unconscious prick, of a photographic detail—a dirty finger-
nail, a necklace, a shoe—that punctures and bruises the ‘‘studium,’’ that
visual quality of the photograph that is invested not only with the ob-
viousness of dominant cultural codes (the given-to-be-seen) but with
‘‘sovereign consciousness’’ (26–27). The studium, Silverman explains,
might be thought of as the result of a contract between ‘‘the creators
and consumers of culture to perpetuate those ‘myths’ which are synony-
mous with normative representation.’’ 32 The studium, in other words, is
what we see when we apprehend the world through a particular image-
repertoire and from a position that is given in advance, the given-to-be-
seen.
In Camera Lucida, Barthes ultimately associates the punctum not
with the detail itself but with memory (42). He concludes that the punc-
tum activates unconscious aspects of personal memory that allow him to
resist the cultural normativity of the studium. In this manner, the punc-
tum grants him a second look at the photograph (53), a type of visual
alterity that allows him to detect what is marginal and insignificant to
others but personally meaningful to himself. In a passage of radical cul-
tural prelapsarianism, Barthes insists that under the sway of the punc-
tum ‘‘I am a primitive, a child—or a maniac; I dismiss all knowledge,

54 racial castration
all culture, I refuse to inherit anything from another eye than my own’’
(51). The punctum pricks Barthes and transports him elsewhere in the
picture, dislodging him from the traditional viewing position of the stu-
dium—of the given-to-be-seen—and placing him in a new relationship
with the visual images before him. The punctum thus unfreezes the
mortifying moment of the photographic image, releasing the viewer into
the present tense of memory.
Like Barthes, Kracauer elaborates upon the ways in which personal
memory stands in opposition to the historical project of photography.
As he writes in his essay ‘‘Photography’’:

Memory encompasses neither the entire spatial appearance nor

the entire temporal course of an event. Compared to photography
memory’s records are full of gaps. . . . Memories are retained be-
cause of their significance for that person. Thus they are organized
according to a principle that is essentially different from the orga-
nizing principle of photography. Photography grasps what is given
as a spatial (or temporal) continuum; memory-images retain what
is given only insofar as it has significance. Since what is significant
is not reducible to either merely spatial or merely temporal terms,
memory-images are at odds with photographic representation.33

In their particular significance for each individual, personal memories

provide an oppositional force to the master narrative that historical
images of the given-to-be-seen attempt to create, fix, and impose on a
society. Indeed, if photography works to dominate the spatial or tem-
poral perception of an object through an ideological master narrative,
personal memory works to restore the occluded contours of that object’s
‘‘history’’ that this narrative would efface.34
Barthes’s description of the punctum—of the unconscious prick and
second look it engenders—as well as Kracauer’s analysis of history and
photography provide a useful commentary on Kingston’s view of per-
sonal memory as it structures her narrator’s permutating remem-
brances of Uncle Bun. It is only by allowing memories to wander, Kings-
ton insists, that traditional views can be displaced. To be pricked by the
unconscious reservoirs of memory gives rise to the creation of new psy-
chic pathways whose final destinations ‘‘return’’ the viewing subject not
to an old location or a conventional point of view but to someplace new—
be it a new China or a new political positioning. It is in this way that we
must understand Kingston’s lesson of psychic return as not necessarily
bringing us to a place where we have been before.
The errant and unpredictable quality of personal memories leads

(re)working on the railroad 55

Barthes to insist in Camera Lucida that the photograph is ‘‘never, in
essence, a memory (whose grammatical expression would be the perfect
tense, whereas the tense of the Photograph is the aorist), but it actually
blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory’’ (91). Expanding
upon the temporal discrepancy that emerges between the past tense of
the photographic image and the present tense of memory as it emerges
from the domain of the preconscious, Silverman adds that whereas ‘‘pho-
tography performs its memorial function by lifting an object out of time
and immortalizing it forever in a particular form, memory is all about
temporality and change. It apprehends the other less as a clearly de-
lineated object than as a complex and constantly shifting conglomera-
tion of images and values’’ (Threshold, 157). Working under contravening
impulses to photography’s project of historical reality, memory’s errant
wanderings not only provide a means of moving away from the fixity of
the given-to-be-seen, and the fixity of the stereotype, but also help us to
apprehend reality in ways that cannot be predicted in advance.
In The Threshold of the Visible World, Silverman points out the funda-
mental tenet of psychoanalysis that every memory involves a simulta-
neous impulse to return to as well as depart from a particular phantas-
mic scene or object. ‘‘The potentially productive uses to which memory
can be put reside not in the imperative to return, but, on the contrary, in
the interlocking imperative to displace,’’ she writes. ‘‘Because the back-
ward path ostensibly leading to gratification is blocked, as Freud puts it
in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, we have no choice but to move forward;
repression dictates that the desired object can only be recovered or ‘re-
membered’ in the guise of a substitute. There can thus be no return or
recollection which is not at the same time a displacement, and which
consequently does not introduce alterity. The productively remember-
ing look is one in which the imperative to displace has come to supersede
the imperative to return’’ (181). Because the psychoanalytic conditions
under which a subject remembers prohibits any final recovery of either
a phantasmic scene or an object, the faithful return demanded by the
given-to-be-seen to one particular viewing position—to the fixity of the
stereotype—becomes an impossible psychic journey. As a consequence,
each return to the given-to-be-seen is an approximation of—or a dis-
placement from—an ‘‘original’’ point of view. In this sense, the given-to-
be-seen, like the stereotype, is not just underpinned by fixity and stasis
but is undermined by a profound psychic ambivalence and instability.
The stereotype, Bhabha reminds us, ‘‘connotes rigidity and an unchang-
ing order as well as disorder, degeneracy and daemonic repetition. . . . [It]
is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is
always ‘in place,’ already known, and something that must be anxiously

56 racial castration
repeated’’ (Location of Culture, 66). Vacillating between fixity and infi-
delity, the viewer’s faithful return to the given-to-be-seen is in no way
guaranteed. Memory’s psychic return, in other words, can bring us to a
place where we have never been before.
If memory in this psychoanalytic sense is inherently unreliable and
unstable, this constraint need not be seen in a negative light. Silverman
proposes that the truly productive look is one that maximizes memory’s
impulse to displace, allowing personal recollections continually to over-
write and reconfigure a subject’s relation to the stereotypical images of
the given-to-be-seen. Moving out of a dominant viewing position neces-
sarily requires that memory’s imperative to displace has come to super-
sede the imperative to return to an original object, scene, or way of look-
ing. Consequently, Silverman concludes, the productive look is one ‘‘in
which the movement forward is no longer at the service of a return, but
has developed an independent momentum’’ (Threshold, 181). In other
words, the productive look remains continually open to the indepen-
dent wanderings of memory and thus resistant to the absolute tyranny
of those visual limitations of the given-to-be-seen that would determine
how and what the spectator would apprehend from a pregiven point
of view.
Throughout China Men, Kingston displays the potential uses of
memory’s wanderings through a vertiginous doubling of titles, myths,
legends, and laws that do not return us to an original narrative or image
but bring us to a place where we have never been before.35 By offer-
ing two (and sometime three) versions of every story she presents—for
example, the twelve interchapter myth stories, the numerous possible
ways in which ‘‘the father from China’’ entered the United States (49,
237), and the beating episode of the two sisters at the hands of BaBa
(253)—Kingston highlights an emphatic departure from the ‘‘original.’’
This departure is even grammatically relevant to the book’s title. David
Leiwei Li points out that the original epithet ‘‘Chinaman Chink’’ was
used to insult Chinese male laborers in America from the late nine-
teenth century (484). Kingston’s departure from—and revision of—this
term comes in the form of a pluralization and a space between the two
words China and Men. By opening this space between China and Men,
she unlocks the term for potential resignification. That is, she acknowl-
edges in her unfaithful repetition of the epithet both its punitive history
and the possibility of viewing it from alternative perspectives neither en-
tirely constrained nor completely given in advance by its prior historical
meanings.
Kingston’s emphasis on the productive uses of memory finds its most
powerful potential for opposition in its resistance to those widely cir-

(re)working on the railroad 57

culated visual images that would attempt to portray one particular his-
torical reality. However, she is careful to warn us throughout China Men
of the difficulties of moving into an alternate viewing position. The ma-
terial consequences involved in looking awry at the given-to-be-seen are
often deadly. Before we turn to her critique of the Promontory Sum-
mit photograph, let us briefly examine her interchapter on ‘‘The Ghost-
mate’’ in order to elaborate upon the material costs of moving outside
the parameters of the visually normative.

Vanitas and Death

In her rewriting of ‘‘The Ghostmate,’’ a traditional Chinese folktale,
Kingston illustrates the difficulty encountered by the marginalized Chi-
nese male subject in attempting to occupy not only the dominant given-
to-be-seen but a viewing position outside of it. In this version, Kings-
ton recounts the tale of a wandering scholar, farmer, or artisan who
encounters on his return journey to his village a beautiful noblewoman.
A widow, she invites him into her splendid house, feeding and enter-
taining the young fellow for what seems to him to be only a short period
of time. When the young scholar finally takes leave of his gracious host
and resumes his travel toward his home, his ‘‘appearance startles the
townspeople’’ (80), who flee from him in terror.
The wandering scholar is no longer youthful but sick and haggard
looking: death warmed over. Encountering a fellow villager, who men-
tions his long absence, they return to the site of the noblewoman’s house:

He remembers a beautiful lady he met in a previous incarnation

or a dream last night.
The closer he comes to where the house had been, the more
the home village becomes the dream. ‘‘Look,’’ says his friend. ‘‘A
grave.’’
Where a front door stood is the marker for the noblewoman’s
grave. The rain and wind have not quite rubbed the dates and the
strange emblems off. She has been dead for years, centuries.
Fear burns along the young man’s spine, and he runs from the
lonely spot where no paths meander, no house looms, no peacocks
or dogs stalk among the lilac trees. His friend dashes after him,
not to be left by himself at the grave. (81)

Kingston’s closing line of this interchapter—‘‘Fancy lovers never last’’—

points to the illusory quality of the young man’s lavish days spent with
the noblewoman ghost whom he remembers as a beautiful lady met ‘‘in

58 racial castration
a previous incarnation or a dream last night.’’ (It also functions as an
allegory for the initial illusory and then soured love affair that Ed, the
‘‘Father from China,’’ has with the United States.) Yet, as the scholar re-
approaches the noblewoman’s house with his fellow villager, his home
village also becomes a dream. Hence, Kingston suggests, both reali-
ties—his village life as well as his days with the noblewomen—are over-
determined by an illusory force. Both visual positions prove mutually
problematic. In which reality, then, should the young scholar invest his
belief ?
In the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, Lacan concludes
his chapter ‘‘Anamorphosis’’ by discussing a 1533 Hans Holbein paint-
ing entitled The Ambassadors. He observes that Holbein encodes in The
Ambassadors two points of view: a traditional geometral point based on
Renaissance perspective, depicting the two ambassadors of the paint-
ing’s title, and an anamorphic point of view outside the given-to-be-seen,
depicting a skull.36 Lacan indicates that the traditional viewing position
from which one apprehends the two ambassadors is based on ‘‘vanitas’’
and misrecognition. Caught in the perspectival space of the given-to-be-
seen, the viewing subject cannot construe the meaning of the anamor-
phic image. It is only when looking at the painting from the far edges
of the picture frame—looking at it anamorphically—that the viewing
subject is dislodged from traditional perspectival space and can thus en-
counter death in the form of the skull.
Commenting upon Lacan’s discussion of the Holbein painting, Sil-
verman writes in The Threshold of the Visible World that ‘‘the painting
also provides a model both for understanding normative vision, and for
imagining how it might be possible to see in a way which is not entirely
given in advance. It shows that the same image can look very different
depending upon the vantage-point from which is it observed. . . . The
Ambassadors thus suggests that the geometral point is only one site from
which to apprehend the image—or, by extension, the cultural screen—
and that the screen can appear very different depending upon where one
‘stands’ ’’ (177–78). While Lacan analyzes Holbein’s skull as an example
of symbolic castration, Silverman discusses this same image as teach-
ing us that a normative viewing position is not inevitable. To state the
case from a slightly different perspective, the anamorphic viewing posi-
tion designates a position apart from the dominance of the geometral
point. It marks a viewing position from which the same representational
field may be apprehended from another angle and from which some-
thing other may be seen. But what are the material constraints under
which subjects can move from one viewing position to another?

(re)working on the railroad 59

 Kingston’s example of ‘‘The Ghostmate’’ suggests the extreme ma-
terial difficulty of occupying either a normative or an anamorphic view-
ing position. When the young man is apart from dominant reality and
in the splendid home of the noblewoman, he sees the world as vibrant,
beautiful, and alive. Yet this anamorphic viewing position outside the
given-to-be-seen is an illusion that proves not merely unsustainable in
the larger society but ultimately damaging to the well-being of the young
man himself. On the other hand, when the wandering scholar returns
to a traditional viewing position the world is dull and mundane. Death
and a gravestone replace the beauty of his earlier illusion.
While Holbein’s painting equates the dominant viewing position
with the misrecognized splendor and vanitas of European imperialism
and an anamorphic viewing position with death, Kingston proposes in
‘‘The Ghostmate’’ the opposite scenario. Only when he is outside a nor-
mative viewing perspective does the young man experience the beauty
of the world. Upon his eventual return to reality and village life all the
scholar sees around him is overwritten by a gravestone and dis-ease.
Kingston’s reversal points to a certain untenability of existence for the
Chinese male subject both inside and outside the given-to-be-seen.
This untenability of existence becomes especially relevant when it
is recontextualized in terms of the Chinese American male immigrant
in the United States. Throughout China Men, Kingston repeatedly de-
scribes Chinese immigrant men—from the father from China to the
wild man of the Green Swamp, to Uncle Bun—who are altogether un-
able to sustain a comfortable relationship with a dominant American
point of view that excludes them. This is a punitive visual and material
ordering that constitutes them as madmen. As such, they cannot be seen
as proper members of the nation-state—a state that nevertheless is eager
to exploit their noncitizen labor on the railroads, sugar plantations, and
farms and in canneries, laundries, and restaurants. Disempowered to
move outside this punitive ordering, their lives are constrained by the
material violence of a visual regime that threatens both their psychic and
bodily existence.
Let us turn now to Kingston’s elaborate description of her grand-
father in ‘‘The Grandfather of the Sierra Nevada Mountains,’’ perhaps the
‘‘maddest’’ of all her forefathers. In this chapter, Kingston provides an ex-
tended and detailed exploration of the most charged historical image of
Chinese American absence: the exclusion of Chinese American laborers
from the Golden Spike ceremony that marked the joining of the Union
Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroads.

60 racial castration
 A Materialism of Absence
There are no visual records, Kingston tells us, of the ten thousand Chi-
nese male laborers who built the transcontinental railroad; ‘‘there is no
record of how many died’’ (138), risking life and limb by blasting through
the Sierra Nevada Mountains while enduring Arctic-like winters living
in the tunnels they excavated—self-made graves. In ‘‘The Grandfather
of the Sierra Nevada Mountains,’’ Kingston emphatically states that ‘‘Ah
Goong does not appear in railroad photographs’’ (145). She thus pro-
vides a terse and immediate corrective to the infamous 1869 photograph
of ‘‘The Big Four’’ robber barons—Huntington, Hopkins, Stanford, and
Crocker—who are depicted hammering in the Golden Spike.37
Ah Goong knows that the railroad he is building ‘‘would not lead him
to his family’’ (129). Because of American exclusion laws against immi-
gration, naturalization, miscegenation, and citizenship, the railroad he
is building will not bridge the distance that separates Ah Goong from
his family in a distant land. The capitalist American economy, Yen Le
Espiritu writes, ‘‘wanted Asian male workers but not their families. To
ensure greater profitability from immigrants’ labor and to decrease the
cost of reproduction—the expense of housing, feeding, clothing, and
educating the workers’ dependents—employers often excluded ‘nonpro-
ductive’ family members such as women and children.’’ 38 The China
man is not needed for his reproductive but for his labor power. His pres-
ence is not intended to populate the barren landscape of the Wild West
with Chinese families but to build the national economic infrastructure
supporting westward expansion. Indeed, the joining of the Union Pacific
and the Central Pacific Railroads to form the first U.S. transcontinental
railroad marked not only the fulfillment of westward expansion but the
achievement of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. It made the journey
across the country—and thus settlement from coast to coast—far easier
than it had been before.
It is important to note, however, that while Manifest Destiny required
the actual movement of the white population westward—the ‘‘civiliz-
ing’’ mission of westward expansion—it would not have been possible
without the concomitant movement of goods and the racialized labor of
immigrants. Historian Sucheng Chan reports that the conditions under
which Chinese railroad laborers toiled were particularly harsh. She notes
that ‘‘six days a week, the Chinese toiled from sunrise to sundown, while
subject to whipping by overseers and forbidden by the company to quit
their jobs.’’ 39 In Strangers from a Different Shore, Ronald Takaki tells the
terrible story of the winter of 1866 when Central Pacific managers, de-

(re)working on the railroad 61

termined to accelerate construction, forced Chinese laborers to work in
the bitter cold: ‘‘The snowdrifts, over sixty feet in height, covered con-
struction operations. The Chinese workers lived and worked in tunnels
under the snow, with shafts to give them air and lanterns to light the way.
Snowslides occasionally buried camps and crews; in the spring, workers
found the thawing corpses, still upright, their cold hands gripping shov-
els and picks and their mouths twisted in frozen terror.’’ 40
The development of industrial capitalism and the shoring up of a
nationalist racial project of westward expansion were not merely ends
achieved through the completion of the transcontinental railroad. In-
deed, capitalism and racism were intertwined as a means, becoming
a self-perpetuating cycle so that the success of industrial capitalism—
typified by the labor practices of the Big Four robber barons—depended
on the abuse of cheap and flexible labor that was racialized. The Big
Four racialized their labor force through wage differentials, paying white
laborers more than nonwhites for identical (if not easier) work. Sucheng
Chan notes that during the building of the transcontinental railroad Chi-
nese workers received 30 dollars a month without board, compared to
unskilled European American workers, who received 30 dollars a month
with board, which was worth approximately 75 cents to a dollar a day
(Asian Americans, 81). These wages were paid regardless of which tasks
the workers performed or how many hours they worked. Takaki cites
similar statistics, stating that Chinese workers were paid $31 dollars a
month for their labor. According to Takaki, had the Central Pacific Rail-
road Company ‘‘used white workers it would have had to pay them the
same wages plus board and lodging, which would have increased labor
costs by one third’’ (85).
Hence, these examples serve as historical illustrations of the ways in
which American industry refined capitalist practices in the nineteenth
century through the racialization of its labor forces. Lowe writes in Im-
migrant Acts that ‘‘in the history of the United States, capital has maxi-
mized its profits not through rendering labor ‘abstract’ but precisely
through the social productions of ‘difference,’ of restrictive particularity
and illegitimacy marked by race, nation, geographical origins, and gen-
der. The law of value has operated, instead, by creating, preserving, and
reproducing the specifically racialized and gendered character of labor
power. These processes of differentiation have provided the means for
capital to exploit through the fracturing and segmentation of different
sectors of the labor force’’ (27–28). It is important to emphasize, then,
that the historical division of labor into white and nonwhite racialized
groups in the nineteenth century first required a new codification of

62 racial castration
white ethnic groups. For instance, many laborers on the eastern portion
of the Union Pacific track were Irish immigrants. Their incorporation
into ‘‘whiteness’’—from which they had consistently and often violently
been barred since their arrival in the United States—relied on a redefi-
nition of the term.41 For industrial capitalism, the extension of ‘‘white-
ness’’ to include the Irish was useful because it effectively divided labor
racially—making union organizing more difficult and the extraction of
greater surplus value from workers possible.
Given these historical conditions, it is safe to say that Ah Goong not
only recognizes that the railroad ‘‘he is building would not lead him to
his family’’ (129) but that the narrative of industrial development that
exploits the China man’s labor will surely exclude and displace him from
its historical achievements. Excluded from all official historical records,
these Chinese American railroad laborers threaten to disappear irre-
trievably, as Roy Batty laments in the closing moments of Blade Runner,
like ‘‘tears in rain.’’ To articulate the past historically, Benjamin states,
‘‘means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger’’
(‘‘Theses,’’ 255). Recognizing, with Benjamin, that the ‘‘state of emer-
gency’’ overshadowing her Chinese American ancestors is not the excep-
tion but the rule, Kingston relies upon personal memory to apprehend
something other than that which is given-to-be-seen in the Promontory
Summit photograph. This photograph thus provides a culminating occa-
sion for the convergence of errant memory, a critique of a racially moti-
vated given-to-be-seen, and the historical recuperation of this Chinese
American visual absence.
If this particular return—to family and to history—is an impossible
one, Kingston nevertheless makes us understand that it offers the pos-
sibility of bringing us elsewhere. During the construction of the Central
Pacific, the Chinese workers strike for shorter hours and increased pay.42
They attract the attention of newspaper editors, who send their artists up
the Sierra Nevada mountains to record this daring event. Writing about
the strike, which ‘‘began on Tuesday morning, June 25, 1867,’’ Kings-
ton not only points out the complicity of these newspaper artists, who
render a certain view of the China male laborers into historical ‘‘reality,’’
but she offers a different way of looking at this reality: ‘‘The men posed
bare-chested, their fists clenched, showing off their arms and backs. The
artists sketched them as perfect young gods reclining against rocks, wise
expressions on their handsome noble-nosed faces, long torsos with lean
stomachs, a strong arm extended over a bent knee, long fingers holding
a pipe, a rope of hair over a wide shoulder. Other artists drew faeries with
antennae for eyebrows and brownies with elvish pigtails; they danced

(re)working on the railroad 63

in white socks and black slippers among mushroom rings by moon-
light’’ (141–42). Here, Kingston’s imaginings give over to two opposing
portraits of Chinese American masculinity: young handsome gods or
‘‘elvish’’ faeries, feminized and emasculated. While some artists clearly
sympathize with the plight of the China men, depicting their fight for
economic justice through their visual rendering of ‘‘bare-chested, fists
clenched . . . perfect young gods,’’ those less sympathetic highlight the
stereotyped characteristics of an orientalized Chineseness: ‘‘faeries with
antennae for eyebrows and brownies with elvish pigtails.’’
Hence, the historical reality of the railroad strike can be as easily re-
framed into an image of valor as it can be configured as a picture of
cravenness. Yet, because it is the latter historical image that dialecti-
cally endures, Kingston simultaneously warns that any visual image that
would pretend to depict historical reality is always already written over
by ideological content and value. Refusing to grant visual sanction to
this image of cravenness, Ah Goong attempts to negotiate a punitive
American image-repertoire by assimilating its masculine criteria: ‘‘Ah
Goong acquired another idea that added to his reputation for craziness:
The pale, thin Chinese scholars and the rich men fat like Buddhas were
less beautiful, less manly than these brown muscular railroad men, of
whom he was one. One of ten thousand heroes’’ (142). While Kingston
provides through Ah Goong’s visual recalcitrance a blueprint for shift-
ing the given-to-be-seen, she is also careful to note how his dissonant
point of view is met with resistance not only by white Americans but
by his fellow Chinese laborers who equate his fanciful visual notions
with insanity. Ah Goong’s valorization of the Chinese laborers as ‘‘brown
muscular railroad men’’ speaks to an alterior view not easily reconcilable
with either the dominant visual regime of white Americans or traditional
Chinese ways of seeing. Once again, we witness the extreme material dif-
ficulty of looking awry at culturally coded image-repertoires: Ah Goong
precedes a long line of male progeny whose visual wanderings garner
them the institutional and cultural label ‘‘madmen.’’
Kingston exposes the ideological content of the given-to-be-seen that
depicts the Chinese American laborer as a demonic faerie. At the same
time, she is careful to note the material circumstances that not only
make it difficult for the Chinese laborer to oppose this punitive visual
ordering but also threaten to obliterate his presence from railroad his-
tory entirely. Writing about the visual absence of China men from the
Promontory Point photograph, Kingston attempts to seize their fleeting
images at this moment of danger. She emphasizes the ‘‘driving out’’ that
culminates in Ah Goong’s erasure from the visual field:

64 racial castration
 The transcontinental railroad was finished. They Yippee’d like
madmen. The white demon officials gave speeches. ‘‘The Greatest
Feat of the Nineteenth Century,’’ they said. ‘‘The Greatest Feat in
the History of Mankind,’’ they said. ‘‘Only Americans could have
done it,’’ they said, which is true. Even if Ah Goong had not spent
half his gold on Citizenship Papers, he was an American for having
built the railroad. A white demon in a top hat tap-tapped on the
gold spike, and pulled it back out. Then one China Man held the
real spike, the steel one, and another hammered it in.
While the demons posed for photographs, the China Men dis-
persed. It was dangerous to stay. The Driving Out had begun. Ah
Goong does not appear in railroad photographs. (145)

Like stuntpeople in Hollywood action films, the China Men function as

body doubles—performing hard labor—only to be replaced by a univer-
salizing whiteness, the faces of the robber baron ‘‘stars’’: Huntington,
Hopkins, Stanford, Crocker. Kingston’s doubled contrast of the white
demon’s ‘‘tap-tapping’’ of the golden spike, which is then ‘‘pulled . . .
back out,’’ against the China Men’s hammering in of the real steel spike
underscores the splitting of the real from representation, of reality from
the ways in which it is reconfigured in the laminating photograph that
memorializes this event. Again, Kingston presents two different ways
of viewing this event, two possible returns of memory to this famous
photographic scene.
Focusing on the stunning contradiction between Ah Goong’s eco-
nomic exploitation and political disenfranchisement, Kingston insists
that ‘‘even if Ah Goong had not spent half his gold on Citizenship Papers,
he was an American for having built the railroad.’’ Yet the explicit con-
nection that Kingston makes between Ah Goong’s economic exploita-
tion for the ‘‘Greatest Feat of the Nineteenth Century . . . the Greatest
Feat in the History of Mankind . . . [which] only Americans could have
done’’ with his deserving political enfranchisement as a citizen is an
impossible conjunction.43 American emphatically does not include Chi-
nese, as the China Men are driven out and their racialized labor is trans-
formed into an abstracted whiteness—a catastrophe, as Benjamin would
describe it, of progress. The driving out marks the China Man’s visual
absence from this historical archive—an absence mobilized precisely
through the threat of his physical elimination:

Ah Goong would have liked a leisurely walk along the tracks to re-
view his finished handiwork, or to walk east to see the rest of his
new country. But instead, Driven Out, he slid down mountains,

(re)working on the railroad 65

 leapt across valleys and streams, crossed plains, hid sometimes
with companions and often alone, and eluded bandits who would
hold him up for his railroad pay and shoot him for practice as they
shot Injuns and jackrabbits. . . . In China bandits did not normally
kill people, the booty the main thing, but here the demons killed
for fun and hate. They tied pigtails to horses and dragged china-
men. (146)

A fugitive like the wild man of the Green Swamp, Ah Goong’s method
of survival is ensured only by his self-erasure, a mandate of invisibility.
His self-erasure is necessary and inevitable not only to avoid further eco-
nomic sanction but to evade racial antipathy—white demons who killed
‘‘for fun and hate.’’ To reinsert the China Man’s rightful place in the his-
torical event culminating at Promontory Summit requires, then, the de-
ferred envisioning of official history from a radically divergent perspec-
tive. It requires us to look ‘‘east,’’ in other words, against a visual tide of
westward expansion.
In Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe analyzes the U.S. nation-state’s rapid
industrial expansion from 1850 to World War II and its history of re-
cruiting cheap Asian labor to meet the needs of development. According
to Lowe, the contradiction between the needs of the economic sphere
for cheap noncitizen labor and the refusal to recognize or enfranchise
this labor in the political arena ‘‘was sublated through the legal exclusion
and disenfranchisement of Chinese immigrant laborers’’ (13; Lowe’s em-
phasis). This historical period of exclusion was a time when popular
stereotypes of Chinese as unassimilable heathens, economic sojourn-
ers, and ‘‘yellow peril’’ prevailed. The abstraction and consolidation of
the nation’s citizenry as an imagined community of whiteness in the
nineteenth century depended not only on the rhetoric of these injuri-
ous stereotypes; the relative success of the nation-state in negotiating
the economic and political contradictions that arose from a racially di-
verse population also relied, as Kingston’s story of Ah Goong illustrates,
upon the strict management of the cultural terrain and visual appa-
ratus. Kingston’s story exemplifies how the contradiction between Ah
Goong’s economic exploitation and his political disenfranchisement as
a full subject of a ‘‘democratic’’ nation-state is resolved visually through
his erasure from the Promontory Summit photograph. The photograph
functions, then, not just as a questionable historical image but as an
ideological apparatus that attests to the ways in which contradictions
among the political, economic, and cultural spheres are reconciled
through the visual management and racialization of the figure of the
China Man.

66 racial castration
 Ah Goong returns to China with his pittance of railroad pay and then
goes back to San Francisco, where in typical fashion Kingston relates two
different versions of his fate: ‘‘Some say he died falling into the crack-
ing earth,’’ while others claim that ‘‘the family went into debt to send
for Ah Goong, who was . . . a homeless wanderer’’ (150). She qualifies
these separate returns, however, stating that ‘‘maybe he hadn’t died in
San Francisco, it was just his papers that burned; it was just that his exis-
tence was outlawed by Chinese Exclusion Acts’’ (151). It is both fitting
and ironic, then, that in ‘‘The Grandfather of the Sierra Nevada Moun-
tains’’ Kingston concludes with a description of the earthquake and fire
of 1906, which burned San Francisco’s Hall of Records and all its ‘‘Citi-
zenship Papers . . . Certificates of Return, Birth Certificates, Residency
Certificates, passenger lists, Marriage Certificates—every paper a China
Man wanted for citizenship and legality burned in that fire’’ (150; fig. 3).
Like the elimination of a single term in a sign chain, the burning of the
Hall of Records—the literal destruction of these particular documents—
demands a subsequent shift in meaning, a shift in the relational terms
that attempt to shore up the historical ruins of the archive. Hence, as a
result of this fire, Kingston tells us, an ‘‘authentic citizen’’ had no more
legal papers—no more claim on America—than an ‘‘alien,’’ and every
‘‘China Man was reborn out of that fire a citizen’’ (150).
In Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone, I would like to recall for a moment, it is
a false identification paper, which Leila discovers in Leon’s ‘‘suitcase of
lies,’’ that finally satisfies the skeptical authorities at the Social Secu-
rity Agency. ‘‘Leon was right to save everything,’’ Leila concludes. ‘‘For a
paper son, paper is blood. . . . I’m a stepdaughter of a paper son and I’ve
inherited this whole suitcase of lies. All of it is mine. All I have is those
memories, and I want to remember them all.’’ 44 Like the Chinese male
laborer’s visual absence in the Promontory Point photo, it is through
this absence of ‘‘authentic’’ legal documentation that the exploited China
Men could finally claim citizenship and their rightful place within a nar-
rative of America and American history as ‘‘paper sons.’’ A certificate of
fiction, a dis-appearance, a type of absent presence, paper sons are over-
determined by the material conditions and visual images that would not
have them. Yet, in turn, they force new meaning into national history as
they create unexpected paths of affiliation and kinship for their progeny,
like Leila, to remember, ‘‘to remember them all.’’

(re)working on the railroad 67

Figure 3 ‘‘It was just his papers that burned’’: ‘‘San Francisco,
April 18, 1906,’’ by Arnold Genthe (U.S. Library of Congress)
 Donald Duk and the Proper Name
The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only
as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recog-
nized and is never seen again. . . . For every image of the past that is
not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns
threatens to disappear irretrievably.
walter benjamin,
‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’’

Donald Duk sleeps, dreams, wakes, panics through the books and
pictures looking for Chinamen from out of the past.
frank chin, Donald Duk

Like Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank Chin harbors strong suspicions

about the dominant images of the given-to-be-seen and the historical
reality they proffer to the viewer. In Donald Duk, Chin opposes the
truth value of those dominant visual images, which exclude Chinese
American men. He does so not only by resignifying the proper name
but by dislodging mainstream representations and offering up a new
set of images and points of view. Like Kingston, Chin relies upon the
errancies of memory to effect this linguistic and visual displacement.
In particular, Chin turns to Donald Duk’s dreams—perhaps the psycho-
analytic category most immediately connected to memory—in order to
conjure forth a collection of substitute images and meanings from the
domain of the young boy’s unconscious.
Donald Duk begins with an extended meditation on the proper name
of its eponymous protagonist. Like Kingston’s orthographic insertion of
a space between the epithet ‘‘Chinaman’’ and her pluralized China Men,
Chin’s omission of the letter c in Donald Duk’s surname marks an in-
fidelity to the original Walt Disney icon, Donald Duck—an immediate
connection between the shifting of language and the shifting of image.
Chin’s adulterated citation of the proper name endeavors not only to
undercut the authenticity and symbolic power of this immensely fa-
mous icon of American popular culture; it also highlights the possibility
of going to a place we have never been in the larger cultural imaginary
and national screen. Put in slightly different terms, Chin’s orthographic
displacement effects not a faithful return to but an unfaithful departure
from the conventional meanings typically associated with Walt Disney’s
Americana. Chin attempts to resignify this powerful American icon to
include the figure of the Chinese American boy, to accommodate, that
is, an affirmative vision of racial difference within the influential image-
repertoire of American popular culture.

(re)working on the railroad 69

 Throughout Donald Duk, Chin presents the reader with a vertiginous
doubling, deformation, and expansion of the proper name. Several other
racially marked characters in the novel sport appellations that are notice-
able not only for their snappy alliteration—Daisy Duk, Larry Louie, and
the Fong Fong Sister—but for their insistent and disjunctive pairing
with popular white media icons. Thus, we are told, Daisy Duk is the Chi-
nese Betty Crocker (46) and Larry Louie is the Chinese Fred Astaire
(50). In addition, the Chinatown Frank Sinatra, the Chinese Richard
Avedon, and the Chinese Marilyn Monroe (134) make guest appear-
ances in Donald’s Chinatown world.45 Furthermore, Chin creates a series
of ‘‘body doubles’’ in the form of female twins. Donald’s own sisters,
Penelope and Venus Duk—from whose demure mouths spouts a con-
stant stream of Freudian pop psychology—challenge in their Chinese
American corporeal presence those classical visions of ancient West-
ern Greek and Roman female beauty that their proper names neces-
sarily evoke.
While Kingston exploits the errancies of memory to rewrite popular
Chinese and American myths, legends, and fables of origin, Chin locates
his point of departure and resistance at the site of American popular cul-
ture. In their whitewashed omnipresence in national (and now global)
media, the largely static yet immensely influential images of the Ameri-
can cultural screen shape our collective perception of identity and reality
while acquiring in their repetitious circulation the status of truth value.46
We must note, however, that Chin’s resignifying project—his attempt to
fold an affirmative vision of racial difference into mainstream popular
culture—works against a long historical tide of punitive media images
of Asians. In Donald Duk and nearly everything else he has written, Chin
rails against the pathological absurdity of familiar Hollywood stereo-
types such as Charlie Chan (e.g., Donald Duk, 121), Fu Manchu, and Ha-
shimura Togo.47
In this respect, Chin’s efforts to resignify the definitional limits of
an image like Donald Duck are not unlike recent attempts by activists
and progressive scholars to rework the historical significance of the term
queer in order to turn against and expand its authorized meanings. Yet,
as Judith Butler asks, what are the social and discursive limits of re-
signifying a term historically deployed as a paralyzing slur—an accusing
taunt of sexual degradation and shame—with a new and affirmative set
of meanings? Butler writes of this significant reappropriation and re-
versal: ‘‘Does the reversal reiterate the logic of repudiation by which it
was spawned? Can the term overcome its constitutive history of injury?
Does it present the discursive occasion for a powerful and compelling
fantasy of historical reparation? When and how does a term like ‘queer’

70 racial castration
become subject to an affirmative resignification for some when a term
like ‘nigger,’ despite some recent efforts at reclamation, appears capable
of only reinscribing its pain?’’ 48 Chin’s attempts to rework our vision of
American popular culture through the figure of the Chinese American
boy must be placed within the recurring and virtually naturalized history
of disparaged images of the ‘‘chinaman chink.’’ The possible affirmative
resignification of the sign-chain ‘‘Donald Duck’’ to include a racialized
version of ‘‘Donald Duk’’ exists only in relation to the accumulated his-
torical force of the negative effects and prior injuries of these disparaged
images. If ‘‘Donald Duk’’ demands a startling turn against a constitutive
history of damaging Asian stereotypes, what are the formidable limits
and constraints on Chin’s unfaithful citation of this particular proper
name? Throughout the novel, Chin makes it abundantly clear that this
project of resignification is by no means an easy task. To the contrary, the
refunctioning of the privileged, authorized, and institutionalized mean-
ings of Disney’s Donald Duck threatens the very material existence and
psychic dissolution of Chin’s Chinese American protagonist.

Donald’s Self-Hate
In the midst of his attempts to resignify the proper name, Chin ques-
tions the efficaciousness of his project. While he opens the novel with a
meditation on the possibilities of Donald’s adulterated sobriquet, Chin
is also careful to emphasize the material consequences of this vexed pair-
ing of Donald Duk with his Disney namesake: ‘‘Who would believe any-
one named Donald Duk dances like Fred Astaire? Donald Duk does not
like his name. Donald Duk never liked his name. He hates his name.
He is not a duck. He is not a cartoon character. He does not go home
to sleep in Disneyland every night’’ (1). Chin not only indicates that
Donald hates his name but also that the dominant white society holds
him in contempt of the ‘‘original’’: who would believe that a Chinese
American boy named Donald Duk could dance like Fred Astaire? Chin’s
citational departure from the proper name not only garners ambivalent
political results but often scorn and ridicule. While his modified vision
of the Disney character challenges the boundaries of popular Ameri-
can culture that would exclude the Chinese American boy, any potential
political subversion of the cultural screen is neutralized by mainstream
society’s reluctance to see or ratify Donald in this particular guise. Chin’s
attempted displacement of Magic Kingdom reality thus cannot be easily
accommodated. To rephrase a famous line of the film theorist Laura
Mulvey, Donald is set adrift to shift restlessly in his borrowed Disney
clothes.

(re)working on the railroad 71

 Chin’s deformative reiteration of the proper name Donald Duk re-
sults neither in an upheaval of symbolic norms and sanctioned mean-
ings nor in the dissolution of the Disney original. Instead, it is Donald’s
own psychic and material stability that is eroded and threatened. At his
expensive private school, Donald ‘‘avoids the other Chinese here. And the
Chinese seem to avoid him. This school is a place where the Chinese are
comfortable hating the Chinese. ‘Only the Chinese are stupid enough to
give a kid a stupid name like Donald Duk,’ Donald Duk says to himself.
‘And if the Chinese were that smart, why didn’t they invent tap danc-
ing?’ ’’ (2). Daily, Donald finds himself in an institutionalized space of
learning where the ‘‘Chinese are comfortable hating the Chinese’’ (2). He
is compelled by this racial (self-)hatred: he resents the fact that his par-
ents are so detached from mainstream popular culture that they could
name their only son after a ridiculous cartoon character, ‘‘that barebutt
cartoon duck in the top half of a sailor suit and no shoes’’ (7)—a Du(c)k,
in other words, with no pants. He relentlessly complains that ‘‘his own
name is driving him crazy! Looking Chinese is driving him crazy!’’ (2)—
another Chinese madman. Hence, he associates his intense hatred for
Chinese culture and the Chinese community with his own name and
finally his own self. As a result, his ability to be comfortable hating the
Chinese is purchased only at the expense of an internalized self-loathing
and a subjectivity that is radically split. To reinvoke a statement from
the Aiiieeeee! group, Donald is infused with feelings of ‘‘self-contempt,
self-rejection, and disintegration.’’ 49
Donald’s fractured psyche is accompanied by an insistent yet failed
identification with whiteness, what might be described as a melancholic
form of racialized subjectivity. Despising his name and attempting to
displace his Chinese identity with one that is typically American, he
looks, ironically, to American popular culture for an alternative sense
of identity. Donald obsessively views Fred Astaire films, occupies all his
spare time with tap-dancing lessons, and hangs posters of his hero all
over his bedroom walls. Donald idolizes Fred Astaire and tap dancing.
(‘‘And if the Chinese were that smart, why didn’t they invent tap danc-
ing?’’) Ironically, in the United States tap dancing traces its genealogy not
to whiteness but to nineteenth-century minstrel shows. Donald imper-
sonates his hero and invests all of his psychic belief in dominant white
images of the silver screen that will not have him. King Duk, Donald’s
father, observes his son’s slavish mimicry of white culture with disap-
pointment: ‘‘He’s acting strange. . . . He’s jumpy and jittery, tapping his
toes and clicking his heels all the time like someone with a palsy. . . . He
finds some old movie on a late-night channel and lets some dead guy in

72 racial castration
black and white be him’’ (89, 104). In this Manichean world of white and
black, there is clearly no space for the yellow boy.
Donald’s psychic self-splitting and utter lack of racial self-respect
comes to poison all his relationships with his family members and
friends. His father, in particular, demurs at his son with the unmitigated
frustration of effaced paternal pride. He criticizes Donald’s antipathy for
the Chinese as well as his relentless assimilatory drive. Bringing Donald
to a Chinese herb doctor to be exorcised of his vexed identifications with
whiteness, King Duk laments: ‘‘He steals from me and lies, and treats
the Chinese like dirt. . . . I think that I may have accidentally taken home
a white boy from the hospital and raised him as my own son. And my
real son is somewhere unhappy in a huge mansion of some old-time San
Francisco money. . . . I can’t believe I have raised a little white racist. He
doesn’t think Chinatown is America’’ (89–90).
Donald’s racial self-loathing also poisons every aspect of his material
life. Ultimately, his lack of confidence and self-esteem becomes so ex-
treme that it overshadows even his postural schema. At the beginning of
the novel, King Duk abruptly wakes his son in the middle of the night to
kvetch: ‘‘You walk like a sad softie. . . . You look like you want everyone to
beat you up’’ (3). King Duk criticizes Donald’s slouching shoulders, his
pouting face, his grasping hands. Donald’s distinctly passive and femi-
nine character gives pause to his father’s paternal anxieties. King Duk
notes that his son seems ‘‘scared’’ (4), and he fears that this lack of con-
fidence will make Donald ‘‘look like a sissy’’ (5) in front of the gangs of
Chinatown. Donald’s emphatic confirmation of his father’s anxieties—
‘‘I am scared!’’ (4)—does nothing to assuage King Duk’s paternal dismay.
In an ultimate act of self-loathing that marks the inexorable fissures
of his split subjectivity, Donald must laugh at himself in order to fend
off the verbal and physical taunts of Chinatown gang members, who like
to beat him because of his compromised moniker. Since Donald can-
not defend a part of himself that he hates with such great intensity, and
since ‘‘he doesn’t know how to fight,’’ he, too, must participate in his own
self-denigration:

‘‘Don’t let these monsters take off my pants. I may be Donald Duk,

but I am as human as you,’’ he says in Chinese, in his Donald
Duck voice, ‘‘I know how to use chopsticks. I use flush toilets.
Why shouldn’t I wear pants on Grant Street in Chinatown?’’ They
all laugh more than three times. Their laughter roars three times
on the corner of Grant and Jackson, and Donald Duk walks away,
leaving them laughing. . . . Donald Duk does not want to laugh
about his name forever. There has to be an end to this. There is an

(re)working on the railroad 73

 end to all kidstuff for a kid. An end to diapers. An end to nursery
rhymes and fairy tales. There has to be an end to laughing about
his name to get out of a fight. Chinese New Year. Everyone will be
laughing. He is twelve years old. (7)

By laughing at himself, along with the ridicule of others, Donald actively

and repeatedly rejects his Chinese American identity. His mimicry of
Disney’s cartoon duck—his actions and his voice—results not in the
final subversion of this cultural icon but ultimately in his own self-
parody, his spiritual pantsing and emasculation, as it were. This unre-
lenting objectification and hatred of the self causes the twelve-year-old
no uncertain physical and psychic pain: ‘‘He does not want to laugh
about his name forever. There has to be an end to this.’’ Yet in the world
of Chin’s Chinatown there are no alternative images of self with which
Donald can easily identify. When he spies himself in a window at night,
it resembles a ‘‘tarnished mirror’’ (57). Slouched and hunched over, he
‘‘looks like he’s about to cry. . . . ‘How depressing,’ Donald Duk says at
the sight of himself ’’ (57). For the Chinese boy, the cultural screen is a
meager source of self-confidence. Unlike Lacan’s jubilant and narcissis-
tic infant in front of its mirror image, Donald experiences little joy at the
sight of his reflection (a disidentification and loss of jubilance that will
be explored in chapter 2).
If Donald’s adulterated surname cannot on its own extend the bound-
aries of the American cultural imaginary to include the young Chinese
American boy, what can? Chin suggests that the shifting of both the
word and the images of screen—a shift that would alleviate the self-
loathing and suffering that grip his protagonist—must be found else-
where. He thus turns to the level of the unconscious—to Donald’s
dreamwork—in order to provide his protagonist with a new set of af-
firming images and meanings with which to identify. It is only through
these new images and meanings, Chin suggests, that Donald can begin
to challenge the repetitious damages of history.

The Damages of History

We cannot be surprised that Donald relentlessly identifies with domi-
nant images of whiteness at the same time that he disparages his Chi-
nese heritage. The racial self-loathing that characterizes his daily life is
continually taught to him at his private school and reinforced by this ma-
terial environment of ‘‘learning,’’ where, Chin reminds us, ‘‘the Chinese
are comfortable hating the Chinese’’ (2). We also must remember, along
with Lowe, that ‘‘education is a primary site through which the narratives

74 racial castration
of national group identity are established and reproduced, dramatizing
that the constructions of others—as enemies—is a fundamental logic in
the constitution of national identity’’ (Immigrant Acts, 56). The passive
demeanor that King Duk despises in his son finds one of its more influ-
ential genealogies in this institutional setting, one rooted in the psychic
life of an impressionable childhood. For Donald, the demand to turn
against this constitutive space of national indoctrination seems insur-
mountable.
During a history lesson, Donald is presented with a group of histori-
cal narratives that shape a dominant national view of Chinese American
men as passive and feminized. The history teacher poses a direct insti-
tutional challenge to any deviation from mainstream society’s point of
view. Mr. Meanwright, whose very name invokes at once a malignancy
of spirit and a ‘‘do-good’’ liberalism, is a staunch promoter of a faithful
vision and reiterated version of the Chinese in American history:

The teacher of California History is so happy to be reading about

the Chinese. ‘‘The man I studied history under at Berkeley au-
thored this book. He was a spellbinding lecturer,’’ the teacher
throbs. Then he reads, ‘‘The Chinese in America were made pas-
sive and nonassertive by centuries of Confucian thought and Zen
mysticism. They were totally unprepared for the violently indi-
vidualistic and democratic Americans. From their first step on
American soil to the middle of the twentieth century, the timid,
introverted Chinese have been helpless against the relentless vic-
timization by aggressive, highly competitive Americans. (2)

Mr. Meanwright personifies Benjamin’s suspect historiographer, who

provides not a flitting but an eternal image of the past. Benjamin warns
us that the ‘‘good tidings which the historian of the past brings with
throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his
mouth’’ (‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’’ 255). When Mr. Mean-
wright ‘‘throbs’’ on about the Confucian thought and Zen mysticism
that characterize the passive and nonassertive qualities of the introverted
Chinese in America, he perpetuates a particular tradition of storytell-
ing that Benjamin stringently eschews. He regurgitates a brand of static
history perpetuated by his ‘‘spellbinding’’ professor at Berkeley and the
line of orientalist scholars who precede him. He attempts to transfer this
fixed history to future and impressionable generations of unquestioning
and spellbound students.
By describing the Berkeley history professor as spellbinding, Chin
suggests the illusory and make-believe quality of the image that is pre-
sented by Mr. Meanwright as indisputable historical reality. Further-

(re)working on the railroad 75

more, he also suggests that this spellbinding history garners its truth
value only through its continual citation and repetition over time of a set
of static images and meanings. Mr. Meanwright offers his spellbound
class the unadulterated version of history that he was given. The nature
of these lectures, one after another, requires the unqualified transfer
of truth from one generation to the next. That he quotes directly from
the history book written by his mentor suggests that Mr. Meanwright is
less the author or owner of historical reality than the citational mouth-
piece of the particular fixed historical narrative he summons. As such,
he derives his authority as a teacher precisely through his faithful cita-
tion and repetition of a conservative, institutionalized version of history.
He is captivated by his own blindness, mesmerized by the history he
cites. Indeed, this version of history succeeds only to the extent that it
echoes former citations, accumulating its force of authority through its
repetition of a prior, authoritative set of practices.50 It preserves a dis-
torted view of the sojourning and victimized Chinese in America that
continues to fuel the present-day needs of American ideology—that con-
tinues to suit the contemporary demands of American exceptionalist
notions such as democracy, individualism, competitiveness, free market, and
capitalism.
For example, Mr. Meanwright notes that ‘‘one of the Confucian con-
cepts that lends the Chinese vulnerable to the assertive ways of the West
is ‘the mandate of heaven.’ As the European kings of old ruled by divine
right, so the emperors of China ruled by the mandate of heaven’’ (2).
In comparing the nonassertive Chinese to individualistic and aggres-
sive Americans, Mr. Meanwright ultimately reiterates a historical view
that judges the eternally superior and democratic founding qualities of
white America against the wanting and static characteristics of prior as
well as contemporary generations of Chinese. Ironically, while the era of
divine right has unequivocally become a relic of the past for its European
progeny, the mandate of heaven still seems to grip the atavistic Chinese.
Mr. Meanwright, we cannot help but notice, pontificates in the present
tense: ‘‘One of the Confucian concepts that lends the Chinese vulnerable
to the assertive ways of the West is ‘the mandate of heaven.’ ’’ Lost in the
splendor of this comparison, Mr. Meanwright, not unlike Freud in his
vision of the atavistic primitive, fails to recognize the temporal slippages
of his erroneous analogy. By aligning the era of absolute rule with the
contemporary Chinese in America, Mr. Meanwright not only helps to fill
Donald’s childhood with institutional abuse but fails to recognize this
history as one that motivates dominant ideologies and beliefs.51
In his unmitigated passion for his version of history, Mr. Meanwright
loses sight of the Benjaminian historicism that he imparts with such

76 racial castration
gleeful ignorance. His image of the Chinese in America is one that main-
tains its status as history only by inspiring an illusory belief in the truth
of its fixed images, repetitively passed down from spellbinding teachers
to spellbound pupils, generation after generation: ‘‘The teacher takes a
breath and looks over his spellbound class. Donald wants to barf pink
and green stuff all over the teacher’s teacher’s book’’ (2–3). Indeed, that
Donald wants to barf all over this history suggests a hysterical desire to
reject the version of history he is being force-fed at his expensive pri-
vate school. This is a history that injures him, psychically and materi-
ally, a history that is in no small way responsible for his lack of self-
regard. Yet Donald’s resistance to the overwhelming and constitutive
force of Mr. Meanwright’s official vision of history involves the daunt-
ing project of undoing a vast network of sanctioned beliefs. In the end,
Donald himself is compelled to lend his voice to this particular citational
vision. Asked by his pal Arnold Azalea what Meanwright is saying, the
boy replies, ‘‘Same thing as everybody else—Chinese are artsy, cutesy,
and chickendick’’ (3).
Given the authoritative force of Mr. Meanwright’s dominant image
of the Chinese, how might Donald begin to turn against the constitu-
tive injuries of this history? I turn now to the dreamwork and investigate
Chin’s psychic prescription for undoing this vast network of historical
beliefs.

Donald’s Dreamwork
Chin ultimately suggests that it is only on the level of the unconscious
that Donald can oppose conscious mainstream views of the Chinese
as ‘‘chickendick.’’ He suggests that the omnipresent screen images of
American popular culture, as well as the dominant historical narratives
they impart, can only be displaced by turning to an alternate set of dream
images that appear as Donald slumbers. Chin navigates Donald’s move-
ment away from the pervasive images of the given-to-be-seen through
a series of opposing dream visions—unconscious images of heroic Chi-
nese laborers that flash up at the instant when they can be recognized
and then threaten never to be seen again. Impelled by a family photo-
graph album given to him by his uncle, Donald begins to dream against
the dominant historical reality and narratives that configure the Chi-
nese American male laborer as passive or absent. Not surprisingly, these
images depict a myriad of wizened Chinese faces as they lay down tracks
for the railroad.
In the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud observes that dreams represent
the unconscious reworking during sleep of waking perceptions.52 In this

(re)working on the railroad 77

topographical model, stimuli (primarily visual or auditory) penetrate the
psyche, pass inward through its reservoir of mnemic traces to enter the
domain of the unconscious. After being processed by the unconscious,
these stimuli return outward, traveling to the level of the preconscious,
finally to arrive again at a state of conscious perception—what Freud
labels the manifest content of the dream.53 The preconscious, organized
by the rules of language, is governed by social norms and prohibitions.
As such, it acts not only as the cultural anteroom and clearinghouse
for unconscious desires and impulses to emerge into conscious thought
but as a psychic censor, binding through language the meanings that
the images of the dream-thoughts can consciously assume. In this man-
ner, the forbidden impulses and affects (of the primary process) running
rampant on the level of the unconscious are linguistically dampened and
controlled (by the secondary process) so that their emergence into con-
sciousness will not threaten the order of things. (Here again we see the
intimate connection between images and words.)
In the process of weaving its associative webs, the unconscious, un-
like the preconscious, manifests a striking indifference to the question of
what is conventionally assumed to be important or worthless at the level
of the given-to-be-seen. The unconscious often displaces psychic value
from one term to another on the basis of what would, in waking life,
seem to be a completely ‘‘inapposite analogy.’’ 54 Indeed, Freud glimpsed
in the dreamwork the ego’s potential for promiscuous mobility; the
dreamwork reveals that psychic life is astonishingly mobile even if lived
experience is not. This flexibility and seemingly random transfer of psy-
chic value becomes necessary because of the censoring mechanism that
governs the secondary operations of the preconscious. That is, the com-
plex networks of signifying chains that are created at the level of the un-
conscious are formed in order to facilitate the disguised expression of a
prohibited desire, object, or scene that cannot be named directly at the
level of the preconscious.
In other words, it is the duty of the unconscious, through condensa-
tion and displacement, to attach censored images to permissible ones
that would allow them to persist and reappear in the preconscious. Gov-
erned by the imperative to recover an interdicted fantasy, the dream-
work circuitously emerges into conscious thought through the laws of
substitution. Under the pressure of preconscious surveillance, the un-
conscious must resort to alternate representations. It must mobilize sig-
nifiers that are capable of disguising their signifieds while at the same
time speaking for them. In this manner, a seemingly innocent substi-
tute object (on the level of the preconscious) is invested with the affect

78 racial castration
and intensity that properly belongs to another taboo object (on the level
of the unconscious). By attaching its prohibited desire to this acceptable
object, the dreamwork, Freud explains, evades censorship and thus be-
comes a wish fulfillment in disguise as it returns to consciousness.
Like memories, the dreamwork’s return cannot be an authentic re-
covery. It is never the same since the laws of repression dictate that the
tabooed desire, scene, or object can only be recuperated in the guise of a
substitute object that is acceptable to the social prohibitions governing
the linguistic systems of the preconscious. In this respect, the dream-
work’s substitutions not only offer the psychic blueprint for the evasion
of censorship but also, at one and the same time, suggest a potential
way of renegotiating regulatory norms and prohibitions by introduc-
ing difference back into our conscious, waking lives. In other words,
by introducing forbidden differences on the level of the unconscious,
and by disguising these prohibited differences on the level of the pre-
conscious, the dreamwork offers the possibility of departure from con-
ventional norms and prohibitions. It thus introduces the possibility of
alterity back into the domain of social life. As condensed and displaced
desires, objects, and scenes of the dreamwork emerge into conscious-
ness, they not only expand the field of representation and meaning but
they simultaneously refigure the social boundaries of difference that
govern our waking lives. In this manner, dreams harbor the potential
to reform our conscious notions of reality by continually contesting and
permutating what would conventionally pass as real. In their disguised
form, the substitute images of the dreamwork—these memories—re-
called during the light of day have the political potential to take us some-
place where we have never been before.
We might characterize this push and pull method of looking—the
visual and linguistic tension between unconscious and preconscious
ways of seeing—as Nachträglichkeit, or ‘‘deferred action.’’ 55 Freud uses
the term in relation to issues of psychic causality and temporality, as does
Barthes, who claims in Camera Lucida that the punctum is revealed ‘‘only
after the fact’’ (53). Deferred action describes a psychic process by means
of which conscious views and meanings are revised at a later time to ac-
commodate new experiences that emerge from unconscious thoughts
and experiences. As such, conscious memories and views do not develop
in any strict linear or chronological fashion. Instead, they are continu-
ally subjected to a fresh rearrangement of meaning in accordance with
new psychic and material circumstances. The retroactive and recipro-
cal quality characterizing deferred action, Laplanche and Pontalis point
out, suggests ‘‘a conception of temporality which was brought to the fore

(re)working on the railroad 79

by philosophers and later adopted by the various tendencies of existen-
tial psycho-analysis: consciousness constitutes it own past, constantly
subjecting its meaning to revision in conformity with its ‘project.’ ’’ 56
Bringing together Freud’s idea of Nachträglichkeit with our discus-
sion of the dreamwork, we might describe the introduction of alterity
into consciousness through the disguised objects of the dreamwork as
a deferred method of productive looking. To resignify the images of the
given-to-be-seen, Silverman points out, requires a double method of pro-
ductive looking that must be written under the psychic registers of both
consciousness and the unconscious. Silverman suggests that deferred
looking entails a psychical process in which we consciously rework the
terms under which we unconsciously look at the objects comprising our
visual landscape. This unconscious looking involves a perpetual struggle
first to recognize our involuntary acts of incorporation and repudiation,
and our implicit affirmation of the given-to-be-seen, and then to look
once more in an alternative way: ‘‘The ethical becomes operative not
at the moment when unconscious desires and phobias assume posses-
sion of our look, but in a subsequent moment, when we take stock of
what we have just ‘seen,’ and attempt—with an inevitably limited self-
knowledge—to look again, differently’’ (Threshold, 173).
For instance, while mainstream society would consciously reject
the resignifying potential of Donald Duk’s proper name, by altering
society’s unconscious ways of seeing this popular cartoon character we
could hope to effect a gradual shift in the meaning of this image on
the level of the conscious. In other words, the introduction of alterity
into waking life through the deferred visual action of the dreamwork
provides a method of productive looking—an introduction of uncon-
scious, prohibited views into consciousness—that would help to expand
the field of representation and meaning by encouraging us to depart
from traditional and conscious ways of seeing. Conscious resignifica-
tion requires, then, unconscious support. By introducing the forbidden
material of unconscious prohibitions into consciousness, individuals as
well as the larger society around them can come to revise and accept on
a conscious level what they would normally reject as incommensurate
with society’s prevailing beliefs.
‘‘What I can name,’’ Barthes avers, ‘‘cannot really prick me’’ (Cam-
era Lucida, 51). The method of double looking described here provides
a new set of images and meanings that not only pricks the viewer with
its unconscious and yet to be named novelty but also dislodges the
traditional narratives of the given-to-be-seen in politically productive
ways. By giving voice to—by naming—these unconscious images as they
emerge into consciousness, the viewer can displace the traditional mean-

80 racial castration
ings of old signifiers to endow them with new significance. Reconfig-
uring visual images on the level of the unconscious and reintroducing
them into our conscious waking lives, the dreamwork retroactively alters
our conventional ways of seeing, our conventional narratives and his-
tories. The dreamwork provides a new battery of images and meanings
with which Donald Duk can identify in order to rework the restrictive
parameters of his daytime life.

The Optical Unconscious

Throughout Donald Duk, the eponymous protagonist wavers between
waking and sleeping life. Indeed, many of the most unforgettable scenes
in Chin’s novel take place while Donald is slumbering. As a consequence,
the reality of Donald’s conscious daytime existence is explored and quali-
fied on the level of the unconscious dreamwork. In his dreams, Donald
appears as a young boy who works with older Chinese laborers to build
the transcontinental railroad. In this regard, history rearranges itself
against the dominant historical narrative presented to Donald by the
spellbinding Meanwright, placing him in direct contact with a group
of nineteenth-century workers. Accepted, not ridiculed or scorned, by
these men, Donald is presented with a visual affirmation of self. More-
over, he finds himself part of a larger racialized community that, unlike
his private school, ratifies his existence as a Chinese American subject.
A repository of new images and meanings emerges from Donald’s un-
conscious dreams—an evolving image-repertoire that initiates the diffi-
cult task of resignifying the static pictures of the given-to-be-seen. This
project of visual displacement begins the crucial undoing of Donald’s
psychic network of self-hate—a task contiguous with the material, back-
breaking labor of the railroad workers.
However, this project also causes Donald no uncertain anxiety. It
is a slow and painstaking process; the evolution of Donald’s image-
repertoire is by no means direct or unimpeded. Indeed, it is marked
by Nachträglichkeit and remains highly precarious, for the moment of
historical accessibility is decisively fleeting. While forbidden images of
heroic Chinese laborers make their direct appearance in his dreams,
Donald nearly loses sight of this past. ‘‘The true picture of the past flits
by,’’ Benjamin warns. ‘‘The past can be seized as an image which flashes
up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again’’
(‘‘Theses,’’ 255). Donald’s dreams flash by while he is asleep. Lost in a
bevy of competing images, these dream visions are in danger of vanish-
ing as quickly as they appear. As soon as Donald wakes, his ‘‘dream is
already nothing but a fading feeling. But how? And why? Donald Duk

(re)working on the railroad 81

closes his eyes and covers his head with his pillow’’ (99). When his
mother inquires about this odd behavior, Donald replies, ‘‘I’m trying to
remember’’ (99). Truth for Donald, like Tiresias, emerges from the dark.
Even when some of Donald’s dream visions manage to endure and
persist in his waking life, they quickly meet the regulating mechanism
of preconscious censorship. Initially, Donald himself rejects the narra-
tive of his dream visions as incommensurate with his pregiven reality:
the dreams ‘‘are all bad because they are all about Chinese he does not
understand’’ (25). However, as he comes to accept the significance of
these countervisions, the pressure of bringing his forbidden dreams
into a mainstream culture resistant to their point of view nearly forces
these alternative historical interpretations into miscarriage. What he
learns about the Chinese railroad workers in his dream visions clearly
contradicts the lessons proffered within the institutionalized space of
the classroom. Encountering an increasing number of these contradic-
tions, Donald faces a personal crisis. He valiantly attempts to follow the
narrative momentum of those departing images, which take him away
from the official tracks of history, a historical ‘‘Calgon moment,’’ as it
were.
In one particular dream vision, Donald witnesses before his eyes the
multitude of Chinese laborers who set a track laying record on Thurs-
day, 29 April 1869. Yet just as he beholds this important event Donald
also sees a ‘‘reporter with the telescope’’ deliberately ignoring the histori-
cal feat. Refusing to acknowledge the presence of these China Men, the
white reporter asks Strobridge, the Central Pacific foreman: ‘‘By the way,
what are the names of the eight Irishmen unloading the rail?’’ (111). The
disparity between Donald’s unconscious dream vision and the official
records of the event he encounters in another institutionalized space—
the archive of the local library—revolves precisely around the reporter’s
telescopic vision, his exclusion of the Chinese from this occasion. Read-
ing the caption that accompanies the picture memorializing this inci-
dent, Donald calls out to his friend Arnold Azalea. ‘‘Look at this,’’ he
tells his pal. ‘‘At rail’s end stood eight burly Irishmen, armed with heavy
track tongs. Their names were Michael Shay, Patrick Joyce, Michael Kennedy,
Thomas Dailky, George Elliot, Michael Sullivan, Edward Killeen, and Fred
McNamara. Not one Chinese name’’ (122; Chin’s emphasis). Absent in
both image and proper name, the Chinese laborers are erased from this
historical event. In a similar historical continuum, the racially marked
Donald Duk is also absent from contemporary images comprising the
screen of American popular culture.
While Donald is rather surprised by the contradictions between the

82 racial castration
personal images of his dreamwork and the dominant images of the his-
tory book, he is initially reluctant to look awry at the truth value of the
official photographic image. King Duk admonishes his son: ‘‘The truth
came looking for you in the dreams. You go look for the truth in the
library. You know what is true. You know what is true. . . . That makes
your life hard, kid. You have the choice. If you say Chinese are ching
chong, you have to choose to do it and lie about what you know is true’’
(139). Despite his father’s caveat, Donald hesitates to look against the
given-to-be-seen, to dismiss the institutional weight of the historical nar-
rative that emerges from the venerable archives of library records. It is
not until the force of contradiction between his dream images and the
static pictures of official history lessons accumulate to the point of what
Althusser describes as ‘‘ruptural unity’’ that a new vision of historical
truth can emerge to oppose the dominant history of the ruling classes.57
Only when the accumulated effects of these contradictory visions
begin to affect Donald’s sense of self does he begins to view history as
what Benjamin labels a ‘‘state of emergency’’ (‘‘Theses,’’ 257). Donald
comes to understand that the fleeting images of his dream visions need
to be, as Benjamin emphasizes, ‘‘recognized by the present as one of its
own concerns’’ (255). It is only at this moment of crisis, at this point of
ruptural unity, at this formative juncture of a dis-appearing history that
he begins to understand the urgency of King Duk’s admonitions. The
continuous pressure of his alternative dream visions begins to force its
way into his consciousness, and Donald learns through these deferred
visions how to look differently at the dominant historical images and
narratives before him.
A category of memory, the dreamwork (unlike the photographic
image) is always given in present tense. Rather than vague lectures about
atavistic Chinese and the mandate of heaven, Donald directly experi-
ences in his dreamwork a tangible history of deprivation that addresses
his present concerns: the difficulties of hard labor, the lack of food, the
exploitation of low-wage labor. These material hardships become con-
crete, practical concerns for the young boy. Donald wakes up with the
other laborers, works grueling hours to lay a world record’s worth of
track, and witnesses the effacement of this historical feat in the official
pages of daily newspapers and history books. He beholds the foreman
Kwan’s courageous interactions with the robber baron Crocker. He over-
hears a heated exchange between Crocker and the foreman, who de-
mands better working hours and wages on behalf of Chinese collective.
Donald’s dreamwork thus provides a pregnant moment for the birth
of a new national history, a countervision of Chinese Americans in the

(re)working on the railroad 83

United States. Just as Donald’s dreams are in danger of disappearing, the
history of Chinese participation in the building of the transcontinental
railroad is in danger of being lost forever. Donald’s dreams are closely
connected to this crisis of history; in order for this truth to be revealed
to a new generation, he must be able to grasp the fleeting images of
his dream, connect them to his present concerns, and use them to look
against the historical reality before him. Focusing directly on this ques-
tion of use value, Fred Astaire suggests to Donald in one of his nighttime
visions that dreams may serve as the privileged psychic mechanism by
which one can shift the dominant visual images of the given-to-be-seen:
‘‘If you forget who you are in your dreams, maybe, then maybe, that
is what dreams are for’’ (126). Dreams provide the occasion for going
somewhere else, the occasion for creating new psychic parameters and
pathways that transform both others and finally the self. In this regard,
the dreamwork opens decisively upon the territory of fantasy—a fantasy
that according to psychoanalytic axiom has the most tangible effects on
the shaping of our sense of reality.58
Donald comes to understand that dreams are those privileged psy-
chic vehicles through which subjects not only are allowed to abandon
their traditional bodily coordinates but are permitted to resignify their
waking perceptions. As Kwan and his fellow Chinese laborers’ heroic
feats become increasingly palpable in his nighttime visions—as these
feats come to fulfill Donald’s present needs for psychic sustenance and
material survival—the threat of their conscious loss is diminished.
Donald, initially passive and along for the ride, becomes increasingly
active in protecting the integrity of his personal visions. As he witnesses
Kwan’s leadership skills, admires the courageous demeanor of his com-
rades, and directly participates in the hard labor of this historical event,
Donald’s unconscious dreams come to mark a conscious shifting of his
entire waking life, demeanor, and attitude.
Like China Men, Donald Duk culminates with the protagonist’s dis-
placement of the given-to-be-seen of the infamous Promontory Summit
photograph. Immediately following his conversation with Fred Astaire,
Donald witnesses the completion of the Central Pacific track by the Chi-
nese laborers, whose last railway tie is pulled up by Irish crew members
in preparation for the Golden Spike ceremony. ‘‘I reckon twenty or thirty
newspapers and magazines have sent their writers and artists’’ (131), T. C.
Durant tells Crocker, ignoring the angry protests of the excluded Chi-
nese laborers. Like Kingston, Chin highlights the material dangers re-
sponsible for the visual absence of Chinese Americans from the photo-
graph:

84 racial castration
 Your candor is most refreshing and appreciated, sir. I promise you,
Mr. Durant, there will not be a heathen in sight at tomorrow’s
ceremonies. I will, with your permission, post riflemen up on the
locomotives and the telegraph poles to warn us of the approach of
any uninvited Celestial and keep them away, with force of arms if
need be. The Golden Spike. The Silver Spike. The Last Spike will
be hammered home, the telegram sent, our photograph made to
preserve a great moment in our nation’s history, without the Chi-
nese. Admire and respect them as I do, I will show them who built
the railroad. White men. White dreams. White brains and white
brawn. (131)

While Crocker admits that the Chinese are integral to the railroad’s com-
pletion, he also understands the need to manage a racialized history
specifically through the power of the visual image. He shifts the truth
of this historical event by claiming that the railroad project is one of
pure white imagination, of ‘‘White men. White dreams. White brains
and white brawn,’’ thus erasing the presence of the China Men. Crocker’s
monomanic repetition of white highlights the ways in which this par-
ticular historical event has been racially whitewashed for the specific
needs of a white nationalist supremacy and history. Like Kingston’s
parable of Ah Goong, Chin reveals a certain truth about the contradic-
tions between the nation-state’s inability to rationalize abstract labor
with the doctrine of citizenship and equal opportunity. His example,
in Lowe’s words, illustrates how in the ‘‘history of the United States,
capital has maximized its profits not through rendering labor ‘abstract’
but precisely through the social productions of ‘difference,’ of restrictive
particularity and illegitimacy marked by race, nation, geographical ori-
gins, and gender’’ (Immigrant Acts, 27–28). Like Kingston, Chin shows
how the visual apparatus—specifically configured here as the camera
lens—is mobilized to dissociate the China Man from the nation’s official
history.
Crocker recognizes the historical importance of Promontory Summit
to the nation’s self-imagining. Consequently, through the production of
whiteness as an abstract yet tangible social difference, the fulfillment
of Manifest Destiny—as well as the progressive and sanctioned expan-
sion of the U.S. nation-state from east to west—is configured as a func-
tion of white self-determination. According to Crocker’s rhetoric, this
spiritual and physical movement across the continent—this abstraction
of whiteness—necessarily excludes the ‘‘heathen’’ Chinese, whose devi-
ance immediately disqualifies them. This disqualification depends upon
the erasure of the figure of the China Man from the visual screen. As in

(re)working on the railroad 85

Kingston’s analysis of the Golden Spike photograph, the contradictions
between the economic and political exploitation of the Chinese Ameri-
can laborer are resolved in the domain of images: an explicit racialized
logic thus configures the China Man’s absence from this photograph,
coercing his ghostly disappearance.
Grasping the material violence of this particular dream vision, Don-
ald again encounters the waking reality of a whitewashed historical
image. And once more he is presented with alternative ways of looking,
a splitting of conscious belief and unconscious resistance. This episte-
mological crisis finally resolves its contradictions through Donald’s con-
scious shifting of and looking away at the given-to-be-seen:

Are there any Chinese in the old photos snapped at Promontory

on May 10, 1869? One Chinese face? One glimpse of a long black
braid of hair? Are the dreams so much poisoned poof ? If there are
none, does it mean the dreams are flashbacks to the real, to his an-
cestral first Lee come to American as a paper Duk? . . . He has the
books with the pictures from the library. Big books. Big old pic-
tures. . . . None of the photos posed and snapped from the ground
or from the tops of the locomotives shows anything, anyone Chi-
nese. (132)

Through the battery of fleeting visual contradictions that flash before

him on the level of his unconscious, Donald is finally able to bring forth
in waking life a new vision of history. Deferred looking begins when
he initiates a search for new material evidence to corroborate his un-
conscious visions: ‘‘Donald Duk sleeps, dreams, wakes, panics through
the books and pictures looking for Chinamen from out of the past’’
(133). More importantly, he begins to regard the dominant historical
images around him with renewed suspicion while endowing familiar ob-
jects with entirely new significance. In Benjamin’s words, Donald thus
‘‘regards it as his task to brush history against the grain’’ (‘‘Theses,’’
257).
He begins to connect the opposing images from his sleep to look dif-
ferently at the daily images around him. The railroad foreman of his
dreamwork finds significance with regard to the present: ‘‘Donald Duk
pads along the hall carpet with expert silence to look at Kwan Kung,
robed on his left side like a scholar. His right side shows an exposed gen-
eral’s armor. . . . He has the eyes of Kwan the foreman’’ (78). Donald
draws a silent but important connection between the visions of his un-
conscious and the shifting views of his conscious reality, the former
coming directly to affect the significance of the latter. Inspired by Kwan

86 racial castration
the foreman, he endows the wooden statue of Kwan Kung with renewed
meaning, an importance that finally reshapes the difficult personal rela-
tionship he has with both Chinese culture and his own father. Kwan the
foreman bears a striking resemblance to the mythic hero, who bears a
striking resemblance to the hero of the Chinatown opera, played by none
other than Donald’s own father—the circuitous renewal of an assaulted
patrilineage. The past and the present, at first seemingly irreconcilable,
begin to merge, and Donald begins to see his waking world differently.
In the end, King Duk’s role as Kwan Kung reorients Donald’s position
with a rehabilitated paternal line. For Chin and the Duk family, the pos-
sibility of racial harmony and self-worth is recovered.
Donald gradually transfers psychic investment from the frozen and
static images of the given-to-be-seen to the dream visions that he
has brought into the present. Bombarded with the aging, cellophane-
wrapped posters of Fred Astaire lining the walls of his bedroom, Donald
notices that Fred has taken on a strange and eerie pallor. The hero of
his black-and-white screen world seems inordinately dull in compari-
son with the colorful world of Donald’s dreams: ‘‘All over the walls are
Donald Duk’s aging movie posters and glossy stills from Fred Astaire’s
movies. Each Fred Astaire wrapped tight in a shiny transparent plastic
wrap makes a lot of strange eyes looking out of the shadows and the jit-
tery shine of things in the room. Donald Duk realizes where he is and
wants back into the dream’’ (99). The once alluring images of American
popular culture that entranced the self-hating Donald become stagnant,
laminated images whose dull luster now encloses and suffocates Chin’s
protagonist in their paralyzing fixity. Torn between his initial unwilling-
ness to abandon his conscious prejudices of the Chinese as ‘‘chicken-
dick’’ and his present desire to be an integral member of his Chinese
(dream) community, Donald finally forces his unconscious visions into
waking reality. As a sense of movement and excitement is brought to
Donald’s world of dreams, the work of bringing Donald’s unconscious
visions into waking reality is slowly accomplished.
Donald’s dreamwork thus provides a psychic road map by means of
which the individual look can work against a tide of collective vision.
In the gradual push-and-pull process of displacing old visions with new
images—of a model of deferred, productive looking—Donald experi-
ences an increasing desire to identify with the pictures of Chinese men
he has consciously rejected for so long. Ultimately, railroad visions, and
not his monomanic obsession with the static screen images of Fred
Astaire, reunite Donald with a renewed and an affirmative sense of self.
Deciding that he no longer wants to go to school, he tells his gathered

(re)working on the railroad 87

family that ‘‘they don’t like Chinese’’ there. ‘‘Since when did you like Chi-
nese?’’ Venus asks. ‘‘Tell them they don’t like Chinese,’’ Donald’s father
responds, ‘‘not me. I have no problem with Chinese people. You’re going
to school’’ (150). In the end, Donald returns to the institutionalized space
of the classroom. However, he brings with him a consciously different
notion of history, a significantly altered image of historical reality.

The Shifting of the Screen

Donald Duk begins as it ends with a Meanwright history lesson. As
the culmination of the Chinese New Year, the history teacher presents
a Promontory Summit slide show from which the heroic feats of the
Chinese laborers are predictably absent. These slides, depicting similar
images that haunt Donald in his dreams, present a dominant historical
narrative that Donald has worked through repeatedly during the course
of his nocturnal labors. The chickendick vision of the Chinese in Ameri-
can history is one that the young boy can no longer accept as true. In-
stead, he airs his unconscious visions in the light of day.
During Meanwright’s lugubrious lecture, Donald’s attention is cap-
tured by one of the slides. Squinting, he begins to look awry at its
visual truth by seeing something that is not immediately apparent to the
others: ‘‘There is a face that might be Donald Duk’s. Donald Duk sees
and looks harder as Mr. Meanwright recites on’’ (151). As Donald stares
at the slide to conjure forth and find his own mirror image, he recalls a
heroic memory that causes him to ‘‘look harder’’ at this image and claim
it as his own. He is ‘‘surprised he’s flashing hot blood and angry now at
what he hears all the time’’ (150). In contrast to his earlier mutterings,
Donald speaks out clearly this time, ‘‘louder than he expects’’:

‘‘You are . . . sir, Mr. Meanwright, not correct about us being pas-
sive, noncompetitive. We did the blasting through Summit Tun-
nel. We worked through two hard winters in the high Sierras. We
went on strike for back pay and Chinese foremen for Chinese
gangs, and won. We set the world’s record for miles of track layed
[sic] in one day. We set our last crosstie at Promontory. And it is
badly informed people like you who keep us out of the picture
there.’’ Donald jerks his chin up to look down his face with killer
eyes at the slide of the Last Spike ceremony, still easy to see, like a
faded painting projected on the wall. Everyone in the room avoids
Donald Duk’s eyes but follows his gesture to the screen. The slide
changes back to an old grainy shot of the Chinese in the Sierra
Nevadas, in the first year, working above the snowline. The white

88 racial castration
 foreman standing to the side of work on the right of way is lost
behind his beard, fur hat and puffy bearskin coat. (151–52)

The literal insertion of his Chinese American male body on top of

Mr. Meanwright’s slide—the superimposition of his corporeal frame
over the projected image—speaks to a conscious redress of the ma-
terial absence of Chinese laborers from the Promontory Summit photo.
Donald’s earlier fusion with this historical image on an unconscious
level gives him a sense of self-confidence in waking life with which he
can consciously oppose that which is given-to-be-seen. Donald refutes
Mr. Meanwright’s claims about Chinese passivity and noncompetitive-
ness as false; he defends his Chinese ancestors through the strategic de-
ployment of a collective ‘‘we.’’ Indeed, his repeated use of ‘‘we’’ and ‘‘us’’
indicates a newly claimed group identification with the Chinese once
absent and unavailable to the young boy.
This plural ‘‘we’’ thus solidifies a conscious identification with his an-
cestors of the past. It begins to heal the injurious psychic wounds of self-
hate that marked the younger, isolated Donald through a new and future
sense of group belonging. Donald’s claiming of his place in the Chinese
community occurs now in the bright light of day, not in the darkened
realm of nocturnal dreams. Thus, he brings what he has learned from
his unconscious dreamwork into consciousness. Significantly, Donald’s
vision is no longer maligned as pathological or individual; nor is he iso-
lated in exceptional singularity. It is through other (white) classmates
such as Arnold Azalea, who share Donald’s unconscious dream visions,
that the young Chinese boy’s views are neither dismissed with derision
on the part of his peers nor finally looked upon with self-contempt.
Their collective participation in this particular dream vision ulti-
mately provides the psychic ratification and political support that Donald
requires to resignify his proper name and expand the boundaries of
the American cultural imaginary. The enduring corporeal presence of
Donald Duk’s body over Mr. Meanwright’s slide image thus dislodges an
effete version of American history to present an alternative view from
which to look awry at the infamous Promontory Summit photograph.
Through an optical unconscious, Donald learns how to look against the
dominant historical images before him. The truth of the photograph is
challenged as its mimetic impulse toward reality is slowly eroded. There
is a literal shifting of the screen as the familiar photographic image dis-
solves, transformed into a ‘‘faded painting’’ on the wall.

(re)working on the railroad 89

 The Remains of History: (Homo)sexuality and the
Given-to-Be-Seen
The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained
by the whore called ‘‘Once upon a time’’ in historicism’s bordello.
He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast
open the continuum of history.
walter benjamin,
‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’’

Like two old China Men, they lived together lonely with no
families. . . . They were white men, but they lived like China Men.
maxine hong kingston, China Men

I took tap dancing when I was a kid. It was my second choice.

I wanted to take ballet. Isn’t that what every father wants to hear?
I wanna take ballet! But he wouldn’t let me take ballet because he was
scared that if I did, I’d turn out to be a big homo. Which is ridiculous.
Ballet won’t turn you into a big homo. Tap dancing will.
alec mapa, ‘‘I Remember Mapa’’

To begin our study of Asian American masculinity by pairing Maxine

Hong Kingston and Frank Chin seems at first to be a somewhat unortho-
dox gesture. Despite their respective statuses as spiritual matriarch and
apoplectic patriarch of Asian American literature, Kingston and Chin are
an unlikely critical couple given their long-standing historical feud over
the public roles and personal responsibilities of Asian American writers
to their ethnic community.
Ever since the 1976 publication of Kingston’s highly acclaimed The
Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, Chin has directed
at Kingston a steady and vitriolic stream of criticism.59 Accusing her of
pandering to a mainstream, parochial white readership by reinforcing
injurious stereotypes of Chinese men as publicly passive and effemi-
nate yet privately abusive and patriarchal, Chin and fellow Aiiieeeee! edi-
tors Jeffrey Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong denounce
what they consider to be Kingston’s ‘‘twisting’’ of traditional Chinese
mythologies that portray Chinese American men as excessive and mi-
sogynist wimps.60 These male editors—Asian American studies’ own
‘‘gang of four’’—describe Kingston’s oeuvre in such typical fashion: ‘‘The
China and Chinese America portrayed in these works are the products
of white racist imagination, not fact, not Chinese culture, and not Chi-
nese American literature.’’ 61 Chin, all the more virulent—and virulently
sexist—in his personal reprovals, states that writers who reinforce white

90 racial castration
stereotypes of Chinese males are whores, while the large commercial
publishing houses that print their works are ‘‘pimps hanging out at the
Port Authority looking for pretty faces they can sell.’’ (This latter state-
ment might indeed hold a grain of truth.) 62
Chin’s self-appointed role as the ‘‘authentic’’ gatekeeper of the Chi-
nese American cultural flame, compounded by his undisguised con-
tempt for ‘‘fake,’’ ‘‘phony,’’ and ‘‘fraudulent’’ feminist writers, would seem
to disqualify him immediately as a critical bedfellow of the author of The
Woman Warrior. Nonetheless, despite Chin’s public denunciations—
and in spite of the apparent ideological gulf separating these two writers
—Chin’s and Kingston’s creative works clearly converge around a com-
mon set of historical anxieties and theoretical concerns regarding the
truth status of the photographic image.63
Through their attention to the limits of collective vision, Kingston
and Chin explore the psychic and material dangers surrounding pho-
tography, the visual image, and the establishment of national history.
In China Men and Donald Duk, the two authors focus on the ways in
which the political imperatives, economic needs, and cultural represen-
tations of the nation-state collectively configure the Chinese American
male subject as an absent presence in the domain of the visual, erasing
his crucial role within the industrial development of the U.S. nation-
state and his legitimate place in national history. Benjamin remarks in
‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’’ that historicism claims that what-
ever remains as the dominant account of history is truth: ‘‘Historicism
gives the ‘eternal’ image of the past’’ (262). Both Kingston and Chin chal-
lenge historicism’s account of an absolute, fixed past. Through their at-
tention to the errancies of personal memory, they teach us to recognize
history as a tool of the ruling classes, to view it through the lens of emer-
gence and emergency: ‘‘A historical materialist cannot do without the
notion of a present which is not a transition’’ (262).
Ultimately, Kingston and Chin create a form of visuality that prob-
lematizes the visual order itself. Both authors endow their protagonists
with the politically productive capability of looking awry at the dominant
images of the given-to-be-seen. Following the errancies of their memo-
ries or the unconscious visions of their dreams, Kingston’s and Chin’s
protagonists not only learn to seize those images of the past that unex-
pectedly appear, in Benjamin’s words, ‘‘to man singled out by history
at a moment of danger’’ (255). Moreover, they discover a way to resig-
nify the dominant images of the given-to-be-seen so as to recuperate a
repudiated history of their Chinese ancestors. Looking awry at the do-
main of the visible through the lens of a repressed Chinese American
historical materialism, these protagonists discover a new version of Chi-

(re)working on the railroad 91

nese American history that is not immediately detectable, that ‘‘flashes
up at the instant it can be recognized and is never seen again’’ (255). By
capturing these fleeting images and wresting ‘‘tradition away from a con-
formism that is about to overpower it’’ (255), Kingston and Chin endow
the individual look with the conscious agency to enact historical change.
The individual look, they teach us, need not accept the dominant images
of the screen as inevitable; it can learn to resist the dominant remains
of history as incontestable truth.
Kingston’s and Chin’s political projects in China Men and Donald
Duk are thus justifiably comparable—a critical convergence largely over-
looked by critics in Asian American studies. Both seek to recuperate a
repressed history of Chinese American laborers on the railroad through
the shifting of visual images. Ultimately, however, the two authors di-
verge on the question of how to achieve their critical goals. While both
Kingston and Chin might be said to have arrived at a common destina-
tion in relation to their critique of race and the visual image, they have
differing itineraries for getting there. Their critical projects diverge most
strikingly on questions of sexuality and its intersection with racial dif-
ference. In particular, the authors hold opposing views on the role of
sexuality as it crosses and underpins a more progressive vision of Asian
American racial formation.
In both novels, the authors recognize that the U.S. exclusion and mis-
cegenation laws emasculated Chinese men by restricting their access
to heterosexual norms and ideals such as nuclear family formations.
Ah Goong, Kingston reminds us, knows that the railroad ‘‘would not
lead him to his family’’ (129). In addition, they recognize the ways in
which economic hardships feminize Chinese American men by forcing
them into professions typically associated with women: cook, waiter, tai-
lor, and laundryman. For the China Man in America, losing his place
in national history is intimately tied to the compromise of traditional
notions of masculinity. In this respect, the erasure or recuperation of
the Chinese laborer’s place within national history is leveraged through
the management of his sexuality. That is, sexuality is not adjunct but
central to the reenvisioning of a suppressed Asian American racial his-
tory. While both Kingston and Chin recognize the complex intersection
of race and sexuality that underpins the formation of Asian American
male subjectivity, they harbor contrary views about the best way to rec-
tify this crisis of masculinity. The critical conflict that emerges between
Kingston and Chin largely revolves around what meanings the sexual
images of the given-to-be-seen will come to assume in relation to the
racial formation of Chinese American masculinity.
Asian American critics have noted that Chin’s oeuvre is unapologeti-

92 racial castration
cally homophobic and misogynist. Railing against mainstream stereo-
types that depict Asian American men as ‘‘completely devoid of man-
hood,’’ Chin notes that ‘‘our nobility is that of an efficient housewife.’’ He
spits bile toward a mainstream society that configures the Asian Ameri-
can man as contemptible: ‘‘womanly, effeminate, devoid of all the tra-
ditionally masculine qualities of originality, daring, physical courage,
creativity.’’ 64 While his more recent pronouncements and cultural pro-
ductions have been tempered somewhat, Chin’s early essays and creative
works consistently denigrate not only women but men who are in any
way ‘‘feminine.’’ Elsewhere, Chin explicitly describes this problem as one
in which white racism has produced the yellow man as ‘‘gay’’: ‘‘It is an
article of white liberal American faith today that Chinese men, at their
best, are effeminate closet queens like Charlie Chan and, at their worst,
are homosexual menaces like Fu Manchu.’’ 65
Chin and his Aiiieeeee! colleagues constantly invoke the stereotype
of the homosexual to describe how the yellow man is seen by white
society. Although this image of gay Asian American male subjectivity is
something that Chin categorically deplores, his work displays an intense
anxiety over the possibility that this is something he has become. Chin
insists throughout his works that white racism has unfairly imputed to
the Asian American male this gross homosexual desire, and he rejects
those yellow men who would seem to display any willingness to subordi-
nate themselves to the white man whom mainstream culture deems su-
perior.Yet, Chin’s fury over the hegemonic norms of mainstream society
are often mixed with a frustrated and loving obsession with the iconic
image of white manhood, a melancholic longing for the heterosexual
propriety and the concomitant entitlement it represents.
While this ambivalent hatred of, yet identification with, dominant
images of white masculinity underpins all of Chin’s early essays and dra-
mas, these vexed affiliations are somewhat transformed in Donald Duk.
While an ambivalent identification with whiteness almost certainly ac-
counts for Donald’s initial self-hatred, the young boy does not develop
into an embittered character. In this respect, Donald is unlike many of
Chin’s earlier and older male protagonists, whose conflicted identifica-
tions with both mainstream and Chinese culture remain in deadlock.
Instead, Donald gradually learns to embrace and accept Chinese cul-
ture with what Sau-ling Cynthia Wong describes as the ‘‘warm glow of
ethnic pride.’’ 66
Chin himself admits a conscious attraction to such a recuperative
project and utopian resolve. In a 1996 interview with Robert Davis, he
noted that he composed Donald Duk to work against the prevalent Asian
American ‘‘autobiographical’’ tradition, which characterizes ‘‘the Chi-

(re)working on the railroad 93

nese family or Japanese family in America as dysfunctional. . . . Where
was the portrait of the functioning Chinese-American family? How did
all these people grow up in America—I am fifth generation—without
committing suicide? . . . I wrote it to demonstrate that I could tell a story
with everything in it that would not be seen as an angry book.’’ 67 The
dreamwork, I argue, is key to the transformation of the ‘‘angry book.’’ By
providing a psychic mechanism with which to challenge the problem-
atic images of the given-to-be-seen, the dreamwork allows Donald a way
to transform his self-loathing into a narrative of social restitution and
psychic fortitude.
While Chin’s employment of the dreamwork ultimately transforms
Donald’s self-hatred and ambivalent identifications with whiteness into
the ‘‘warm glow of ethnic pride,’’ we must note that this psychic turn is
dependent upon its unstated yet unwavering connection to heterosexu-
ality. Donald’s movement into racial self-acceptance comes only with his
resolute pledge to heterosexual norms and ideals. When King Duk criti-
cizes Donald’s lack of racial pride in front of the herb doctor, the father
makes repeated references to Donald’s ‘‘womanish’’ behavior, thus asso-
ciating his son’s failure of racial pride, as well as his desire to be white,
with the lapse of a traditionally accepted masculinity. The doctor asks
the prepubescent Donald if he has a girlfriend:

‘‘No.’’
‘‘Do you think about girls a lot?’’
‘‘No.’’
‘‘Hmmmmm. Hmmmmm.’’ The herb doctor looks up from his
notes again. ‘‘Do you think about boys the way boys think about
girls?’’
‘‘No.’’
‘‘Whew!’’ Dad says. (90–91)

The specter of feminization and homophobia that haunts this conver-

sation between father and son, and doctor and patient, represents the
precarious balance on which Chinese American history rests. Chin ties
his project of racial recovery to the success of heterosexuality, associating
proper Chinese male pride with normative masculine desire. In this sce-
nario, heterosexuality emerges only negatively—by default—through
Donald’s disavowal of the doctor’s disavowal of an unstated homosexu-
ality: ‘‘Do you think about boys the way boys think about girls?’’ When
Donald comes to embrace Chinese culture, he ultimately seeks nothing
more than to confirm what his father initially desires—a rescripting of
paternal power through the unimpeded transmission of a masculinized
Chinese culture.

94 racial castration
 King Duk tutors Donald into an acceptance of Chinese culture pre-
cisely through his aggressive masculinization of it. The father valorizes
the Chinese martial tradition. He exposes Donald to dominant Chinese
myths through his building of stick and paper model airplanes that
represent each of the 108 heroes of the legendary Chinese folktale Out-
laws of the Marsh. He thus combines an entertaining childhood activity
with war stories, seeking to replace a dominant American tradition of
cowboys and Indians with one distinctly Chinese.
King Duk even masculinizes the traditionally feminized realm of
food preparation. A renowned chef, he often mentions food in connec-
tion with the mythic Kwan Kung, ‘‘the most powerful character in the
opera’’ (67). He emphasizes the culinary discipline governing his own
performance of Kwan Kung in the Chinese opera, ultimately associating
this self-control with the mandate of heaven: ‘‘When I play Kwan Kung
I eat nothing but vegetables three days before the performance. . . . I
bring my water in a bottle. I bring my own food. I soak dried oysters,
dried vegetables, dried seeds and fruit and bean threads to make Monk’s
delight. The water restoring the dried things and the cooking of the re-
stored mummied things makes up all the five elements and the mandate
of heaven’’ (68–69). Weaving together the Chinese martial arts tradition
with his duties as cook, King Duk alters the feminized status of his pro-
fession. Cooking becomes an essential element not just for the survival
of Chinese culture but for the perpetuation of masculinity itself.
King Duk’s actions might be described as the conscious substitution
of masculine images from a dominant Chinese cultural imaginary for
those comprising a dominant American cultural imaginary. This sub-
stitution contravenes the historical figuration of the Chinese American
male as feminized and passive. King Duk presents these unedited sub-
stitutions, gleaned from Chinese mythology and folklore, without trou-
bling their heterosexist assumptions. Initially, these paternal exchanges
have no tangible effect on Donald. That is, King Duk’s lessons assume
no immediate significance until they affect Donald’s dreams, until they
dislodge the images of self-hate that circulate on the level of his uncon-
scious.
Donald’s dreamwork, I must note, is also consistently aligned with
heterosexuality. For instance, in his first dream Donald encounters the
son of Yin the Magician. Yin’s son functions as Donald’s alter ego; the
two physically resemble one another and are the same age. However,
while Donald idolizes the Western image of Fred Astaire, Yin’s son hon-
ors the Chinese image of Kwan Kung, wielding a copy of his halberd
during his kung fu exercises. During the course of Chin’s novel, Donald
slowly transfers his psychic investments from Fred Astaire to Kwan

(re)working on the railroad 95

Kung. However, the ultimate success of Donald’s identification with
Yin’s son as well as with Kwan Kung’s heroic narrative comes about
largely through the catalytic presence of the twin sister of Yin’s son.
Donald reacts to her presence with surprised joy: ‘‘She is so pretty!’’ (29),
he repeatedly exclaims. This young girl consistently appears in Donald’s
dreams, her physical beauty and graceful movements used to attract
the protagonist’s prepubescent attention and desire. She pays Donald
special heed, tutoring him in king fu and validating his sense of self.
She makes Chinese culture alluring for Donald with the promise of
reciprocity and the fulfillment of heterosexual desire: ‘‘The dream was
so real. Her eyes were happy to see him. He wants to stay asleep and
dream’’ (29).
As such, Chin’s unconscious dreamwork accomplishes its racial pro-
ject by attaching its goals to a normative heterosexual fantasy. Donald’s
ultimate willingness to look differently at the Chinese is inextricably
tied to this heterosexual satisfaction. As both an object and a subject of
desire, the young girl affirms Donald’s role as heterosexual agent. This
sexual affirmation encourages Donald to rethink his initial renunciation
of Chinese culture as well as his ambivalent identification with white-
ness. Heterosexuality transforms Donald’s self-hate and his dismissal of
Chinese culture into self-acceptance by luring the young boy’s psychic
investments through the force of its appealing desire. Put otherwise,
Chinese racial identity is reconsolidated as positive through an affirma-
tion of heterosexuality and a disavowal of homosexuality.
Once Donald’s sense of a Chinese self is established on the level
of his unconscious, the image of his dreams comes to merge with the
conscious reality of his father’s world. In the epilogue to Chin’s novel,
Donald participates in the New Year’s dragon parade, just as he had par-
ticipated earlier in his dreamwork’s lion dance. For the first time, Donald
takes on an active role: ‘‘Year after year Donald Duk sees it all. But this
is the first time he’s run in the dragon’’ (170). Inside the dragon, Donald
hears the ‘‘thumping running shoes, the thumping hearts roll a pattering
fleshy thunder tuned to the dragon’s drums and tooth-chattering brass’’
(170). He unites with the larger Chinese community, culture, and tra-
dition through the social collective powering the dragon. He identifies,
as Freud notes in Group Psychology, ‘‘On Narcissism,’’ ‘‘On the Mecha-
nism of Paranoia,’’ and elsewhere, with a social group—this particular
one based on racial difference and its implicit connection to heterosexu-
ality: That is, through the psychic bonds formed by the common per-
ception of racial group interests, ideas, and values, erotic friendship is
managed and homosexual desire is sublimated into heterosexuality and
an abstract sense of esprit de corps.68

96 racial castration
 Predictably, the girl from Donald’s dreams makes a guest appearance
to mark this transformation from the optical unconscious to an optics
of conscious belief. Donald spies her and ‘‘walks fast, intent on keeping
up with the dragon and seeing if the girl is the girl from the dreams’’
(170). The girl’s presence provides a heterosexual bridge between the
unconscious world of Donald’s dreamwork and the conscious world of
his waking reality. Donald’s new image-repertoire is reinforced through
heterosexual continuity between these two worlds. Heterosexuality thus
remains a constant in both domains, and it is only with this heterosexual
continuity that the dreams abate and the legacy of Promontory Summit
is finally put to rest: ‘‘He’s glad the dreams are gone. He believes the
dreams are gone. The last spike—the photos snapped slowly on glass
plates—seems the end of the story. Donald Duk looks into the crowd
for faces he knows. The white sweatshirts and black pants make sense
now’’ (170).
Chin’s version of Chinese American history is an admittedly mascu-
linized one. His recuperation of a lost racial history is, at one and the
same time, a leveraging of normative (hetero)sexuality—the recupera-
tion of a heterosexual tradition and an aggressive masculinity. ‘‘History
is war, not sport!’’ King Duk tells Donald. ‘‘You gotta keep the history
yourself or lose it forever, boy. That’s the mandate of heaven’’ (123).While
Chin rescues his young narrator from a future of self-loathing and racial-
ized self-hate and anger, this psychic recovery is purchased only through
its concomitant and committed relationship to heterosexuality. In limit-
ing Donald’s racial pride to the development of a normative heterosexu-
ality, Asian American women and gay men are left out of Chin’s vision—
left out, as it were, of the picture. Consequently, they are the figurative
mules who bear Donald’s psychic burdens.
Chin does not recognize that women and homosexuals are not the
major source of the racist and sexist treatment that Chinese males suf-
fer in a white America that is organized around patriarchal systems of
power. The masculinized substitutions of a conservative heterosexist
Chinese tradition for a conservative heterosexist American tradition can-
not viably redress the problems facing either Asian American men or
women. It cannot account for King-Kok Cheung’s admonition that ‘‘pre-
cisely because the racist treatment of Asians has taken the peculiar form
of sexism—insofar as the indignities suffered by men of Chinese de-
scent are analogous to those traditionally suffered by women—we must
refrain from seeking antifeminist solutions to racism. To do otherwise
would reinforce not only patriarchy but also white supremacy’’ (‘‘The
Woman Warrior Versus The Chinaman Pacific,’’ 244).
While Chin’s analysis reveals the ways in which race and sexuality

(re)working on the railroad 97

intersect one another—how Asian American men come to be feminized
in dominant white culture—Chin does not investigate how this stra-
tegic recovery might address not only issues of racism but also femi-
nist and queer concerns. To the contrary, Chin’s vision is decidedly mi-
sogynistic and homophobic. Against this point of view, we must ask
whether feminization and homosexuality inevitably signify racial subor-
dination and loss of agency for the Chinese male. Chin’s failure to con-
sider how heterosexuality and whiteness work in unison to limit Chi-
nese American male subjectivity replaces one patriarchal lineage with
another. Donald Duk challenges the racist feminization of Chinese men
by inserting its young protagonists into a dominant (and according to
Chin authentic) Chinese tradition. This insertion valorizes heterosexual-
ized myths and martial culture in its attempts simply to reverse the femi-
nization process to which Asian American men have been subjected in
the U.S. cultural imaginary. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong aptly summarizes
Chin’s works, noting that they bring out ‘‘the intoxicatingly destructive
aspects of mechanized locomotion, the sexual violence implied in the
male imagery of continental penetration, and the intense contradictions
involved in creating a Chinese American mobility myth around the sym-
bol of the railroad’’ (Reading, 146).
For Kingston, the railroad cannot be recuperated as a macho myth;
reclaiming it as a symbol of masculine power and heterosexual prowess
will not bring Ah Goong back to his family or to heterosexuality. In con-
trast to Chin, Kingston’s shifting of the given-to-be-seen accounts for
the possibility of resisting not just white supremacy but its interlock-
ing patriarchal support. In other words, Kingston’s literary project in-
terrogates the relationship between heterosexuality as it underwrites a
project of white racial oppression.
Like Chin, Kingston invents a form of visuality that problematizes
our ways of seeing. For Kingston, however, the recuperation of national
history for the China Man need not be organized around martial violence
and the patriarchal oppression of women and homosexuals. As Kingston
explores the ways in which we are given-to-be-seen, she avoids prescrib-
ing a new (hetero)sexual content to replace the old. She leaves the ques-
tion of sexuality open, introducing the possibility of resignifying Asian
American masculinity in new and unprecedented ways. Her rewriting of
Chinese patriarchal myths with different or open endings has attracted
intense criticism from Chin. Given the fact that Chin’s project of racial
recuperation, as we witness it in Donald Duk, depends precisely upon
‘‘authentic’’ and hierarchical relations between the sexes, his reprovals
are not surprising.
In China Men, Kingston’s ‘‘Grandfather of the Sierra Nevada Moun-

98 racial castration
tains’’ represents, to borrow a phrase from Kaja Silverman, male sub-
jectivity at the margins. Emasculated in America by political, economic,
and cultural laws feminizing the Chinese man, Ah Goong, we must
remember, voluntarily eschews patriarchal privileges even in China,
where he supposedly has unimpeded access to them. ‘‘Dumbfounded
that he had four sons, all in his old age’’ (China Men, 16), he continually
questions the role of his penis. Disappointed by its inability to produce a
daughter, Ah Goong happily trades his fourth son, a promising scholar,
for a neighbor’s female infant:

He walked slowly, adoring the peachy face. He sat by the side of

the road to look at her. He counted her pink toes and promised
that no one would break them. He tickled her under the chin. She
would make his somber sons laugh. Kindness would soon soften
the sides of their mouths. They would kneel to listen to her funny
requests. They would beguile her with toys they’d make out of
feathers and wood. ‘‘I’ll make you a doll,’’ he promised her. (20)

Ah Goong has little regard for the traditional propagation of the pa-
ternal line from father to son. The conventional connection of hetero-
sexuality—the utilitarian purpose of the penis as a vehicle for the re-
production of male heirs—to the continuance of patriarchal norms is a
historical lesson lost on Ah Goong. He willingly takes on the feminine
role of seamstress in order to fabricate a doll for his precious daughter.
In a later episode, after the ‘‘driving out,’’ Ah Goong encounters a young
child on a farm road. As the youngster ‘‘climbed into the hollow of his
arms and legs,’’ Kingston presents an even more radical vision of gen-
der, the dream of epicene progeny: ‘‘ ‘I wish you were my baby,’ he told
it. ‘My baby.’ He was very satisfied sitting there under the humming sun
with the baby, who was satisfied too, no squirming. ‘My daughter,’ he
said. ‘My son’ ’’ (147).
Ah Goong’s fabrications come to a grinding halt, however. In Kings-
ton’s world of indeterminate gender roles, it is left to Ah Goong’s wife,
Ah Po, to enforce the patriarchal rules that her husband relinquishes.
When Ah Po learns that he has traded their son for a daughter, she im-
mediately redresses Ah Goong’s ‘‘foolish’’ actions by ‘‘snatching’’ her
baby back from the ‘‘swindling’’ neighbors. Ah Goong is lost in tears, as
the narrator contemplates:

Perhaps it was that very evening and not after the Japanese had
bayoneted him that he began taking his penis out at the dinner
table, worrying it, wondering at it, asking why it had given him
four sons and no daughter, chastising it, asking it whether it were

(re)working on the railroad 99

 yet capable of producing the daughter of his dreams. He shook
his head and clucked his tongue at it. When he saw what a dis-
turbance it caused, he laughed, laughed in Ah Po’s irked face,
whacked his naked penis on the table, and joked, ‘‘Take a look at
this sausage.’’ (21; emphasis in original)

Ah Goong chastises his member for its inability to produce the daughter
of his dreams, taking personal responsibility for the burdens of sexual
difference. The chromosomal xy responsibility, we must note, is typi-
cally associated not with males but with females in a patriarchal cul-
ture. In attempting to fabricate new lines of kinship, Ah Goong treats
this privileged organ as a separate entity, not with traditional awe but
with surprising contempt. The prestige of his male organ, rendered as
a sausage, is given over to a frightening display of disappointment and
disdain.
In America, unlike China, Ah Goong is subject to harsh immigration
and miscegenation laws that involuntarily emasculate him. Kingston is
careful to note the ways in which these laws force the China Men to waste
their lives and their seed. However, she is also careful to connect her
critique of white racial supremacy with patriarchal norms through Ah
Goong’s sustained attention to the penis. Suspended from a wicker bas-
ket, Ah Goong digs holes into the mountainside, placing gunpowder and
fuses into them. He witnesses a number of fellow China Men fall from
their baskets to unsightly deaths at the bottoms of ravines. He watches
as a number of fellow workers are blown to bits in gunpowder accidents.
One day, Ah Goong urinates out of his basket, calling to the wind: ‘‘Look
at me . . . I’m a waterfall.’’ And on another day, ‘‘dangling in the sun above
a new valley, not the desire to urinate but sexual desire clutched him so
hard that he bent over in the basket. He curled up, overcome by beauty
and fear, which shot to his penis. He tried to rub himself calm. Suddenly
he stood up tall and squirted out into space. ‘I am fucking the world,’ he
said’’ (132–33).
Here Ah Goong uses his penis to make a statement of racial protest.
He laughs in the face of death, sending his waste down where other
China Men have sent their lives. While he intentionally pulls down his
pants to urinate out of the basket, when Ah Goong desires to ‘‘fuck the
world’’ he loses all control. Clutched by desire and ‘‘overcome by beauty
and fear,’’ he ejaculates suddenly and helplessly into the empty air. Kings-
ton ties this loss of control to Ah Goong’s devalued racial position in
America. Associated with urine—his waste—Ah Goong’s reproductive
seed is thus also rendered unproductive. Instead, the power of his labor
is harnessed to build the railroad, whose paternity is then attributed to

100 racial castration

the white suits who appear in the photograph commemorating its com-
pletion. His desire to be seen and recognized is unrequited. As far as
national history is concerned, only white men are the fathers of the rail-
road. In this respect, the China Men who gave their bodies and lives to
build it are cut off from its paternal legacy. Ah Goong is right to be sus-
picious of patriarchal lineage.
In the face of the racist laws that ‘‘fuck’’ the China Man and place him
outside the sphere of social recognition, Ah Goong continues to question
the role of the penis and its privileged place in a male world. He consti-
tutes the male penis as the source and site of oppression. The mastur-
batory scene in the basket does not assert traditional notions of virility,
nor is it productive in conventional ways. After completing the railroad,
Ah Goong continues to berate his penis, taking it out from ‘‘under his
blanket’’ or baring it ‘‘in the woods.’’ He ‘‘also just looked at it, wonder-
ing what it was that it was for, what a man was for, what he had to have a
penis for’’ (144). Kingston, of course, never answers these questions. She
does not prescribe new content to replace the old. Instead, she presents
the predicament of masculine privilege endured by the racialized China
Man in America and teaches us to look at it differently. Released from
patriarchal norms, the unmanned China Man offers the possibility not
only of resignifying Asian American masculinity but of envisioning a
new set of gender roles outside traditional boundaries.
In a passage near the end of China Men, Kingston raises the possibility
that a resignified masculinity might remake the world in a kinder image,
cognizant of both racial hierarchies and sexual oppression. Kingston de-
scribes two white men who lived with one another like a married couple:

Like two old China Men, they lived together lonely with no fami-
lies. They sat in front of stores; they sat on their porch. They fenced
a part of the slough for their vegetable patch, which had a wooden
sign declaring the names of the vegetables and who they belong to.
They also had a wooden sign over their front door: tranquility,
a wish or blessing or the name of their house. They gave us nickels
and quarters; they made dimes come out of noses, ears, and el-
bows and waved coins in and out between their knuckles. They
were white men, but they lived like China Men. (243)

Kingston compares the plight of China Men in America to that of a gay

white couple, who ‘‘live together lonely with no family.’’ Both disappear
in the dominant images of the given-to-be-seen. In contrast to Chin,
Kingston has no interest in subsuming the China man to a dominant
Chinese heroic and heterosexual tradition. Comparing them to this gay
couple, she critiques the sexual as well as the racial given-to-be-seen. She

(re)working on the railroad 101

suggests that one cannot be thought of outside its relation to the other
and that one cannot be redressed without redressing the other.
Predictably, Kingston teaches us to look at the white men who live
like China Men in new ways. Although they may seem ‘‘lonely with no
family’’—outside of traditional heterosexual norms—they are together
in their affiliation and mutual commitment. Their domestic life is
marked by a striking tranquility, harmony, and peace. Like paper sons,
they reconstitute a new form of family life and kinship with the Chi-
nese narrator and her siblings. The hidden nickels, dimes, and quar-
ters that appear out of noses, ears, elbows, and knuckles make no visual
sense; they are optical illusions, sleights of hand. Yet, as Kingston im-
plies through her attention to these visual antics, it is only by shifting
the visual order that the hidden racial and sexual histories of both China
Men and this couple can emerge from invisibility. In linking together
racial difference and homosexuality, Kingston not only critiques Ameri-
can racism but heterosexual privilege across races, cultures, and national
borders. She gestures toward a necessary consideration of the ways in
which multiple axes of social difference come to overdetermine Chinese
American male subjectivity while imagining a type of masculinity that
could be feminist and antihomophobic as well. While Chin eliminates
any social space for homosexuality and feminism, Kingston envisions a
world in which homosexuality and racial difference need not have an in-
verse or adversarial relation. Kingston acknowledges multiple and inter-
secting social injuries and attempts to rework them simultaneously.
Resignifying categories such as race, gender, and sexuality is no small
task. The affirmative resignification of the term ‘‘queer,’’ as discussed
earlier, demands a turn against a long constitutive history of shame.
And, as much as this identity term must be used, and as much as out-
ness is to be affirmed, ‘‘queer’’ must also be subjected to a thorough cri-
tique of its exclusionary operations of production. As we resignify ‘‘Asian
American masculinity’’ against its long history of feminization and in-
visibility in national history, we might ask who is presently included and
who is decidedly excluded in its contemporary usage. ‘‘Queer’’ as it is
deployed today may present an impossible conflict for a concurrent and
equal vision of racial justice. We cannot wish a similar fate for ‘‘Asian
American.’’ ‘‘Asian American masculinity’’ should not come to eliminate
the occasion for a complex consideration of a progressive sexual politics
that is both antiracist and antihomophobic.
Ultimately, Chin’s vision in Donald Duk resembles Benjamin’s his-
torical materialist approach to history, which ‘‘blasts a specific era out
of the homogenous course of history’’ (‘‘Theses,’’ 263). Benjamin’s dis-
course of ‘‘shock’’ and violence suits Donald’s dreamwork well insofar as

102 racial castration

Chin marks all of the young boy’s discoveries by a strong masculine and
heterosexualized power. As workers blast through the Sierra Nevadas,
so, too, does historical materialism blast the lost history of the Central
Pacific Railroad into Donald’s consciousness, leaving it to others to be
drained by the whore called ‘‘once upon a time.’’ Yet, as Kingston warns,
these blasts are not without their fatalities. In creating a space for the
railroad, and a space in national history for the China Man, these blasts
also threaten the precarious existence of Ah Goong himself.

(re)working on the railroad 103

 TWO
Primal Scenes: Queer Childhood in

‘‘The Shoyu Kid’’

‘‘What are you, Itchy, some kind of queer or something?

Don’t you know you’re supposed to have a hard-on when

you see a naked girl?’’ Jackson was getting wound up on

his favorite subject. I sneaked a look at Jackson,

and I think he was lying.

lonny kaneko, ‘‘The Shoyu Kid’’

Strangers from a Different Shore

Unlike the imposed invisibility of Chinese American male laborers at
Promontory Summit, the political rhetoric advocating the mass incar-
ceration of persons of Japanese ancestry during World War II turned
precisely on a question of visibility. In a 7 November 1941 report on
the West Coast situation forwarded to President Roosevelt, Curtis B.
Munson, a well-to-do Chicago businessman enlisted by John Franklin
Carter, a highly placed Roosevelt intelligence adviser, states: ‘‘The Japa-
nese are hampered as saboteurs because of their easily recognized physi-
cal appearance. It will be hard for them to get near anything to blow
up if it is guarded. . . . We do not believe that they would be at least
any more disloyal than any other racial group in the United States with
whom we went to war.’’ 1 Despite Munson’s opinion—and the concurring
views of numerous other intelligence sources—that the ethnic Japanese
posed a very limited risk to national security and should not be detained
en masse, President Roosevelt, swayed more by ‘‘public and political
pressure rather than on factual data,’’ 2 came to a divergent conclusion
and signed Executive Order 9066. Authorized on 19 February 1942,
the order permitted the forcible removal and exclusion of any person
deemed undesirable from designated military areas.3 General John L.
Dewitt, head of the Western Defense Command based in San Francisco’s
Presidio, implemented Executive Order 9066 for the immediate deten-
tion, relocation, and incarceration of more than 112,000 people of Japa-
nese ancestry on the Pacific coast, roughly two-thirds of whom were
American-born citizens.
In contrast to Americans of German and Italian ancestry, the Roose-
velt administration reasoned, the Japanese—‘‘strangers from a different
shore’’—while distinct as a racial group, were difficult to distinguish
from one another as individuals.4 This visual justification for internment
was largely based on opinions held by military commanders in the War
Department such as Dewitt, who strongly advocated incarceration of the
Japanese. In a conversation between Dewitt and John J. McCloy, a spe-
cial assistant and then assistant secretary of war, the general stated that
‘‘all Japanese look alike and those charged with the enforcement of the
regulation of excluding alien enemies from restricted areas will not be
able to distinguish between them.’’ 5 While those of German and Italian
descent could be individually monitored, ‘‘the Occidental eye [could not]
easily distinguish one Japanese resident from another.’’ 6 Sucheng Chan
concludes that as a result of this Euro-American failing, the mass evacua-
tion of persons of Japanese ancestry became inevitable (Asian Ameri-
cans, 124). ‘‘Look in the mirror, Richie,’’ directs Misa Wakatsuki to her
perplexed son in Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s memoir of wartime in-
ternment, Farewell to Manzanar. Responding to Richie’s queries as to
why German and Italian Americans have not been similarly detained,
Wakatsuki states, ‘‘We can change our names, but we can never change
our faces.’’ 7
Historically, certain Japanese and Japanese Americans, attempting to
disguise their racial identities, did change their surnames after Amer-
ica’s entry into World War II. Moreover, there is at least one documented
case of a Japanese American citizen—Fred Korematsu—who altered his
face through plastic surgery in an effort to pass as other than Japanese.8
Korematsu’s effort proved fruitless, as did his two subsequent legal hear-
ings before the U.S. Supreme Court contesting the constitutionality of
the government’s evacuation orders.9 Arguing that membership in the
American union requires certain burdens, Justice Hugo Black wrote in
the six-to-three Korematsu v. United States (1944) decision: ‘‘All citizens
alike, both in and out of uniform, feel the impact of war in greater or

primal scenes 105

lesser measure. Citizenship has its responsibilities as well as its privi-
leges, and in time of war, the burden is always heavier.’’ 10
Ironically, this national inability to distinguish one Japanese Ameri-
can from another depended on the revision of the competing percep-
tion that ‘‘all Asians look alike.’’ Directly after the bombing of Pearl
Harbor, both the popular press and U.S. military published advice col-
umns on how to distinguish the Japanese from other ‘‘friendly Asiatics’’
(fig. 4). For instance, in their 22 December 1941 issues, Time and Life
printed handbooks for ‘‘Americans’’ under the headlines ‘‘How to Tell
Your Friends from the Japs’’ and ‘‘How to Tell Japs from the Chinese.’’ 11
These publications offered an array of sweeping visual, material, ideo-
logical, sartorial, and anthropological comparisons:

Some Chinese are tall (average: 5 ft. 5 in.).Virtually all Japanese are
short (average: 5 ft. 2 1/2 in.). . . . Japanese—except for wrestlers—
are seldom fat; they often dry up and grow lean as they age. The
Chinese often put on weight, particularly if they are prosperous
(in China, with its frequent famines, being fat is esteemed as a
sign of being a solid citizen). . . . Most Chinese avoid horn-rimmed
spectacles. . . . Although both have the typical epicanthic fold of
the upper eyelid (which makes them look almond-eyed), Japanese
eyes are usually set closer together. . . . Those who know them
best often rely on facial expressions to tell them apart: the Chinese
expression is likely to be more placid, kindly, open; the Japanese
more positive, dogmatic, arrogant. . . . Japanese walk stiffly erect,
hard-heeled. Chinese, more relaxed, have an easy gait, sometimes
shuffle. (Time, 22 December 1941, 33)

During this time of Japanese American isolation and internment, one

can only imagine why the Chinese appeared to be more relaxed.
Examples drawn from the popular press and military publications
thus evidence a historical moment in which the political management of
race worked to shift dominant stereotypes of Asian Americans as diffi-
cult to distinguish from one another by attempting to atomize them into
specific ethnic groups and national identity types. This diversification of
the specular realm depended on a new battery of stereotypical images.
While disloyal Japanese Americans were characterized as monstrous,
hard-heeled, dogmatic, and arrogant, this frightful portrait drew much
of its negative ideological reinforcement from a contrasting portrait of
Chinese Americans as placid, loyal, and domesticated—feminized at-
tributes associated with their easy gait and occasional shuffle.12 In the
divide-and-conquer logic of this visual management of race, Japanese
Americans and Chinese Americans were polarized as bad and good, dis-

106 racial castration

Figure 4 ‘‘How to Tell Your Friends from the Japs’’ (Time, 22 Decem-
ber 1941)
Figures 5 and 6 ‘‘How to Tell Japs from the Chinese’’ (Life, 22 De-
cember 1941)
loyal and loyal, subjects of the nation. We might note that in the contem-
porary context a similar logic endures in the mainstream ordering of
race that largely characterizes African and Asian Americans as problem
and model minorities, respectively, in the public sphere.
These brief examples—drawn from an array of historical, juridical,
literary, journalistic, and military materials—of the hypervisibility of
the Japanese American body during World War II underscore the cru-
cial role that the specular played in isolating, regulating, and demo-
nizing a particular racial group following the bombing of Pearl Har-
bor. In contrast to the heightened visibility of Japanese Americans, the
refusal of the U.S. government to grant citizenship to Chinese immi-
grant male laborers, whose cheap and flexible labor was indispensable
to the economic success and political stability of a rapidly industrializ-
ing nation-state, worked to enforce their invisibility within the politi-
cal realm, to dissolve their group history, and ultimately to erase them
from the specular domain. In examining these particularized, opposing
portraits of Japanese and Chinese Americans, however, we immediately
realize that neither invisibility nor visibility guarantees Asian American
subjects access to or membership in the nation-state. Homi Bhabha ob-
serves that the stereotype ‘‘is a form of knowledge and identification that
vacillates between what is always ‘in place,’ already known, and some-
thing that must be anxiously repeated . . . as if the essential duplicity
of the Asiatic or the bestial sexual license of the African that needs no
proof, can never really, in discourse, be proved.’’ 13
Considering the history of the stereotype in specific relation to dif-
fering Asian American ethnic groups, Lisa Lowe observes further:

Throughout the twentieth century, the figure of the Asian immi-

grant has served as a ‘‘screen,’’ a phantasmatic site, on which the
nation projects a series of condensed, complicated anxieties re-
garding external and internal threats to the mutable coherence of
the national body: the invading multitude, the lascivious seduc-
tress, the servile yet treacherous domestic, the automaton whose
inhuman efficiency will supersede American ingenuity. Indeed, it
is precisely the unfixed liminality of the Asian immigrant—geo-
graphically, linguistically, and racially at odds with the context of
the ‘‘national’’—that has given rise to the necessity of endlessly fix-
ing and repeating such stereotypes.14

The need to fix and repeat newly specific and hypervisible images of

Japanese American disloyalty during World War II underwrote a national
project in which media representations played a crucial role. Ultimately,
I argue, invisibility and visibility are not opposed but are two sides of

primal scenes 109

one representational coin. That is, visibility is not necessarily better or
more positive than invisibility, and visibility is not necessarily indica-
tive of a more evolved or progressive political state of being for Asian
Americans.15
What we come to understand from a comparison of stereotypes of
the Chinese American male laborer during westward expansion and the
Japanese American male body during wartime internment is that invisi-
bility and visibility work in historical tandem to configure and reconfig-
ure the Asian immigrant as the phantasmatic screen on which the nation
projects its shifting anxieties of coherence and stability. Invisibility and
visibility work to fix, shift, and refix the figure of the Asian immigrant
according to the particular political exigencies and historical demands of
the nation-state. The battle for control of this representational currency
has serious material effects as to which Asian American ethnic groups
will or will not be—how they will or will not be seen—in the national
political, economic, and cultural life.
The visual apartheid enacted against Americans of Japanese descent
during World War II points to a larger phenomenon by which racial
difference is insistently managed and figured in relation to visual stereo-
typing. The effects of the specular domain on Asian American male sub-
jectivity are expanded upon in this chapter through a focus on the visi-
bility of the Japanese American male body during wartime internment.
In particular, Lonny Kaneko’s ‘‘The Shoyu Kid,’’ which is set in Idaho’s
Minidoka concentration camp, exposes and reworks—indeed, ‘‘shows
you’’—the mechanisms of this specularity.16 A semiautobiographical
short story published in Amerasia Journal in 1976, ‘‘The Shoyu Kid’’ fol-
lows a day in the lives of four young boys, one of whom, dubbed the
Shoyu Kid by the others, is molested by a white camp guard. Through-
out the course of the day, the three boys, Jackson, Itchy, and Masao, race
around the internment camp playing cowboys and Indians. Refusing to
adopt the part of ‘‘colored’’ Indians, however, they gang up on the Shoyu
(meaning ‘‘soy sauce’’ in Japanese) Kid, forcing him to assume the abject
brownness of this colored role. The three boys reserve the role of cow-
boy for themselves, attempting to identify with a group of Hollywood
screen icons (John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart most notably) through
their slavish imitation of these cinematic idols.17
Kaneko’s short story is obsessed with the realm of the visible and
the psychic effects that normative white male heterosexual images have
upon the sexual and racial identifications of the four youngsters. Ulti-
mately, ‘‘The Shoyu Kid’’ presents a dense psychological commentary
on these young Japanese American boys’ frustrated attempts to change
‘‘face.’’ While they mimic and attempt to incorporate idealized male

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images of American heterosexuality and whiteness, these images re-
main stubbornly exterior to them. Their psychic obeisance toward these
unattainable images proves not only frustrating but debilitating.
My analysis of ‘‘The Shoyu Kid’’ relies upon two fundamental mecha-
nisms of identification within the visual domain: Lacan’s mirror stage,
in which the infant forms its primordial sense of self through seeing its
reflection in a looking glass; and Freud’s primal scene, described by Jean
Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis as a retroactive childhood fantasy
of origin.18 The goal of this chapter is to explore how sexual and racial
identifications mutually inform the genesis of Japanese American male
subjectivity. As such, I will draw on Kaja Silverman’s theory of the self-
same body as a way to read productively social difference into the mir-
ror stage. Placing the mirror stage, the self-same body, and the primal
scene in critical dialogue, I then analyze Itchy’s witnessing of the Shoyu
Kid’s molestation by the white soldier. I argue that Kaneko configures
this spying incident as a ‘‘sodomitical’’ primal scene. This primal scene
ultimately encloses these young boys not within a normative identifi-
cation with heterosexuality, whiteness, and Americanness but within
a profoundly negative identification with homosexuality, racialization,
and alienation from the U.S. nation-state.

The Mirror Stage and the Self-Same Body

In ‘‘the mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in
psychoanalytic experience,’’ Jacques Lacan describes the infant’s origi-
nal encounter with its ‘‘self ’’ in the reflective surface of a mirror.19 Ac-
cording to Lacan, the ego and the sense of self are created through this
specular act of identification, which entails the infant’s instantaneous
mental apprehension of its reflected bodily form (what Lacan terms the
imago). According to the logic of the mirror stage, sense of self is intro-
duced from the outside in, through an ‘‘other’’ in the form of this external
image. The I ‘‘finds its unity in the image of the other,’’ Lacan remarks
in Seminar II. ‘‘And it is jammed, sucked in by the image, the deceiving
and realised image, of the other, or equally by its own specular image.
That is where it finds its unity.’’ 20
The mirror stage thus revises the doctrine of Cartesian humanism by
qualifying the sanctity of the cogito—‘‘I think therefore I am’’—and by
challenging the principle that subjectivity emanates from the inside out
through an all-seeing I/eye. For Lacan, the ego and sense of self does not
result from an internal act of enlightened will. Instead, it comes only
from the outside in, from the infant’s identification with its external
image: ‘‘Unable as yet to walk, or even to stand up, and held tightly as he

primal scenes 111

is by some support, human or artificial . . . he nevertheless overcomes, in
a flutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his support and, fixing his
attitude in a slightly leaning-forward position, in order to hold it in his
gaze, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image’’ (‘‘Mirror Stage,’’
1–2). Unable as yet to walk, and still lacking anything remotely resem-
bling full motor capacity, the jubilant infant nevertheless tips forward,
aggressively separating itself from its supporting mother, in an attempt
to merge with its imago. Considering the theoretical vocabulary of the
previous chapter on photography in relation to this particular scenario,
we might characterize the infant’s forward-leaning movement as indica-
tive of an irrepressible desire to become one with its mirror reflection—
to laminate body and image together. Kaja Silverman extends this notion
of lamination, arguing that the sense of self in Lacan’s mirror stage de-
pends not merely on the infant’s identification with its specular image
but on its successful mapping of this external imago onto its corporeal
coordinates, a phenomenon she describes as the ‘‘self-same body.’’
In The Threshold of the Visible World, Silverman argues that the self-
same body is created through the successful alignment of two distinct
egos—one bodily (or sensational), the other visual.21 Her observations
on the role of the sensational ego—gleaned from Freud’s famous state-
ment that the ego is ‘‘first and foremost a bodily ego’’ 22—offer, then, a
critical qualification to Lacan’s theory of self-discovery and development
as a purely specular transaction. Although Lacan does not directly sug-
gest that the infant’s recognition of its self in the mirror stage depends
upon this mapping of bodily and visual ego, Silverman writes that his
‘‘curious reliance in his account of the mirror stage on a tableau in which
the visual image seems a direct extension of the physical body of the
child . . . implies as much’’ (17). Hence, it is only with the smooth map-
ping of the (Lacanian) visual imago onto the (Freudian) bodily ego that
the infant is able to gain a sense of self-sameness and coherent identity—
to secure psychic presence, hereness, and ultimately jubilation.
That the infant moves aggressively toward and not away from its mir-
ror image suggests that the reflection encountered in Lacan’s looking
glass enchants rather than horrifies, seduces rather than repels. Lacan
and his commentators repeatedly stress the fictional quality of the mir-
ror stage, and they are quick to point out that the infant’s infatuated
love of its image is a tragic misrecognition—a self-love compromised
by ‘‘méconnaissance.’’ The coherence of the visual imago that captures
the infant’s attention is at heart a misplaced belief in the permanence
of a unified image of the self.23 For Lacan, from its moment of incep-
tion, the ego (and human desire) are oriented in a ‘‘fictional direction’’
(‘‘Mirror Stage,’’ 2), alternating between jubilant identification with and

112 racial castration

paranoid dissolution of the specular imago. On the one hand, the in-
fant experiences jubilation and narcissistic ecstasy ( jouissance) by tip-
ping into the image to find its self in the mirror reflection. On the other
hand, the infant is beset with poisonous anxiety and jealous aggressivity
at the discovery that the image is precisely not ‘‘I,’’ that it is a misrecogni-
tion (méconnaissance), an unmappable specular illusion, remaining, as
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen observes, at a stubborn distance ‘‘over there’’—
rigid, elusive, frozen, ‘‘unshakable [and] fixed for eternity.’’ 24
While much of the critical commentary generated by Lacan’s short
essay revolves around the alienating effects of this jubilant/identification
and paranoid/misrecognition see-saw dynamic of human subjectivity,
little has been said about the specific ways in which this psychic trans-
action is socially determined. That is, while Lacan warns that the infant’s
identification with its imago is finally a tragic misrecognition of self, he
nevertheless implicitly assumes that there is always a moment of jubi-
lant identification for the infant. He does not suggest that there might
be situations in which jubilation is an impossible prospect.
Might subjects experience jouissance in dissimilar ways? Does the
mirror stage necessarily and invariably entail moments of joyful identi-
fication given over to the constitutive formation of the ego and the psy-
chic reinforcement of the sense of self ? How can we understand the
subjectivity of those who do not have the initial jubilance of Lacan’s in-
fant against which méconnaissance works? How might sexual and racial
difference intersect this drama of self-discovery in the mirror stage to
trouble the smooth alignment and identification of bodily ego and visual
imago? How might sexual and racial difference disturb the productions
of self-sameness, leading the infant less to joy than to profound sadness
and bitter dejection? While Lacan offers no direct comments on the pre-
sumed (white) racial status of the generic (male) child he describes in
‘‘The Mirror Stage,’’ we must pause to consider whether the white male
and the Japanese American child experience their images before the mir-
ror in similar ways. That is, we must rethink the question of méconnais-
sance in terms of less than jubilant identifications.

The Mirror Stage and Social Difference

We come to understand how social differences—sexual and racial—en-
courage or impede the formation of the self-same body when we under-
stand that the joining of the infant’s bodily ego with its imago is not a
two-way imaginary but a three-way symbolic transaction. The successful
alignment of bodily ego and imago requires the presence of a symbolic
third term, providing social sanction, ratification, and support. This par-

primal scenes 113

ticular point is clarified when we consider Lacan’s description of the in-
fant’s initial capture of its image as being triangulated from the outside
by ‘‘some support, human or artificial’’ (‘‘Mirror Stage,’’ 1).
The mother, for example, who holds the baby up to the frame of the
mirror not only supports the infant in a literal sense; she also supports
in a figurative sense the cultural expectations that invariably precede
and psychically inform the image of self that the infant first encounters
and then assumes in its specular reflection. ‘‘Look, junior, you doctor,
you lawyer, you fireman,’’ coos the mother. Her acoustic invocations and
bodily gestures thus work in tandem with the mirror image of the infant
to laminate it to its sense of self while conveying a pregiven set of social
(gendered, racial, and class) expectations. Here we not only find a merg-
ing of the bodily ego and imago socially facilitated by the mother; we
come to understand that what is already there lying in wait for the child
within the frame of the mirror are the demands, hopes, and intentions
of others—social ideals and imperatives. Read metaphorically, Lacan’s
essay is thus as much about an encounter of the infant with images from
the place of others—the images and expectations of other subjects—as
it is about an encounter of the infant with the images of self.
Silverman observes that the reliance of the self-same body—this map-
ping of bodily ego with visual imago—on social validation becomes all
the more evident when we substitute for the imago Lacan’s category of
the screen, that cultural image-repertoire of external visual representa-
tions by means of which identity is constructed.25 These screen imagos
—images from photographs, the print media, television, and cinema,
for example—act as metaphorical mirrors in which individuals are con-
tinually (re)constituted as subjects. ‘‘All sorts of things in the world,’’
Lacan reminds us in Seminar II, ‘‘behave like mirrors’’ (49). And here we
must remember that neither the mirror stage nor entry into the visible
world happens only once. In its metaphorical capacity, the mirror stage
must be continually (re)negotiated if the subject is to have a stable and
coherent sense of identity over time. In other words, identity comes to
be profoundly dependent not merely on the ‘‘original’’ image of self en-
countered in the mirror frame (primary identification) but on a constant
stream of socially sanctioned representations that comprise the visual
screen (secondary identifications).
Lacan tells us in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis
that in order to emerge within the field of the visible the subject must
not only align himself or herself identificatorily with the images of the
screen but must also be recognized and validated in that guise by mul-
tiple others (in the form of an unapprehensible ‘‘gaze’’).26 In the specular
drama of ‘‘The Mirror Stage,’’ the mother’s look plays that pivotal role of

114 racial castration

social validation and gendered support, standing in for what no one look
can actually approximate: the gaze. Lacan’s theory of look, screen, and
gaze thus qualifies and delimits, as Silverman maintains, the fashion-
able concept of a perpetually mobile subject able to identify freely with
a plurality of heterogeneous images.
Considering for a moment Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psycho-Analysis in light of his essay ‘‘The Mirror Stage,’’ we come to
understand that our psychic experience of the self-same body does not
necessarily follow from our voluntary or self-willed identification with
the imago. On the contrary, any jubilant sense of identification with an
external image hinges on collective social affirmation. In other words,
it is only when the cumulative looks of others provide symbolic valida-
tion and social support that the subject can gain access to the desired
image. Without this collective affirmation, the imago cannot be success-
fully mapped onto the bodily ego to produce any feeling of psychic tri-
umph or self-sameness.27
Silverman proceeds to note that in our present-day social organiza-
tion of the field of vision those images traditionally idealized in society—
masculinity, heterosexuality, and whiteness—cannot be readily available
to all. Indeed, idealized images are available only to those whose bodily
egos are somehow culturally authorized to see themselves within them.
Consequently, one’s psychic identifications with these prized images is
not only dependent upon a self-willed identification; it is also dependent
upon cultural norms and prohibitions that regulate the circulation of
these idealized representations. That is, one can neither simply choose
through a singular act of will how to be seen nor can one freely conjure
up those idealized images with which one would like to be aligned.With-
out widespread social validation, the concomitant mapping of bodily
ego and imago that produces a feeling of self-sameness cannot be sus-
tained. Psychic ‘‘presence’’ is forfeited; jubilant identification is impos-
sible; and the subject is left with a profound sense of fragmentation,
disunity, and loss.
In this regard, we must remember that idealized images such as
masculinity, heterosexuality, and whiteness also imply an obverse set of
images such as femininity, homosexuality, and racialization. These cul-
turally devalued images are ones that socially marked subjects are en-
couraged to loath. Even more, they are encouraged to disidentify with
these images. When held to these unpleasant and devalued identifica-
tions, the subject experiences them as external impositions, which leads
to a negative sense of self and a psychic sense of dislocation. Numer-
ous cultural critics have pointed to Frantz Fanon’s rich commentary on
the profound feelings of fragmentation that result from the black male

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subject’s ambivalent relation to pejorative, stereotypical images of black-
ness—as savage, as criminal, as unlovable—that circulate around and
dog him.28 In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon writes eloquently about
the ways in which stereotyped cinematic portrayals and print represen-
tations of the ‘‘dirty nigger’’ lead to a ‘‘consciousness of the body [that]
is solely a negating activity.’’ 29 Sitting in the darkness of a movie the-
ater, Fanon waits anxiously for his image to appear on the screen, rep-
resentations that not only frighten little white children (112) but leave
the black man ‘‘forever in combat with his own image’’ (194). Fanon’s
struggle with this culturally compromised racial imago leads not to jubi-
lant identification but to a strong desire to maintain as much psychic
distance from it as possible. Inevitably, such a compromised relation-
ship with this negative image of blackness results in feelings of dehis-
cence, as Fanon’s bodily schema fragments and crumbles into a myriad
of psychic pieces: ‘‘I burst apart’’ (109).
From an Asian American perspective, we need to remember Misa
Wakatsuki’s admonition to her son in Houston’s Farewell to Manzanar:
‘‘Look in the mirror, Richie. We can change our names, but we can never
change our faces.’’ Wakatsuki’s statement allows us to understand the
virtual impossibility for Asian American subjects not only to achieve a
sense of psychic coherence but to control the ways in which they are
apprehended. Houston’s example shows us that it is not possible for
all mothers to provide the kind of social validation and gendered sup-
port that Lacan’s generic mother in ‘‘The Mirror Stage’’ is presumed to
offer her joyful infant. The male infant’s separation from his mother—
his overcoming ‘‘in a flutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his
support’’—speaks immediately to a drama of self-discovery that hinges
on sexual difference (male separation from the mother into the public
sphere of the father). What Fanon’s and Houston’s examples provide us
with are alternate ways of thinking the racial dynamics that implicitly
underpin the mirror stage as well.
Before turning to ‘‘The Shoyu Kid,’’ I raise one final example that de-
velops this complex relationship between sexual and racial difference
in the mirror stage. The recent work of filmmaker Pamela Tom encour-
ages us to consider further the ways in which sexual and racial differ-
ence are constitutive of one another for their discursive legibility. Tom’s
sophisticated and stylized Two Lies is a short film that provides a com-
pelling account of the intersection of sexual and racial difference as it
impinges upon the mirror image and overdetermines the genesis of a
lovable ego.30 The film explores plastic surgery and the popular Asian
American female practice of getting ‘‘eye jobs’’ to create a Caucasian
double eyelid from a single epicanthic fold. The mother in Two Lies epito-

116 racial castration

mizes the culturally marked Chinese American female subject whose
tortured relations to deprecated images of femininity and Asianness
cause her to mutilate her body. Her surgery is a futile and grotesque
corporeal attempt to approximate the idealized images of white female
beauty that she encounters in magazines and film.
The mother’s botched surgery scars her physically and psychically.
Her bandaged eyes—a literal and metaphorical wound at the site/sight
of identification—provide a sad and bitter commentary on the torturous
difficulty of the Chinese female’s ever gaining a sense of self-sameness
and psychic stability. It is impossible for Tom’s mother either willingly to
identify with the devalued images of Asian femininity that she eschews
or successfully to close the psychic gap between her bodily ego and the
pervasive images of idealized white femininity to which she is drawn.
In particular, Two Lies attests to the inability of the Chinese American
female to exist in a comfortable relationship with valorized images of not
just female but specifically white female beauty. Here sexual and racial
difference work in conjunction to bar the Chinese American female
from any possibility of jubilant identification. Idealized representations
of sexual and racial beauty that demand and receive the mother’s iden-
tificatory investments cannot be thought of separately in Tom’s film. In-
deed, for Tom’s mother, they come into existence in a negative relation
with one another.
While Lacan has little to say about the specific ways in which the psy-
chic transactions in the mirror stage are socially determined, Fanon,
Houston, and Tom provide compelling testimonies as to how both sexu-
ality and race intersect in the mirror stage to produce social subjects
constituted through multiple axes of social difference. Prized represen-
tations of whiteness and femininity prove inimical to these minority sub-
jects, whose access to psychic coherence, presence, and jubilance are
summarily dispensed with again and again. Fanon, Houston, and Tom
underscore the ways in which dominant images of the cultural screen
prohibit the psychic production of a lovable bodily ego in which the
racialized subject can even provisionally invest.
Let us turn now to ‘‘The Shoyu Kid,’’ a story in which cinematic
images of whiteness and heterosexuality also remain stubbornly ex-
terior to the Japanese American boys. Unable to identify with popular
cinematic idols and to be socially ratified in connection with them, the
youngsters in the story are held instead to devalued images of Japa-
neseness and homosexuality—visual representations that involuntarily
mark them as alien others. These disparaged images provide little nar-
cissistic gratification, are experienced as external impositions, and prove
to be toxic representations with which the boys refuse to identify psy-

primal scenes 117

chically. How is this failure of the self-same body charted through the
events of Kaneko’s short story? And how does this psychic failure revise
the very phantasmatic consistency of the origins of an interned Japanese
American childhood to mark it as both racialized and queer?

‘‘The Shoyu Kid’’ and the Self-Same Body

An intensely visual text, ‘‘The Shoyu Kid’’ provides a virtual disqui-
sition on the Japanese American male subject’s overdetermination by
images of the screen in wartime internment. Placed under ‘‘preven-
tative detention,’’ Japanese Americans during this particular historical
period were not only presumed to be guilty and disloyal but were legally
barred from keeping anything Japanese—books, pictures, clothes, arti-
facts, even scriptures—in their households.31
It comes as no surprise that under this assumption of disloyalty
—the ‘‘No-No Boy’’ phenomenon—the youngsters in Kaneko’s short
story, Jackson, Masao, and Itchy, resist identifying with anything Japa-
nese.32 Instead, they gravitate toward idealized male images of white-
ness. The three boys passionately mimic Hollywood icons John Wayne
and Humphrey Bogart as well as an ancillary cast of generic white mas-
culine ideals who exemplify American loyalty: soldiers in war movies,
cowboys, cavalry colonels, and police investigators. These reified white
male images populate Kaneko’s short story from beginning to end, con-
stituting the very phantasmatic limits of the three boys’ identificatory
framework. All three—and in particular Jackson—are imaginatively fix-
ated on these American movie idols, self-consciously imitating their on-
screen speeches, poses, bravado, and swagger. As such, their behavior
illustrates the coercive power that these culturally idealized images of
whiteness and masculinity possess in eliciting both psychic faith in and
bodily mimicry of their representations.
In an attempt to keep disparaged Japaneseness at a distance, the three
boys gang up on the Shoyu Kid in their games of cowboys and Indians,
forcing him to play the abject role of Indian—alien other, foreign enemy,
intruding burglar, prisoner of war, spy.33 In adopting the role of cow-
boys, the three youngsters might also be viewed as enacting a fantasy
of nationalism and citizenship, a battle for westward expansion and the
patriotic duty of conquering the frontier from disenfranchised Indian
hands. In waging this ‘‘good’’ war, Jackson attempts physically to displace
his own racial brownness elsewhere by rubbing onto the Shoyu Kid’s
arm an ‘‘Indian burn’’ during a mock interrogation (7). In this patent
move to disavow the similitude of their bodily egos, Jackson attempts to
shore up his own dissonant relationship to valorized white male images

118 racial castration

of the cowboy by displacing, projecting, and marking racial difference
elsewhere on the body of his intended victim.
However, this willful attempt to (re)define themselves outside a chain
of Japanese signifiers proves futile. The boys’ aspirations to identify
with idealized images of white masculinity are not only undermined by
their physical incarceration in Minidoka as enemies of whiteness but
are qualified by a gaze that refuses to affirm them in such a particular
guise. Their slavish mimicry of white male imagos results in neither
the smooth psychic mapping of these hip-shooting images onto their
own bodily egos nor the production of a coherent psychic sense of self-
sameness. Instead, it produces what Homi Bhabha describes as a hapless
doubling, a partial ‘‘metonymy of presence,’’ a result that is ‘‘almost the same
but not white.’’ 34
In yet another effort to dispatch loathed racial representations else-
where, the three boys exchange their Japanese names for more Euro-
American-sounding ones (e.g., Hiroshi becomes Jackson and Ichiro
becomes Itchy). However, by persistently calling the boys by their Japa-
nese monikers, the obasans (aunties/old ladies) of the camp refuse to
provide the cultural sanction necessary for them to see themselves in a
guise other than Japanese. Jackson’s negative reaction to their hailing—
he ‘‘would make a face or thumb his nose as soon as they turned their
backs’’ (2)—underscores the tortured and ambivalent relationship that
minoritarian subjects have with the racialized images that would mark
them as disparaged alien others.
Here we are reminded of Althusser’s description of interpellation
in ‘‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,’’ in which the subject
comes about only through recognition by the police of his or her trespass
against the law. Althusser suggests that the hailing moment is produc-
tive of both subjectivity and subjection, stigmatizing the individual from
the initial hailing and holding him or her to a type of social criminal-
ization.35 Jackson’s negative response to the obasans’ scenario of naming
suggests the ambivalent relationship the marginal male subject has with
this social interpellation of Japaneseness. The resulting psychic tension
to which this racial identification holds Jackson produces in him a loss
of ‘‘presence’’ and an unlovable bodily ego, one in which he refuses to
invest psychically.
Thus, when Jackson threatens to tear the Shoyu Kid ‘‘limb from limb’’
(7) during a mock interrogation, his John Wayne impersonation works
less to close the gap between his own bodily ego and dominant images
of white masculinity than to highlight the ironic distance between Jack-
son’s own corporeal schema and this idealized imago. It is important to
note that Kaneko’s short story presents no coherent image of Japanese

primal scenes 119

American masculinity with which the boys can even potentially identify.
The fathers of the camp, we are told by the narrator Masao, are off fight-
ing a fire in the desert (can deserts catch fire?), their specular presence
banished by means of this textual detail (9). The only Japanese male body
within the visible realm of the Minidoka camp is the fractured image of
cousin Aya’s aged grandfather. Masao describes his crumpled body as
‘‘scurrying between the hollyhocks, leaping awkwardly every now and
then as if he were stepping on nails. He was a skinny old man whose
feet seemed to be moving in two directions at once while his body was
heading in a third. His arms, weighted by a heavy, blunt spade, seemed
to be confused about moving in a fourth direction’’ (5). Going in four
directions, the grandfather’s corporeal schema breaks down, fractures,
and dissolves—to borrow a phrase from Lacan—into ‘‘bits and pieces.’’ 36
This body, the only available Japanese American male body with which
the boys can potentially identify, acquires in its fragmented state an ab-
horrent value. It is not surprising that, given this grotesque image of
‘‘mature’’ Japanese American manhood, the three boys resist identifying
with anything Japanese. In their repudiation of the grandfather’s repel-
lent image, in their reluctance to allow any mapping of this disparaged
Japanese American imago onto their bodily egos, they thus forfeit any
potential for psychic coherence, presence, or ‘‘self-sameness.’’
The boys resist the Japanese names by which the obasans of the camp
address them as willfully as they renounce any identification with the
fragmented body of the aged grandfather. Nevertheless, Jackson, Itchy,
and Masao are held to an uncomfortable identification with these Japa-
nese names and images. Kaneko’s description of the grandfather comes
at a moment when he is engaged in an unsuccessful hunt for a rodent
that has scurried under the barracks’ floor. The question of whether the
animal is a rat or a rabbit persists through the story. The ambiguous iden-
tity of the hunted animal is significant in its association with the pursuit
of the Shoyu Kid, with Jackson (in the final lines of the story), and ulti-
mately with the internees in general. Are Japanese Americans rats or
rabbits, disloyal or loyal?
This unsuccessful hunt not only gestures to the radical difficulty of
these questions; it also echoes the opening passage of Kaneko’s short
story in which the three boys fail to capture the Shoyu Kid. In their collec-
tive inability to subdue either rodent or ‘‘Indian,’’ the discombobulated
grandfather and the three boys are thus figuratively and thematically
intertwined. The boys’ homage to cinematic images of white Ameri-
can male potency results not in their alignment with John Wayne or
Humphrey Bogart but finally in their alignment with the disparaged
image of the old Japanese American grandfather. Their divestment from

120 racial castration

valorized masculine images of the visual domain permeates the short
story from beginning to end.

Queer Expectations
There is something decidedly ‘‘queer’’ in the world of Minidoka, queer
not just in the sense of the epithet, the slur of sexual shame that is con-
tinually hurled from one youngster to another, but queer in the sense
that visual authority is consistently thwarted in the moment of its antici-
pated fulfillment. The story opens with just such a queer turn of events:
the shifting of specular control away from the three young boys in the
form of a botched ambush. The narrator, Masao, describes a game of
cowboys and Indians in which the Shoyu Kid is meant to play the role of
the Indian and the intended victim:

We were ready for him. The three of us were crouched in the vines
expecting the Kid to come stumbling into the garden. Itchy was to
my right trying to tell me about what he’d seen earlier in the morn-
ing. Something about the sun rising from the wrong direction. I
was too busy looking for the Kid to pay much attention. Jackson
was in front of Itchy, ready to close off the Kid’s escape in case he
should see us before we could jump him. He came this way every
day. . . . The Kid had stopped about six feet in front of Jackson,
still too far away for Jackson to nab him. I heard him drawing the
snot back into his nose. It was his trademark, that sniffing. . . . We
waited a long time. When I looked up, the Kid was gone. (1–2; my
emphasis)

As we join their ambush in medias res, Jackson, Itchy, and Masao are dili-
gently—mechanically—enacting the role of cowboy, preoccupied with
their surveillance of the Kid. Yet the world of Minidoka is full of unpre-
dictable reversals, both cosmic and mundane. Not only does the Idaho
sun seem to be rising from the ‘‘wrong direction’’ at this particular mo-
ment but the meticulous battle strategy of the three youngsters is sub-
jected to a similar logic of reversal as well. Although the Kid, Masao
tells us, ‘‘came this way every day,’’ their plan backfires at its moment of
predicted fulfillment. A mere six feet away and sniffling up an acoustic
storm, the Kid appears—sounds—at first to be an easy target to nab. Yet
as the three boys turn their eyes upon their intended victim he suddenly
disappears. Instead of looking at him, they end up looking for him. The
three are left in a state of bewilderment: ‘‘When I looked up, the Kid
was gone.’’—‘‘Hey, where’d he go?’’—‘‘I donno.’’—‘‘That way. Around the
building’’ (2).

primal scenes 121

 The boys’ attempt to play the active role of ‘‘looker’’ and aggressor is
thus undercut through an estrangement of their specular control. Ex-
pecting to catch the Kid unawares, Jackson, Itchy, and the narrator are
caught in their own voyeuristic confusion, as their ‘‘looks’’ are rendered
impotent in this sudden moment of reversal. Unable to establish any
visual authority in this game of cat-and-mouse, the boys cannot locate
the object of their attention, the target of their attack. In this manner,
they are left resembling their intended victim—more, that is, like an
Indian than a cowboy. In a disconcerting instant, expectations are curi-
ously frustrated, vision is blurred, and subject and object are rendered
indeterminate.
Moreover, this moment of specular divestment is accompanied by
a structural focusing of the literary text upon the lookers themselves.
Eluded by the object of scrutiny, the narrator’s attention comes to rest
upon Jackson in what I would describe as the textual equivalent of a cine-
matic zoom. Unlike most filmic zooms, however, this textual zoom cen-
ters not on the supposedly passive object of their hunt—the Shoyu Kid,
after all, is nowhere to be found—but on the ostensibly active stalkers
of the scenario:

Jackson was up and flying down the edge of the garden with Itchy
and me not far behind. At the corner of the building, he pulled up,
flattened himself against the wall and like a soldier in a war movie,
peered around the corner. We pulled up behind him, puffing, and
he turned and put a finger to his lips and inched an eye like a peri-
scope around the corner. His body relaxed, and he turned back to
us. ‘‘He’s gone.’’ (2)

Once again, their pursuit of the Kid proves futile from the start because
the three cowboys never manage even to sight their Indian. Unable to
locate the Kid, Masao’s narrative delivers instead a detailed description of
Jackson, the ‘‘soldier in a war movie.’’ And while the narrative configures
him as an all-seeing and flexible eye—a rotating ‘‘periscope’’ of vision—
Jackson’s inability to spot the Kid only compounds his ironic miscasting
as the one who looks. In this manner, the story’s textual zoom on Jack-
son not only constitutes a reversal of one of the conventional signifiers
of vision—a zoom in on what is seen—but focuses its attention upon
the looker rather than the object at which he seeks to look.
Consequently, this is a textual zoom that transports the looker em-
phatically into the domain of the visible and the realm of spectacle. It
delivers up not the object of the three boys’ attention but the boys them-
selves. As such, it draws attention to the impotence of their specular
pretensions by placing their marked bodies squarely within the field

122 racial castration

of the visible. Any attempt on the part of the youngsters to identify
with the position of cowboy—with the active role of the one who looks
and stalks—is undermined and qualified by this abrupt inversion of the
scopic drive. Hence, this textual zoom not only attests to the Japanese
American boys’ inability to fix their object, but the specular reversal also
divorces them from traditional scopic regimes (discussed by feminist
film theorists such as Laura Mulvey) in which visual authority is nor-
mally granted to the male subject, a crossing of race with a gendered
visual differential.37
This opening passage of ‘‘The Shoyu Kid’’ provides a virtual gloss
on the function of the gaze, as it prevents the three boys from looking
with any visual authority while prohibiting their identification with cul-
turally prized images of white masculinity. Like Sartre’s voyeur at the
keyhole—interrupted and surprised by a noise behind him—Jackson,
Itchy, and Masao are disturbed by a gaze that suddenly overwhelms them
and reduces them to a ‘‘feeling of shame.’’ 38 Unlike Sartre’s male voy-
eur, however, the shame that marks these three young boys is produced
not only through the arrogance of aligning oneself with the gaze but
through being seen in deidealizing ways—the shame of being looked
at. Ultimately, the shame that marks these youngsters is produced and
circulated within the historical, racialized space of the Minidoka con-
centration camp—in the face, that is, of virulent national anti-Japanese
sentiment. As such, this opening scene of ‘‘The Shoyu Kid’’ does not
merely establish that the young boys who look are less subject than sub-
jected; it also suggests that their subjection is historically marked and
culturally motivated by the particular racializing conditions under which
they are seen as disloyal and suspect and thus incarcerated by the U.S.
government.
The illustrated cover of the 1976 Amerasia Journal in which ‘‘The
Shoyu Kid’’ was first published speaks to this intersection of the visual,
psychic, and historical. In yet another gesture toward the story’s specu-
lar and cinematic themes, the graphic box surrounding the figure of a
slouching and sullen-looking Kid resembles the frame of a photograph
(fig. 7). Unlike the jubilant infant capturing his image before the frame
of Lacan’s mirror, the reflected image of the Japanese American male
body in this illustration is permeated with a profound sadness. More-
over, this frozen image of the Shoyu Kid does not exist in an unmarked
physical space but is framed by the material environment of the intern-
ment camp. The cramped and makeshift barracks encroach upon and
bleed into the borders of the frame. They enclose the image of the Shoyu
Kid, as three indistinct and shadowy figures (presumably Jackson, Itchy,
and Masao) emerge from the bottom of the illustration to echo this in-

primal scenes 123

 Figure 7 Cowboys and
Indians: ‘‘The Shoyu Kid,’’
cover of Amerasia
Journal 3.2 (1976)

trusion visually. Both the opening passages of Kaneko’s short story and
the cover illustration establish, then, the historical and cultural parame-
ters of this World War II period through which all the boys—far from
being able to identify freely with the position of cowboy—are ultimately
framed and forced to identify with one another in their role of victimized
prisoner, Indian, and spy.
Thus far we have focused primarily on the racial foreclosures of
Japaneseness underpinning Kaneko’s text of literal wartime enclosure.
How do these devalued racial images intersect with queerness—with
homosexuality—in Kaneko’s text? Sau-ling Cynthia Wong suggests that
queerness works with racialization to configure Japanese American male
subjectivity as weak. Wong observes that throughout Kaneko’s story
a ‘‘simple code, constantly reinforced by mutual egging-on, underlies
[Jackson, Itchy, and Masao’s] feeble gestures of defiance: avoid appearing
weak—that is, Japanese and ‘queer’—at all costs.’’ 39 The boys’ inability to
identify with privileged racial images of whiteness manifests itself most
profoundly in its intersection with the failure of a sexual ideal: a hetero-
sexual norm. Collectively, these failures reconfigure the very phantas-
matic limits of their unconscious psychic lives. I would like to examine

124 racial castration

Itchy’s primal scene, his witnessing of the Shoyu Kid’s molestation by
the white soldier.

Primal Glances
Let us return, then, to a scene of discovery, an old scene, a scene of seduc-
tion. Spying on the molestation of the Shoyu Kid behind the garage, Itchy
at once discovers the source of the boy’s coveted chocolate bars and wit-
nesses a spectacle that I would describe as nothing less than primal. The
narrator, Masao, tells us that ‘‘Itchy was already peering around the cor-
ner like an Indian from behind a tree, when his body went stiff. He mo-
tioned us back, but he stayed fixed at the corner for another minute; then
he took off past us running as hard as he could’’ (3). Itchy’s witnessing of
the molestation is not—cannot be—overtly described by the narrator. In-
stead, it acquires meaning by means of its subsequent (re)construction
through the psychical mechanism Freud labels as Nachträglichkeit—de-
ferred action. This is a psychical process through which the importance
of a memory is assigned only after the fact, its significance becoming
clear through its juxtaposition with a latter series of events.
Kaneko’s use of the past imperfect—‘‘was already peering’’—sug-
gests through its indefinite grammar the temporal unresolvability as
well as the psychic confusion of this primal scene as Itchy witnesses
it. As the three boys race around the internment camp searching for
the Shoyu Kid, their movement through space dissolves into a vertigi-
nous frenzy—out of focus, untrackable, and suspended in time. Jean La-
planche observes in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis that, because of its
skewed temporality, the primal scene is initially disempowering for the
infant, who watches and overhears its parents in the act of copulation
with little comprehension. In a passive and masochistic position, the in-
fant, Laplanche writes, is like ‘‘Ulysses tied to the mast [of ] Tantalus, on
whom is imposed the spectacle of parental intercourse.’’ 40 When Itchy
spies on this unorthodox primal scene—this act of pedophilia—he, too,
occupies the passive and masochistic position described by Laplanche.
He is excluded from the action, witnessing rather than participating in
the stream of events.41 Stripped of his earlier role of cowboy and aggres-
sor, Itchy stands behind the tree ‘‘like an Indian,’’ a subject looking illic-
itly. In a similar manner to Laplanche’s infant in the crib, he watches and
listens passively with little visual or auditory control over the incidents
he views. Moreover, he is physically placed in a marginal position—occu-
pying a space on the edge of the scene as a silent witness—with respect
to the framing of the main actions.

primal scenes 125

 At first, Itchy reacts to this primal scene with mixed fascination and
horror: ‘‘his body went stiff. He motioned us back, but he stayed fixed at
the corner for another minute’’ (3). Like the infant who is at first unable
to comprehend the meaning of parental intercourse, Itchy’s subsequent
reaction to the scene he observes is one of patent disavowal. Incapable
of comprehending the significance of this physical assault, he flees in a
confused panic: ‘‘Then he took off past us running as hard as he could.
Jackson and I turned and ran too. Itchy turned the corner of the garage,
cut across the street, zagged past the second row of barracks and cut
into the walkway in front of the third, almost hitting the old women and
stumbling over one of the girls with the rope. We followed as fast as we
could’’ (3). Itchy races past Jackson and Masao, who chase after him in
dumbfounded pursuit. However, despite the continual prodding of his
unsuspecting pals, Itchy refuses to recount—for he cannot apprehend—
what he has just witnessed. ‘‘Hey, Itchy, what were we running for?’’ the
two boys query. His emphatic response: ‘‘Nothing’’ (3). Following upon
the suspended temporal logic of the past imperfect, as well as the ver-
tiginous topography of their pursuit, the boys’ conversation at this mo-
ment dissolves into a similar pattern of indeterminacy. Their voices are
a rebounding chorus of overlapping questions and answers: ‘‘Nothing.’’
‘‘Nothing?’’ ‘‘C’mon, what happened?’’ (3)
Because of its initial opacity, Laplanche characterizes the primal
scene—its staging of fantasy and its inception of sexuality in the infant—
as a traumatic ‘‘taking behind’’ of the ego (Life, 47). The primal scene,
as well as the sexual knowledge it imparts to the young child, occurs
both too early and too late, for it defines ‘‘a psychic experience in which
the most crucial and constitutive dramas of human life are those that
can never be viewed head on, those that can never be taken in fron-
tally, but only, as it were, approached from behind.’’ 42 In its après coup
logic, the primal scene ‘‘occurs not so much in ‘reality’ as in fantasy . . .
it is a construction after the fact, subsequent to an event with which
it is by no means commensurate. The primal scene, in other words,
never actually ‘happens’ as such, but is either constituted through a de-
ferred action . . . or constructed as a fantasy on the basis of some re-
membered detail. It is consequently ‘marked’ as an image.’’ 43 The primal
scene has no existence as a scene of psychic trauma until it is marked
as an image, (re)constituted, (re)presented, and (re)produced at a later
time through deferred action. Yet the image and the meaning that the
primal scene eventually assumes cannot be underestimated, for it pro-
vides what Freud labels the ‘‘stereotype plate’’ of our dreams, our ‘‘ready-
made’’ unconscious fantasies, our object choices, and our desires.44 In

126 racial castration

its retroactive form, the primal scene provides the psychic fodder of our
phantasmatic life.
It is indeed not until after Itchy is initiated into the world of (hetero)-
sexual difference that he becomes equipped with the knowledge to im-
pute meaning to the earlier event he witnesses. Running away from the
scene of molestation behind the garage, Itchy encounters yet another
traumatic image: the naked body of Joyce Furata being bathed by her
mother. His subsequent exchange with Jackson—an object lesson on the
anatomical distinction between the sexes—is worth quoting at length:

‘‘C’mon what happened?’’

‘‘Did you see Joyce?’’ Itchy was changing the subject. ‘‘Little girls
are sure funny to look at, aren’t they?’’
‘‘Itchy, you act like you ain’t never seen a naked girl before.’’
‘‘Well, have you? I mean really seen one, Jackson? Seen what
kind of prick they have?’’
‘‘They don’t have one.’’
‘‘That’s what I mean. Do you know what to do with it?’’
‘‘Everyone knows. You get this hard-on, see, and . . .’’
‘‘Jackson, you got a hard-on?’’ Itchy’s face was tight.
‘‘Yeah, don’t you? You’re supposed to.’’
‘‘N-no.’’
‘‘What are you, Itchy, some kind of queer or something? Don’t
you know you’re supposed to have a hard-on when you see a naked
girl?’’ Jackson was getting wound up on his favorite subject. I
sneaked a look at Jackson, and I think he was lying. (3–4)

Indoctrinating the reluctant Itchy into the protocols of (hetero)sexual

difference, Jackson not only provides a summary lecture on female cas-
tration—the having and not having of the penis—but he also imparts
to his two companions the imperatives of compulsory heterosexuality:
‘‘You get this hard-on, see.’’ Curiously enough, Jackson’s (hetero)sexual
directive and his deprecation of the ‘‘queer’’ do not produce a commen-
surate anatomical response. Masao sneaks a look at Jackson’s penis and
believes him to be lying. Jackson’s verbal affirmation of mainstream and
compulsory heterosexual norms does not produce a stiff bodily reaction
adequate to its stated ideals. In this case, Jackson’s attempted identifica-
tion with dominant images of heterosexuality emphatically slips away
from his desired identity. For Jackson, identification and identity do not
easily align.
Equipped with the social lessons of compulsory heterosexuality, Itchy
is thus able to (re)evaluate the earlier event behind the garage. How does

primal scenes 127

Itchy’s retroactive understanding of this incident stray from the norma-
tive protocols of compulsory heterosexuality? How does this scene of
seduction come to intersect with whiteness, to mark Itchy and the other
Japanese American boys as both queer and racialized?

Queer Childhood
Discussing the fluid identifications underpinning the primal scene,
Freud observes in his 1925 essay ‘‘Some Psychological Consequences
of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes’’ that the infant iden-
tifies as easily with the mother as the father in this psychic scenario.45
Put another way, the primal scene encourages identification with both
versions of the positive—heterosexual—and negative—homosexual—
Oedipus complex. In a positive Oedipal trajectory, the male infant iden-
tifies with the father and desires the mother, while in a negative Oedi-
pal trajectory he identifies with the mother and desires the father. The
psychic fluidity emblematic of the primal scene confounds any easy dis-
tinction between identification and desire. As such, it ‘‘disposes of ana-
tomical lack in ways that are profoundly disruptive of conventional mas-
culinity.’’ 46
In his case history on the ‘‘Wolf Man’’ (1918), Freud states in un-
equivocal terms the nature of this intolerable disruption: by identifying
with the position of the mother, the little boy desires to be used from ‘‘be-
hind,’’ as he perceives she is by the father.47 In his piecing together of the
Wolf Man’s primal scene, Freud thus stumbles upon a scandalous sup-
position inimical to the norms of conventional male heterosexuality: a
sodomitical fantasy of homosexual desire whose psychic roots form the
foundational basis for the emergence of normative heterosexual mas-
culinity.48 By conceding the imaginative priority of a homosexual iden-
tification underpinning the primal scene, Freud, Lee Edelman notes,
allows us to understand that male heterosexuality is retroactively pro-
duced as a ‘‘narcissistic compromise that only painfully and with diffi-
culty represses its identification with the so-called ‘passive’ position in
that [primal] scene so as to protect the narcissistically invested penis
from the fate that is assumed to have befallen the penis of the mother’’—
castration.49
It is through the Law of the Father and the law of castration that the
(re)construction of the primal scene is given over to a retroactive process
of belated heterosexual revision. The traumatizing knowledge of the pri-
mal scene for the heterosexual male viewing it in hindsight—already,
that is, within a compulsory heterosexual framework—is precisely the
sodomitical trajectory of his earlier muddled queer identifications and

128 racial castration

desires. Hence, the emergence of normative male heterosexuality within
the field of the visible depends upon the strict repression of these sod-
omitical traces and their belated revision into strict heterosexual forms
of identification and desire. Edelman comments:

Indeed, the sodomitical spectacle, when viewed from this perspec-

tive, cannot fail to implicate the heterosexual male situated to ob-
serve it since it constitutes an affront to the primary narrative that
orients his theory of sexuality. From such a vantage point it gener-
ates a response that can be interpreted as the negative counterpart
or inversion, as it were, of fetishism and the fetishistic overesteem-
ing of the object: for if the problem engaged in the fetish is that of
affirming a belief in presence of and against the knowledge of loss,
the problem produced by the scene of sodomy is that of affirming
a belief in loss over and against the knowledge of presence. (107)

According to Edelman, the primal scene—in its first instance perceived

as sodomitical—must necessarily undergo a retroactive process of psy-
chic revision and homosexual erasure in order for the Law of the Father
and the (positive) Oedipal complex to make sense. Because the sodomiti-
cal spectacle threatens the Law of the Father by undoing the logic of
castration, its presence proves intolerable to the conventional norms of
heterosexuality. This sodomitical spectacle must therefore be repressed
through a belated (re)configuration of the primal scene that hetero-
sexualizes the young boy’s identifications and desires. Coerced by the
bogey of castration, the little man is terrorized into a type of psychic
amnesia, the putting behind of his ambivalent erotic desires for the
father in favor of an identification with him. Governed by the primacy of
compulsory heterosexuality, the normative (re)construction of the pri-
mal scene through Nachträglichkeit thus necessitates the reworking of a
homosexual presence into a homosexual absence and the strict segre-
gation of identification and desire. We might characterize this psychic
scenario, along with Edelman, as a type of reverse fetishism or reverse
hallucination: not seeing what is there to see. (This revised psychoana-
lytic concept is central to the discussion of M. Butterfly in chapter three.)
How does racial difference come to intersect this primal narrative
of belated heterosexualization? How do ‘‘queerness’’ and ‘‘Japaneseness’’
come together to mark Itchy’s witnessing of the white soldier’s sexual
assault on the Shoyu Kid as a primal scene not heterosexually but homo-
sexually as well as racially circumscribed? What we must consider in
Freud’s description of the belated heterosexual narrative of the primal
scene is the fact that it is a racialized narrative at the same time. If, as I
suggested in my earlier discussion of the self-same body, sexuality and

primal scenes 129

race gain their discursive legibility in relation to one another, then the
belated heterosexualization of the male infant’s identifications in the
primal scene can never simply be a heterosexual revision. Indeed, any
retroactive reimagining of compulsory heterosexuality is made possible
through its privileged relationship to a hegemonic whiteness.
That is, the principle of the self-same body teaches us that certain
prized images of whiteness and heterosexuality are simultaneously
barred for racially marked subjects culturally unauthorized to see them-
selves within them. If idealized images of whiteness and heterosexu-
ality are inextricably bound together in our present-day cultural imagi-
nary, then whiteness necessarily works in tandem with heterosexuality
to regulate which subjects will or will not have retroactive psychic access
to sexual as well as racial normativity in the primal scene. In other words,
together whiteness and heterosexuality regulate who can or cannot have
access to a lovable bodily ego and a coherent sense of self.
In their failure to incorporate successfully the cinematic images of
white American masculinity exemplified by John Wayne and Humphrey
Bogart, the Japanese American boys in ‘‘The Shoyu Kid’’ are thus retro-
actively closed off from heterosexual identifications as well. As he wit-
nesses the white soldier’s assault on the Shoyu Kid, Itchy is described by
the author as observing ‘‘like an Indian from behind a tree’’ (3). Itchy’s
disempowerment is not merely structural in the sense of Laplanche’s
disenfranchised infant, who watches and listens passively to the events
around him from the enclosure of the crib. In addition, Itchy’s wit-
nessing of this molestation illustrates a material reworking of a primal
narrative in which whiteness structurally works in tandem with com-
pulsory heterosexuality to foreclose the Japanese American youngster’s
psychic access to sexual normativity, masculine activity, and the Law of
the (white) Father. Itchy’s failure to become culturally validated in the
image of whiteness thus manifests itself most insistently in this pri-
mal tableau through its intersecting failure with a concomitant hetero-
sexual ideal. This intersection is the psychic correlation of Wong’s earlier
contention that ‘‘a simple code, constantly reinforced by mutual egging-
on, underlies [Jackson, Itchy, and Masao’s] feeble gestures of defiance:
avoid appearing weak—that is, Japanese and ‘queer’—at all costs’’ (Read-
ing, 100).
Unable to identify with his white screen heroes, Itchy cannot make
heterosexual sense of his primal scene. In its intersection with a fore-
closed domain of whiteness, Itchy’s primal scene is retroactively racial-
ized in addition to being homosexualized. Instead of undergoing the
belated heterosexualization (and ascendancy into male privilege and so-
cial empowerment) typical of Freud’s male infant, Itchy’s primal scene

130 racial castration

opens upon the psychic territory of the negative Oedipus complex. This
is a primal scene whose trajectory of desire holds him at once to an un-
pleasurable identification with queerness as it holds him to an insistent
identification with Japaneseness.
Going ‘‘behind’’ the tree, Itchy watches the Shoyu Kid going ‘‘down’’
on the white camp guard.50 This depiction of a sodomitical primal scene
gains its full psychic significance—its historical and social consequence
—only after Itchy’s initiation into the protocols of compulsory hetero-
sexuality and only with our understanding that the availability of any
retroactive heterosexual meaning in this scene is contingent upon its
hegemonic collusion with whiteness. According to Freud, the primal
scene necessarily opens upon both a negative and a positive Oedipal tra-
jectory. In the maturation of the young (white) male infant from boy
to man, heterosexuality and the Name of the (white) Father work to re-
press and to erase all traces of homosexuality. Itchy’s sodomitical primal
scene, however, suggests how racial difference intersects this Freudian
narrative of retroactive heterosexuality by barring heterosexual identi-
fication for the Japanese American male. Itchy’s primal scene works,
then, to revise and render queer the very phantasmatic origins of Japa-
nese American childhood during wartime internment. Japaneseness
and homosexuality come to inscribe the psychic limits by means of
which Japanese American male subjectivity is molded, formed, and con-
stituted in queer childhood.

Psychic Infection
Before the discovery of the Shoyu Kid’s molestation, Jackson, Masao, and
Itchy are able to function more or less as a single psychic unit, mutually
reassuring one another in their slavish imitations of cowboys, of white
American heterosexual cinematic ideals. It is after Itchy’s witnessing
of the molestation of the Shoyu Kid, and his retroactive configuration
of it as both a racially and a homosexually circumscribed primal scene,
that the psychic implications of this discovery come to infect and impli-
cate the three youngsters in reverse: from Itchy to Jackson to the narra-
tor. This psychic chain reaction is brought to a resolution with the final
pantsing episode of the Shoyu Kid:

‘‘No,’’ the Kid was saying, ‘‘I didn’t do anything. I just played with
his chimpo like he asked.’’
Jackson stopped, his mouth dropped open. ‘‘You what? You
whore! Queer!’’ He was shouting ‘‘Queer! Queer!’’ and yanking at
the pants at the same time and there staring at us with its single

primal scenes 131

 eye squinting in Jackson’s face was a little white prick like a broken
pencil between equally white but shapeless thighs. Jackson was
immobilized, his face slack in surprise, and Itchy moved away. (8)

As in the opening of the story, Jackson is forced yet again into an un-
comfortable confrontation with an unwanted image of self. Through his
admonishments of the Shoyu Kid, Jackson attempts to distance himself
from this repellent image of homosexuality (‘‘queer’’) and feminization
(‘‘whore’’). The single eye of the Kid’s penis, however, returns Jackson’s
look, implicating him in a circuit of shame and immobility. Though it is
described as a broken pencil, the presence of the Shoyu Kid’s prick does
not fully conform to the Law of the (white) Father, which demands cas-
tration as the punishment for homosexuality. In its broken presence, the
Shoyu Kid’s penis elicits surprise from Jackson, who futilely attempts
to yank it off: ‘‘And then Jackson was at him again. ‘You played with the
sonofabitch soldier? Goddam queer!’ and Jackson’s hands were fumbling
for the Kid’s prick and he was pulling as if he were going to pull it off
and the Kid was convulsing on the ground, trying to roll away, his face
smeared brown’’ (8). The emphatic contrast of the ‘‘white’’ prick on the
Shoyu Kid’s ‘‘smeared brown’’ body serves as an anatomical reminder
of the sodomitical primal scene Itchy had witnessed earlier. The penis
has not yet been cut off, as the Law of the (white) Father would demand
of the normative (white) male subject. Jackson cannot serve as the en-
forcer of the Law of the (white) Father; his attempted identifications with
heterosexual white male ideals—his attempts to punish and castrate the
Shoyu Kid—are doomed to failure. Instead, the continued presence of
the white and ‘‘broken’’ prick on the Shoyu Kid’s smeared brown body
serves as a symbolic marker of a sodomitical submission—a continual
material reminder of the abhorrent racial and homosexual identification
to which all these Japanese American boys are involuntarily held.
Itchy’s witnessing of the Shoyu Kid’s molestation forces us to con-
sider the status of racial difference as underpinning the traditional
heterosexual narrative of the primal scene. We discover through our
analysis of this classic psychic paradigm a shifting backward of both
homosexual and racial difference to an unconscious psychic arena that
underpins fantasies of queer self in Japanese American male childhood.
Yet I must emphasize that these fantasies of queer self are, if nothing
else, historically constituted. Commenting upon the mutual connec-
tions of individual and group history, Teresa de Lauretis reminds us

that if the primal or original fantasies can be understood as a struc-

ture in the subject’s prehistory . . . it is in the sense of a ‘‘prestruc-

132 racial castration

 ture which is actualized and transmitted by the parental fantasies.’’
Thus the original fantasies lie ‘‘beyond the history of the subject
but nevertheless in history—a kind of language and a symbolic se-
quence, but loaded with elements of imagination; a structure, but
activated by contingent elements.’’ The fantasies of origin, in other
words, are historically structured as well as structuring of the sub-
ject’s history; that is to say, the constitutive role of fantasy in sub-
jectivity is both structural and historically motivated, historically
specific.51

In its provocative exploration of a historical and psychic era of intense

U.S. anti-Japanese sentiment, ‘‘The Shoyu Kid’’ provides an exemplary
case study for a critical analysis of the ways in which wartime policies
and prevailing national attitudes configure psychic structures—such as
the mirror stage and the primal scene—through contingent historical
events. It is through this mixing of the material and the psychic that Japa-
nese American male subjectivity is formed, limited, and constrained.
Throughout ‘‘The Shoyu Kid,’’ Kaneko reminds us that identification is
never outside history. Identification names the sexual and racial history
of the subject while it is itself implicated in and through specific histori-
cal events.
I close this chapter by returning to the domain of the visible, to that
symbolic treat of the brown chocolate bar that the white soldier ironically
bestows upon the Shoyu Kid at the moment of his sodomitical violation.
The chocolate bar provides a provocative closing image, crystallizing not
just the psychic or historical aspects of Itchy’s primal scene but its con-
stitutive (homo)sexual and racial foreclosures. In its gooey brownness,
the chocolate bar denotes not only sodomy and anal penetration but the
process of racialization itself: ‘‘The Kid always had that heavy snot drip-
ping from his nose. Like a perpetual cold. Except that the snot was the
color of soy sauce. Jackson’s older brother told him the reason the Kid had
brown snot was because he used too much soy sauce, and it just dripped
out of his nose. We all stopped using shoyu when we heard that’’ (5). The
three boys think that the revolting brown snot comes from the use of too
much shoyu (soy sauce) and is thus a congenital trait of Japaneseness.
They therefore unanimously agree to avoid the use of this seasoning,
refusing yet again to identify themselves with deprecated racial images
and objects.
The events of Itchy’s primal scene suggest, however, that the older
brother’s account of the Shoyu Kid’s ‘‘brownness’’ is in fact more com-
plex. Far from being an ontological marker of race, the brownness of the
Shoyu Kid’s snot could very well be attributed to the chocolate bestowed

primal scenes 133

upon him by the white camp guard in return for sexual services. In this
sense, race and racialization cannot be read as an ontological phenome-
non. On the contrary, it must be read as a historically motivated event.
As a marker of the soldier’s material and psychic violation of the Shoyu
Kid, the chocolate bar comes to displace any ontological racial preten-
sions associated with soy sauce. As Masao subsequently remarks, ‘‘Later,
I thought it was the chocolate that made the Kid’s snot brown because
it didn’t used to be when he trailed after us’’ (5). Hence, the chocolate
bar serves not only as a marker of these continuous homosexual viola-
tions; it also signifies the racialized and homosexualized otherness that
historically structures the identificatory limits of the Shoyu Kid’s as well
as the three other Japanese American boys’ psychic lives.
Finally, it must be noted that the image of the chocolate bar carries
another historical inflection as well, serving to comment upon the larger
question of U.S. military aggression and neoimperialism. The image of
the chocolate bar, Wong suggests, ‘‘recalls numerous propaganda photo-
graphs and film clips of friendly American gi’s overseas giving out candy
to eager, undernourished children. It evokes at once the enviable plenty
of America—that which attracts immigrants from all corners of the
world—and the concomitant power that makes domination possible
abroad or at home’’ (48).52 As a dominant image of the U.S. propaganda
machine, the chocolate bar squarely occupies that cluster of idealized
representations of ‘‘Americanness’’—of American benevolence, sover-
eignty, and freedom. Yet, in an opposing capacity as symbolic marker of
those racial and (homo)sexual identifications forced upon the Japanese
American male subject, the chocolate bar also qualifies the rhetoric of ab-
stract equality—of American democracy, liberal pluralism, and equal ac-
cess to representation. At a particular historical moment in which Japa-
nese Americans had to be seen as enemies of the nation at all costs,
the chocolate bar functions as an overdetermined image through which
multiple national anxieties are enacted and displayed. The image of the
chocolate bar thus serves to mark the psychic distance of both the Shoyu
Kid as an individual from a stable, coherent, or lovable identity and of
Japanese American males as a social group from national ideals of proper
citizenship and inclusion.
The American gi who bestows upon the Kid this ideological treat is
also, after all, the pointer of the gun, the enforcer of the law, the gate-
keeper of the nation’s borders. ‘‘There’s something strange about that
guy,’’ Itchy observes. ‘‘I mean that’s the same red-headed soldier who
used to stand there at the fence and point his gun at me like he was going
to shoot’’ (4). As simultaneous guard and molester, it is this soldier with
the shooting gun who patrols not just the material but the psychic and

134 racial castration

ideological fences around which Kaneko’s short story both begins and
concludes:

‘‘Jeez.’’ Itchy was talking more to himself than to Jackson or me. ‘‘I
thought the guy was just taking a leak behind the garage. Goddam
queers. Jeezus, everyone’s queer.’’ He stood up and threw a rock
at the Off Limits sign we had taken. And missed. He picked up
another and missed again. ‘‘Do you think the kid will squeal?’’
‘‘Nyaa. Who cares.’’ Jackson’s voice was quiet, almost a curse.
He threw a stone at the other sign. It hit the wood above the words
minidoka relocation center. Jackson continued to stare at the
red glow, his face pale in the spotlight from the fence a hundred
yards off. He was sitting very still, and his eyes were soft and wide
like a rabbit’s. (312)

Itchy’s verbal circumscription of Japanese American male subjectivity—

‘‘Jeezus, everyone’s queer’’—provides a final commentary on the homo-
sexual and racial limits of these young boys’ identifications and psy-
chic sense of self. The dominating signs of white America that the
three boys attempt to steal and at which they hurl stones in frustra-
tion are not theirs to use—are ultimately ‘‘off limits’’ to them. Instead,
the youngsters are visually overdetermined by that ‘‘other’’ historical
sign, minidoka relocation center, which textually dominates this
closing paragraph and resists through its foreboding specular presence
their ability to define or control the images that would historically and
psychically overshadow them. In this respect, ‘‘The Shoyu Kid’’ prefig-
ures a significant and compelling group of subsequent Asian American
works such as R. Zamora Linmark’s Rolling the R’s, Shyam Selvadurai’s
Funny Boy, and Norman Wong’s Cultural Revolution, all of which expand
upon queer male childhood through an insistent critique of the failure
of national ideals and imaginings of abstract equivalence in the nation-
state.53
It is always open season on gay kids, Eve Sedgwick notes in her essay
‘‘How to Bring Your Kids up Gay: The War on Effeminate Boys.’’ She adds
that the ‘‘presiding asymmetry of value assignment between hetero and
homo goes unchallenged everywhere: advice on how to help your kids
turn out gay, not to mention your students, your parishioners, your ther-
apy clients, or your military subordinates, is less ubiquitous than you
might think. On the other hand, the scope of institutions whose pro-
grammatic undertaking is to prevent the development of gay people is
unimaginably large.’’ 54 The primal scene Kaneko presents to us in ‘‘The
Shoyu Kid’’ relies not, as Sedgwick poses, on the disregarded question
of how in America to ‘‘bring your kids up gay.’’ Instead, it hinges on the

primal scenes 135

pressing question of how in Japanese American male childhood during
wartime internment it could possibly be otherwise.
Yet Sedgwick’s analysis neglects the fact that in the war on effemi-
nate boys some racialized communities are indeed produced precisely
as feminized, homosexualized, queer. In ‘‘The Shoyu Kid,’’ the hetero-
sexual stability of the patriotic white American male icon emerges only
in contrast to the resolute linking of queerness with Japaneseness. In
this manner, normative masculine self-representation constitutively de-
pends upon the sexual ‘‘perversion’’ and pathologizing of the racialized
masculine subject. The solution to such warfare on a racialized and ef-
feminized Japanese American childhood, however, cannot be to reify
or aspire toward those normative masculinized images underwritten by
mainstream society—a version of Frank Chin and his Aiiieeeee! group’s
political prescription. We cannot place our psychic hopes in this type of
so-called limited, positive imagery; we cannot place our political hopes
in the extension of masculine, patriarchal privileges to these Japanese
American youngsters. In the final analysis, we must not conserve but
proliferate the idealized images of the screen.
The struggle to recompose the psychic and material body of the racial-
ized masculine subject can often result in the ascribing of conservative
norms to emancipatory political projects. For instance, Fanon—in re-
constructing the black male body that has ‘‘burst apart’’—has often been
criticized by feminist and queer commentators for building his incisive
critique of French colonialism on the reassertion of woman as lack and
on the linking of racism with homosexuality rather than homophobia.55
Countering stereotypes of Asian American male subjectivity as the con-
flation of ‘‘Asian’’ and ‘‘anus’’ by valorizing whiteness and heterosexu-
ality would not only serve to reinforce the racist and homophobic logic
that produces these limited and debilitating roles from the onset but
also sanction the racist and homophobic logic that understands Japanese
American internment as having been both legitimate and necessary in
the first place. Psychic salvation for the Asian American male cannot
be the monopoly of a masculinist compulsory heterosexuality. To accept
this racial and (hetero)sexual logic—to aspire to the presumed material
rewards it offers—amount to what Angela Y. Davis calls ‘‘accepting a
bribe’’—an illusory compensation for powerlessness.56 Redeeming Japa-
nese American queer childhood does not require, then, material and
psychic strategies to maintain the dominant order of things. On the con-
trary, it requires renewed material and psychic challenges to the struc-
tures of domination altogether.

136 racial castration

 THREE
Heterosexuality in the Face of Whiteness:

Divided Belief in M. Butterfly

White is a color—it is a pastel. . . .

In a place where it doesn’t belong, on Michael,

that same pastel remains a flaming signifier.

eve sedgwick, ‘‘White Glasses’’

For some time now, critics in gender, ethnic, queer, and cultural studies
have stressed the importance of giving disenfranchised subjects—
women, people of color, gays, and lesbians—‘‘voices,’’ full subjectivities,
visibilities in the face of invisibilities.1 In my discussion of photography
and national history in China Men and Donald Duk, I noted the great psy-
chic and material difficulties encountered by marginal Asian American
male subjects who attempt to emerge from a domain of silence and in-
visibility into an order of speech and visibility. However, this emergence
into history, as it were, is only one part of a larger cultural politics of dif-
ference. My analysis of the hypervisibility of the young Japanese Ameri-
can male during wartime internment in ‘‘The Shoyu Kid’’ expands my
critique of the discursive mechanisms by means of which Asian Ameri-
cans continue to be rendered speechless and invisible despite their ap-
pearance in the visual field. Chapter two takes into consideration the
particular historical conditions of World War II to explore the psychic
constraints under which Japanese American male subjectivity is allowed
to emerge within the realm of the visible. Chapter two concludes with
a caveat on the false promises of investing in a dominant ideology of
heterosexuality and whiteness, the psychic costs of valorizing this hege-
monic pairing instead of making a concerted attempt to contest and dis-
mantle it. The present chapter extends the critique of heterosexuality
and whiteness from yet another perspective. Reading M. Butterfly allows
us to discover the costs of heterosexuality and whiteness not just from
the Asian American male’s point of view but from that of the putatively
normative, straight white male.
Kobena Mercer provides an initial entry point for this investigation
by insisting that we initiate a critical examination of whiteness and its
strategic occlusion from the visible domain. For ‘‘all our rhetoric about
‘making ourselves visible,’ ’’ he asserts, ‘‘the real challenge in the new cul-
tural politics of difference is to make ‘whiteness’ visible for the first time,
as a culturally constructed ethnic identity historically contingent upon
the disavowal and violent denial of difference.’’ 2 Mercer’s intervention
is significant. Whiteness—in its refusal to be named and its refusal to be
seen—represents itself as the universal and unmarked standard, a ubiq-
uitous norm from which all else and all others are viewed as a regrettable
deviation.
I would like to take up Mercer’s challenge to make whiteness visible,
then, by investigating not only its conditions of possibility but its mo-
ments of failure. Consider the remarkable closing scene of David Henry
Hwang’s Tony-Award-winning drama M. Butterfly, which takes place mo-
ments before the demise of the French diplomat. Donning the robes
of the forsaken Japanese geisha Cio-Cio-San (memorialized in Puccini’s
1904 opera Madama Butterfly and its numerous antecedents),3 René
Gallimard commits seppuku, but only after uttering these final words:
‘‘There is a vision of the Orient that I have. Of slender women in chong
sams and kimonos who die for the love of unworthy foreign devils. Who
are born and raised to be the perfect women. Who take whatever pun-
ishment we give them, and bounce back, strengthened by love, uncondi-
tionally. It is a vision that has become my life.’’ 4 I read this final scene of
the drama in contrast to the unveiling of opera diva Song Liling’s penis
at the opening of act III. Gallimard is so committed to Puccini’s Madama
Butterfly fantasy of ‘‘the submissive Oriental woman and the cruel white
man’’ (17) that it is impossible for him to imagine an alternative outcome
to this dreary story of heterosexual domination and white supremacy.
Indeed, because he cannot relinquish his colonial fantasy of ‘‘slender
women in chong sams and kimonos who die for the love of unworthy
foreign devils,’’ the diplomat must ‘‘turn somersaults’’ (60) in order to
protect the psychic integrity of his farce.
Vigilant in his desire to maintain this particular vision of a submissive
Orient, Gallimard is forced to counter the disrobed diva with a trans-
vesting act of his own: now that Song is publicly the man, Gallimard
must publicly become the woman. ‘‘Get away from me!’’ he orders Song

138 racial castration

petulantly. ‘‘Tonight, I’ve finally learned to tell fantasy from reality. And,
knowing the difference, I choose fantasy’’ (90). Rejecting the psychoana-
lytic axiom that posits a constitutive relationship between fantasy and
reality—that what is most real to the subject is fantasy—the diplomat re-
fuses to face the real world effects of his geisha dream. He assumes the
sartorial role of Cio-Cio-San and thus recedes into the imagined realm
of his Madama Butterfly fantasy by ‘‘straightening’’ his relationship to
the exposed Chinese man. He returns it once again, in the realm of his
imagination and in the domain of the visible, to a normative hetero-
sexual union. This concluding scene is of course an ironic rendering of
Puccini’s dictum that ‘‘death with honor is better than life . . . life with
dishonor’’ (92; Hwang’s ellipsis), for the price of Gallimard’s phantas-
matic sartorial conversion—the death of the white man—is materially
high. Gallimard commits suicide, but he dies with his orientalist fantasy
intact and, most importantly, as a nominal member of the acceptably
heterosexual community.
I would like to isolate a striking visual detail emphasized in this
concluding scene both in Hwang’s stage version and in David Cronen-
berg’s film adaptation of the drama. Before Gallimard dons his wig and
kimono, he carefully—even methodically—applies a thick layer of white
makeup to his face, appearing literally in whiteface (figs. 8 and 9). Sev-
eral commentators have read this cosmetic transformation as a faithful
rendering of the aesthetic protocols of Japanese theater, relating Galli-
mard’s application of whiteface to the traditional makeup of the onno-
gata in Kabuki theater.5 Majorie Garber, however, expands the possible
interpretations of this critical moment by analyzing the diplomat’s bad
makeup job in the confluence of various ethnic channels:

The whiteness of the makeup is traditional in Japanese theater as a

sign of the ideal white complexion of the noble, who can afford to
keep out of the sun, and the pallor of the protected young woman
(or trained geisha) even today. We might note that in Chinese opera
face-painting participates in an entirely different sign system, in
which white on an actor’s face symbolized treachery, as red does
loyalty, yellow, piety, and gold, the supernatural. In this story of
spies and treason the Chinese and Japanese significations are at
odds with one another, and Song has already warned Gallimard
not to conflate the two.6

Although Garber’s analysis of this scene largely focuses on Gallimard’s

egregious misreading of disparate East Asian cultural aesthetics—the
conflation of Chinese chong sams and Japanese kimonos—she sub-
sequently appends a final and provocative interpretation: ‘‘The white

heterosexuality and whiteness 139

Figures 8 and 9 Heterosexuality in the face of whiteness: Jeremy Irons in David
Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly (Warner Brothers)
makeup has yet another significance, since [Gallimard] is continually
described as a ‘white man’ throughout the play, even in France, where
‘There’re white men all around’ ’’ (244).7 Garber proffers a triple reading
of Gallimard’s bad makeup job through this condensed cultural survey,
but I would like to elaborate on her final point: Gallimard is continually
described by Song as a white man; the visible face underscoring Galli-
mard’s failures, demise, and swan song appears to us literally as a white
face; the Orientalist and heterosexist fantasy for which Gallimard ulti-
mately dies is achieved only in the face of whiteness.
Judith Butler insists that we must begin to theorize the compulsory
regimes of the symbolic order—the numerous interpellations and coer-
cive prohibitions by which individuals are rendered legible as subjects—
through the lens not only of (hetero)sexual but also racial difference.
‘‘The symbolic—that register of regulatory ideality—is also and always
a racial industry, indeed, the reiterated practice of racializing interpella-
tions.’’ She continues:

Rejecting those models of power which would reduce racial dif-

ferences to the derivative effects of sexual difference (as if sexual
difference were not only autonomous in relation to racial articula-
tion but somehow more prior, in a temporal or ontological sense),
it seems crucial to rethink the scenes of reproduction and, hence,
of sexing practices not only as ones through which a heterosexual
imperative is inculcated, but as ones through which boundaries
of racial distinction are secured as well as contested. Especially at
those junctures in which a compulsory heterosexuality works in
the service of maintaining hegemonic forms of racial purity, the
‘‘threat’’ of homosexuality takes on a distinctive complexity.8

Butler asks us to consider how sexual and racial norms intersect to pro-
duce viable and recognizable subject positions and to consider how the
homosexual and racial prohibitions that underpin the foundations of
the symbolic order interdict a spectrum of repudiated social identities.
If the symbolic order is always also a set of racializing norms, it be-
comes impossible to speak of the heterosexual matrix apart from racial
distinctions. The articulation of such a ‘‘colorless’’ category would as-
sume a priori the ontological presumption of sexual over racial differ-
ence while denying race any constitutive role in the formation of a legible
subjectivity.
Moreover, the assumed primacy in this model of the sexual over the
racial would imply that sexual difference is in effect ‘‘white sexual differ-
ence, and that whiteness is not a form of racial difference.’’ 9 In produc-
ing whiteness as an unnamed and invisible category, the symbolic order

heterosexuality and whiteness 141

projects the burden of racial difference onto those bodies outside a uni-
versalizing discourse of whiteness. In other words, if a symbolic system
of compulsory heterosexuality depends on the occlusion of whiteness
as a racial category—drawing its discursive potency in and through this
concealed alignment—then it is imperative that we insist on making
whiteness emphatically visible as a culturally constructed and racialized
category.
Furthermore, we must begin to consider the multiple ways in which
this universalizing of an unmarked whiteness works to authorize at one
and the same time the naturalizing power of heterosexuality. This atten-
tion to the discursive erasure of whiteness is a necessary amendment
to the critical ways in which feminism and queer studies have hitherto
framed issues of gender and sexuality. To deconstruct a system of com-
pulsory heterosexual privilege (as psychoanalytic critics in feminist and
queer studies have worked so hard to do) without considering racial
difference—to fail to understand whiteness through the perspective of
racial formation—would be to concede from the very outset that ‘‘white-
ness . . . is yet another power that need not speak its name.’’ 10 It would in
effect allow the discursive pretensions of whiteness as a universalizing
and unmarked racial category to continue unchecked and unqualified.
Granted that the consolidation of the symbolic order is contingent
upon unstated norms of heterosexuality and whiteness, as well as prohi-
bitions against homosexuality and nonwhiteness, we must note that this
consolidation has functioned largely as a regulatory standard hitherto
invisible within the field of the visible and unremarked in the protocols
of social discourse. In their ‘‘ideal’’ form, heterosexuality and whiteness
maintain their compulsory power by remaining veiled and undisclosed.
Furthermore, they work in collusion, drawing their discursive force in
and through their smooth alignment. If, as Eve Sedgwick says of her
friend Michael Lynch—a gay, white male—whiteness somehow ‘‘doesn’t
belong’’ on him, remaining a ‘‘flaming signifier,’’ it is because the crucial
and mandatory combination of heterosexuality and whiteness has been
violated and transgressed.11 In his ‘‘flaming’’ queerness, the whiteness
of Michael Lynch is suddenly brought into relief, rendered visible and
disconcerting.
Consequently, I read Gallimard’s phantasmatic sartorial conversion
as a frantic attempt to maintain the normative sexual and racial stipu-
lations of the symbolic order, as a desperate effort to maintain hetero-
sexuality in the face of whiteness. Unable to occupy the position of the
domineering European imperialist following Song’s morphological un-
veiling, Gallimard is so invested in heterosexuality and whiteness that he
ultimately elects to occupy the position of the ‘‘other’’ so as to guarantee

142 racial castration

the structural integrity of his Madama Butterfly fantasy. In a grave sense,
then, the symbolic appeals of heterosexuality that impel the death of—
and Gallimard’s death as—Cio-Cio-San can be realized only in a white
face. And it is, of course, this dual presumption of a (hetero)sexual and
racial positioning that the French diplomat vigilantly struggles to main-
tain but fails miserably to preserve.
Gallimard’s self-sacrifice must finally be read not only as a visible fail-
ure of heterosexuality and whiteness but as a hyperbolic illustration of
the homosexual and racial anxieties that underpin the abject borders of
the symbolic domain. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of com-
mentaries generated by M. Butterfly do not account for this complex
nexus of (homo)sexual and racial regulation. They focus exclusively on
Song Liling’s dramatic male to female crossing rather than on the possi-
bility of Gallimard’s passing between an acceptable white male hetero-
sexuality and an abjected white male homosexuality. New York Times
theater critic Frank Rich, for instance, claims that Hwang is not ‘‘overly
concerned with how the opera singer . . . pulled his hocus-pocus in the
boudoir.’’ 12 Rich dismisses the possibility that Gallimard’s blunder over
Song’s anatomy might be explored through the lens of a closeted or self-
denying homosexuality. Moira Hodgson, in her summary of the drama
for the Nation, emphatically concurs with Rich’s latter point: ‘‘Hwang
never gets to the bottom of Gallimard’s character. He doesn’t question
whether the Foreign Service officer knew that Song Liling was in fact a
man (‘It was dark and she was very modest’), nor does he make him into
a self-deluded homosexual.’’ 13 Collectively, much of this criticism is so
thoroughly transfixed by M. Butterfly’s bizarre (homo)sexual story that
the drama’s incisive racial critique is in danger of vanishing.
Furthermore, when race is discussed, commentators by and large
refuse to investigate the (hetero)sexual limits of white male subjectivity.
Instead, they focus their critical attention solely on the ‘‘multicultural’’
issues of the drama: Asian American political agendas, assimilation,
the model minority myth, and artistic license.14 John Simon’s bitter dis-
missal of M. Butterfly in New York magazine, for instance, attacks Hwang
as the ‘‘son of affluent Chinese Americans [who] has scores to settle
with both America and the new China, the former for making him em-
barrassed about his ethnicity, the latter for repudiating his bourgeois
status and Armani suits.’’ 15 Deflecting his attention away from the in-
herent qualities of the drama itself, Simon dislodges Hwang from the
position of the disembodied artist. That is, Simon refuses Hwang the
site of liberal subjectivity and artistic license, conflating the playwright
with his opera diva. Hence, Simon’s review largely focuses on the moti-
vations and failures of Hwang as a frustrated, self-loathing Asian Ameri-

heterosexuality and whiteness 143

can dramatist, insisting instead on the ‘‘burden of liveness’’ for this artist
of color. Ironically, while Simon conflates Hwang with Song, he reso-
lutely disidentifies with Gallimard’s cognitive inadequacies and avoids
giving any serious consideration to the failures of conventional white
masculinity that inform the play.16
These asymmetries remain unchallenged by critics, even though
Song bluntly reminds Gallimard of these racial and sexual inequities
from the very beginning of the play. At their first encounter, the diva
challenges the diplomat’s enthusiastic praise of his performance as Cio-
Cio-San, responding with a sharp rejoinder: ‘‘Consider it this way: what
would you say if a blonde homecoming queen fell in love with a short
Japanese businessman? He treats her cruelly, then goes home for three
years, during which time she prays to his picture and turns down mar-
riage from a young Kennedy. Then, when she learns he has remarried,
she kills herself. Now, I believe you would consider this girl to be a de-
ranged idiot, correct? But because it’s an Oriental who kills herself for
a Westerner—ah!—you find it beautiful’’ (17). Song’s Madama Butterfly
parable—his cultural inversion of spurious sexual and racial asymme-
tries—seems to be a critical point lost on both Gallimard and his com-
mentators.17
Hwang’s drama allows us to consider the methods through which
symbolic norms and prohibitions coerce Gallimard’s phantasmatic alle-
giance to ideals of heterosexuality and whiteness. M. Butterfly ultimately
exposes the production of whiteness as a universal norm that projects the
burden of racial difference onto the Asian (American) male body. More-
over, it reveals how this production of an unmarked and invisible white-
ness is achieved only through its complicit intersection with a system
of compulsory heterosexuality. Focusing on fetishism—perhaps Freud’s
most privileged mechanism for the management of difference—I refig-
ure this psychic category in terms of a ‘‘racial castration,’’ one that de-
mands serious reconsideration of Freud’s paradigm along very altered
lines of race.
What exactly is the ‘‘enchanted space’’ of the prison cell, ruled by the
‘‘work of fairies,’’ that Gallimard describes in his opening monologue
(2)? What are the queer and racial phantasms that order and control
the white diplomat’s psychic blunders and material failures? I turn my
critical attentions to Gallimard in order to consider how for more than
twenty years he could have been ignorant of Song’s anatomical sex. ‘‘Did
Monsieur Gallimard know you were a man?’’ (81) persists the officious
judge, swinging the all too familiar juridical gavel as he interrogates the
Oriental diva. In his desire to categorize and stabilize the foundational
terms of the symbolic order for which he is a citational mouthpiece, the

144 racial castration

judge’s obsessive question (Hodgson’s question, too) emerges as the cen-
tral concern of the drama. Yet psychoanalysis would tell us that there is
no clear-cut answer to the judge’s query, that to know and not know, that
to not see what is apparently there for us to see, is a perfectly explicable
condition in the realm of the psyche.

‘‘An Almost Artful Dealing with Reality’’

In ‘‘The Dissection of the Psychical Personality’’ (1933), Freud provides
a visual map of the structural relations between the ego, the id, and
the superego and the psychical territories of the repressed, the uncon-
scious, the preconscious, and the perceptual-conscious systems.18 This
‘‘final topography’’ is a structural elaboration of a comparatively sche-
matic ‘‘late topography’’ developed in The Ego and the Id. In contrast to
the late topography, in which the ego is seen to occupy a less capacious
area of the psyche, the final topography illustrates a definitive expan-
sion of the ego’s psychic territory as it comes to occupy areas in the pre-
conscious, the unconscious, and the territory of the repressed. As such,
the final topography is notable because it visualizes a point repeatedly
underscored in The Ego and the Id: a ‘‘part of the ego, too—and Heaven
knows how important a part—may be unconscious, undoubtedly is un-
conscious.’’ 19 If the ego is the seat of both (pre)conscious knowledge and
unconscious resistance, then the final topography provides us with a
visual representation of the divided subject, one who can know and not
know at the same time.
The notion of the divided ego is most fully elaborated in one of Freud’s
posthumously published works, ‘‘Splitting of the Ego in the Defensive
Process,’’ written in 1938. In this essay, Freud explains that under the
sway of a powerful instinctual demand whose satisfaction is threatened
by the danger of an encroaching reality the ego is forced to decide ‘‘either
to recognize the real danger, give way to it and do without the instinc-
tual satisfaction, or to repudiate reality and persuade itself that there is
no reason for fear, so that it may be able to retain the satisfaction.’’ 20
Unable to make this no-win decision, the ego pursues both possibilities
simultaneously through a defensive maneuver that results in two ‘‘con-
trary reactions’’: on one hand, the ego refuses reality and its constraints
on instinctual satisfaction; on the other hand, it recognizes the danger
of reality and attempts to divest itself of this fear. The ‘‘two contrary re-
actions to the conflict persist,’’ Freud maintains, ‘‘as the centre-point of
a splitting of the ego.’’ 21
Freud goes on to describe the paradigmatic psychic mechanism for
this simultaneous gratification of instinctual demand and obedience to

heterosexuality and whiteness 145

social prohibition as fetishism. A little boy caught masturbating is sub-
ject to the threat of castration not only by the father’s admonishments
but by the traumatic sight of female ‘‘castration,’’ the absence of a penis
on the girl.22 Because the boy is reluctant to give up masturbation, and
because the danger of an encroaching reality—the potential loss of his
privileged organ—is effective only insofar as the threat of castration by
the father is coupled with and reinforced by this frightening visual affir-
mation of absence, the boy creates a fetish that disavows the girl’s lack
and thus circumvents the paternal threat. Consequently, he carries out
his denial of female castration by finding a substitute that can be pro-
jected in its place: a shine on the nose, a plait of hair, an undergarment,
a shoe. The fetish serves, then, as a paradigmatic example of divided be-
lief. Its very existence both denies and attests to female castration: it says
that she does and does not have a penis. Freud maintains that the fetish
serves as an ingenious mechanism that ‘‘almost deserves to be described
as [an] artful’’ means of dealing with reality.23 Through the fetish, the boy
confronts the exigencies of psychic life and the redoubtable threats of
the father. In this way, the little boy not only eludes paternal prohibition
but facilitates a method by means of which he can continue undisturbed
in his gratifying sexual activities.
In both ‘‘Splitting of the Ego in the Defensive Process’’ and ‘‘Fetish-
ism,’’ Freud provides us with a model of divided belief that explains how
Gallimard could, at once, both know and not know Song’s anatomical
sex. Extending for a moment fetishism’s logic of female castration to the
Asian male body, might Gallimard’s psychic appraisal of Song’s corpo-
real endowments also fall into simultaneous affirmation and disavowal?
Moreover, the defensive splitting of the ego explains how on a conscious
level the diplomat could not see what he had already perhaps acknowl-
edged on an unconscious level: Song’s penis. We come to understand,
through the diplomat’s simultaneous disavowing and affirming of the
presence of this male organ, how he could at once be and not be a (self-
denying) homosexual.
Although Freud relishes his description of fetishism as a means of
instinctual satisfaction and the evasion of paternal constraint, he leaves
us with a foreboding caveat: ‘‘But everything has to be paid for in one way
or another, and [the boy’s] success is achieved at the price of a rift in the
ego which never heals but which increases as time goes on.’’ 24 The fetish,
which ‘‘almost deserves to be described as [an] artful’’ means of dealing
with reality, is secured at the cost of a split ego whose misrecognitions
only grow larger with time. Castration inevitably comes back to haunt
the ego in frightening and unpredictable ways. How does this promised
homecoming of castration plague Gallimard in M. Butterfly? And what

146 racial castration

are the social conditions under which the diplomat is first coerced into
such a state of divided belief ?

Lotus Blossom Fantasy

‘‘We were worried about you, Gallimard,’’ remarks an envious Manuel
Toulon, ambassador extraordinaire of the French embassy. ‘‘We thought
you were the only one here without a secret. Now you go and find a lotus
blossom . . . and top us all’’ (46; Hwang’s ellipsis). In one fell swoop,
Toulon assuages his worries about Gallimard through the reassuring ar-
ticulation of the diplomat’s heterosexuality. For Toulon, the secret of
Gallimard’s illicit affair with Song Liling is perfectly ‘‘straightforward’’—
filtered, that is, through symbolic imperatives of heterosexuality and
whiteness and framed by a historical legacy of colonialism. As a conse-
quence, Gallimard’s secret is really no secret at all but a projection of
Toulon’s own proleptic confusions and orientalist dreams: the secret af-
fair of the cruel white man and the Oriental ‘‘lotus blossom.’’ Put other-
wise, because Toulon’s own fantasies are played out in and projected
onto his imaginings of Gallimard’s illicit affair, the ambassador is blind
to the circular logic whereby Gallimard’s relationship with Song proves
his heterosexuality at the same time that Gallimard’s heterosexuality
proves his affair with Song.
The Madama Butterfly tableau that Toulon enjoys is a fantasy reinforc-
ing and reinforced by the foundations of the colonial order—its demar-
cation of distinct sexual and racial borders materially fortified by a long
history of European imperialism. I must emphasize that Toulon’s ‘‘rec-
ognition’’ of Gallimard’s perceived heterosexuality in this scene of eco-
nomic, political, and cultural domination is facilitated through the diplo-
mat’s perceived possession of the Oriental butterfly—the sexual and
racial exploitation of the little brown woman upon whom white male
subjectivity in the colonial order is built. Indeed, Toulon’s (mis)recogni-
tion of the diplomat’s affair with the Oriental lotus blossom—Galli-
mard’s racialized heterosexuality, as it were—speaks to a colonial struc-
ture of knowledge in which sexual and racial difference gain a new and
full significance in relation to one another. Ultimately, this lotus blossom
fantasy is neither private nor personal but an open secret that is passed
down in time from one colonial bureaucrat to another, from one colo-
nial administration to the next. In the process, it becomes, like Puccini’s
Madama Butterfly tableau, the same old story through its continuous re-
prisals and compulsive rescriptings.
That Hwang chooses to set M. Butterfly during the cold war and Viet-
nam War eras as well as the late 1980s (at the end of Reagan’s ‘‘evil

heterosexuality and whiteness 147

empire’’ discourse) is significant.25 Gender scholars of the cold war era,
such as Robert Corber and Lee Edelman, note that this was a historical
period when a triumphant U.S. exceptionalism spearheaded the move-
ment to contain the threat of communism on the international level. At
the same time, it also labored on the domestic front to consolidate its
‘‘democratic’’ ideals as leader of the so-called free world through the codi-
fication of middle-class family values and the (re)consolidation of strict
gender norms.26 This historical era of the Red scare—of Father Knows
Best, the witch-hunts of the House Un-American Activities Committee,
and the shift from production to consumer capitalism—witnessed the
interpenetration of nationalism with new figurations of sexuality. These
included the development of the ‘‘organization man,’’ the rise of corpo-
rate culture, and the suburbanization of the efficient middle-American
housewife.
In Homosexuality in Cold War Culture, Robert Corber writes that in
this historical context homosexuality ‘‘was understood as a form of psy-
chopathology that undermined the nation’s defenses against Commu-
nist infiltration. The politicization of homosexuality was crucial to the
consolidation of the Cold War consensus. The homosexualization of left-
wing political activity by the discourses of national security enabled Cold
War liberalism to emerge as the only acceptable alternative to the forces
of reaction in postwar American society’’ (3). In the national imagin-
ings of the cold war era, heterosexuality is linked to national health and
security while homosexuality is connected not only to the threat of com-
munist infiltration but to the figure of a foreign and racialized other.27
The national paranoia ensuing from this double threat, it is important to
note, arose precisely as a problem of visuality. The possibility that homo-
sexuals could escape detection by passing as heterosexuals linked them
in the cold war political imaginary to unidentified and undetected com-
munists who were thought to be conspiring against U.S. government
interests.
Given this particular historical context, Toulon’s lotus blossom fan-
tasy might be also said to illustrate the vexed crossings between psycho-
analysis and an ascendant Western neoimperialism. It is worth remark-
ing that many of Freud’s psychic paradigms rely heavily on metaphors
of economic domination and compensation. As was noted earlier, for in-
stance, in ‘‘Splitting of the Ego in the Defensive Process,’’ Freud states:
‘‘But everything has to be paid for in one way or another, and this suc-
cess is achieved at a price of a rift in the ego which never heals but which
increases as time goes on’’ (275–76). In M. Butterfly, the economics of
colonialism as well as an ascendant neoimperialism intersect with these
economic metaphors of the psyche in ways that demand the historicizing

148 racial castration

of psychoanalysis and the psychologizing of colonialism and its contem-
porary legacies. In the context of M. Butterfly, such crossings indicate
that, like any other commodity in the imperial system, Toulon’s knowl-
edge of Gallimard’s open ‘‘secret’’ circulates as a kind of ‘‘intellectual’’
property undergirding the rise of Western neoimperialist interventions
across the globe, often configured as the political containment of com-
munism.
If Toulon’s secret Madama Butterfly fantasy is less an individual than
a collective fantasy of Western domination, then its articulation serves
not merely to describe the conditions of a culturally acceptable hetero-
sexual and white colonial desire but, more importantly, to produce these
symbolic ideals in its very utterance. In this structuring of the social
order, colonial ideals of heterosexuality and whiteness acquire their effi-
cacy only in and through a reiterative structure of citationality and a
material structure of the circulation of commodities, capital, and knowl-
edge on the global stage. As such, Toulon’s gleeful utterances function
as a kind of colonial performative, hailing Gallimard into its ideological
web. Toulon—subject of and subjected to the symbolic norms and prohi-
bitions of the colonial order—becomes a spokesperson for this exclusive
club, another cog in the wheel, as it were.
That the presumptuous Toulon and the pontificating judge (‘‘Did
Monsieur Gallimard know you were a man?’’) are scripted by Hwang to
be played by the same actor works to underscore their collective psychic
and material investments in the colonial regime they mindlessly extol.
The very fabric of the social world dramatized in M. Butterfly thus gains
its psychic and material resilience through the homogeneous fantasies
of corporate players like Toulon and juridical tools like the judge. Collec-
tively, their primary responsibilities to their particular domains of eco-
nomics and politics involve the repeated interpellations of bureaucratic
tools such as Gallimard into this old boy network.28
The French ambassador’s gleeful statement—‘‘We were worried
about you, Gallimard. We thought you were the only one without a
secret. Now you go and find a lotus blossom . . . and top us all’’—is
an optative hailing of the bumbling diplomat into a compulsory net-
work of heterosexuality and whiteness and into an economic and a politi-
cal structure of colonial privilege. Hence, the performative utterance
by which Toulon transforms and renders Gallimard’s little secret pub-
lic functions as the reiterative mechanism through which the colonial
legacy strives to secure its psychic investments, bind its political en-
titlements, and guarantee its economic inheritance. How well does Gal-
limard recite the prescriptive norms of this collective lotus blossom
fantasy?

heterosexuality and whiteness 149

 Racial Castration
In ‘‘Fetishism’’ (1927), Freud describes the fetish as a psychic process by
means of which a little boy gives the female a penis substitute so as to
disavow her ‘‘lack’’ and difference and make women ‘‘tolerable as sexual
objects.’’ 29 Freud thus implies that fetishism serves as a compensatory
psychic mechanism through which the trauma of female sexual differ-
ence is managed and heterosexual relations between men and women
are normalized. Since fetishes are ‘‘easily accessible and [the fetishist]
can readily obtain the sexual satisfaction attached to [them]’’ (154), Freud
offers this psychic process as an everyday means of facilitating a norma-
tive heterosexual relationship between the sexes.
Classic fetishism, according to Freud, plays itself out along lines of
sexual difference. The male fetishist refuses to acknowledge female cas-
tration by seeing on the female body a penis that is not there to see. In
M. Butterfly, however, we encounter a strange reversal of this psychic
paradigm, a curious reconfiguration of the fetish beyond what Freud’s
essay explicitly offers. With Gallimard, we do not witness a denial of
sexual difference and lack resulting in the projection onto the body of a
female a substitute penis that is not there to see. Instead, we encounter
the opposite, a ‘‘reverse fetishism,’’ so to speak: Gallimard’s blatant re-
fusal to see on the body of an Asian male the penis that is clearly there
for him to see. How might we account for this strange reconfiguration
of the fetish and its avowal of castration?
At this juncture, it is necessary to consider racial difference in the for-
mulation of any potential explanation since in Gallimard’s reconfigura-
tion of the fetish, castration is not denied but stringently affirmed—and
affirmed not at the site of the white woman but at the site of the Asian
man. How might this racial castration—this curious crossing of castra-
tion with race—make possible the heterosexual relationship between
the white man and white woman on which Freud implicitly centers his
discussions? In this particular psychic scenario, what kinds of differ-
ences and lacks are being denied, shorn up, and rendered invisible? 30
To begin our exploration, let us turn to an example of racial dynamics
offered by Kaja Silverman in The Threshold of the Visible World. In her dis-
cussion of the different ideological and cultural values conferred upon
the black and white male penises, Silverman delineates a social struc-
ture in which the black penis works to disturb the sexual relations be-
tween white man and white woman: ‘‘The differentiation of the white
man from the black man on the basis of the black man’s hyperbolic penis
consequently reverberates in disturbing ways within the domain of gen-
der. It places the white man on the side of ‘less’ rather than ‘more,’ and,

150 racial castration

so, threatens to erase the distinction between him and the white woman.
This is the primary reason, I would argue, why the body of the black man
disrupts the unity of the white male corporeal ego.’’ 31 The putatively hy-
perbolic black male penis threatens the unity of the white male ego by
placing him in the position of being less masculine, thereby endanger-
ing the structural distinction between him and the white woman.
In M. Butterfly, however, we encounter the opposite situation: a white
male is placed into the position of being more masculine through his
disavowal of the Asian penis—a triangulating of American race relations
beyond the conventional Manichean relationship of black and white.32
In other words, by denying the penis that is clearly there for him to see,
Gallimard psychically castrates the Asian male, placing him in a position
of lesser masculinity to secure for himself a position of greater mascu-
linity—a material illustration of Richard Fung’s contention that in the
Western imaginary ‘‘Asian and anus are conflated.’’ 33 The white diplo-
mat’s racial castration of the Asian male works, then, not to disturb but to
stabilize the distinction between him and the white woman—a reversal
of the psychic anxiety he conventionally faces with the black male body.
Indeed, this model of racial castration—of ‘‘reverse fetishism’’ and its
denial of the Asian penis—might be seen as an attempt to produce and
normalize heterosexual relations between the white couple. In M. Butter-
fly, racial castration comes to reinforce the very structures of normative
fetishism described by Freud: the myth of the sufficient white male and
the lacking white female is upheld and strengthened. Put otherwise, a
gendered distinction between the white man and the white woman is
stabilized and secured through racial difference.
The French diplomat’s reconfiguration of Freudian fetishism in this
particular manner, then, works less to problematize than to reiterate the
prescriptive norms of the colonial order—the emasculation of the Asian
male functioning through not only a material but a psychically enforced
orientalist framework. In this particular example of reverse fetishism,
the Asian male is psychically emasculated, foreclosed from an identifica-
tion with normative heterosexuality, so as to guarantee the white male’s
claim to this location. As such, the potential trauma of sexual difference
is not arrested at the site of the female body (as in the case of classic
fetishism). Instead, sexual difference is managed through the arrest, dis-
avowal, and projection of racial difference at the site of the Asian male
body. Hence, Gallimard’s racial castration of Song presents a psychic
scenario in which sexual and racial differences intersect and are simul-
taneously managed in attempts to affirm and stabilize the diplomat’s
subjectivity. Gallimard’s refusal to see the Asian penis before him thus
illustrates the complex manner in which Asian, white, and black male

heterosexuality and whiteness 151

identity circulate in a psychic economy of racial as well as sexual differ-
ences, gaining their discursive legibility in relation to one another. In
this particular instance, Gallimard’s racial denial of Song’s penis facili-
tates the smooth alignment of heterosexuality and whiteness. This is an
invisible alignment that, in its refusal to be named or seen, attempts to
secure heterosexuality and whiteness as universal norms in a colonial
world order.
Gallimard’s use of reverse fetishism in an effort to shore up his flag-
ging masculine position illustrates a definitive instance in which racial
difference must be discussed in terms of sexual difference. The white
diplomat’s racial castration of Song exemplifies a distinct psychic pro-
cess through which whiteness and heterosexuality work collectively to
articulate and secure their universal status in relation to a devalued
Asian racial positioning. Through Gallimard’s psychic revision of clas-
sic fetishism, the potential trauma of racial difference is deflected away
from the white male body and projected elsewhere. In his continual de-
fense against the potential threats of numerous social differences, Galli-
mard’s reworking of classic fetishism both manages and erases race. In
this respect, we might recall our introductory discussion of Freud and
psychoanalysis’s management and erasure of the figure of the primitive
to assert that castration is in every case racial castration. This adminis-
tration of sexuality and race simultaneously reveals the gaps while sutur-
ing the fissures through which various material incongruities and lived
misidentifications are not psychically experienced as discrepant. Racial
castration thus functions for Gallimard and the colonial legacy he repre-
sents as a psychic mechanism that, in its protectionist veiling of hetero-
sexuality and whiteness, is ‘‘responsible for the production of univer-
salities, harmonies, and gratifications.’’ 34 In this manner, conventional
white male subjectivity, as well as a normative heterosexual relationship
between the (white) sexes, is scripted and sustained through a specified
racial distinction and loss.

Anatomical Weenies and Epic Fiction

Freud describes classic fetishism as serving to normalize the white het-
erosexual relations on which the paternal legacy is built through the
management of female sexual difference and the simultaneous denial
of female castration and lack. Reconfigured by Gallimard, fetishism also
manages anxieties of racial difference by facilitating a normative white
heterosexual relationship through the affirmation of a castrated Asian
male body that serves to reinforce white male sufficiency. However, as
we come to see in M. Butterfly, this psychic mechanism turns out to be a

152 racial castration

profound disappointment for the diplomat. M. Butterfly qualifies Galli-
mard’s call to normative white masculinity by charting a series of notable
(hetero)sexual reversals.
Ambassador Toulon’s attempts to interpellate Gallimard into a colo-
nial matrix of whiteness and heterosexuality through their shared lotus
blossom fantasy, as well as the diplomat’s own attempts to shore up his
flagging masculine position through his racial reconfiguration of classic
fetishism, are qualified in the course of the drama by a long history of
repeated failures with white women: the pinup girl, Helga, and Renée. If
the purpose of the Freudian fetish is to remake the (white) female body
into a viable sexual object through the denial of her sexual difference and
the projection of a penis substitute, then Gallimard’s relationships with
these three white women come to be marked by a strange psychic rever-
sal. The trauma of castration is not neutralized at the site of the female
body. Indeed, it returns to wash over the white male body.
The diplomat’s history with white women—before, during, and after
his relationship with Song—is highlighted by the continued failure of
the heterosexual imperative. In the young Gallimard’s Playboy fantasies,
we witness the first instance of this washout. His onanistic activities are
rapidly short-circuited by uncooperative anatomy:

gallimard: I first discovered these magazines at my uncle’s

house. One day, as a boy of twelve. The first time I saw them
in his closet . . . all lined up—my body shook. Not with lust—
no, with power. Here were women—a shelfful—who would do
exactly what I wanted.

The ‘‘Love Duet’’ creeps in over the speakers. Special comes up, re-
vealing, not Song this time, but a pinup girl in a sexy negligee, her
back to us. Gallimard turns upstage and looks at her.

girl: I know you’re watching me.

gallimard: My throat . . . it’s dry.
girl: I leave my blinds open every night before I go to bed.
gallimard: I can’t move.
girl: I leave my blinds open and the lights on.
gallimard: I’m shaking. My skin is hot, but my penis is soft.
Why?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
girl: I can’t see you. You can do whatever you want.
gallimard: I can’t do a thing. Why? (10–12)

Within the confines of the avuncular ‘‘closet,’’ Gallimard’s reactions

seem atypical of most pubescent heterosexual males. Although the dip-

heterosexuality and whiteness 153

lomat’s identification with paternal power is definitively aroused, his
penis remains permanently soft. On one hand, Gallimard is thoroughly
excited by the prospect of phallic control—enthralled by the power to
make ‘‘women . . . do exactly what I wanted.’’ On the other hand, he lacks
the necessary equipment and is racked by performance anxieties about
his heterosexual adequacy. Despite the pinup girl’s self-proclaimed in-
ability to return Gallimard’s look, the young diplomat is overwrought by
seeing and being seen. He is, moreover, disturbed by the visible failure
of his privileged organ: ‘‘I’m shaking. My skin is hot, but my penis is
soft. Why? . . . I can’t do a thing. Why?’’ Gallimard, the young voyeur, is
thus himself caught at the peephole, subjected to the power of an un-
apprehensible and terrorizing gaze. Since the diplomat literally occupies
center stage at this particular moment, the visible failure of his organ
comes under intense scrutiny, its flaccid presence given our full cine-
matic attention.
As a ‘‘queer’’ adolescent, the diplomat’s struggle to identify with the
position of the father—with a position of heterosexuality and white-
ness—comes to be haunted by the masculine dis-ease of his organ. Just
as Gallimard’s racial reconfiguration of fetishism in relation to Song sug-
gests a logic of reversal—the affirmation of the ‘‘castrated’’ Asian male—
here, too, we witness a further inversion. Castration is not disavowed and
projected onto the white female body but emphatically returns to wash
over the white male body. Gallimard—the white male, not the white
female—becomes the locus of insufficiency. Hence, we witness in this
Playboy phantasmatic an incipient pledge to a white and heterosexual
paternal order, one strongly qualified by a dissonant trajectory of desire.
Penis and phallus work toward opposite ends, a slippage of phallic power
from anatomical control.
At this point, it seems appropriate to invoke recent feminist debates
on the distinction between phallus and penis and the displacement of
a differential ‘‘lack’’ and ‘‘castration’’ onto the female body. Silverman,
for instance, delineates two separate castrations experienced by all sub-
jects: the entry into language (primal repression) and the paternal meta-
phor (the Oedipus complex). If primal repression and the paternal meta-
phor can be thought of as two separate events, Silverman argues, we
can understand the Freudian castration complex ‘‘as the metaphoric re-
inscription and containment of a loss which happens much earlier, at the
point of linguistic entry—as the restaging with a ‘difference’ of a crisis
which would otherwise prove inimical to masculinity.’’ 35 Silverman’s cri-
tique of Freud’s inequitable distribution of a prior linguistic castration
onto a ‘‘lacking’’ female (and, in Gallimard’s instance, racial) body finds

154 racial castration

an unwitting ally in the diplomat. Gallimard’s inability to place his flac-
cid penis within a phantasmatic scene of tumescent phallic plenitude
suggests that there is nothing inevitable, after all, in the connection be-
tween anatomical male penis and symbolic phallus. The diplomat’s fail-
ures with white women, as well as with Asian men, emphatically illus-
trate that he is also—and most hyperbolically—a subject of sexual and
racial lack.
Gallimard’s psychosexual inadequacies are further elaborated in his
‘‘arranged’’ marriage to Helga, the Australian ambassador’s daughter.
Their conjugal union exemplifies the continuous rescripting of a divided
allegiance between white paternal authority and heterosexual desire. To
begin with, the couple’s marriage is overshadowed by Gallimard’s ‘‘vow
renouncing love . . . for a quick leap up the career ladder’’ (14). Moreover,
the political, economic, and social gain enjoyed by Gallimard through
this union is subsequently qualified by a noticeable absence of progeny,
the material failure of what we might call, in a contemporary context,
‘‘family values.’’ That their marriage remains childless is, as Helga con-
tends, not of her doing. Gallimard’s loyalties to a white and heterosexual
symbolic order appear yet again to be undermined by a slippage between
the psychic and the material. Although he identifies with the privileges
of paternal, colonial power, the diplomat is immobilized by the perfor-
mative requirements this power demands.
This rift between phallic authority and bodily penis finds its most
resonant example in Gallimard’s interactions with Renée, the assertive
Danish coed. If the male René Gallimard’s patronym, which invokes one
of France’s largest publishing houses, indicates an inherited legacy of
paternal privilege, his first name qualifies this presumption through its
relationship to his female doppelgänger. Renée’s presence, perhaps more
than that of any other white woman in the drama, works to the utter
ruination of Gallimard’s identifications with a colonial regime of privi-
lege. To begin with, the diplomat’s extramarital affair with the Danish
coed is marked by a reversal of gender norms. She is a woman who is
‘‘too uninhibited, too willing . . . too masculine’’ (54; Hwang’s emphases).
Furthermore, Renée’s discourse on anatomical ‘‘weenies’’ and epic fic-
tion attests to the slippage of male penis from symbolic phallus, bringing
the male René face to face with his sexual insufficiency:

renée: I—I think maybe it’s because I really don’t know what to
do with them—that’s why I call them ‘‘weenies.’’
gallimard: Well you did quite well with . . . mine.
renée: Thanks, but I mean, really do with them. Like, okay, have
you ever looked at one? I mean, really?

heterosexuality and whiteness 155

 gallimard: No, I suppose when it’s part of you, you sort of take
it for granted.
renée: I guess. But, like, it just hangs there. This little . . . flap of
flesh. And there’s so much fuss that we make about it. Like, I
think the reason we fight wars is because we wear clothes. Be-
cause no one knows—between the men, I mean—who has the
bigger . . . weenie. So, if I’m a guy with a small one, I’m going to
build a really big building or take over a really big piece of land or
write a really long book so the other men don’t know, right? But,
see, it never really works, that’s the problem. I mean, you con-
quer the country, or whatever, but you’re still wearing clothes,
so there’s no way to prove absolutely whose is bigger or smaller.
And that’s what we call a civilized society. The whole world run
by a bunch of men with pricks the size of pins. (She exits)
gallimard (To us): This was simply not acceptable. (55–56)

René Gallimard’s horrified reaction to the female Renée’s disquisition

on the separation between anatomical weenies and their symbolic mani-
festations—wars, epic fiction, large buildings—clearly results from her
unwelcome incursion into the realm of paternal privilege and her ap-
propriation of its most powerful tool: language. Renée is completely
dominant, physically and psychically. In bed she is in charge, quite lit-
erally on top, as Gallimard admits in saying ‘‘you did quite well with . . .
mine’’ (his penis). Outside the bedroom, she assumes a position of dis-
cursive authority, vexing the tongue-tied diplomat by running verbal
circles around him in conversation.
Renée’s scaling down of penile presumption, as well as her incisive
observations on the ‘‘phallacy’’ of male size and privilege, drives the
wedge ever more deeply between bodily penis and symbolic phallus.36
If the silent e that marks the difference in their shared name is that let-
ter whose responsibility is to both signify and stabilize a relationship of
gender, the silent ‘‘e’’ also accounts for a certain unavoidable symbolic
e-masculation that Gallimard undergoes at the hands of Renée. In this
particular world, Gallimard clearly lacks the e. As a consequence, the
diplomat, in all his encounters with his female double, cannot avoid con-
frontation with—he can no longer render invisible—his heterosexual
failures. On the contrary, the diplomat’s relationship with Renée comes
to epitomize all his interactions with the white women of the drama: cas-
tration and lack return to sit squarely on the shoulders of the white male.

156 racial castration

 A Homosexual and a Fetishist: Rice Queens and Yellow Fever
How might we reconcile Gallimard’s curious attraction to the paternal
legacy but not to white women and heterosexuality? 37 Can the fetish
serve to deny male homosexuality rather than female castration? Can
the fetishist be a homosexual?
On the face of it, these questions might seem rather untenable, since
Freud claims that it is precisely the fetish that saves the little boy ‘‘from
becoming a homosexual, by endowing women with the characteristic
which makes them tolerable as sexual objects.’’ 38 Yet the distinct homo-
sexual and fetishistic pathways by which Freud leads the boy out of the
horror of female castration are not so straight as never to cross. If the
male fetishist creates a penis substitute and projects it onto the body
of the female to make her an acceptable sexual object, this projection is
entirely necessary, we learn, for the very reason that the boy holds an
incredible narcissistic investment in the corporeal integrity of his male
organ: ‘‘No, that [female castration] could be true: for if a woman had
been castrated, then his own possession of a penis was in danger; and
against that there rose in rebellion the portion of his narcissism which
Nature has, as a precaution, attached to that particular organ.’’ 39
And here Freud implies that the heterosexual man is no more, no less,
a (displaced) narcissist who can only love those objects that remind him
of himself, can love only those objects endowed with a penis, with the
corporeal outline of his own bodily ego. According to this logic of simili-
tude and false equivalence, the female body becomes a substitute for the
male body as heterosexuality becomes a substitute for homosexuality.
As such, the homosexual—traditionally excluded from Freud’s cast of
anaclitic love objects—would nevertheless be the one love object holding
the greatest psychic cache for the heterosexual man. Not only does the
homosexual man reassuringly and faithfully mirror his body back to the
heterosexual man; furthermore, the homosexual man also has a putative
narcissism that would be a potent reminder of the renounced libidinal
territory the heterosexual man relinquished in his departure from nar-
cissistic to anaclitic (heterosexual) love.40 In this scenario, the simulta-
neous masculine (dis)avowal of homosexuality structures the very con-
dition of possibility by means of which conventional white masculinity
is allowed to emerge.
How might this model of fetishism and homosexuality intersect
with Gallimard’s racial castration of the Asian male? How might the
disavowed Asian male penis that Gallimard refuses to recognize on
Song’s body serve as a displaced representative of a tabooed homosexual
and racial desire? The psychic configuration of ‘‘reverse fetishism’’ in

heterosexuality and whiteness 157

M. Butterfly suggests that Gallimard’s denial of Song’s penis works not
merely to shore up a heterosexual relationship between white man and
woman; it also covers up an abjected homosexual desire for the Asian
male body. In this sense, we might describe this scenario as Gallimard’s
‘‘passing’’ between an acceptable white male heterosexuality and an un-
acceptable white male homosexuality. How might the diplomat’s refusal
to see the Asian penis before him pass off a prohibited homosexual
desire for that masculine body as a normative heterosexuality in the face
of whiteness?
As discussed earlier, the cruel white man and the submissive Oriental
lotus blossom mark a narrative of imperial knowledge that is assiduously
cultivated and rescripted by the colonial order. Yet this phantasmatic—
deployed from Puccini to Ambassador Toulon—as well as the diplo-
mat’s numerous anatomical failures with white women come ultimately
to qualify Gallimard’s tenuous position (and finally his life) within the
colonial matrix of white heterosexual power. If the Madama Butterfly
phantasmatic occupies the acceptable side of a colonialist fantasy, the
conscious side of authorized desire, how might we describe the unac-
ceptable underside of this fantasy, the unconscious denial of a tabooed
desire? To answer these questions, we might turn to Hwang’s striking
afterword to the play, in which he offers a potential explanation for the
diplomat’s state of divided belief, one unnamed in the drama proper:

Gay friends have told me of a derogatory term used in their com-

munity: ‘‘Rice Queen’’—a gay Caucasian man primarily attracted
to Asians. In these relationships, the Asian virtually always plays
the role of the ‘‘woman’’; the Rice Queen, culturally and sexually,
is the ‘‘man.’’ This pattern of relationships had become so codified
that, until recently, it was considered unnatural for gay Asians to
date one another. Such men would be taunted with a phrase which
implied they were lesbians.
Similarly, heterosexual Asians have long been aware of ‘‘Yellow
Fever’’—Caucasian men with a fetish for exotic Oriental women.
I have often heard it said that ‘‘Oriental women make the best
wives.’’ (Rarely is this heard from the mouths of Asian men, inci-
dentally.) This mythology is exploited by the Oriental mail-order
bride trade which has flourished over the past decade. American
men can now send away for catalogues of ‘‘obedient, domesti-
cated’’ Asian women looking for husbands. (98)

According to Hwang, the concepts of Yellow Fever and Rice Queens are
constructed along congruent lines of heterosexual and homosexual sub-
mission—the conscious and acceptable as well as the unconscious and

158 racial castration

abject sides of a colonialist fantasy. The concept of Yellow Fever exists
squarely within the approved norms and acceptable knowledges of a con-
ventional colonial order, working to buttress white male heterosexuality
through the possession and exploitation of the native brown woman.
Conversely, the suppressed equivalent of this phenomenon is the
homosexual Rice Queen fantasy. This Rice Queen fantasy—entailing at-
tachment to and desire for the Asian male body—exists squarely within
the tabooed regions of symbolic prohibitions against homosexuality and
nonwhiteness. Its emergence into the domain of visibility would thus
shed light on the abject underside of the symbolic order, an order whose
stability is contingent upon not only the disavowal but also the vio-
lent suppression of homosexuality and nonwhiteness. In this regard, we
might view Gallimard’s psychic makeover and denial of Song’s penis as
serving a dual purpose. Gallimard’s castration of the male opera singer
could function as both an attempt to buttress his flagging white mas-
culinity and an effort to remake the unacceptable Asian male body into
an acceptable Asian female form for colonial consumption, enjoyment,
and privilege.
This double-sided fantasy explains how the white diplomat’s failures
with white women might be interpreted through both a heterosexual
and a homosexual valence. I would suggest, finally, that we must read
Gallimard’s state of divided belief through both of these possibilities:
a failed heterosexuality in the face of whiteness and an occluded fan-
tasy of homosexual desire. The former serves as a psychic mechanism
through which the symbolic norms of heterosexuality and whiteness
are shored up and consolidated in Gallimard’s colonial world; the latter
serves as a psychic mechanism through which symbolic prohibitions
against homosexuality and nonwhiteness are suspended and called into
question.
In which fantasy—the Madama Butterfly or the Rice Queen phan-
tasmatic—does Gallimard hold the most faith? Is the diplomat finally
heterosexual or homosexual? This question may ultimately be unan-
swerable, for in a larger sense Gallimard’s putative ignorance concern-
ing Song’s anatomical sex suggests a fundamental equivocation—as well
as the fluidity of sexual identification and desire—that structures the
symbolic order itself. It suggests the ultimate unknowability and there-
fore the unreliability of sex and sexual practice as indicators of a psychic
truth or an unwavering sexual disposition. In slightly different terms,
Gallimard’s psychic equivocations over Song’s anatomy concede the in-
evitable failure of symbolic norms and prohibitions to command faithful
versions of heterosexuality and whiteness that they cannot ultimately
produce, enforce, or guarantee.41

heterosexuality and whiteness 159

 Nevertheless, if the very conception of our bodily ego and borders of
the self come to be informed by a threat of symbolic and material pun-
ishment—a threat of pain, a threat of bodily disintegration, and a threat-
ened loss of social identity—it may be that Gallimard’s ostensible obei-
sance to a conscious Madama Butterfly fantasy serves as a mechanism of
self-preservation and advanced self-punishment, the compensatory re-
sult of an unconscious disavowal of a desired Rice Queen phantasmatic.
Indeed, Butler writes, the symbolic order marshals an incredible force
of coercion: ‘‘When the threat of punishment wielded by that prohibi-
tion [against homosexuality and nonwhiteness] is too great, it may be
that we desire someone who will keep us from ever seeing the desire for
which we are punishable, and in attaching ourselves to that person, it
may be that we effectively punish ourselves in advance and, indeed, gen-
erate desire in and through and for that self-punishment’’ (Bodies, 100).
Should we read Gallimard’s wavering allegiance to symbolic norms of
heterosexuality and whiteness as a rebellion against or as a submission
to this advance self-punishment?
Gallimard’s passing between an acceptable white male heterosexu-
ality and a tabooed white male homosexuality brings with it not only
psychic relief but concrete material rewards. The diplomat’s passing—
whether consciously or finally unconsciously achieved—is reinforced by
a corresponding framework of economic and political benefits. As Earl
Jackson Jr. observes, gay white males occupy ‘‘a peculiar position in a
heterosexist society in that, as men (if they are not ‘out’), they potentially
have full access to the very power mechanisms that repress them and
their fellow ‘outsiders,’ who cannot ‘pass,’ white women and people of
color of any sexual orientation.’’ 42 The political, economic, and cultural
stakes are high for the passing gay white male: full access to the world of
colonial privilege and rewards. In light of these considerable material ad-
vantages, could Gallimard’s putative ignorance be seen as conscious bad
faith? Could Gallimard’s anatomical blunder be seen as a consciously
self-denying homosexuality encouraged by the likes of Toulon and the
pontificating judge?
This question—yet another version of ‘‘Did Monsieur Gallimard
know you were a man?’’—may not be answerable. However, uncon-
scious self-deception and conscious bad faith often have similar results
in the social context of the real world. The material rewards of Galli-
mard’s passing as a heterosexual conqueror in Toulon’s colonial regime
are great—promotion and adulation by others—whereas the conse-
quences of Song’s disrobing and Gallimard’s exposure as a homosexual
lead to imprisonment, ignominy, and death. Hence, questions of the
conscious intent to pass must be considered, for venal complicity in

160 racial castration

a system of colonial privilege enjoyed by gay white men who do con-
sciously pass is a phenomenon all too familiar in Hwang’s context of
colonial, cold war China as well as in our contemporary Western con-
text.43
If, as I have argued throughout this chapter, the power of symbolic
norms of heterosexuality and whiteness functions largely through the
tacit veiling of their collusionary ideals, then rendering visible by nam-
ing the invisible workings of a compulsory system of both heterosexu-
ality and whiteness is an imperative project. Gallimard’s passing and
his slippage from normative ideals of white masculinity can be used to
provide a model through which we may contest and dislodge the social
structures that seem to guarantee an immutable and universal position
of privilege to the normative white male subject. To this effect, I conclude
with a final interpretation of fetishism and the failure of heterosexuality
and whiteness. I conclude, that is, with the failure of the fetishizing Am-
bassador Toulon, the most strongly coded ‘‘sufficient’’ white male sub-
ject of the drama, to prevent even himself from falling into the abjected
domain of homosexual desire.

The Confidence of the Thing

We come to learn in Freud’s essay ‘‘Fetishism’’ that the struggle that im-
pels divided belief and calls for the psychic mechanism of the fetish is
not merely the sight of female ‘‘castration’’ but the truly threatening pro-
portions that this visual castration takes when coupled with the threaten-
ing prohibitions of the father. In this respect, what the little boy struggles
against in ‘‘Fetishism’’ is the father himself and the ambivalent attitudes
of both hatred and love that his paternal authority elicits.
My observations on the father-son drama that underpins fetishism
are supported in the Freudian text by an interesting story of denial,
which I would describe as the urtext of castration, that of two young boys
who disavow the death of their father. Describing one of the youngsters,
who ‘‘oscillated in every situation in life between two assumptions’’ of
divided belief, Freud observes, ‘‘the one, that his father was still alive
and was hindering his activities; the other, opposite one, that he was en-
titled to regard himself as his father’s successor.’’ 44 The boy’s state of
split knowledge thus suggests that the assumption of the paternal posi-
tion is ultimately an ambivalent process that is never complete. To bor-
row loosely from the logic of fetishism: the boy can and cannot be his
father.
If the purpose of fetishism is to normalize a relationship between a
(white) man and woman, then this psychic mechanism serves to encour-

heterosexuality and whiteness 161

age and facilitate the assumption of the father’s place, Freud suggests,
specifically through the axis of sexuality, by offering the boy a pathway
into heterosexual desire. In other words, fetishism, by (re)making the
female body an acceptable locale for his libidinal investments, encour-
ages the boy to identify with the heterosexual position of the father while
denying any residual homosexual desire that he may have for him. This
psychic process, as we have observed, occurs only by (re)configuring the
female body in the guise of the male—by neutralizing the ‘‘horror’’ of her
sexual difference and lack. And in this regard, we witness in fetishism a
rather overt attempt on the part of the little boy to write out a desire for
the father, which is nevertheless curiously preserved in the male form
that the female body must invariably assume. Consequently, the social
order—its system of compulsory heterosexuality—is maintained by a
tenuous line between heterosexual identification and a constant prom-
ise of resexualized homosexual desire. Here we must remember that
the ‘‘pangs of conscience’’ resulting from the little boy’s identification
with the father through the sublimation of his homosexual desire are,
as Judith Butler points out, ‘‘nothing other than the displaced satisfac-
tions of homosexual desire’’ (Bodies, 277). These pangs, whose role lies in
keeping the boy from acknowledging a prohibited desire for his father,
are in no way secure, for they are the displaced result of a psychical con-
servation of homosexual desire and not an obliteration of it.
In my reading of M. Butterfly, I have focused attention on Gallimard
as a hyperbolically marginal male figure occupying the conventional bor-
ders of white masculinity. The diplomat’s shaky relationship with pater-
nal authority is, however, not an anomalous psychic position but one
that all white men come to embody, including Ambassador Toulon him-
self, the most strongly coded father figure in the drama. In highlighting
the phallic failures of white heterosexual masculinity in general, Hwang
thus qualifies its universalizing pretensions. Let us return one last time
to this dynamic father-son duo. Promoting Gallimard to vice consul,
Toulon offers a few words of advice to his new protégé in training:

toulon: Humility won’t be part of the job. You’re going to coordi-

nate the revamped intelligence division. Want to know a secret?
A year ago, you would’ve been out. But the past few months, I
don’t know how it happened, you’ve become this new aggressive
confident . . . thing. And they also tell me you get along with the
Chinese. So I think you’re a lucky man, Gallimard. Congratula-
tions.
They shake hands. Toulon exits. Party noises out. Gallimard stum-
bles across a darkened stage.

162 racial castration

 gallimard: Vice-consul? Impossible! As I stumbled out of the
party, I saw it written across the sky: There is no God. Or, no—
say that there is a God. But that God . . . understands. Of course!
God who creates Eve to serve Adam, who blesses Solomon with
his harem but ties Jezebel to a burning bed—that God is a man.
And he understands! At age thirty-nine, I was suddenly initiated
into the way of the world. (37–38)

Embracing the psychic contract of Toulon’s old-boy network, Gallimard

comes to realize that his emotional battering of the Oriental diva has
been swiftly and richly rewarded. Indeed, Gallimard would be—as Tou-
lon suggests—‘‘out’’ were it not for his racial buttress, his ability to
‘‘get along with the Chinese.’’ The silence of whiteness—the race that
need not speak its name—thus ensures that Gallimard need not speak
his (homo)sexuality. At age thirty-nine, Gallimard’s interpellation into a
colonial realm of heterosexual and white privilege is rather late. He ‘‘ma-
tures’’ only under the tutelage of Toulon, who rewards the late bloomer
with an unexpected promotion.
In his enthusiastic response to Toulon, Gallimard unwittingly begins
to mime the ambassador’s lessons through an equivocating turn to bib-
lical law: ‘‘There is no God. Or, no—say that there is a God. But that
God . . . understands. Of course! God who creates Eve to serve Adam . . .
that God is a man.’’ The diplomat suggests, through biblical references
to Adam and Eve, that his promotion to vice-consul signals divine ac-
ceptance of the lotus blossom fantasy. Yet, although the rhetoric of the
language of Genesis is meant to lend an eternal vision to Gallimard’s
symbolic revelations, the fact that this knowledge is ‘‘written across the
sky’’ produces a contradictory feeling of transience. The truths of this
religious law are written in air, and the urgency of Gallimard’s newfound
confidence in normative white masculinity has no solid foundation.
Are we back in the territory of fetishism? We must note that Toulon
and Gallimard’s dialogue is firmly embedded in the logic of divided be-
lief, the willful splitting of heterosexual identification from homosexual
desire. Invoking yet again the open secret and knowledge of colonial
presumption—the possession of the Oriental lotus blossom—Toulon at-
tempts to forestall any psychic equivocation on the part of Gallimard
by installing him in a psychic network of heterosexuality and whiteness
through his material promotion to vice consul. Pay attention to the am-
bassador’s words, however. The diplomat’s assumption of a place within
the paternal legacy is dependent upon a ‘‘revamped intelligence divi-
sion.’’ As dictated by Toulon, this division of intelligence—Gallimard’s
knowing and not knowing (of Song’s penis, of there truly being a sexist

heterosexuality and whiteness 163

God)—is one that ultimately becomes emblematic of an unstable white
male heterosexuality tout court.
As such, fetishism and divided belief become the privileged psy-
chic linchpin for the maintenance of white male colonial subjectivity as
the universal norm. In this regard, we must note that the figure of the
aggressive woman—Eve and Jezebel—explicitly invoked as the hetero-
sexual buttress of the white male subject is finally overshadowed by an
occluded homosexual desire. In Toulon’s congratulatory words to the
new vice-consul, the ambassador invariably turns Gallimard into a fe-
tishized object, resexualizing the borders of a prohibited homosexual
desire. ‘‘You’ve become this new aggressive confident . . . thing’’ (my em-
phasis), he tells Gallimard.What is the all-powerful thing that Toulon eu-
phemistically describes but the delegated symbol of male privilege and
abuse—the anatomical penis as symbolic phallus? How might we inter-
pret Toulon’s conflation of penis and phallus? And what does it mean
that Gallimard has ‘‘become this new aggressive confident . . . thing’’ for
Toulon—has become, in effect, the phallus for the ambassador?
Mark Chiang suggests that in becoming the phallus ‘‘Gallimard no
longer occupies the position of the man, who is possessor of the phal-
lus; he occupies the position of the woman, whose only hope is to be
the phallus. . . . Masculinity in this reading would seem to be just as
much a fetish, just as much the object of fetishization, as femininity.
If Gallimard accedes to the plenitude of heterosexual masculinity, it is
by making himself over into the phallus, by becoming a fetish for Am-
bassador Toulon.’’ 45 If, as Lacan argues in ‘‘The Signification of the Phal-
lus,’’ the male must have the phallus and the female must be the phallus,
then no longer can white masculinity lay claim to having the phallus in
M. Butterfly once Gallimard has become this privileged signifier.46 If the
male Gallimard can become—is made to be—the phallus for Toulon,
then masculinity, as Chiang points out, is apparently ‘‘just as much a
fetish, just as much the object of fetishization, as femininity.’’ The male
body itself is (re)made to function for Toulon as the locus of libidinal in-
vestment and homosexual desire.47 Gallimard’s bodily frame comes to
mark the conceptual limits of the ambassador’s (hetero)sexual desire. As
such, no longer is a female body—or even an Asian male dressed up as
a female—required to be the phallus for the white male. Instead, Galli-
mard can be the phallus for Toulon, a homosexual relay of a white male
object for a white male subject. Here, homosociality and its exchange of
women gives way to a libidinal economy that no longer, for the moment,
requires their presence. Undoubtedly, we have returned to the narcissis-
tic psychic terrain in which the normative white male subject sees only
himself everywhere he looks.

164 racial castration

 Toulon’s brief discourse on Gallimard as a thing speaks not only to
the contradiction of a Lacanian binary—the having of the phallus on the
part of the male and the being of the phallus on the part of the female—
but also to the very collapse of the having/being distinction that legiti-
mates normative white male heterosexuality as the universal norm of the
social order. In other words, if one can only have the phallus as a male,
Gallimard’s falling out of this naturalized framework suggests that the
logic of a compulsory heterosexual matrix requiring that one can either
have or be the phallus is beset by a fundamental contradiction, an ir-
reconcilable state of anxiety over having and being the phallus that can
never be fully surmounted or strictly separated. The French ambassa-
dor’s configuration of Gallimard as the phallus thus comes to illustrate a
nagging yet entirely normative equivocation at the heart of conventional
white masculinity: a having that can never be fully had and a being that
can never fully be.
Ultimately, as M. Butterfly brilliantly illustrates, borders between het-
erosexual identification and homosexual desire, between white and non-
white identity, are hardly clear-cut; they are unable to function in iso-
lation. This brief exchange between the ambassador and the diplomat
renders visible the insistent partitioning of heterosexual identification
from homosexual desire that underwrites normative white male sub-
jectivity. Furthermore, this masking of homosexual desire also involves
the masking of whiteness as an invisible racial category. The lotus blos-
som fantasy—Toulon’s open ‘‘secret,’’ which underpins all the ambas-
sador’s exchanges with Gallimard—attests to conventional white male
subjectivity’s resolute dependence on the maintenance of both a hege-
monic whiteness and an occluded racial boundary. And it is this complex
crossing of (homo)sexual and racial difference, exposed in Gallimard’s
donning of whiteface, that not only marks the extravagant failure of his
Madama Butterfly phantasmatic but insists on a sustained investigation
of racial difference in conventional psychoanalytic paradigms of sexual
difference such as fetishism.
In the final analysis, Gallimard’s application of a thick layer of white
makeup to his face—his colonization and assumption of the ‘‘other’’ ’s
place—must be read not merely as an attempt to deflect the explicit
homosexual implications of Song’s penile unveiling but as the unveiling
of whiteness as a fetishistic application itself, a mask. This relativizing of
whiteness as a universal racial category acknowledges the constructed-
ness of both sexual and racial categories. It stresses the need to enlarge
our critical focus in Asian American, ethnic, feminist, gender, and queer
studies by considering—by naming—heterosexuality and whiteness at
one and the same time as they work in tandem to secure the symbolic

heterosexuality and whiteness 165

ideals of colonial authority. In applying this white mask to his face, Gal-
limard’s actions acknowledge that one can be neither heterosexual nor
white, that symbolic ideals of colonial rule demanding compliance to
universal notions of heterosexuality and whiteness can only be approxi-
mated—that they are ultimately unfulfilled and unfulfillable.
In M. Butterfly, the possession of the lotus blossom fantasy exacts
an expensive toll on Gallimard, for the fetishistic costs of arresting the
trauma of homosexual and racial difference at the site of the Asian male
body require a definitive rift in the diplomat’s ego, ‘‘which never heals
but which increases as time goes on.’’ 48 It is the concerted focus on the
attendant sexual and racial crossings of this rift that turns the analytic
lens of Asian American studies and psychoanalytic theory onto hetero-
sexuality and whiteness as universalizing categories for deconstruction
in a new cultural politics—and play—of differences.

166 racial castration

 FOUR
Male Hysteria—Real and Imagined—in

Eat a Bowl of Tea and Pangs of Love

All symptoms, after all, are states of conviction.

adam phillips, ‘‘Keep It Moving’’

What is the relationship between assimilation and illness, between as-

similation and hysteria? Much of Asian American literature is popu-
lated with hysterical female bodies.1 For instance, the narrator of Maxine
Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among
Ghosts falls mysteriously ill after torturing a fellow Chinese American
classmate for what she most abhors in herself: unwavering and unrelent-
ing silence. ‘‘The world is sometimes just, and I spent the next eighteen
months sick in bed with a mysterious illness,’’ the narrator recounts.
‘‘There was no pain and no symptoms, though the middle line in my
left palm broke in two. Instead of starting junior high school, I lived
like the Victorian recluses I read about.’’ 2 Unable to trace the etiology
of her disease, Kingston’s narrator postpones for a year and a half her
entry into junior high school. Not unlike the numerous female hyster-
ics who populate the frigid landscapes of popular Victorian novels, she
withdraws entirely from the public sphere and the normal social activi-
ties that characterize typical girlhood adolescence. This retreat from the
public space of the classroom—perhaps the most crucial site of child-
hood integration into national ideals of proper citizenry—does not prove
to be a psychic burden for Kingston’s narrator. On the contrary, it pro-
vides her with unequivocal psychic relief: ‘‘I saw no one but my family,
who took good care of me. I could have no visitors, no other relatives, no
villagers. My bed was against the west window, and I watched the sea-
sons change the peach tree. I had a bell to ring for help. I used a bedpan.
It was the best year and half of my life. Nothing happened’’ (182).
Nothing happened.Why is it that, for Kingston’s Asian American nar-
rator, social stasis equals psychic stability and health—the best year and
a half of her young life? What does it mean that in The Woman War-
rior hysteria’s cure lies in total withdrawal from the public sphere rather
than steadfast integration into it? Does hysteria result from the narra-
tor’s individual yet thwarted attempts to ‘‘fit in’’ socially? Or does hyste-
ria function, in fact, as a larger social symptom of the torturous psychic
constraints and sobering material realities under which Asian Ameri-
cans—female as well as male—are assimilated into the public domain?
For Asian Americans, are assimilation and psychic health antipathetic
terms?
In light of this discussion, it is not surprising to note that much of
Asian American literature is also populated with male hysterics. Yet to
describe the protagonists in Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea and David
Wong Louie’s collection of short stories, Pangs of Love, as male hyster-
ics is finally both an easy and a difficult task.3 It is easy because Chu’s
Ben Loy as well as many of Louie’s Chinese American male charac-
ters exhibit symptoms of hysteria—mysterious symptoms all relating
to sexual impotence and resulting in complicated withdrawals from the
social realm. It is difficult because Western medical, juridical, and philo-
sophical discourses have long associated the ‘‘disease’’ of hysteria ex-
clusively with the female body.4 Yet my brief discussion of The Woman
Warrior positions hysteria in relation to questions of not only sexual
but racial difference, to issues of Asian American integration and as-
similation into the public sphere. In this particular context, what would
it mean to describe Chu’s and Louie’s Chinese American characters as
male hysterics?
It is important to remember that Chu’s and Louie’s novels—which
were published in 1961 and 1991, respectively—engage quite different
moments in Asian American history and culture. Chu’s Ben Loy cir-
culates in a post–World War II Chinatown ‘‘bachelor community’’ in
which vestiges of legalized exclusion, the effects of racial segregation,
and stereotypes of Asian Americans as the unassimilable yellow peril
continue to dominate. Chu’s early 1950s New York is a reflection of a long
legacy of American anti-Asian immigration and antimiscegenation laws
that configure the immigrant inhabitants of Chinatown as noncitizen
aliens. This legislated exclusion from equal membership in the nation
accounts for the production of Chinatown as a bachelor community—
predominately male and with a long history of distorted gender rela-
tions. In this regard, the nullification of the National Origins Law by the

168 racial castration

Magnuson Act of 1943, which allowed the enfranchisement of Chinese
immigrants as citizens, as well as the enactment of the War Brides Act
in 1945 (emended in 1947) which allowed the reunification of Chinese
wives and children with husbands and fathers who had served in the U.S.
military, mark the vexed transition of a marginalized and segregated
racial community on the verge of biological extinction to its promised
renewal as a site of familial and cultural reproduction.5 From this van-
tage, Eat a Bowl of Tea might be described as charting the problematic
transformation and promised assimilation of Chinatown and Chinese
Americans into the larger national polity.
In contrast to Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea, Louie’s Pangs of Love depicts
the post-1965 urban landscape of what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and
others have termed the ‘‘new immigrant.’’ 6 Louie’s 1980s multicultural
world is one in which legally sanctioned racial exclusion and segregation
are in theory no longer ascendant. The passing of the McCarran-Walter
Act of 1952, which relaxed immigration quotas as an expression of anti-
communist cold war policy, and the Immigration and Nationality Act of
1965, which radically expanded quotas for Asian immigrants through
its revised preferences, are commonly seen as legal culminations that
marked the reversal of anti-Asian exclusion, a reversal inaugurated by
the Magnuson Act in 1943. This period of national reversal and the liber-
alization of immigration policy between 1943 and 1965 describes what
Lisa Lowe terms the legal and historical transformation of ‘‘Asian alien
into Asian American citizen’’ (Immigrant Acts, 10). Indeed, unlike Chu’s
segregated Chinatown bachelors, the Chinese American men populat-
ing Louie’s short stories are overwhelmingly hyperassimilated ‘‘model
minorities,’’ living in cities and upscale suburbs under the putative ban-
ner of integration and social acceptance. Moreover, unlike most of Eat
a Bowl of Tea’s Chinese American male characters, who are exploited,
low-wage laborers in the laundry, restaurant, and other service-sector
industries, the characters in Pangs of Love are highly paid professionals,
not only the objects but also the subjects of an expansive global capi-
talism. In this respect, Louie’s Chinese American men are represen-
tational testaments to the historical displacement of the yellow peril
stereotype—which dominated the representation and racialization of
Asian American male subjectivity prior to World War II—by the contem-
porary ‘‘model minority’’ myth—the hyperassimilated national figure of
racial success and harmony. It is important to note that this success and
harmony are often used in exceptionalist national rhetoric to validate the
notion (instituted by the juridical turn in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Edu-
cation Supreme Court decision) that the U.S. nation-state is a color-blind
society.

male hysteria 169

 Lowe points out that this transformation of Asian alien into Asian
American citizen ‘‘institutionalizes the disavowal of the history of racial-
ized labor exploitation and disenfranchisement through the promise of
freedom in the political sphere. Yet the historical and continued racial-
ization of the Asian American, as citizen, exacerbates the contradictions
of the national project that promises the resolution of material inequali-
ties through the political domain of equal representation’’ (Immigrant
Acts, 10). How does this shift in the state’s organization and interpreta-
tion of Asian immigrants from unassimilable to assimilated expose the
inadequacy of state institutions to deliver on the promise of freedom and
equal representation? In this particular context, what does it mean for
male hysteria to bridge two distinct periods of Asian American immigra-
tion history, racialization processes, and representational politics? How
might Louie’s male hysterics qualify the teleological narrative of political
equity? How might male hysteria expose the contemporary administra-
tion of Asian Americans—figured now as model minorities and exem-
plary citizens—as the continuing genealogy and disavowed trace of an
institutionalized history of Asian American exploitation and exclusion?
What, in other words, does Asian American male hysteria symptomize
socially and politically?
This chapter begins with a short theoretical account of the geneal-
ogy of hysteria. It considers hysteria’s gendered origins in the female
body as well as its psychoanalytic evolution through the category of
the unconscious. Through an account of hysteria as what Slavoj Žižek
terms the ‘‘testimony of a failed interpellation,’’ 7 I analyze Eat a Bowl
of Tea and Pangs of Love in order to develop a critical theory of male
hysteria—of Asian American racial hysteria—attendant to past and con-
temporary processes of Asian American immigration, assimilation, and
racialization as well as national mechanisms of historical disavowal and
exclusion.

The Wandering Womb

What does a Woman Want?
sigmund freud, Letter to Marie Bonaparte

Dating from 1900 b.c., the oldest surviving Egyptian medical papyrus
attributes hysteria to improper migrations of the female womb.8 In the
Greek tradition, Hippocrates not only linked hysteria to the ‘‘wander-
ing womb’’ but also to ‘‘abnormal’’ sexual activities. Lacking appropriate
moisture, the uterus—described by Plato in the Timaeus as an indepen-
dent animal longing to procreate—begins to shift restlessly around the

170 racial castration

female body, causing a host of hysterical symptoms: shortness of breath,
fainting, vomiting, loss of voice, headaches, and convulsions. The pre-
scribed remedies for the hysteric’s wandering womb and its reproduc-
tive urges are marriage, (hetero)sexual intercourse, pregnancy, and ma-
ternity. From medieval times until the nineteenth century, definitions
of hysteria continued to evolve—from supernatural interpretations re-
lating to witchcraft and heresy to notions of the disease as an imbal-
ance of humors and sympathies to the possibilities of a mental origin
for the illness. Through all these various historical interpretations, how-
ever, one thing endured. The classic Egyptian and Greek ‘‘diagnosis of
female sexual disturbance, and a cure by submission to the yoke of patri-
archy (the reproduction of mothering),’’ Charles Bernheimer notes, ‘‘re-
mained basic to the medical concept of hysteria’’ (3). Gerard Wajeman
suggests that ‘‘hysteria clings to woman.’’ 9 This enduring historical con-
nection, as critics are quick to point out, can be immediately detected
in the etymology of the term. The word hysteria derives from the Greek
root hystera, meaning ‘‘uterus.’’
In the late nineteenth century—often considered the golden age of
hysteria—both Freud and Jean-Martin Charcot (the notorious French
physician whose spectacular seminars on hysteria at the Salpetrière
Freud attended) were among the first medical authorities to contend that
hysteria was not a disease exclusively afflicting women.10 Charcot de-
scribes more than sixty male patients in his case histories on hysteria.11
And in ‘‘Observation of a Severe Case of Hemi-Anaesthesia in a Hysteri-
cal Male’’ (1886), Freud responds to the challenge of his teacher Hofrat
Professor Meynert to present before the Vienna Society of Medicine a
convincing case of male hysteria. ‘‘Before beginning my demonstration,’’
Freud writes, ‘‘I will merely remark that I am far from thinking that what
I am showing you is a rare or peculiar case. On the contrary, I regard it
as a very ordinary case of frequent occurrence, though one which may
often be overlooked.’’ 12 What allowed for this shift in historical and theo-
retical perspective—hysteria’s encompassing of not just female but also
male bodies?
It was Freud’s ‘‘discovery’’ of the unconscious that provided the theo-
retical leverage that allowed him to speculate on the possibility of male
hysteria. Indeed, as many psychoanalytic critics note, Freud developed
his theory of the unconscious largely in relation to his studies on hyste-
ria and his subsequent investigations of its relation to the dreamwork.
Jacques Lacan points out that ‘‘Freud’s first interest was in hysteria. He
spent a lot of time listening, and while he was listening, there resulted
something paradoxical, . . . a reading. It was while listening to hysterics
that he read that there was an unconscious.’’ 13 By contending that the hys-

male hysteria 171

terical symptom arose not from organic disturbances of the wandering
womb but from repressed psychic traumas in the unconscious, Freud’s
psychoanalytic account of the disease divested it for the first time from
its privileged connection to the female body. That is, it separated hys-
teria from any absolute relation to the anatomical distinction between
the sexes.
Freud’s account of hysteria allows us to extract the disease from the
realm of sexual stigma and moral degeneracy by defining it not as an
organic failure of the female body but as a psychic effect of something
that we are all liable to do: forget the past. ‘‘Hysterics suffer mainly from
reminiscences,’’ we are told in Studies on Hysteria.14 Their suffering is due
to a selective blockage of traumatic memories (most notably memories
of sexual seduction), which have been repressed into the unconscious.15
Hysteria, Freud maintains, is the result of ‘‘somatic conversion.’’ This is
a process through which the unconscious speaks these traumatic memo-
ries through their transformation into physical symptoms.16 It is because
language fails the hysteric—fails, that is, to give adequate expression
to these reminiscences—that the body must speak instead for the un-
conscious. From a slightly different perspective, we might say that the
hysteric always remembers in a displaced manner. For the hysteric,
traumatic memories can never be confronted head on. Rather, they are
transformed into corporeal symptoms so that the body becomes the
discursive field upon which unconscious traumas find their displaced
expression.
Jacqueline Rose reminds us that ‘‘Freud’s work on hysteria started
precisely with a rejection of any simple mapping of the symptom onto
the body (Charcot’s hysterogenic zones). By so doing he made of hys-
teria a language (made it speak) but one whose relation to the body
was decentered, since if the body spoke it was precisely because there
was something called the unconscious that could not.’’ 17 If the hysterical
symptom speaks through the body, this speaking occurs only indirectly
through a network of denatured signifiers no longer attached to the body
in any immediate one-to-one relationship. Freud’s studies on hysteria
thus depart from predominant theoretical accounts of his predecessors,
who insisted upon a direct correspondence between hysteria—the wan-
dering womb—and its corporeal symptoms—aphasia, coughing, faint-
ing, convulsions, paresis, and so on. Unlike earlier uterine theories of the
disease, Freud’s notion of the unconscious introduced for the first time
an insistently psychic basis for the disease. His psychoanalytic account
of hysteria proffers the unconscious as a type of third-term mediator be-
tween the psychic root of the symptom (the traumatic memory) and its
corporeal expression (the hysterical sign). Through the category of the

172 racial castration

unconscious, the hysterical symptom and the corporeal body are thus
triangulated and split.
Freud’s psychoanalytic account of hysteria thus offers us an impor-
tant critical intervention in terms of the maintenance of sexual differ-
ence. By opening up a theoretical space in which to resist direct biologi-
cal mapping of the hysterical symptom onto the corporeal body, Freud
allows us to understand that hysteria need not be restricted to the female
body. In short, Freud’s movement away from any exclusive correspon-
dence between the wandering womb and the hysterical symptom pro-
vides a way for us to imagine an account of male hysteria. Since the
hysterical symptom is the result of a psychical and not an organic dis-
turbance (of the womb), it follows that these denatured signifiers could
attach themselves to either female or male bodies. Simply put, the fact
that everyone possesses an unconscious means that anyone can exhibit
hysteria. Traumatic memories can potentially manifest themselves in
any body, a somatic rendering of hysterical symptoms unrestricted by
anatomical sex.
Not only did many of his early case histories explore the category of
male hysteria, but Freud came to diagnose himself, and his brother, as
male hysterics.18 Lacan notes that Freud’s initial investigation of hyste-
ria—from which the field of psychoanalysis later emerged—involved a
startling self-implication: Freud ‘‘could not avoid participating in what
the hysteric was telling him’’—he felt affected by it. ‘‘It is because he
hears and feels the woman’s suffering within himself,’’ Shoshana Fel-
man adds, ‘‘because he finds the feminine complaint inscribed in his
own body,’’ that Freud is moved toward self-reflection and an exploration
of the relationship between hysteria and male subjectivity (What Does
a Woman Want?, 101). Despite the fact that Freud originally pursued
a theory of male hysteria, in the end he abandoned the project, refus-
ing to develop any further a theoretical account of hysteria across lines
of sexual difference, ultimately reconnecting the disease to the female
body. In this way, Daniel Boyarin and others have noted, Freud displaces
male hysteria from the traumatized (Jewish) male body to reconfigure
the disease once again as largely descriptive of a (deracinated) female
condition.19 Lacan writes that ‘‘everything in the resulting rules through
which [Freud] established the practice of psychoanalysis is designed to
counteract this consequence [of self-implication], to conduct things in
such a way as to avoid being affected’’ (Kanzer Seminar, 101). Why is
this so? Why does the genealogy of hysteria as pathological female sub-
jectivity—as the uncontrollable wandering womb—continue to endure?
What exactly does hysteria imply socially and politically about male sub-
jectivity?

male hysteria 173

 Heroine/Victim
The social meanings of hysteria as a discourse of protest have been
widely deliberated by feminist critics. For instance, in their dialogue
concerning Freud’s most famous case history, recorded in ‘‘Dora: Frag-
ment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’’ (1905), Hélène Cixous and
Catherine Clément advocate two widely divergent points of view.20 In
‘‘The Untenable,’’ Cixous and Clément debate hysteria’s effects on the
dominant social order. Is Dora, they ask, the heroine against or the vic-
tim of the oppressive patriarchal demands that are exacted upon her by
a Victorian bourgeois familial structure?
Both Cixous and Clément agree that Dora’s hysteria is the product
of a complaint—a complaint against patriarchy, a complaint against
what Lévi-Strauss describes as ‘‘elementary structures of kinship’’ and
what Gayle Rubin later calls ‘‘traffic in women.’’ Objecting to a male-
dominated Viennese society that underwrote the systematic and bla-
tant exchange of women between men, Dora’s hysterical condition is the
effect of a refusal to be used. Dora (whose real name was Ida Bauer) can-
not accept being exploited by her father (Philip Bauer), who attempts to
hand her over, as an ‘‘object of barter,’’ to his admired friend, Herr K, in
exchange for Herr K’s wife. Adding insult to injury, Philip Bauer drags
Dora to Freud’s doorstep with the implicit mandate that the doctor rec-
oncile his hysterical daughter to her unsavory fate.
In his introduction to Freud’s case history, Philip Rieff notes that
Dora wants nothing to do with this bargain: ‘‘The sick daughter has a sick
father, who has a sick mistress, who has a sick husband, who proposes
himself to the sick daughter as her lover. Dora does not want to hold
hands in this charmless circle—although Freud does, at one point, in-
dicate that she should.’’ 21 Dora’s hysteria is thus generated as an uncon-
scious protest against the social pressure to accept her place within this
circle and along with it the institutionalized abuse of women. In this re-
gard, Dora’s hysteria might be seen not as an aberrant but as an entirely
emblematic reaction to a patriarchal society that renders the female con-
dition impossible and ‘‘proper’’ female social responsibility odious.22 We
are given, then, in this notion of hysteria as social protest a compelling
political reason to retain hysteria as a term of critical analysis. As a mode
of political resistance, hysteria signals the refusal of a female subject to
occupy her proper place within a patriarchal society, her refusal to sub-
mit to dominant modes of identification, and her refusal to comply with
conventional mores—a social, not an anatomical, wandering from one’s
culturally assigned position.23
While Cixous and Clément both interpret hysteria as a reaction-form-

174 racial castration

ation to the patriarchal exploitation of women, they strongly disagree
about the ultimate social effects of this protest. Does hysteria contest or
conserve the dominant order of things? Do we regard Dora as a hero-
ine or victim of this system? Cixous reads Dora’s hysteria—her desire to
get off this ‘‘hideous merry-go-round’’ (278) of illness and infidelity—as
politically redeeming. Noting that Dora ‘‘sees women massacred to make
room for her [and] knows that she will have her turn at being massacred’’
(285), Cixous interprets Dora as heroine and hysteria as not only con-
testing but finally exploding the social order. ‘‘The girl has understood,’’
insists Cixous.

Dora seemed to me to be the one who resists the system, the one
who cannot stand that the family and society are founded on the
body of women, on bodies despised, rejected, bodies that are hu-
miliating once they are used. And this girl—like all hysterics, de-
prived of the possibility of saying directly what she perceived, of
speaking face-to-face or on the telephone as father B. or father K.
or Freud, et cetera do—still had the strength to make it known. It
is the nuclear example of women’s power to protest. It happened
in 1899; it happens today wherever women have not been able to
speak differently from Dora, but have spoken so effectively that it
bursts the family into pieces. . . . Dora broke something. (285, 288)

Deprived of the ability to protest directly, Dora nevertheless speaks

through her unconscious, through her hysterical symptoms. For Cixous,
then, hysteria represents an effective ‘‘language’’ of female resistance
in a social order that renders direct expression nearly impossible for
women. An expression of women’s power to protest, Dora’s hysteria
not only ‘‘bursts the family into pieces’’ but finally breaks something. It
breaks, Cixous maintains, the rigid structure of the familial order.
In contrast to Cixous, Clément cannot view the hysterical condition
through such a sanguine lens. While hysteria might temporarily dis-
rupt the social order, Clément concedes, it is finally politically ineffec-
tual not only because its language is an imaginary one in excess of sym-
bolic expression but because it cannot permanently change the enduring
patriarchal imperatives of the social order. Hysteria, Clément argues,
‘‘mimics, it metaphorizes destruction, but the family reconstitutes itself
around it. As when you throw a stone in water, the water ripples but
becomes smooth again. . . . That doesn’t change the structures, how-
ever. On the contrary, it makes them comfortable. . . . [I]t introduces
dissension, but it doesn’t explode anything at all; it doesn’t disperse the
bourgeois family, which also exists only through its dissension, which
holds together only in the possibility or the reality of its own distur-

male hysteria 175

bance, always reclosable, always reclosed’’ (286, 287). Unlike Cixous,
Clément reads Dora’s hysteria as finally contained, containable, within
the closed cell of the bourgeois family. While hysteria may introduce
dissension into this social structure, it does not break the family unit,
which quickly reconstitutes itself around Dora’s maladies. This disper-
sion allows Dora’s protest to be registered, but ultimately this protest is
naturalized. ‘‘Dora broke something,’’ Cixous insists. ‘‘I don’t think so,’’
Clément concludes. ‘‘A heroine for Cixous,’’ Jane Gallop observes, ‘‘Dora
is only a victim for Clément.’’ 24
Ultimately, I would like to suggest, it is neither possible nor useful
to read hysteria as a psychic or a political state of either/or—as only a
negative sign of an oppressed normative feminine condition or as only
a positive sign of the rejection of femininity’s social constraints. The
role of the hysteric, Gallop argues, is decidedly ambiguous (202). Hyste-
ria contests the social order, but this contestation can be contained, co-
opted, and commodified. The hysterical symptom is, as Adam Phillips
suggests, a state of conviction—one that is decidedly double edged. On
one hand, this state of conviction is a social positioning in which the
hysteric finds herself trapped and enclosed (as an object) by patriarchal
norms and ideals. On the other hand, this state of conviction is also a
psychic condition by means of which the hysteric stringently resists that
social positioning (as a subject) through a set of alternate personal be-
liefs. Rather than trying to determine once and for all whether the hys-
terical condition ultimately contests or conserves the dominant order of
things, I would like to focus on hysteria’s double-edged status—on its
ambiguity and the productive potential of this ambiguity.
In the final analysis, we might say that hysteria marks a tear in the
patriarchal order. The hysterical condition, if nothing else, indicates the
failure of the social order to produce successfully those it seeks to name
and to regulate successfully those it seeks to deny. ‘‘In the last resort,’’
Slavoj Žižek asks, ‘‘what is hysteria if not precisely the effect and testi-
mony of a failed interpellation; what is the hysterical question if not an
articulation of the incapacity of the subject to fulfill the symbolic man-
date?’’ (113). Refusing—or unable—to occupy her proper social position,
the hysteric points to interpellation’s failure. As Louis Althusser puts
it, the hail hits its target only 90 percent of the time: ‘‘One individual
(nine times out of ten it is the right one) turns round.’’ 25 In this re-
gard, hysteria’s ambiguity functions as an emphatic testimony against
symbolic mandates that seek to prescribe how women like Dora must
live out their traditional roles as wives, mothers, or daughters. In other
words, the ambiguity of the hysterical condition, neither inherently radi-
cal nor inherently conservative, nevertheless marks a particular histori-

176 racial castration

cal instance in which symbolic mandates cannot produce or achieve their
intended effects. The hysterical condition calls attention to the social
order’s failure to discipline, regulate, coerce, or finally socialize its others
into their proper social places. Is it any surprise that the female hysterics
populating Freud’s couch are highly intelligent, active, and ambitious
women who eschew the passive domesticity allotted to them by their
fathers, husbands, and brothers?
Indeed, from this particular angle, hysteria’s ambiguous double-
edged status might not only be described as the symbolic’s failure to so-
cialize its repressed others; it might also be said to mark the emergence
of the repressed histories of these others. In For They Know Not What
They Do, Žižek elaborates upon his assertion of hysteria as a ‘‘failed inter-
pellation,’’ focusing on the role of history as it intersects this failure. Hys-
teria, he contends, is ‘‘the subject’s way of resisting the prevailing, his-
torically specified forms of interpellation or symbolic identification.’’ 26
‘‘History,’’ as Cixous points out, ‘‘is always in several places at once, there
are always several histories underway’’ (293). Indeed, Freud himself ob-
served during his Clark lectures in the United States that hysteria ‘‘might
perhaps be best understood as analogous to a kind of overinvolvement
in history.’’ 27 In this regard, hysteria serves to exhume the disavowed,
alternate, and buried stories of its sufferers.

Male Hysteria, or What Do They Want?

By reading hysteria as marking a failed interpellation into the norma-
tive ideals, official histories, and symbolic positions of the social order,
we come to understand the scandalous implications of hysteria for male
subjectivity. In a patriarchal world, the presence of the male hysteric
would paradoxically imply the refusal of that male subject to occupy a
symbolic position that prizes his social role above those of all others.
That Freud could not finally imagine male hysteria as an operative term
under these conditions comes, then, as no real surprise. The presence
of male hysteria calls attention to a flaw in the logic of patriarchal as-
sumption that Freud, as well as the Victorian society in which he lived,
attempted to describe, uphold, and produce. To be a male hysteric, as
Paul Smith points out, is to have reneged upon the paternal responsibili-
ties of the Oedipal contract, ‘‘to have abandoned to some degree the here
and now—or, in short, to have failed to live up to the demands of the
Oedipalized world. And this is not what ‘men’ are assumed to do. The
Oedipus divides those of us who are assumed to obey—and to be able to
obey—the law from those who are assumed to be unable. In this sense
the Oedipus entails the demand that men forget a past in favor of access

male hysteria 177

to the law.’’ 28 In the patriarchal community of fin de siècle Vienna, the
male subject is encouraged to relinquish any hysterical reminiscences of
the past in favor of what is promised to be a glorious future: unimpeded
access to paternal privilege. The presence of the male hysteric in Freud’s
Oedipalized world would signal, then, the breakdown of conventional
masculine identifications and desires, the failed delivery of a glorious
future, and the problematic blockage of patriarchal assumption. This re-
turn of disavowed histories implies not only the subversion of patriar-
chal laws but also the erosion of patrilineal transmission from fathers to
sons. Ultimately, it marks the very uncoding of men as men. As Smith
neatly summarizes it, the male hysteric ‘‘is what always exceeds the phal-
lic stakes, jumps off.’’ 29
Indeed, when male hysteria does make an appearance at the turn of
the nineteenth century it appears as a psychic condition that attaches
itself to male subjects insistently marked by particular class deficien-
cies. That is, the male hysterics about whom Charcot and Freud write
are largely lower-class male laborers traumatized by ‘‘railroad spine and
brain’’ (hysterical paralysis)—by the ravages of industrialization. Lynne
Kirby observes that, in adapting a notion of male hysteria to a domi-
nant female model, Charcot was at a loss to explain this astonishing ap-
pearance of hysterical symptoms in virile working-class men since it
was generally assumed that hysteria should be found among the ‘‘ef-
feminate’’ men of the upper classes—homosexuals—and not among the
strong and vigorous proletariat (123).What emerged ultimately from this
fin de siècle portrait of male hysteria was the contradictory conclusion
that, while the most frequent cases of female hysteria were to be found
in the upper classes, the precise opposite applied in the case of men.
Male hysteria was most common among the working classes.30
Although Charcot and Freud did not analyze the social implications
of this class divergence, I would like to do so. In assigning the hys-
terical diagnoses to lower-class railroad workers and industrial laborers
performing manual jobs in a rapidly industrializing European society,
hysteria served to mark off and produce particular male bodies as ill
and diseased specifically through the axis of class differences. ‘‘In a kind
of mirror image of otherness,’’ Kirby concludes, ‘‘one can see that cul-
tural displacement as massive as nineteenth-century mechanization and
urbanization—railway-assisted—made of its traumatized victims some-
thing like female hysterics. In other words, it emasculated men, even if
only, for some, those of a certain class. Women, proletarian men, and
marginals thus bore the brunt of the shocks of modernity’’ (124). Ob-
jects of labor, these lower-class workers are marked off and socially un-
manned, clearly separated from those men of the bourgeois and upper-

178 racial castration

classes who are subjects of capital and consequently, as it were, owners
of their labor.
In this vein, hysteria not only testifies to a failed social interpellation
but it also speaks to the production of subjects marked by particular de-
privileged social positions. In other words, it speaks to the production
of a class of male subjects who are excluded by and large from symbolic
privileges because of their class.31 In this expanded capacity, male hys-
teria also comes to mark off as well as create powerless bodies—both
female and male—defined against the universal (white, middle-class,
heterosexual) normative male subject. Daniel Boyarin suggests, insofar
as ‘‘gender is a set of cultural expectations and performances, usually but
not determinately mapped onto the ‘anatomical differences between the
sexes,’ it becomes impossible to assume constant genderings in cross-
cultural comparison. If being gendered ‘male’ in our culture is having
power and speech—phallus and logos—the silenced and powerless sub-
ject is female, whatever her anatomical construction’’ (118). As such, this
model of male hysteria—significantly crosshatched by class issues—
provides us with one critical way to discuss the Asian American male
subject as economically marked through the exploitation and disenfran-
chisement of his labor. How might we expand our present discussion
of male hysteria and class dynamics to better account for problems of
racial difference? What does a woman want? What do they—as it is often
asked of people of color—want? 32 What does the hysterical Asian Ameri-
can male want? Configuring race through the question of hysteria—con-
sidering the ‘‘native’’ question by means of the ‘‘woman’’ question, as it
were—raises an intersectional question that Ben Loy’s hysteria in Eat a
Bowl of Tea begins to address.

Bachelor Society, Geographical Impotence, Biological

Extinction: Eat a Bowl of Tea
The mother, once her role is fulfilled, is through. As the
Germans say: ‘‘Der Mohr hat sein Pflicht getan, er kann gehen.’’
The Moor has done his job, out with him. Now he can go. That is
Othello in ‘‘The Moor of Venice.’’ You can replace ‘‘the Moor’’
with the mother. She is done making kids, so she is made
secondary in the story.
hélène cixous, ‘‘The Untenable’’

Like Shakespeare’s Othello, ‘‘The Moor of Venice,’’ Louis Chu’s Ben Loy
Wang puts his body on the line as a soldier—not for the security of
Venice but for the sake of the U.S. nation-state. Surprisingly, however,

male hysteria 179

Ben Loy’s sacrifice to the U.S. military body as a stalwart protector of
American democracy does not lead to his unimpeded integration and
assimilation into the mainstream American social body. Instead, like
Othello, forever ‘‘of ’’ but never from Venice, Ben Loy’s transformation
from Chinese alien into American citizen after the 1943 congressional
lifting of the ban on Chinese immigration and naturalization remains
questionable and secondary to his adopted country.
Eat a Bowl of Tea charts the tenuous transition of a dying Chinatown
from a bachelor society to its promised rebirth as a site of familial and
cultural reproduction. An ex-soldier of World War II, Ben Loy is per-
mitted, through the War Brides Act of 1945, to bring his wife, Mei Oi,
from China to reside with him in the United States. After over half a
century of exclusion acts directed against the Chinese (1882–1943), anti-
miscegenation laws enacted against this community, and the juridical
barring of Chinese wives from entering the United States, the Wang
couple is given the incredible opportunity to start a family.33 In doing
so, they are not just given the chance to create a new generation of Chi-
nese Americans for a racialized community on the verge of biological
extinction. They are also given the chance precisely through this renewal
and reproduction of the nuclear family for of a type of unprecedented
inclusion and integration into the U.S. nation-state hitherto impossible
for any Asian American ethnic group. In Chu’s novel, the drama of re-
producing the nuclear family comes to be the sine qua non of Chinese
American assimilation into national body. However, this renewal and re-
production, this integration into the U.S. nation-state precisely through
the very question of renewal and reproduction, proves vexed.
Ben Loy is impotent, and his malady is a spatial impotence—a selec-
tive geographical failing—that must finally be recognized as a form of
male hysteria. Ben Loy’s inability to ‘‘get it up’’ for Mei Oi is confined
only to the spatial boundaries of New York’s Chinatown. Inside this seg-
regated community, Ben Loy cannot perform. Outside its segregated
borders, he can. Put another way, Ben Loy can only regain his potency
when he leaves the historical and spatial framework of emasculation that
is New York’s—indeed—America’s, Chinatown. But can he ever really
leave? As a Chinese American immigrant striving to assimilate into the
mainstream community, Ben Loy is impotent in the United States but
not in China.Within the boundaries of the U.S. nation-state, he can tem-
porarily assert his masculinity but only while on vacation, ironically, in
the nation’s capital, and only while hundreds of miles away from his
feminized position as a Chinatown waiter.Within his everyday racialized
community, Ben Loy cannot muster such assertion. This selective geo-

180 racial castration

graphical impotence speaks to a hysterical root at the base of his flaccid
condition. In such a light, Ben Loy’s impotence cannot be characterized
as the result of an organic ailment. On the contrary, it must be described
as an unconscious effect of his limited social role within the segregated
borders of Chinatown as well as his limited access to the larger space of
the U.S. nation-state.34
In Eat a Bowl of Tea, racial difference drives Ben Loy’s sexual symp-
toms. As such, it might be said that his hysterical impotence marks an
unconscious protest against past exclusions and economic exploitations
suffered by Chinese male immigrants in America. That is, his hysterical
symptoms reprise a long-repressed history of institutionalized racism
and disenfranchisement that subordinated the Chinese male immigrant
as alien and thus excludable, while configuring him as socially emascu-
lated and powerless. This history of social impotence manifests itself in
Ben Loy’s hysterical impotence. Politically, economically, and culturally
weak, and firmly enclosed within the segregated borders of Chinatown,
he is also physically and psychically deficient in this space. As the U.S.
nation-state transforms its Asian aliens into American citizens, Lowe
argues, it must necessarily disavow and misremember its history of in-
stitutionalized exclusion. Ben Loy’s male hysteria might thus be said to
contest this misremembering by marking an alternate and ‘‘other’’ his-
tory of racialized trauma. In this regard, Ben Loy’s male hysteria does not
indicate, as Žižek puts it, ‘‘the incapacity of the subject to fulfill the sym-
bolic mandate’’ or even his refusal to occupy a symbolic position within
nationals ideals of a proper masculine citizenry. Rather, Ben Loy’s male
hysteria might be said to testify to the Asian immigrant’s long history
of emphatic exclusion from these national ideals. From another angle,
then, Ben Loy’s condition might be characterized as a type of Asian
American racial hysteria. That is, to speak about Asian American male
subjectivity and hysteria is at once to be speaking about racial hysteria.
For Ben Loy, male hysteria and racial hysteria are constitutive and inter-
secting discourses that mark his symbolic disenfranchisement from the
normative national ideals of white masculinity.
Ultimately, Ben Loy’s hysterical impotence contravenes a dominant
version of U.S. national history that denies a legacy of institutionalized
racism and uneven processes of immigration, assimilation, and racial-
ization even as it constitutes the nation-state as a political sphere of ab-
stract equality and an economic bastion of equal opportunity. Moreover,
in preventing him from siring the needed paternal offspring for the re-
newal of a dying bachelor society, Ben Loy’s male hysteria marks an un-
conscious conviction against present social conditions that suspend his

male hysteria 181

integration into mainstream society. For instance, almost the entire nar-
rative plot of Eat a Bowl of Tea takes place within the confines of New
York’s Chinatown, in a Chinese restaurant in Stanton, in a Chinese laun-
dry in Newark, and in China itself. In Chu’s novel, the juridical lifting of
exclusion does not translate into either the spatial desegregation of this
ethnic ghetto or greater access to the public sphere of America. It neither
translates into greater personal freedom nor offers increased economic
independence to Ben Loy. Indeed, the entire social world of Eat a Bowl of
Tea, subtitled ‘‘A Novel of New York’s Chinatown,’’ occurs within a deeply
segregated space that, in its remarkable isolation from the public world
outside its borders, seems to implode upon itself. Alteration of the law
does not guarantee a concomitant shift in the social practices against—
or the dominant perceptions of—the Chinese male immigrant in realms
outside the juridical. Put simply, changes in immigration law do not nec-
essarily translate into a concomitant easing of alternate forms of every-
day exclusion and disenfranchisement, material or psychic, which con-
tinue to endure.
Ben Loy’s hysterical failure jeopardizes the renewal of the dying
Chinatown bachelor society as it symptomizes the enduring problem
of immigration, assimilation, and racialization for Chinese immigrants,
their continued distance from the abstract national body and ideals of
fully enfranchised citizenship. If the fulfillment of the patriarchal man-
date depends upon the heterosexual logic of reproduction and the siring
of male heirs, Ben Loy’s impotence locates him firmly outside this pater-
nal logic. In this regard, male hysteria in Chu’s novel also symbolizes the
continued exclusion of Chinatown from traditional structures of patri-
archal assumption. The specter of extinction continues to loom large, as
Ben Loy is unable to assume a proper masculine role in either the main-
stream public sphere or his own minority community. Consequently, his
hysteria ultimately exposes the crisis of assimilation as a type of double
jeopardy. For Ben Loy, Asian American racial hysteria marks assimila-
tion as the physical and psychic coping with incommensurability on two
fronts: both the mainstream and minority worlds. This social crisis—on
the side of ‘‘Asian’’ and on the side of ‘‘American’’—is one somatized by
Ben Loy as a hysterical response. For Chu’s male protagonist, assimila-
tion and dis-ease proceed hand in hand.

Looking for My Penis

Ultimately, Ben Loy’s crisis of assimilation is assumed by Chu’s female
characters as well. This crisis of assimilation disrupts traditional (het-
ero)sexual relations between the sexes, lending a racialized valence to

182 racial castration

Freud’s provocative assertion that for men and women ‘‘love is a phase
apart.’’ 35
Not surprisingly, the history of the bachelor society in America is one
of nonnormative gender relations. The socially disempowered bachelors
who populated New York’s Chinatown are symbolized in Eat a Bowl of
Tea as feminized subjects through their incessant gossip and idle linger-
ing. Indeed, almost all significant news in Chinatown is passed by word
of mouth: ‘‘In a homogeneous community like Chinatown, people spent
most of their free time in the shops, sipping tea or coffee, just talking
with their friends. Each had his own favorite spot. The coffee shop. The
corner candy store. The barber shop. The steps in front of the Chinese
school’’ (113). Gossip—an improper mode of social discourse typically
associated with women not men—is contrasted to yet another, more im-
portant, gender reversal: the alignment of the proper agency of the letter
of the law with women. It is female rather than male bodies that inaugu-
rate narrative action in Chu’s novel through their appeal to the letter of
the law. Hence, we might read Asian American male hysteria as also
indexing this reversal of traditional gender roles.
We must remember that it is Lau Shee, Ben Loy’s mother in China,
who sets the plot of Eat a Bowl of Tea in motion through an admonishing
letter written to her husband, Wah Gay:

Dearly beloved husband . . . as if I’m talking to you face to face.

More than twenty springs have passed since you left the village.
Those who go overseas tend to forget home and remain abroad for-
ever. I hope my husband is not one of those. Ben Loy is now a man.
It is your responsibility to see that he comes home and makes him-
self a family. Many veterans are now returning to Sunwei to take
a bride. (23–24)

Lau Shee’s missive is a nagging reminder of what must be done—the

arrangement of Ben Loy’s marriage—and only with this letter in hand
is Wah Gay finally spurred into compliance. Lau Shee’s letter keeps Wah
Gay sleepless at night. He rereads its requests—its hope for the renewal
of family—as he ponders the abnegation of his proper masculine respon-
sibilities not only to his son but to his wife: ‘‘He was all alone now. Each
time he had received a letter from his wife he began to relive the past.
He knew it was not right to let the old woman stay in the village by her-
self. He often wondered, during lonely moments, if perhaps someday he
and Lau Shee would have a joyous reunion’’ (24). Hysterics, Freud tells
us, suffer mainly from reminiscences. And as Wah Gay relives the past
the burden of unlived symbolic promise fills him with longing. Unlike
in the world of Freud’s Dora, in Chu’s realm of overseas bachelors it is

male hysteria 183

the forward-looking wives in China, instead of their nostalgic husbands
in America, who assume paternal responsibility for the future, as well
as the future exchange, of their children.
The breakdown of the patriarchal assumption for the Chinese immi-
grant male is evident in the symbolic reversal represented by Lau Shee’s
letter, as it is equally foreshadowed by the circumstances of Ben Loy’s
arrival in China to take a wife. In Sunwei, the Chinese immigrant male
body is figured as a site of social crisis by the female matchmakers en-
listed to broker Ben Loy and Mei Oi’s conjugal union. From the outset,
the matchmaker hired by Jung Shee, Mei Oi’s mother, voices a series
of doubts about Ben Loy’s potency. The matchmaker’s misgivings serve
not only to reprise historical conceptions of an attenuated Chinese male
subjectivity in America but to foreshadow Ben Loy’s subsequent impo-
tence with his bride. These apprehensions represent an enduring his-
torical legacy of Chinese American male subjectivity as a masculinity
constrained by limited means. Importantly, in Eat a Bowl of Tea these
social perceptions are internalized by the women. Indeed, it might be
said that the social and material emasculation of the Chinese immigrant
man in America gains its ideological hold and a most potent psychic effi-
cacy through this internalization on the part of their intended partners.
Looking for Ben Loy’s penis—to borrow a phrase from Richard Fung—
comes to be displaced downward onto the suspect terrain of the young
soldier’s ‘‘artificial’’ legs (figs. 10–12):36

The following day Jung Shee’s matchmaker showed up at the

gimshunhock’s house about noon, excited and out of breath. ‘‘The
girl’s mother said everybody is saying that [Chinese] American sol-
diers returning to China all have artificial limbs,’’ she announced
heatedly. ‘‘They are either lepers or are with unnatural legs.’’ She
paused to catch her breath, adding that a woman of her age grew
breathless from all that walking from Mei Oi’s village on such a
chilly day. ‘‘I told them all this talk about artificial legs and diseases
is rumor. You know how people talk. But Mei Oi’s mother . . .’’
‘‘You go back and tell her my Ben Loy is a healthy boy with two
good hands and legs,’’ Lau Shee shouted, pointing to her son.
‘‘She asked me to be sure and take a look at Mr. Wang’s legs,’’
said the matchmaker uncertainly.
‘‘You will do no such thing!’’ screamed Lau Shee.
Before his mother could stop it, Ben Loy quickly pulled both
his trouser legs up above the knees. ‘‘Here, look. Take a good look,’’
he laughed.
The old matchmaker sprung her neck out like a chicken picking

184 racial castration

 at grains in the open courtyard, and sniffed at Ben Loy’s exposed
leg. The gimshunhock raised his hand and slapped hard at the calf:
‘‘See? Flesh and blood.’’
‘‘Heh heh heh, that’s what I’ve told them right along,’’ remarked
the matchmaker dryly and left. (53–54)

Like the female hysteric whose body animates a discussion among the
members of her male audience, Ben Loy’s exposed body is presented as
an object of social discourse. This is an important reversal of the typi-
cal Freudian scenario in which a conversation between two men is tri-
angulated across the body of a woman. Here, Chu presents us with a
reversal of gender roles as the Chinese American male body is placed in
a feminized frame by two women—rendered an object of scrutiny and
a locus of doubt. In a reprisal and reversal of the logic of female hyste-
ria, Ben Loy’s male body comes to be placed through the axis of racial
difference in a discourse of national disease and social pathology: ‘‘[Chi-
nese] American soldiers returning to China all have artificial limbs. . . .
They are either lepers or are with unnatural legs.’’ Here, the racialized,
wounded male body is also constituted as the carrier of disease. This dis-
course of racial contamination thus opens upon the terrain of the social
leprosy that is Ben Loy’s legacy in America.
Throughout Eat a Bowl of Tea, the materiality and material inade-
quacy of Ben Loy’s male body emerge in the field of the visible with a
notable vengeance. We might characterize this materialization and visu-
alization as marking a return of the repressed. Importantly, this is a re-
turn of the Chinese American male body not only from a narrative pro-
cess that traditionally configures the normative (white) male body (as
was discussed in chapter three) as absent and transcendent but also a
turning away of the Chinese American soldier from discourses of ab-
stract equivalence. In other words, it is typically believed that the nation’s
military body is governed by the fundamental logic of abstract equiva-
lence—that every soldier is the same. However, the matchmaker’s sus-
tained attention to the figure of the Chinese American soldier as a carrier
of disease exposes particularisms of race and racialization that render
notions of universalism particularly tenuous. This attention to the uni-
versalism of the military body is highlighted in Wayne Wang’s film ver-
sion of this particular scene in Eat a Bowl of Tea through the match-
maker’s insistence that Ben Loy don his soldier’s uniform.37
While the purpose of the uniform is to naturalize the incommensu-
rabilities of socially marked bodies, the materiality of certain socially
marked bodies returns to insist on their particular differences. For in-
stance, once Shakespeare’s Othello has done his job defending Venice’s

male hysteria 185

Figures 10–12 Looking for my penis: Ng Yuen Yee and Russell Wong in Wayne
Wang’s Eat a Bowl of Tea (Columbia Pictures)

borders, he must be expelled, rendered secondary, as Cixous puts it.38

By successfully defending the borders of Venice, Othello falsely believes
that he has earned the right to a place in its society through his conjugal
union with Desdemona, the daughter of the Venetian senator, Braban-
tio. However, Othello is firmly excluded from participating in this type
of symbolic exchange—an exchange that would mark him as a mem-
ber of Venetian society. As the definite article comes to mark Othello’s
name—his exemplary and singular status—it also excludes his entry
into the larger body politic. In this respect, Iago’s unrelenting persecu-
tion of ‘‘the Moor of Venice’’ might be understood as the continual expo-
sure of myths of abstract equivalence, the continual betrayal of dreams
of universalism and assimilation.
We might think of Ben Loy’s service to the U.S. military in a simi-
lar vein. While his successful military tour grants him putative access
to the legal rights and privileges of national membership, his hysteri-
cal impotence qualifies this dream of inclusion and integration for the
Chinese American soldier. In Tangled Memories, Marita Sturken writes
that the bodies of surviving Vietnam veterans ‘‘resist the closure of his-
tory.’’ Indeed, she argues, ‘‘history operates more efficiently when its
agents are no longer alive. These veteran bodies, dressed in fatigues,

male hysteria 187

scarred and disabled, contaminated by toxins, refuse to let certain nar-
ratives of completion stand. Memories of war have been deeply en-
coded in these bodies, marked literally and figuratively in their flesh.’’ 39
Sturken’s analysis of the soldier’s body from the Vietnam War calls at-
tention to a physically scarred body whose visible wounds resist the
closure of national history by encoding its violence. Ben Loy’s predica-
ment expands Sturken’s critique by suggesting that the wounded vet-
eran’s body can also be a psychically scarred one. That is, although Ben
Loy’s bodily integrity seems intact, his hysterical impotence, similar to a
physically scarred body, qualifies his full membership in the nation-state
as it simultaneously resists the closure of national history.
Ben Loy’s internal, psychic wound recalls Victor Burgin’s compelling
notion of ‘‘internal exile.’’ In ‘‘Paranoiac Spaces,’’ Burgin writes that ‘‘in-
stitutionalized racism may ensure that racial minorities live in a condi-
tion of internal exile within the nation in which they are citizens—an
exile that, if it is not legal, cannot be named.’’ 40 Internal exile cannot
be recognized by the law, for it exists outside the law’s proper jurisdic-
tion, rendering its sufferers—and even its citizens—invisible and ille-
gitimate. Writing about John Okada’s novel No-No Boy, Sanda Mayzaw
Lwin notes that internal exile is a condition unrecognizable within the
realm of legal discourse: ‘‘The term ‘internal exile’ is inadequate to de-
scribe the condition that is its referent—it is a contradiction in terms
suggesting simultaneously a sense of deepest interiority and organic
physicality (internal) as well as banishment and expulsion by the state
(exile)’’ (132). ‘‘Internal exile’’ may thus begin to describe Ben Loy’s hys-
terical impotence as a wounded condition that, in its interiority, exists
outside the proper realm of the law yet at the same time signifies a state
of alienation that may be described as one of the law’s debilitating effects.
As such, for Ben Loy, as for Burgin, exile is not just about physical dis-
placement from the borders of the nation but also about psychical dis-
placement. Indeed, Ben Loy’s male hysteria suggests that the inward
displacement of exile functions to authorize the law’s refusal to recog-
nize racism in its other manifest and more subtle forms. How does Ben
Loy excavate himself from this condition of ‘‘internal exile’’?

Assimilation in the Age of Hysteria

Chu suggests that if ‘‘internal exile’’ renders Ben Loy as well as his hys-
terical condition illegitimate, then the answer to this impasse must also
involve illegitimate solutions. Upon their return to New York, Ben Loy
and Mei Oi face the tremendous task of reviving the paternal legacy for
the dying Chinatown bachelor society: the biological repopulation of its

188 racial castration

inhabitants. Paralyzed by the weight of this historical burden and ren-
dered immobile by the representational history of Asian masculinity in
America, Ben Loy’s hysterical condition reaches its narrative apotheo-
sis: all conjugal relations with his spouse come to a grinding halt. The
‘‘no can do’’ Ben Loy thus becomes the Chinese bachelor society’s abject
object of discussion. Mortifying news of his impotence is passed from
elder to elder through an informal network of gossip.
Chu’s resolution to Ben Loy’s hysterical condition is rather stunning.
Significantly, it is heterosexual female desire that is left with the respon-
sibility not only of restoring Ben Loy’s flaccid masculinity but of finally
rescuing Chinese America from extinction. That is, if Ben Loy’s male
hysteria marks a disavowed history that places him outside structures of
traditional patriarchal privilege—eccentric to the position of male sub-
ject of desire and exterior to the imperatives of reproductive heterosexu-
ality—then this position must ultimately be ceded to the Chinese Ameri-
can female, reclaimed by Mei Oi. Mei Oi’s affair with Ah Song—and her
ultimate conception of a male heir through a series of illegitimate en-
counters with this notorious Chinatown seducer—initially comes about
through the scandalous transformation of the Chinese American female
into a subject of desire.
If Ben Loy’s male hysteria comes to be ‘‘cured,’’ if Chinese America
is allowed to live and continue, it is only because of this illegitimate de-
tour through female desire, this writing in of female desire not fully
accountable to the law. Illegitimacy breeds illegitimacy as Mei Oi con-
fronts her interdicted desire for Ah Song: ‘‘The mere reference to the
word lover made her shudder. She had never dreamed that she would
ever apply the term lover to herself. Right or wrong, justified or not, she
was only human in wanting to be a woman. In Chinese weekly maga-
zines, as well as in the newspapers, she had frequently come across the
word lover, spread out across the pages in large letters. These stories had
seemed so distant and out of reach’’ (172; Chu’s emphasis). Ultimately,
female desire breeds a type of female agency as a strongly coded, de-
siring ‘‘I’’ unexpectedly emerges from Mei Oi’s encounters with Song.
For Mei Oi, ‘‘lover,’’ once an unfamiliar concept associated with the dis-
tant scandals of magazines and newspapers, allows her to assume the
symbolic position of desiring subject—a position typically reserved for
men in a patriarchal society. Indeed, it is Mei Oi’s very name, ‘‘beautiful
love,’’ that catalyzes this emergence of female agency. Mei Oi first uses
this ‘‘I’’ to address her desire for Song, but finally she redirects her ‘‘im-
proper’’ desires to her husband. On the last page of Chu’s novel, Mei Oi
tells Ben Loy: ‘‘I love you so very much’’ (250; emphasis added).
While Mei Oi’s scandalous actions are condemned by the patriarchs

male hysteria 189

of Chinatown, the birth of her son is also what allows this dying bache-
lor society not only to live on in a displaced manner but to reclaim
female desire and reinsert it back in line with patriarchal imperatives.
Indeed, the classic prescription for hysteria’s cure—marriage, hetero-
sexual intercourse, pregnancy, and maternity—is a quotidian narrative
fulfilled by Mei Oi. These men do not live along the strict Confucian lines
of established hierarchies so often cited by them but in an illegitimate
form. Chu suggests that this moment of illegitimacy—of the emergence
of the female agent of desire—is the very historical and social condi-
tion through which an illegitimate Chinese community in America can
survive.
In ‘‘Secular Criticism,’’ Edward Said delineates the evolution of com-
munity relationships under siege. Writing about the opposition of filia-
tion (biological reproduction) to affiliation (cultural reproduction), Said
asks ‘‘if biological reproduction is either too difficult or too unpleasant,
is there some other way by which men and women can create social
bonds between each other that would substitute for those ties that con-
nect members of the same family across generations?’’ 41 While for Said,
this dynamic of filiation and affiliation represents the exemplary condi-
tion of modernity’s displacements, it is important to contest the hetero-
sexist assumptions of this model. That is, does affiliation always func-
tion as a substitute for a failed filiation and primal heterosexuality? Is
affiliation always compensatory to filiation? Can we imagine a model of
productive affiliation that bypasses the insistent hierarchy that config-
ures biology as always trumping culture? (These possible affiliations are
explored in the epilogue.)
In the context of Eat a Bowl of Tea, however, affiliation is strongly con-
figured as compensatory to filiation. Mei Oi’s illegitimate desire emerges
as a response to the historical conditions in the United States that make
biological reproduction nearly impossible for the Chinese male immi-
grant. The birth of her ‘‘love child’’ and male heir is what finally cures
Ben Loy’s hysterical predicament. Her husband’s ultimate acceptance of
Mei Oi and Ah Song’s illegitimate son as his own speaks to the forced
turn from filiation to affiliation. Indeed, it reprises the long unofficial
history of ‘‘paper sons,’’ who exist at the heart of an illegitimate patri-
archal Chinese enterprise in America. As such, Mei Oi and Ah Song’s
love child is only the latest installment in a model of assaulted patrilineal
assumption based not on blood but on culture.
This model of cultural transmission, Sau-ling Cynthia Wong writes,
ultimately provided the emerging Asian American studies movement
with a novel way of recuperating a workable notion of survival:

190 racial castration

 Though immigration laws changed in 1965, the Asian American
movement took place at a time when the effects of the new legisla-
tion were just beginning to be felt, and the aftermath of Exclusion
was still very visible in Chinatowns and Manilatowns. As Frank
Chin’s short story ‘‘The Only Real Day’’ shows, if biological repro-
duction is impossible for Chan, the old waiter from the Exclusion
era, his only hope for cultural transmission lies in revising the
descent-based notion of the Chinese family to include a biologi-
cally unrelated male child, the American-born, English-speaking
Dirigible. It is, in part, the predicament of males like Dirigible that
calls for the cultural tenets informing the Aiiieeeee! Introduction:
since genetic patrilineality is unfeasible, culture must be dissoci-
ated from blood, and the concept of an ever-evolving Asian Ameri-
can culture unencumbered by expectations of ‘‘authenticity’’—
whether of pedigree or of cultural practices—must be allowed to
flourish.42

Yet, as Wong notes, this affiliation is an implicitly gendered act. Indeed,

the Aiiieeeee! school’s unspoken goal, I would argue, is to recuperate a
legacy of patriarchal assumption—one mired in a heterosexist frame-
work that privileges masculine traceability as a prerequisite, even if in
an eroded form. Is Mei Oi’s phantasmatic ‘‘love child’’ ultimately ac-
cepted by the Chinatown bachelor society because he is a male and not
a female heir, the carrier of a bloodline? Thus, the seemingly ‘‘antiessen-
tialist’’ cultural enterprise of 1960s Asian America is, Wong concludes,
‘‘at heart, a means to recuperate essentialism in some disguised or at-
tenuated form: a compromise with the realities of the threatened patri-
line for which traceability is a prerequisite. A filiative impulse lurks be-
neath the persuasive general logic of affiliative theory’’ (‘‘Chinese/Asian
American Men,’’ 189; Wong’s emphasis). In the final analysis, if the male
hysteric in Chu’s novel must relinquish his position of desire for the ar-
ticulation of a female subject ‘‘I,’’ this is a tolerated and temporary com-
promise finally meant to reinsert the Chinese immigrant male into a re-
newed patriarchal framework. The articulation of female desire in Eat a
Bowl of Tea may reconfigure the traditional relations between the sexes,
but it also finally cures Ben Loy of his male hysteria by salvaging the
Chinese phallus in America in an affiliated and attenuated form.43
Eat a Bowl of Tea concludes with Ben Loy and Mei Oi’s exile to San
Francisco. In his introduction to the 1979 edition of Chu’s novel, Jeffrey
Chan writes that

there is no question in Chu’s narrative about what determines the

paternity of the child Mei Oi bears, as if illegitimate beginnings

male hysteria 191

 lend strength and continuity to a new generation of Chinese-
Americans. In a bachelor society women are scarce, and having
children, a family, is difficult. So it is culture, the social environ-
ment of a dying generation, that determines paternity in this situa-
tion. Further, it is no coincidence that Chu sends Ben Loy and
Mei Oi to San Francisco for Ben Loy to reclaim his virility, his
paternity, and his wife. His return to San Francisco to make him-
self anew is not the response of a sojourner. He is a Chinese-
American remaking a covenant with Gum Sahn, what the first gen-
eration called America, the Golden Mountain. He returns to the
city where Chinese-America first began.44

If the historical conditions giving rise to male hysteria in Eat a Bowl of

Tea call for unorthodox solutions—the emergence of female desire—
this swerve into the illegitimate is finally temporary. Culture, I would
emphasize, always determines paternity, and Chan reads the end of
Chu’s novel, the couple’s return to San Francisco, as not only the prom-
ised rebirth of Chinese American culture but also the simultaneous
reclaiming of male virility, male paternity, and a traditional masculin-
ist relation between the sexes. However, is this reuniting of Chinese
America with heterosexist assumptions of paternal descent—this re-
newal of the Chinese American male legacy—premature, a fantasy of
projected wholeness, a false image?
Describing Ben Loy and Mei Oi’s conjugal union on the final page of
Eat a Bowl of Tea, Chu writes: ‘‘For this hour, all creation existed solely
for them. Their bed was the universe, the stars, the sun, the moon, the
air, heaven and earth. The room was incandescent . . .’’ (250). Chu’s el-
lipses suggest an indeterminacy to this image of suggested completion.
Indeed, the renewal of Chinese American male heterosexual potency is
maintained only ‘‘for this hour’’ and only through the couple’s total with-
drawal from the domain of the social, of culture.While their sexual union
effaces all borders, spatial and psychological, this cosmic state is not only
romantic convention but also contrived. It suggests that Ben Loy and
Mei Oi can only come together by suspending themselves from the so-
cial world and the Chinatown culture of their fathers. In other words,
it is not their perfect union that creates this cosmic universe; it is their
isolation in this cosmic universe that facilitates their perfect union.
Chu’s phantasmatic ending to Eat a Bowl of Tea suggests that Chan’s
sanguine heralding of normative heterosexual masculinity’s rebirth
might be premature. The hope for masculine renewal and integration
comes only through continual exile (in San Francisco) and displacement
(into a cosmic universe). Is the hope for male hysteria’s cure—the hope

192 racial castration

for the couple’s racial assimilation into America—only possible through
this detachment and alienation? Set in the multicultural age of Asian
American citizenship and equal opportunity, David Wong Louie’s Pangs
of Love provides a site of investigation.

Model Minorities, Multiculturalism, Postmodern

Chinatowns: Pangs of Love
I had a conversation with the show’s producer. He said my
story was too complex. He wanted me to simplify it. He advised
me that if I wanted listeners’ sympathy I should consider dropping
the ‘‘Chinese stuff.’’ Before I listened to another word, I told him
that I hoped one day he’d be lonesome and heartbroken in
the back roads of China, thousands of miles from Western
ears, and the nearest ones carved from stone.
david wong louie, ‘‘Birthday’’

Ben Loy’s male hysteria marks the tenuous transition of Chinese alien
into American citizen during an era of late 1940s triumphant American
exceptionalism. The world of Eat a Bowl of Tea is a segregated China-
town, absolute in its isolation from the mainstream public sphere. In
contrast, David Wong Louie’s dark collection of short stories, Pangs of
Love, depicts a multicultural 1980s world of Asian American ‘‘model mi-
norities’’ in the age of assimilation and citizenship.45 The Chinese Ameri-
can men we encounter in Pangs of Love have a type of mobility and ac-
cess to the public sphere unimaginable in the era of Eat a Bowl of Tea.
These short stories—set in cities, upscale suburbs, and the beaches of
Long Island—depict an ostensibly desegregated and integrated Asian
America through the proliferation and hybridity of their multiple loca-
tions.46 Set after the 1943–65 liberalization of immigration laws, after
the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ‘‘dismantling’’ legalized
segregation, after the civil rights and ethnic power movements, and after
the advent of Stonewall and second-wave feminism, the world of Louie’s
short stories cannot be more different from the gritty post–World War II
Chinatown ghetto of Chu’s novel.
It is also crucial to note that Louie’s Chinese American males are
no longer subject to the parricidal immigration laws that threaten the
biological existence of Chu’s bachelor society. Indeed, since the pass-
ing of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, Asian America has
been renewed not only through biological reproduction but through the
widespread arrival of ‘‘new Asian immigrants,’’ the post-1965 wave of
Asians from East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia that has shifted

male hysteria 193

the demographics of Asian America from predominantly native-born
to a present majority of first-generation arrivals. Louie’s male charac-
ters are not traditional Chinatown cooks, waiters, or laundrymen. They
are no longer just the objects but also the subjects of capitalism, a pro-
fessional class of commercial artists, cafe owners, corporate chemists,
and designers of home video games—model minorities with economic
mobility. As Sau-ling Cynthia Wong observes, these men ‘‘know their
way around the America of the Reagan-Bush era, use its products, speak
its lingo; they drive expertly and not only sleep with white women but
break up with them with regularity’’ (‘‘Chinese/Asian American Men,’’
182). Existing in a world in which legislative injunctions against their im-
migration, naturalization, reproduction, miscegenation, and economic
livelihood have been putatively eliminated, they can exist and reproduce,
politically, economically, and culturally, without fear. One starts with the
distinct impression that the Chinese American men populating Louie’s
collection should be exempt from paternal anxieties over emasculation.
Yet male hysteria exists everywhere in Pangs of Love.
Unlike Eat a Bowl of Tea, in which male hysteria is isolated in one
pathologized body, male hysteria in Pangs of Love is dispersed across
bodies, spaces, and even objects. Throughout Louie’s short stories, this
dispersion acquires a distinct vocabulary. For example, one cannot help
but notice in the titles of the stories a network of hysterical possibilities:
‘‘Displacement,’’ ‘‘Pangs of Love,’’ ‘‘Love on the Rocks,’’ ‘‘Disturbing the
Universe,’’ ‘‘One Man’s Hysteria—Real and Imagined—in the Twentieth
Century.’’ Like Ben Loy, Louie’s Chinese American men—their Asian-
ness often mentioned or implied only in passing—are wracked with hys-
terical impotence. This condition not only insists upon a critique of the
Asian American model minority myth in the age of multiculturalism, as-
similation, and citizenship as the site for the continuing and disavowed
legacy of racist exclusion against Asians; it also insists upon an analy-
sis of the social conditions that continue to generate failures—real and
imagined—of a thwarted patriarchal assumptions everywhere in Pangs
of Love’s postmodern world. What might we say about male hysteria—
real and imagined—in Louie’s late twentieth century?

Hysterical Bodies
Manini Samarth observes that each story in Pangs of Love ‘‘seems a ges-
ture toward or a relinquishing of a relationship.’’ 47 Samarth provides a
crucial starting point for our analysis. Unlike the hysterical impotence
that is literally somatized on Ben Loy’s corporeal body, the hysterical
impotence plaguing the Chinese American male body in Louie’s world

194 racial castration

takes on a more diffuse and abstract pattern of disconnection and relin-
quishment across a series of bodies. As such, it calls continual attention
to hysteria not as individual pathology but as social dis-ease, a group mal-
aise, even a lifestyle. Pangs of Love marks this condition of male hysteria
through the insistent failure of (hetero)sexual miscegenation between
the sexes: the Chinese American man’s inability to sustain a lasting re-
lationship with a white woman. The cause of this failure of sexual rela-
tions—the impossibility of sexuality itself—is not organic but decidedly
psychic.
In ‘‘Bottles of Beaujolais,’’ for instance, the narrator, a Chinese waiter
in a Japanese sushi restaurant, unable to express his desire to Luna, the
chain-smoking white female financial analyst, slices his hand in order
to create for her a bottle of French Beaujolais from Japanese sake. This
image of bodily mutilation might be thought of as a hysterical symp-
tom of failed miscegenation in the age of diversity. The promise of mis-
cegenation and desegregation has only repellent effects. Like curdled
milk, the blood coagulates ‘‘into a cinnamon crust, sealing the sake
underneath’’ (52). In ‘‘Love on the Rocks,’’ Buddy Lam’s hysterical impo-
tence also has maudlin and gruesome results. When his marriage to his
white Vassar-educated wife Cookie fails, Buddy murders her and puts
her corpse on ice. Every evening Buddy makes a trip to the local super-
market, repacking Cookie’s frozen body with a new supply of ‘‘rocks’’
as he carries on an internalized conversation with her. In this solipsis-
tic manner, Buddy continues to conduct what necessarily should be an
intersubjective marital affair in its displaced intrapsychic form. In the
eponymous title story of the collection, ‘‘Pangs of Love,’’ the male narra-
tor also broods upon his history of failed sexual relationships with white
women. He tells us, for instance, about the impotence he experiences
with his former girlfriend, Amanda. He admits to bolstering his flac-
cid masculinity with a chemical aphrodisiac created in his laboratory—
Musk 838/Lot no. i9144375941–3e—meant to ‘‘jump start’’ his sexual
relations with her.
Throughout these stories, Louie’s Chinese American men are hys-
terically impotent with white women, and this impotence compromises
the notion of Asian American assimilation through the specific access of
promised integration and miscegenation. This hysterical impotence em-
phatically precludes the siring of heirs while exempting yet again these
Chinese American citizens from a proper place in the line of patrilin-
eal assumption and national inheritance. There is, practically speaking,
not one male heir in Louie’s entire collection. And the one who does
exist, in ‘‘One Man’s Hysteria—Real and Imagined—in the Twentieth
Century,’’ exists only in the narrator Stephen’s imagination. A fiction

male hysteria 195

writer, Stephen names his male heir Todd—a name tracing its roots to
the German for ‘‘dead’’—pointing to a type of hysterical stillbirth worthy
of Breuer’s ‘‘Fräulein Anna O.’’ Stephen’s white girlfriend scoffs at this
idea of progeny: ‘‘I know nothing about [multiple orgasms] from first-
hand experience. I haven’t been privileged to such delirium. But my
memory is good. I remember our first time. Your pal down there be-
tween your legs took the night off ’’ (147). In the age of equal opportu-
nity, the male characters in Pangs of Love are no longer segregated in
the ethnic ghettos of Chinatown. Nevertheless, they continue to experi-
ence a type of emotional segregation from whiteness. Indeed, this seg-
regation from whiteness comes to permeate—to be desegregated into—
the entire spatial world of Pangs of Love. I turn to Louie’s opening story,
‘‘Birthday,’’ to investigate this dispersion of hysteria into space.

Hysterical Space
In ‘‘Birthday,’’ issues of the law and patriarchal assumption emerge with
a vengeance. The story begins with sustained attention to the spatial
boundaries of house and home. ‘‘Birthday’’ opens with a white man out-
side the narrator’s door, an ostensible trespasser who pounds away with
a physical force that threatens to dissolve the borders separating them.
The narrator,Wallace Wong, tells us: ‘‘There’s a man outside the door. He
pounds away at it with his fists, and that whole side of the room shakes.
He can pound until the house falls. I don’t care, it’s his house; he can
do with it what he pleases’’ (3). What initially seems to be an image of
trespass and violation, however, immediately reverses itself. We come to
understand that, despite being locked ‘‘outside the door,’’ the white man
is not trespassing. It is the Chinese American narrator, in fact, who has
barricaded himself inside the white man’s house. ‘‘Birthday’’ and Pangs
of Love thus begin with an image of the Chinese American male narra-
tor’s occupation of an illegitimate space in which he does not belong.
This image of trespass proves to be a type of urtext for reading Louie’s
collection. Throughout, Chinese American male characters find them-
selves in houses and homes to which they have no claim, and this inde-
terminate locationality is ultimately related to a racialized male hysteria.
‘‘I came to see the boy,’’ Wallace Wong explains to us in the third para-
graph of ‘‘Birthday.’’ He goes on to elaborate: ‘‘It’s true I have no rights
except those that come with love. And if I paid attention to what the court
says, I wouldn’t be here. The court says the boy belongs to the man, the
boy’s father. This has been hard to take. After all, the boy calls us both
by our first names, and as far as I’m concerned that means we’re equals’’
(3). Jilted by Frank’s ex-wife, Sylvie, Wallace demands access to Frank

196 racial castration

and Sylvie’s son, Welby. Yet, as Wallace points out, under the eyes of the
law he has no legal recourse to the white son.
Wallace insists that Welby recognize not only the name of the white
father but also of the yellow father: the ‘‘boy calls us both by our first
names, and as far as I’m concerned that means we’re equals.’’ However,
in the juridical realm it is not the given name but the patronym that is
at stake, and the court has already ruled that Wallace has no recourse
to this paternal privilege. Wallace also emphatically states that his right
to the white son (with whom he fantasizes ‘‘an afternoon of baseball—
sunshine, pop, [and] hotdogs’’) comes through ‘‘love,’’ a category of affect
patently unrecognizable to the law.
The law does not—cannot—acknowledge the emotional valence that
binds Wallace, Sylvie, and Welby together: ‘‘The boy’s mother is gone
from the picture. . . . Losing the boy almost killed her. All those days
in court for nothing. What did that black robe know about the weave of
our three hearts? The man won custody. Perhaps he bribed the judge;
it’s happened before’’ (4). The ‘‘black robe’s’’—the law’s—decision to
grant custody to the biological father thus dissolves the new multicul-
tural family created by Wallace, Sylvie, and Welby’s bonds of love. Here
is an example of an emotional affiliation that produces the possibility of a
new formation of family and community not compensatory to a hetero-
sexist notion of filiation. Fatherhood, Wallace reveals to us, is always a
leap of faith. Not surprisingly, this is a philosophy and new social forma-
tion that the court refuses to recognize or validate.
Indeed, the fact that the law sides with the white biological father
—who perhaps bribed the judge—suggests that the law is undeniably
biased (linking fatherhood to biology, heterosexuality, and whiteness)
and potentially venal. Even more, in its refusal to recognize the affect
that it cruelly dissolves, the law forces the Chinese American male into
a type of permanent and suspended internal exile. ‘‘Birthday’’ suggests
that internal exile may be the very normative psychic condition under
which the Asian American male model minority continues to be racial-
ized and excluded in the age of multiculturalism. Wallace Wong tells us
that by being in Frank’s house he is violating the court’s order dictating
that he not be there. As such, Wallace literally finds himself inside the
space from which he has been exiled. Being inside this interdicted space,
he thus literally embodies the notion of internal exile. A psychic condi-
tion, internal exile becomes thoroughly spatialized. The male hysteric
and his space are one. Space assumes the status of hysterical space.
In a contemporary social context that insists upon the practice of a
‘‘color-blind’’ society—constituting those minorities who expose struc-
tures of race and racism as being pathologically attached to their victim-

male hysteria 197

hood—internal exile assumes a status of paramount and paradigmatic
significance. In Eat a Bowl of Tea, male hysteria is indexed to a specific
location—the segregated space of Chinatown. It is only in Chinatown
that Ben Loy is impotent. However, in the age of desegregation—the
age of postmodern Chinatowns—this geographical specificity has be-
come abstracted. It has disappeared and been dispersed into its scattered
fragments. Male hysteria has migrated everywhere, making it particu-
larly hard to locate and label. It has moved into every space, internal-
ized and externalized, so that space itself becomes a hysterical symp-
tom, as Raymond Williams describes, a generalized structure of feeling.
Wallace’s internal exile—his alienation from house, home, family, and
love—may thus begin to account for the hysterical impotence permeat-
ing all the Chinese American male subjectivities in their various spaces
everywhere. This internal exile and hysterical impotence are not only
the result of the law’s debilitating effects but are categorically unrecog-
nized by either the law or a mainstream society attached to its notions
of abstract equality.
In a fit of desperation,Wallace calls a radio psychologist. Banned even
from the air (!), Wallace instead talks to the radio show’s producer, who,
like Frank the moviemaker, sanitizes Wallace’s claims to difference, ren-
dering them invisible:

I had a conversation with the show’s producer. He said my story

was too complex. He wanted me to simplify it. He advised me
that if I wanted listeners’ sympathy I should consider dropping the
‘‘Chinese stuff.’’ Before I listened to another word, I told him that I
hoped one day he’d be lonesome and heartbroken in the back roads
of China, thousands of miles from Western ears, and the nearest
ones carved from stone. (9)

In a ‘‘color-blind’’ multicultural society, color can never be seen—only

aestheticized and commodified—even when it is staring you in the face.
The official color-blind society inaugurated by Brown v. Board of Educa-
tion and heralded by the Reagan-Bush era of diversity management is
especially insidious in its exploitation of a universalism blind to the par-
ticularisms that it ruthlessly produces and manages. This management
is especially problematic when thought of in these specific terms: ab-
stract equality exists everywhere; the Asian American model minority
is a triumphant example of the abstract equivalence of all American citi-
zens; equal opportunity is available to all; those who suffer can only
blame themselves. This type of universalism is particularly dangerous
for the ways in which it is often used to divide different racialized groups

198 racial castration

in the United States. The model minority myth, for example, is fre-
quently cited as a rejoinder to the assertion of this nation’s systemic insti-
tutionalized economic failure of African Americans and Latinos. Indeed,
Louie ends ‘‘Birthday’’ with the image of a birthday cake whose frosting
entails the mixing of ‘‘the chocolate with the sugar and the yolks’’ (17).
This problematic mixing of a ‘‘melting pot’’ of black, white, and yellow is
one of the fundamental issues that undergirds questions of social justice
in the age of corporatized multiculturalism.
Male hysteria in Louie’s short stories exposes a virulent universalism
that is blind to continuing and uneven processes of race, gender, and
class formation. Thus, even though Stephen the narrator in ‘‘One Man’s
Hysteria—Real and Imagined—in the Twentieth Century,’’ exhibits a
breathtaking fluency in the Western canon—believing that committing
European metaphysical poetry to heart will save the world in the event
of nuclear holocaust—anxieties of ‘‘real and imagined’’ assimilation and
extinction continue to plague him. This is an absolute internal exile that
exposes a virulent discourse of universalism that contradicts a national
project of abstract equivalance and equal representation. This debilitat-
ing psychical conflict—which I have described elsewhere as a type of
racial melancholia of ungrieved and ungrievable losses—must be recog-
nized and confronted.48
In his analysis of the model minority myth in the late 1970s, Bob H.
Suzuki rings such a warning bell. He notes how the model minority
stereotype has resignified dominant perceptions of Asian Americans
from yellow peril to assimilated mascot in the span of a few short de-
cades.49 He notes that the assimilation of the model minority into main-
stream society remains dubious—especially given the high costs of this
transformation. The myth exacts an expensive psychological toll—what
I have been calling internal exile—that is ignored and unrecognized by
mainstream society:

Asian Americans have argued that the high psychological cost paid
by middle-class Asian Americans for this apparent ‘‘success’’ has
far outweighed the socioeconomic benefits.
According to this point of view, over-anxious attempts by Asian
Americans to gain acceptance have stripped them of their dignity
and have caused many of them to suffer from severe psychologi-
cal disorders characterized by lack of confidence, low self-esteem,
excessive conformity and alienation. Thus, far from having suc-
ceeded in American society, the argument goes, Asian Americans
continue to be victims of white racism, albeit insidiously subtle in
form. (25)

male hysteria 199

It is the ‘‘insidiously subtle’’ forms of internal exile that must be recog-
nized in the age of multiculturalism and Asian American citizenship.
Because male hysteria cannot be indexed to a specific space anymore,
the potential that it will go unrecognized is all the greater. The material
effects of these erasures and violences are great. For example, as I indi-
cated earlier, Wallace, Sylvie, and Welby’s affective and affiliative bonds
constitute a new multicultural formation of historical ‘‘make-do’’ fami-
lies from the era of exclusion—such as that of Ben Loy at the close of
Eat a Bowl of Tea. Wallace’s new family is based not on the concept of a
fraught and recuperated filiation but on an affiliation potentially outside
the framework of compensation and loss. However, Louie’s contempo-
rary version of this make-do family proves to be even more tenuous in its
precarious existence than its historical predecessor was. In ‘‘Birthday’’
the family of affiliation is dissolved by a triumphant return to a model of
filiation and biologism, a model inscribed by universalizing whiteness
and heterosexuality. This is a model that, in our contemporary moment,
is still the predominant rule.

Hysterical Furniture
I would like to end this chapter with a brief discussion of the eponymous
title story of Louie’s collection, Pangs of Love. Pang, the narrator’s family
name, also describes the psychic stab of pain that underwrites the hys-
terical conflict between racial and sexual identity of Chinese American
male subjectivity. In ‘‘Pangs of Love’’ this hysterical conflict assumes the
form of the Chinese American narrator’s brother, Bagel, a homosexual
living with three gay white men and two cats, all of whom share a beach
house on Long Island. Bagel’s Chinese American male subjectivity–his
new form of affiliation, which bypasses the demands of biological re-
production vocalized by his mother, Mrs. Pang—is constituted by Louie
as an especially problematic type of (new) Chinese American male sub-
jectivity. That is, for Bagel the possibilities of a new model of affiliation
prove entirely antipathetic to his racial identity. The narrator describes
Bagel’s house in the following manner:

Bagel’s house is white. Even the oak floors have been bleached
white. A stranger in a white turtleneck and white pleated trousers
opens the door. He’s very blond, with dazzling teeth and a jawline
that’s an archeologist’s dream. ‘‘Well, look who’s here,’’ he says,
‘‘the brother, et al.’’ We shake hands, and he says his name’s Nino.
Nino leads us to the sun-washed living room and introduces us to
Mack, who’s sprawled out over a couch with the Times. My mother

200 racial castration

 whispers that she’d warned my brother against buying a white
couch because it wouldn’t ‘‘withstand the dirt,’’ but she’s surprised
at how clean it looks. (88)

In this dazzlingly white environment, Nino’s blond hair and dream jaw-
line seem to be an intrinsic extension of his (racialized) surroundings.
But Bagel’s position within this white space is vexed. The Chinese Amer-
ican brother’s attempts to affiliate with this queer world prove to be
at the cost of a split subjectivity that denies his racial differences even
while it continually exposes it. Unlike the other three men of the house,
who are all dressed in white, Bagel is sartorially mottled, ‘‘decked out in
hound’s-tooth slacks, tight turquoise tennis shirt, and black-and-white
saddle shoes’’ (89). Bagel’s body literally stands out in this whitewashed
environment. His mimicry of its aesthetic ideals—‘‘Bagel’s got bulk. He
pumps iron. I feel as if I’m holding a steer’’ (89), the narrator tells us—
is condemned to failure.
In ‘‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,’’
Homi Bhabha describes the ways in which a colonial regime impels the
colonized subject to mimic Western ideals of whiteness. At the same
time, this mimicry is also condemned to defeat. Bhabha writes, ‘‘Colo-
nial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject
of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say, that the
discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to
be effective, mimicry must continually reproduce its slippage, its excess,
its difference. . . . Almost the same but not white.’’ 50 Bhabha has located
and labeled the social imperative to assimilate as the colonial structure of
mimicry. He marks not only this social imperative but also its inevitable,
built-in failure. This doubling of difference that is almost the same, but
not quite, almost the same but not white, results in ambivalence, which
comes to define the failure of mimicry.
Bagel’s attempts to align himself with a new queer family and home—
his pumped-up muscles and off-color clothes—give way to a psychic
ambivalence that might ideally be described through the dynamics of
mimicry. This is a queer affiliation, which demands the imitation of
whiteness but ultimately finds this imitation intolerable. When Mrs.
Pang, for example, drips soy sauce onto the off-white armchair in which
she has chosen to sit, all the men of the house become hysterical. Un-
able to face this intrusion of brownness into their white world, they close
ranks to become one coherent body in force: ‘‘Within seconds, Nino,
Mack, Jamie, and Bagel converge on the stains with sponges, Palmolive
dishwashing detergent, paper towels, and a pot of water. An eight-armed
upholstery patrol’’ (89). In the space of the Long Island beach house, the

male hysteria 201

furniture itself comes to manifest the hysterical symptoms of a thwarted
assimilation. This hysterical symptom is ultimately referenced back to
Bagel. Nino’s ironic comment—‘‘God, Billy . . . you always look so pulled
together’’ (89)—calls attention to mimicry’s built-in failure, its refusal
of assimilation. In scrubbing out the brownness that stains the off-white
armchair, Bagel becomes the agent of his own self-exclusion. Indeed,
mimicry might be said to underwrite the process of racial hysteria and
internal exile that comes to form and define Bagel’s subjectivity. In the
era of postmodern Chinatowns, the malady of mimicry might be char-
acterized as the dispersed form of the illness of assimilation.
While the figure of the homosexual is insistently figured in a homo-
phobic society as the end of civilization, the end of culture, the end of
race, and the end of history, I would like to resist any reading suggest-
ing that Bagel’s homosexuality is the dead end of Chinese American
racial and cultural integrity, especially given the long and complex his-
tory of immigration exclusion and bars to citizenship against this im-
migrant group. Instead, I would insist on reading Bagel’s domestic pre-
dicament as proffering a new form of community directly addressing the
ravaged material history of racial exclusion and sexual disenfranchise-
ment overshadowing Chinese American male subjectivity in the age of
multiculturalism. If the end of the twentieth century has brought upon
us the exhilarating possibility of queer affiliations neither compensatory
nor adjunct to the reign of a biologistic heterosexuality and whiteness,
we must develop forms of affiliation that are scrupulously attendant to
sexual as well as racial differences. (These new possibilities for ‘‘home’’
are the topic of the next chapter on queerness and diaspora.) In Bagel’s
queerness, might we find the recuperated form of Freud’s banished fig-
ures of the primitive and the homosexual?
‘‘Pangs of Love’’ ends with an impossibly sweetened image of bitter-
ness that aptly symbolizes the dangerous politesse of a multicultural age.
Attempting to smooth over the racial and (homo)sexual tensions under-
pinning their Long Island gathering, the narrator passes out yet another
chemical concoction to the unsuspecting guests:

I say nothing. I pull out from my pocket gold-foil packets the size
and shape of condoms. Inside each is a tablet developed at the lab.
You dissolve it in your mouth, and it will disguise the sourness of
whatever you drink or eat. I pass them to everyone at the table.
They won’t know what has happened.They will laugh, delighted
by the tricks of their tongues. But soon the old bitterness in our
mouths will be forgotten, and from this moment on, our words
will come out sweet. (98)

202 racial castration

These sweet words are the rhetoric of juridical equality and justice. They
are condoms for the mouth, covering a suppressed bitterness that might
well characterize the politics of difference into the twenty-first century.
In the thirty years spanned by the publications of Eat a Bowl of Tea and
Pangs of Love, Asian Americans have occupied one of the most charged
sites of national anxiety and the idealization of assimilation. In the span
of three short decades, that is, Asian Americans have moved from yellow
peril to model minorities. As a dis-ease indexing national fears of immi-
gration, assimilation, and racialization, male hysteria serves as a psychic
link between these two historical periods, the era of the Asian alien and
the era of Asian American citizenship. The enduring presence of male
hysteria suggests that anxiety and idealization—yellow peril and model
minority—are not opposite phenomena; indeed, they exist on the same
material and psychic continuum. Together Chu and Louie’s attention to
male hysteria qualifies the teleological narrative of American positivism.
Ultimately, the multicultural age of Asian American citizenship and the
society of the color-blind do not represent a state of greater advancement
or an advanced condition of moral progress. Asian American male hys-
teria calls attention to these universalisms and incommensurabilities.
It calls for the continual investigation of assimilation and illness, not
for their individual pathological bases but for their social and political
etiologies.

male hysteria 203

 EPILOGUE
Out Here and Over There: Queerness and

Diaspora in Asian American Studies

Impossible Arrivals
As we have witnessed in the works of Kingston, Chin, Kaneko, Hwang,
Chu, and Louie issues of home for Asian Americans are particularly
vexed. Historically configured as either unassimilable aliens or per-
versely assimilated and thus ‘‘whiter than white’’ (the sojourner/yellow
peril thesis versus the model minority myth), Asian Americans have at
best a dubious claim to citizenship and a place within the U.S. nation-
state.1 A sense of membership within the larger national collective has
traditionally followed the political, economic, and cultural incorporation
of a Western European ethnic group under the banner of immigration
and assimilation as well as through the spatial metaphorics of the United
States as a point of arrival and melting pot. However, recent debates in
Asian American studies about diaspora—its focus on point of departure
and displacement from origin—insist that we (re)think the problematics
of home in this field.2 Suspended between departure and arrival, Asian
Americans remain permanently disenfranchised from home, relegated
to a nostalgic sense of its loss or to an optative sense of its unattainability.
Approaching this problem of home from a spatial angle, we might
reasonably wonder: where, after all, is Asian America? Can Asian Amer-
ica finally be located, designated, or pinned down? A quasi-geographical
term that gained popularity in the 1970s, Asian America is being in-
voked with increasing frequency today.3 A siteless locale with no ter-
ritorial sovereignty, the term Asian America underwrites, as Sau-ling
Cynthia Wong suggests, ‘‘a yearning for the kind of containing bound-
aries and contained site enjoyed by the dominant society, a nation-state’’
—a home.4 To refigure this particular spatial dynamic in relation to
Oscar V. Campomanes’s suggestive claims about Filipino American lit-
eratures, Asian American identity might well be considered more in
conjunction with a discourse of exile and emergence than with one of
immigration and settlement.5 In this manner, considering diaspora in
Asian American studies works to undermine and dislodge any smooth
alignment of home and nation-state. Moreover, the popular presump-
tion in both Asian American and American studies that our intrinsic
fields of inquiry are necessarily grounded in one location—the domes-
tic space of the United States—would merit reconsideration through the
lens of a more spatially—that is, diasporically—encompassing theoreti-
cal framing.
Thinking for a moment outside the traditional borders of Asian
American studies, for those of us also invested in the field of queer
studies questions of home prove equally problematic. The often literal
ejection of queers from their homes—coupled with their marginaliza-
tion by pervasive structures of normative heterosexuality—attests to
similar dilemmas that emerge around this issue. Traumatic displace-
ment from a lost heterosexual ‘‘origin,’’ questions of political member-
ship, and the impossibilities of full social recognition dog the queer
subject in a mainstream society impelled by the presumptions of com-
pulsory heterosexuality. In this particular ordering of the social sphere,
to ‘‘come out’’ is precisely and finally never to be ‘‘out’’—a never-ending
process of constrained avowal, a perpetually deferred state of achieve-
ment, an uninhabitable domain. Suspended between an ‘‘in’’ and ‘‘out’’
of the closet—between origin and destination and private and public
space—queer entitlements to home and nation-state remain doubtful
as well.6
How might we think about queer notions of home in this particular
context of impossible arrivals? To take one example, let us turn to Jennie
Livingston’s Paris Is Burning.7 A 1991 film documenting the everynight
lives of a group of Harlem drag queens, Paris Is Burning chronicles a
series of elaborate voguing contests and drag balls in which participants
contend with one another under the sponsorship of their ‘‘houses’’ and
‘‘house mothers’’ (The House of Xtravaganza, The House of Ninja, etc.).
That Livingston’s film obsessively rescripts the topic of house and the
subject of kinship in its narrative and thematic content suggests that
anxieties about loss of home remain psychically central to queer (as
well as racialized) cultural projects and social agendas.8 Moreover, the
political monikers of activist groups such as Queer Nation, which tena-
ciously locate questions of membership within a larger national collec-
tivity, propose that home as a regulating principle might, on reflection,
constitute one of queer activism’s organizing conditions of possibility.9
In its alignment with the nation-state, home becomes the site of valida-

out here and over there 205

tion, the privileged location for the benefits of citizenship, the central
place of belonging.
While Paris Is Burning and Queer Nation might offer potential ways
to disturb traditional understandings of membership in the U.S. nation-
state, their multiple invocations of home nonetheless suggest that
queers, like Asian Americans, harbor yearnings for the kind of contained
boundaries enjoyed by mainstream society. Hence, despite frequent and
trenchant queer dismissals of home and its discontents, it would be a
mistake to underestimate enduring queer affiliations with this concept.
The solution, of course, is neither to reinforce nor to reify the hegemonic
regimes of heterosexuality and whiteness that facilitate unimpeded ac-
cess to home, citizenship, and membership in a social community. In-
deed, to repeat my assertion throughout Racial Castration, the goal is
to contest the inevitability of these normative structures while decon-
structing their mechanisms of exclusion.
Taken together, these numerous problems of home urge us to con-
sider the intersection of queerness and diaspora—the implications of
their various crossings—in Asian American studies. How might we
theorize queerness and diaspora against a historical legacy that has un-
relentingly configured Asian Americans as exterior or pathological to
the U.S. nation-state? How might queerness and diaspora provide a criti-
cal methodology for a more adequate understanding of Asian American
racial and sexual formation as shaped in the space between the domes-
tic and the diasporic? What enduring roles do nations and nationalism
play in the delineation of such a critical project? This closing chapter is
a speculative treatise on one critical direction in which Asian American
studies might productively move in relation to both diasporic studies
and queer theory. In particular it attempts to rethink questions of kin-
ship and new affiliations.
This chapter is speculative in part because the pairing of queerness
with diaspora demands a rather dramatic critical turn against the con-
ventional ways in which diaspora has been philosophically configured
to the exclusion of queer networks. Tracing its genealogy to the book
of Deuteronomy, diaspora is both a verb—meaning ‘‘to disperse’’ or ‘‘to
sow’’—and a proper noun referring to the scattering of the Jews. Ac-
cording to the Oxford English Dictionary, diaspora, an ancient term in
Hebrew and Greek, appeared rather recently in English usage (1876).
Khachig Tölölyan notes in the 1991 introduction to the inaugural issue
of Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies that we ‘‘use ‘diaspora’ pro-
visionally to indicate our belief that the term that once described Jew-
ish, Greek, and Armenian dispersion now shares meaning with a larger
semantic domain that includes words like immigrant, expatriate, refu-

206 racial castration

gee, guest-worker, exile community, overseas community, ethnic com-
munity. This is the vocabulary of transnationalism, and any of its terms
can usefully be considered under more than one of its rubrics.’’ 10 It is
important to point out that, in Tölölyan’s explication of the term, the
political implications of diaspora both in its traditional and its contem-
porary usages are inherently unstable with regard to the nation-state.
That is, diasporas can be sites of political resistance to the nation-state.
However, they can function as unusually conservative sites of national-
ism as well. Put otherwise, while diasporic communities are sometimes
the paradigmatic other of the nation-state, they are at other times, Tö-
lölyan contends, ‘‘its ally, lobby or even, as in the case of Israel, its pre-
cursor. . . . Diasporas are sometimes the source of ideological, financial,
and political support for national movements that aim at a renewal of
the homeland (Sun Yat Sen, Yasser Arafat)’’ (5). Hence, it is crucial to re-
member that diasporas are not invariably oppositional to the entity of
the nation-state. Their political functions are not so predetermined.
In this regard, how has sexuality traditionally functioned in concep-
tions of diaspora? Jee Yeun Lee notes that in reifying the category of
the nation-state diasporas often ‘‘rely on heterosexist conceptions of kin-
ship and lineage to define community. As a concept, diaspora may be
even more prone to myths of reproductive heritage than the nation,
whose boundaries can at least be tracked geographically. But if a people
is spread over various lands, according to this line of thought, how else
can you tell if someone belongs to the diaspora than through a family
tree?’’ 11 Lee flags the heterosexist practices of conservative diasporas that
rely on community organization through strict lines of filiation and kin-
ship. How might we rethink the underlying political assumptions of a
diaspora organized in this manner—organized, that is, around the con-
servation of racial and ethnic dispersion? What could thinking about a
diaspora largely ordered through the lens of sexuality—through a focus
on queerness—possibly offer us in Asian American as well as queer
studies? If diasporas are not inherently sites of political resistance—as
queer is not always an oppositional or radical state of being—what might
the unorthodox pairing of queerness and diaspora politically yield? 12
How might a queer diaspora provide new methods of contesting tra-
ditional kinship structures, of reorganizing communities based not on
filiation and biology but on affiliation and the assumption of a common
set of social practices or political commitments such as economic and
social justice? What new forms of community could emerge from a dias-
poric and queer challenge to the linking of home and the nation-state?
In approaching diaspora and queerness through this particular set of
issues, I hope to create a productive dialogue between Asian American

out here and over there 207

and queer studies. I hope, that is, to bring together two disciplines that
have remained traditionally unconnected through specific attention to a
diaspora focused on sexuality. In considering the material and theoreti-
cal intersections of queer diasporas for Asian Americans, this chapter
also engages contemporary debates on the internationalizing of Ameri-
can studies. Investigating American studies in physical sites outside the
immediate borders of the United States and in theoretical sites with
which it is typically not associated offers new understandings for the cur-
rent hateful and conservative national backlash against people of color
and queers. It would be a mistake to align in too analogous a manner the
political agendas and intellectual concerns of Asian American, Ameri-
can, queer, and diasporic studies. However, it does seem clear from the
above discussion of home that we must undertake a serious examination
of how social relations within our domestic borders inflect, and in turn
are inflected by, the diasporic, by framings of transnational capital, im-
migration, and labor. I offer the following speculations on queerness and
diaspora in Asian American studies with the hope of yielding some new
methods of thinking about how this rapidly expanding field provides
unexplored theoretical paradigms for a crucial evaluation of American
identity, home, and nation-state in an age of globalized sexual and racial
formations.

Heterosexuality and the Domestic

In order to trace the increasingly important relationship between queer-
ness and diaspora in Asian American studies in the late 1990s, it is
useful first to consider a brief history of the Asian American studies
movement as it originally formed around the domestic imperative of
claiming the U.S. nation-state.13 In the shadow of 1950s and 1960s
civil rights struggles, the emerging Asian American studies movement
focused much of its political energy and theoretical attention on do-
mestically based race relations within the geographical boundaries of
the U.S. nation-state. Modeled on the cultural nationalism of the Black
Power movement, the Yellow Power movement during this period
largely endorsed a political platform of identity-based politics, racial
separatism, and a Marxist-inspired class critique of American capital-
ism. The Asian American cultural nationalist project, perhaps best ex-
emplified in the academy by Frank Chin’s Aiiieeeee! group, centered its
attentions on local Asian American communities as sites of resistance
for the mobilizing of political action, the building of alternative eco-
nomic institutions, and the creation of an oppositional nativist culture.14
In the 1975 prefatory manifesto to their now-classic collection of

208 racial castration

Asian American writings, Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American
Writers, the editors contend that ‘‘legislative racism and euphemized
white racist love’’ have consigned Asian Americans to a state of ‘‘self-
contempt, self-rejection, and disintegration.’’ 15 A remedy, the Aiiieeeee!
group insists, demands the assertion of an Asian American identity with
its own unique political as well as recognizable cultural parameters. Re-
jecting the dominant either/or conception of Asian American identity
as forever divided—split between the Asian and the American and be-
tween Asia and America—the editors insist on claiming the domestic
sphere as their own. Hence, they link entitlement to the public sphere
of the nation-state with the private prerogatives of home.16 Seizing upon
their self-definition of Asian American, they emphatically state that the

myth of being either/or and the equally goofy concept of the dual
personality haunted our lobes while our rejection by both Asia and
white America proved we were neither one nor the other. Nor were
we half and half or more one than the other. Neither Asian cul-
ture nor American culture was equipped to define us except in the
most superficial terms. However, American culture, equipped to
deny us the legitimacy of our uniqueness as American minorities,
did so, and in the process contributed to the effect of stunting self-
contempt on the development and expression of our sensibility
that in turn has contributed to a mass rejection of Chinese and
Japanese America by Chinese- and Japanese-Americans.17

In delineating an integrally and a psychically ‘‘whole’’ Asian American

subject against this model of either/or split subjectivity, cultural nation-
alism’s political project was centered squarely on Asian American claims
to the space of the U.S. nation-state as enfranchised citizen-subjects.
The Aiiieeeee! model worked to configure Asian Americans as a racial-
ized minority group with inviolable political needs, economic concerns,
and cultural contours.18 Rejecting the mainstream stereotype of Asian
Americans as anomalous ethnic novelties ill fitted to the general socio-
political landscape of the U.S. nation-state, cultural nationalism’s ener-
gies focused on not merely defining but prescribing who a recogniz-
able and recognizably legitimate Asian American racial subject should
ideally be: male, heterosexual, working class, American born, and En-
glish speaking. Noting that it ‘‘is an article of white liberal American faith
today that Chinese men, at their best, are effeminate closet queens like
Charlie Chan and, at their worst, are homosexual menaces like Fu Man-
chu,’’ 19 the Aiiieeeee! group envisioned the prototypical Asian Ameri-
can male as a grassroots activist who would counter dominant main-
stream stereotypes of the passive Asian American male sissy, ‘‘devoid of

out here and over there 209

manhood,’’ through his consciously oppositional voice, his militant atti-
tude, and his resistance to bourgeois social convention.20 As we have wit-
nessed in each chapter of this book, feminization is a crucial issue that
plagued Asian American male subjectivity throughout the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. It is fair to say, however, that with the publi-
cation of Aiiieeeee!, feminization—and resistance to feminization—be-
came one of Asian American studies’ motivating and central debates.
Past as well as present Asian American feminist and queer com-
mentators have rightly noted the Aiiieeeee! group’s problematic assump-
tions of a narrowly defined concept of Asian American male identity.21
These critics observe that by staking their cultural nationalist project
on such an inflexible and strict notion of identity—on the recupera-
tion of a strident Asian American masculinity and a ‘‘pure,’’ heroic,
Asian martial tradition—the Aiiieeeee! group reinscribes a dominant sys-
tem of compulsory heterosexuality with all its attendant misogyny and
homophobia. Paradoxically, then, cultural nationalist tenets mirrored
the mainstream heterosexist and racist structures by which stereotypi-
cal conceptions of Asian American men as ‘‘efficient housewives’’—as
effeminate, illegitimate, and divided—were produced in the first in-
stance.22
This critique of cultural nationalism is by now not only well known
but well rehearsed. In criticizing the Aiiieeeee! group’s reliance on this
narrow definition of Asian American identity, however, Asian Ameri-
can cultural commentators have failed to remark upon the specific con-
nection between the Aiiieeeee! group’s focus on the domestic and their
focus on the heterosexual. That is, they have failed to remark upon the
Aiiieeeee! group’s implicit linking of cultural nationalism’s claims on the
domestic space of the nation-state as a naturalized function of compul-
sory heterosexuality. In this instance, the paradoxical double meaning of
domestic as both the public space of the masculine (nation-state) and the
private realm of the feminine (home) is brought into relief and contradic-
tion, the forced reconciliation of their crossing contingent on the strict
repression and disciplining of the latter to the former. Put otherwise, a
public Asian American male identity is purchased through the emphatic
possession of and control over a popularly devalued private realm, con-
stituted here as both the feminine and the homosexual.
This coupling of the cultural nationalist project with the hetero-
sexual is neither intrinsic nor predetermined.23 Thus, we must be care-
ful not only to critique vigorously the patriarchal complicities of the
Asian American cultural nationalist project but also to consider how this
disciplining of the domestic, the forced repression of feminine and
homosexual to masculine, and of the home to the nation-state, is a for-

210 racial castration

mation in need of queering. How does Asian American cultural nation-
alism’s claiming of the domestic through the heterosexual preempt a
more comprehensive investigation of an Asian American male identity
undercut by anxieties of feminization as well as a political platform in-
formed by issues of queerness and diaspora? If the elevation of the do-
mestic and the heterosexual in Asian American cultural nationalism has
worked to disavow and preclude a discussion of the queer and the dias-
poric from the inception of the Yellow Power movement’s political and
intellectual genealogy, how might we rethink the historical effects of
the Asian American movement’s (heterosexual) desire for the domestic?
How might we invoke a queer and diasporic assumption of the domestic
to denaturalize claims on the nation-state and home as inevitable func-
tions of the heterosexual? 24

Return of the Repressed: Risking the Asian(-)American Hyphen

The relative success of Asian American cultural nationalism’s (hetero-
sexual) desire for the domestic might perhaps be best examined in light
of the continuing debates on the Asian American as a hyphenated iden-
tity: Asian American versus Asian-American. As I understand the argu-
ment, attempts to excise the hyphen from this term reflect on a gram-
matical level cultural nationalism’s desire to eschew the notion of a split
subjectivity while claiming the uniqueness of Asian American identity
as ‘‘whole’’ and wholly viable within the space of the nation-state. Hence,
the elimination of the hyphen from this term claims not only psychic
but also spatial entitlement to Asian American membership within the
larger U.S. national collective. If diasporic tenets suggest a suspension
between departure and arrival, between origin and destination, for the
Asian American subject—the sustaining of a spatial hyphen—then cul-
tural nationalism’s desire to claim the space of the domestic as our own
relies upon the definitive excision of this marker.
The hyphen debate remains interesting for several reasons. The fre-
quency with which the repressed hyphen returns to mark the term
Asian(-)American with randomness clearly suggests that Asian Ameri-
can claims to the domestic space of the nation-state as home and as
citizen-subjects are far from resolved.25 The difficulty of banishing the
hyphen from this term functions, then, as a (grammatical) symptom viti-
ating Asian American claims to membership in the U.S. nation-state.
Moreover, the slippage of Asian and American calls to our attention the
tenuous coupling of nation and state itself, whose own hyphenated sta-
bility is secured, among other ways, through the sustaining ambiguity of
Asian(-)American as a hyphenated and thus foreign, exotic, and exclud-

out here and over there 211

able identity.26 The arbitrariness with which the hyphen continues to re-
appear thus underscores the conceptual and political limits of cultural
nationalism’s (heterosexual) desire for the domestic—to challenge effec-
tively enduring historical configurations of Asian Americans as aliens,
exterior to the nation-state and divided between ‘‘over here’’ and ‘‘over
there.’’ 27 If the continual return of the repressed hyphen marks the im-
possibility of cultural nationalism’s naturalizing turn to the domestic
and heterosexual—functioning as the enduring symptom of the vicissi-
tudes of this turn—then might we begin to reevaluate the efficacious-
ness of cultural nationalism’s domestic and heterosexual project against
alternative theoretical models and political strategies?
Can the hyphen in Asian(-)American only ever be a grammatical effect
of mainstream prejudice and exclusion? Does the orthographic excision
of the hyphen laminate, to borrow from Barthes’s theoretical vocabulary
on the photograph, Asian with American identity in ways that obviate
more careful analyses of the double consciousness thrust upon Asian
American psyches by mainstream society? Might we begin to reconsider
the hyphen not just as a grammatical marker of Asian American disen-
franchisement from the sphere of the domestic (in both its private as
and public manifestations) but as a necessary risk for a more sufficient
analysis of old and new forms of Asian American racial and sexual for-
mations? Might risking the hyphen yield a theoretical model beyond the
domestic and the heterosexual as the presumptive limits of an effica-
cious Asian American political project? Do historical reasons and cur-
rent political uses call for hyperbolization, and not the removal, of the
hyphen to create spaces for future (re)articulations of Asian American
identities?
It seems to me that one possible effect of risking the hyphen would be
to force Asian American studies beyond the borders of the domestic—to
confront the status of Asian in the term Asian American.28 It is wise to re-
member that the very genesis of Asian American studies was, as Sucheta
Mazumdar points out, international from its inception.29 In configur-
ing a political platform around the domestic, Asian American cultural
nationalism relied heavily on the political lessons of Vietnam War pro-
tests, Maoist movements in China, and other actions in the Third World.
Sau-ling Cynthia Wong notes that in the early days of the movement
‘‘transnational concerns had a way of looping back to the domestic once
political lessons had been extracted,’’ the linkage between the domes-
tic and the international being ‘‘more in the nature of inspiration and
analogy, with ‘foreign’ spheres of struggle lending strength and legiti-
macy to the American minority political enterprise.’’ 30
We need to be critical of the ways in which this looping back effaces

212 racial castration

a certain historical legacy of the international in the Asian American
studies movement—a repression mimed by the desire to banish the hy-
phen in Asian(-)American. This banishment leads to an arrested notion
of Asian American identity while simultaneously closing off alternative
possibilities for political resistance, coalition, and organization across
not only multiple locations but multiple constituencies. For example,
new Asian American immigration—that is, post-1965 Asian immigrant
subjects and post-1965 Asian immigrant communities in the United
States—continues to disrupt the traditional disciplinary boundaries of
Asian American studies (as well as disciplinary paradigms underwriting
American studies and Asian area studies). New post-1965 immigration
from Vietnam, South Korea, and the Philippines cannot be understood,
for instance, outside of U.S. neoimperialist interventions and colonial-
ism in these regions—the disciplining and ordering of Asian American
identities that begin ‘‘over there’’ rather than ‘‘over here’’ within the do-
mestic borders of the United States.31 As such, any serious understand-
ing of Asian American racial formation must be considered in relation to
a comparative and internationalist model of subject formation and sub-
jection beyond the real and imaginary borders of the U.S. nation-state.
To risk the hyphen in this instance is to recognize the interpene-
trations between the diasporic and the domestic in the historical and
contemporary genesis of Asian(-)American as a political identity and an
oppositional social movement. To recognize these interpenetrations is
not only to reevaluate the genealogies of past Asian immigrant settle-
ment but also to recognize contemporary shifts in Asian American
demographics as the present index of U.S. nationalism and national-
ist legacies in a global framework. From a slightly different angle, if
the period from 1850 to World War II, as Lisa Lowe contends, config-
ures Asian immigration to the United States as a site for the eruptions
and resolutions of contradictions between the national economy and the
political state, the period since World War II represents Asian immi-
gration as the locus of contradictions between the nation-state and the
global economy.32
In a contemporary context, the current demand for the use of the hy-
phen remains significant when one considers the political landscape of
the 1990s as one that was increasingly influenced by the shifting trans-
national flows of global capital, immigration, and labor. In the thirty-plus
years since the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, the
demographic landscape of U.S. immigration has been completely trans-
formed, with Asians,Central Americans, Mexicans, and Caribbeans con-
stituting 80 percent of all migration to the United States.33 Today, the
resulting shift in Asian American identity from an American-born to a

out here and over there 213

majority-foreign-born model (from not only East Asia but also Southeast
and South Asia) calls attention to an emerging group of Asian Americans
whose ongoing political, economic, and cultural ties to and dependency
upon the Pacific have produced unprecedented Asian American identi-
ties. For instance, a new transnational vocabulary has arisen with regard
to contemporary familial as well as group configurations in these mul-
tiple spaces: satellite people, parachute kids, reverse settlers, and flex-
ible citizenship, to name but a few.34 These contemporary phenomena
underscore the diasporic within the domestic, calling attention to the
ways in which global flows of capital not only give rise to new Asian
American identities but also reinforce, renew, and recreate the historical
disenfranchising of Asian Americans from the U.S. nation-state in ways
we have yet to analyze.35 Taken together, these historical conditions and
contemporary phenomena underwrite a reemergence of the hyphen in
Asian(-)American through the (re)articulation of Asian American racial
formation throughout various global sites and locales.
In delineating a contemporary Asian(-)American political project
around the hyphen and globalization, however, we must remember
that arguments characterizing the nation-state as losing significance
in diasporic formations fail to recognize the absolute need of global
capital to exert its demands within the concrete, localized space of the
nation-state. Global capital, Saskia Sassen reminds us, exerts its de-
mands through effective claims on nation-states to guarantee its eco-
nomic rights within both a global and a domestic context.36 As such,
Sassen’s caveat urges us to think not only of U.S. racisms as they travel
through an international arena but also of the global effects of racial for-
mation as they manifest themselves within the local space of the United
States.37 How, for instance, might we analyze the current massive attack
on civil rights in the United States for immigrants, people of color, and
gays and lesbians as an effect of globalization? What are the possible
new meanings of race as it crosses various national borders and locales?
In configuring my concerns in this way, I am not arguing for a dias-
poric viewpoint that subsumes the domestic. Rather, I am arguing for a
vigilant examination of the diasporic in contemporary analyses of Asian
American racial formation and oppositional politics. I am advocating a
recognition that the diasporic and the domestic were intertwined from
the start.
Given the historical internationalism of Asian American identities
and Asian American studies, and given the contemporary flows of global
capital, immigration, and labor, might we risk the hyphen in Asian(-)
American studies in order to focus attention on the international as
a strategy that can help us claim membership in the national? Might

214 racial castration

we (re)claim and not dismiss the hyphen for its political potential and
its oppositional possibilities? Lowe reminds us in ‘‘Heterogeneity,
Hybridity, Multiplicity: Asian American Differences’’ that the 1990s
marked a historical moment in the field of Asian American studies in
which we could and had to reconsider notions of Asian American iden-
tity not only in terms of similarity and unity but in relation to par-
ticularity and difference as the necessary basis for continual, renewed,
and efficacious political action.38 Indeed, what might a hyperbolization
of the hyphen offer in terms of calling attention to new and uneven
political practices in various sites and locales and across various iden-
tities and sexualities claiming the label Asian(-)American? How might
this hyperbolization of the hyphen in Asian(-)American supplement cul-
tural nationalism’s political focus on the domestic and the heterosexual
with an explicit consideration—a histrionics even—of the diasporic and
the queer?

Queerness and Diaspora in Asian American Studies

To consider the hyphen in Asian American studies requires the investi-
gation of diaspora as a function of queerness. This is queerness not only
in the sense of sexual identity and sexual practices; it is also queerness in
the sense of a critical methodology for evaluating Asian American racial
formation across multiple axes of difference as well as in numerous local
and global manifestations. How does queerness as a critical method-
ology provide a theoretical vantage point for thinking out past, present,
and future Asian American political, economic, and cultural practices?
I want to approach these questions by juxtaposing two articles from
recent issues of Amerasia Journal.39 In the first volume, a special issue on
lesbian, gay, and bisexual topics entitled ‘‘Dimensions of Desire: Other
Asian and Pacific American Sexualities: Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Iden-
tities and Orientation,’’ Dana Y. Takagi notes in her lead article the poten-
tial of gay and lesbian sexual identities to dislodge the ossified masculin-
ist notions of cultural nationalism. She eloquently argues for the need
to recognize different sexual identities that also lay claim to the label
Asian American. By doing so, Takagi insists, we can begin to rethink and
reevaluate ‘‘notions of identity that have been used, for the most part,
unproblematically and uncritically in Asian American studies’’ since its
inception in the early 1970s around the tenets of cultural nationalism.
She suggests that we ought to be talking seriously about the junctions of
‘‘gay and lesbian sexuality and Asian American Studies’’ because of the
continued ‘‘theoretical trouble we encounter in our attempts to situate
and think about sexual identity and racial identity’’ together.40

out here and over there 215

 Takagi invokes gay and lesbian sexuality (she does not use the term
queer) in the sense of sexual identity and practices that gain their mean-
ing through the polarization of an oppositional heterosexuality and
homosexuality.41 To the extent that Asian American cultural national-
ism was dependent on an unexamined notion of the ‘‘ideal’’ subject
as male and heterosexual, the introduction of gay and lesbian sexu-
ality into Asian American studies challenges this outdated conception of
the ‘‘proper’’ Asian American subject by reconsidering racial formation
through the lens of sexual multiplicity. However, in gesturing toward
the possibility of a dynamic relationship between racial and sexual dif-
ference, Takagi’s essay also points us in the useful direction of think-
ing about a potential (albeit unrealized) political project of queerness in
Asian American studies neither restricted to nor exhausted by sexual
identity and practices. How might we consider queerness as a critical
methodology that intersects Asian American identity formation across
multiple axes of difference and in highly dynamic ways?
Let me return for a moment to a passage from Lowe’s Immigrant
Acts discussed in the introduction to this volume. In this passage, Lowe
notes the ways in which immigration exclusion laws and bars to citizen-
ship not only racialized but also gendered the Asian American subject.
‘‘Racialization along the legal axis of definitions of citizenship,’’ Lowe
writes, ‘‘has also ascribed ‘gender’ to the Asian American subject. Up
until 1870, American citizenship was granted exclusively to white male
persons; in 1870, men of African descent could become naturalized, but
the bar to citizenship remained for Asian men until the repeal acts of
1943–1952. Whereas the ‘masculinity’ of the citizen was first inseparable
from his ‘whiteness,’ as the state extended citizenship to nonwhite male
persons, it formally designated these subjects as ‘male,’ as well’’ (11).
Lowe analyzes the ways in which social definitions of maleness are inex-
tricably bound to hegemonic conceptions of whiteness. As such, she pro-
vides a provocative model for thinking about Asian American sexual and
racial formation not as separate processes of identity formation. Sexu-
ality and race cannot be restricted in singular isolation. To the contrary,
they come into existence in and through a dialectical relationship with
one another.
Lowe’s model thus provides a theoretical grounding that can focus
our attention on the dynamic relationship between sexuality and gender
formation as they frame and are framed by Asian American racializa-
tion processes. The model provides a way for scholars in Asian American
studies to consider queerness as a critical methodology based not only
on content but on style and form. Thinking about queerness in this way

216 racial castration

highlights the need for those of us in Asian American studies to under-
stand that legal and cultural discourses on ‘‘deviant’’ sexuality affect not
merely those contemporary Asian American subjects who readily self-
identify as gay or lesbian (a strict form of identity politics); rather, queer-
ness comes to describe, affect, and encompass a much larger Asian
American constituency—whatever their sexual identities or practices—
whose historically disavowed status as U.S. citizen-subject under puni-
tive immigration and exclusion laws renders them ‘‘queer’’ as such.
I am sketching a conception of queerness in Asian American studies
that exceeds the question of sexuality as a narrowly defined or singular
category by considering the ways in which other critical and intersecting
axes of difference give legibility to our social identities. From a slightly
different angle, I am focusing on a politics of queerness that can func-
tion for Asian American studies as a wide method of racial critique, con-
sidering at once a network of social difference and political concerns as
it dynamically underpins the formation of Asian American subjectivity.
This focus on queerness, like our focus on the question of psychoanaly-
sis, implicitly demands the investigation of Asian American racial for-
mation through broad social categories and epistemologies, including
(but not limited to) questions of sexuality and sexual identification.
Let me turn now to my second example from Amerasia Journal in
order to consider how this expanded notion of queerness as a critical
methodology for the examination of Asian American subject formation
works in conjunction with diaspora in multiple global and local sites. In
a special issue ‘‘Thinking Theory in Asian American Studies,’’ published
on the discipline’s twenty-fifth anniversary in the academy, Takagi and
Michael Omi (in their roles as guest coeditors) note in their introduction
that the

waning of radical political movements in the 1980s had attendant

effects on theory and politics within Asian American Studies. We
feel that the absence of a sustained and coherent radical theory
of social transformation led to a retreat to more mainstream,
discipline-based paradigmatic orientations. Contributing to this
trend was the increasing ‘‘professionalization’’ of the field in aca-
demic settings, the demands of tenure and promotion for faculty
members, and the entrance of newcomers to the field trained in
specific disciplines who had not participated in the new social
movements of the previous decades. The result of this has been
the contraction of space for dialogue across the disciplines—one
which could have critically interrogated disciplinary boundaries
and fostered cross-disciplinary perspectives.42

out here and over there 217

How does this passage relate to Takagi’s earlier claims for Asian Ameri-
can gays and lesbians as well as to my earlier remarks on queerness as a
methodology not only attendant to content but to form and style? How
might we evaluate Takagi and Omi’s observations on the ‘‘waning of radi-
cal political movements’’ in Asian American studies in the 1980s against
the emergence of queer activism and the aids movement during this
same historical period?
That two Asian American critics as perceptive as Takagi and Omi
fail to consider the historical contributions of Asian Americans to queer
activism and the aids movement is indicative of the difficulties we still
face in Asian American studies systematically to integrate not only
issues of (homo)sexuality but issues of queerness into our critical vo-
cabulary and theoretical discussions. This difficulty, I would also note,
results from an intransigent failure on the part of mainstream gay and
lesbian scholarship to consider queerness in the broader context I have
sketched. In its consistent elision of race as a conceptual category for
analysis, mainstream gay and lesbian scholarship fails to embrace queer-
ness as a critical methodology for the understanding of sexual identity
as it is dynamically formed in and through racial epistemologies. This
integration is a crucial project given the alarming ways in which main-
stream gay and lesbian political organizations have shaped, for example,
current political claims and debates such as gay marriage as issues of
civil and equal rights. This shaping, of course, is in opposition to the
scaling back and massive attacks on affirmative action for people of color
as special rights.) 43
Takagi and Omi are certainly correct in their suggestion that the
1980s marked a demonstrable shift in Asian American political activism
and the Asian American studies movement. Unquestionably, the apo-
theosis of global capital under the Reagan and Thatcher administrations,
the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,
and the dismantling of prolabor movements and unions led to a con-
comitant shift in Asian American studies away from a traditional class-
based critique of race.44 Yet this shift, I would emphasize, might also be
thought of as a displacement of progressive Asian American politics—
and sustained class-based analyses of racial formation—into new realms
of struggle rather than the disappearance or waning of radical political
movements. This is not to say that issues of class should no longer be
vigilantly pursued in their new global and local configurations but that
our interrogation of Asian American racial formation must also be me-
diated by analyses of other forms of domination.
Globalization has shifted current frameworks of resistance. There-
fore, we in Asian American studies cannot ignore the rise of queer activ-

218 racial castration

ism (as well as critical debates on multiculturalism and cultural studies)
in the 1980s as a visible and oppositional political movement.45 If the
global restructuring of capital in the 1980s dismantled a traditional
class-based critique of race as the foundation for ‘‘radical political move-
ments’’ in Asian American studies, we must consider how this attack on
the field of progressive politics relates to the rise of queer activism and
its critique of subject formation as a viable strategic alternative to a trans-
formative Asian American political platform.46 How does queer studies’
critique of the subject come to function as a displaced marker for more
traditional class-based analyses of race in Asian American studies?
To the extent that Takagi recognizes (in ‘‘Maiden Voyage’’) the dis-
lodging of Asian American identity from its cultural nationalist moor-
ings as a function of ‘‘gay and lesbian’’ sexualities, she offers a way for us
to reconsider Asian American subjectivity in more capacious ways. In-
deed, the now familiar critique of the subject of Asian American cultural
nationalism as equating political efficacy not with particularity and dif-
ference but with similarity and unity as the basis for social action traces
much of its theoretical roots to work done in queer (as well as feminist)
activism and cultural studies during this time. Queerness, then, can help
us to articulate how Asian American sexual, racial, and class formations
come into existence in relation to one another. To the extent, however,
that Takagi and Omi (in ‘‘Thinking Theory’’) overlook queer activism’s
ascendant role in oppositional politics in the 1980s, they miss the op-
portunity to understand queerness as it intersects with Asian American
studies—queerness as a critical methodology that promises to open up
a much broader set of Asian American identities as well as a more ex-
tensive set of Asian American concerns and locations.
How does Asian American queerness function not just in terms of
identities but in terms of locations? If global restructuring of capital in
the 1980s worked to clear the discursive field of oppositional class poli-
tics for a queer critique of the subject as one of progressive politics’s new
sites, then we must recognize and evaluate this displacement. This is a
contemporary displacement, I reiterate, that emphasizes sexuality and
globalization—queerness and diaspora—in Asian American studies. If
earlier Asian American cultural nationalist projects were built on the
political strategy of claiming home and nation-state through the domes-
tic and the heterosexual, a new political project of thinking about this
concept in Asian American studies today would seem to center around
queerness and diaspora—its rethinking of home and nation-state across
multiple identity formations and numerous locations ‘‘out here’’ and
‘‘over there.’’ In the beginning of the new millennium, queerness and
diaspora should be used not only to reevaluate the past but to orient the

out here and over there 219

future development of Asian American political projects and strategies
whose claims on a politics of social transformation can be acknowledged
as such. This moment should be marked by a definitive shift away from a
politics of cultural nationalism to a politics of transnational culturalism.
How might these various theoretical speculations on queerness and
diaspora in Asian American studies appear in a material context? What
might a queer Asian American in a globalized frame look like? I end this
chapter and book with two brief analyses: Ang Lee’s 1993 film, The Wed-
ding Banquet, and R. Zamora Linmark’s 1995 novella, Rolling the R’s.47
Ang’s transnational film provides us with one model for thinking about
the possibilities—and ultimate limitations—of an emergent queer and
diasporic Asian American male identity. Through its emphatic turn to
the global, Linmark’s queer novella provides us with promising new
methods for contesting a domestic image-repertoire that has continually
limited and constrained representations of Asian American masculinity.

Out Here and Over There:

The Wedding Banquet and Rolling the R’s
At first glance Gao Wai-Tung (played by Winston Chao) in Ang Lee’s
The Wedding Banquet provides what might be considered to be an un-
precedented representation of Asian American male identity within the
domestic sphere of the U.S. nation-state. Considering the immigrant’s
queer and diasporic status with regard to his domestic situation in the
urban metropole of New York City yields a rather startling picture that
diverges from mainstream stereotypes of Asian American men as well
as dominant portrayals of them in the popular gay press and media.48
Reviewing the film upon its release in 1993, I noted that The Wedding
Banquet was the first wide-release motion picture in this country that
significantly reconfigured the dominant Rice Queen dynamic so preva-
lent in the mainstream gay community. This stereotype, explored in
chapter three’s discussion of M. Butterfly, relies upon the racist coupling
of passive gay Asian (American) men—the continuous recirculation of
Puccini’s Madama Butterfly fantasy—with objectionable Rice Queens—
white men attracted to gay Asian (American) men through their orien-
talized fantasies of submissive ‘‘bottoms.’’ 49 That The Wedding Banquet
significantly revises this Rice Queen dynamic, depicting a successful,
savvy, and handsome Asian male who is not in a relationship of eco-
nomic dependence with a homely white man twice his age, marks a
laudable departure from the pervasive stereotype of the white daddy and
the Asian houseboy endemic to mainstream gay culture. In my mind,
Lee’s innovative portrayal inaugurates a potential (though ultimately un-

220 racial castration

fulfilled) shift of a stereotypical Asian American gay male image away
from normative domestic representations toward a queer and diasporic
formation. It is this detour through queerness, coupled with this turn
toward the global, that takes us someplace new in terms of the dominant
domestic image-repertoire. The Wedding Banquet challenges traditional
stereotypes of Asian American men by instituting a new set of poten-
tially enabling representations.
In light of our discussion about the vexed claims of both Asian Ameri-
cans and queers on home and the nation-state, Wai-Tung’s portrayal
in The Wedding Banquet is notable for the fact that he is enfranchised
as a U.S. citizen. Given the long national history of Chinese exclusion
and barriers to U.S. citizenship, Lee’s rendering of Wai-Tung as citizen
verges on—indeed, becomes dependent upon—the queer. Through his
ability to claim the domestic space of the U.S. nation-state as a legiti-
mate home—and through his ability to be legally recognized in his
claims—queerness and diaspora emerge in Lee’s film as a new and privi-
leged form of Asian American male subjectivity. Earlier I asked what a
diaspora organized in terms of sexuality, and not just racial or ethnic
dispersion, might offer. This expansion of citizenship and legal claims
through the combination of queerness and diaspora is one potential
yield. Furthermore, it is important to note that not only is Wai-Tung en-
franchised as a U.S. citizen, it is through his diasporic queerness that
Wei-Wei (played by May Chin) obtains her coveted green card and her
own legal status—a reframing of Asian American identity outside of tra-
ditional heterosexual and white domestic familial configurations. This
reconfiguration and reworking of kinship lines is another unexpected
material consequence of queerness and diaspora’s unpredictable com-
bination. It is another way in which Lee’s attention to a queer diaspora
expands the conventional image-repertoire by reworking its representa-
tions through a challenge to its traditional exclusions.
Nevertheless, we must remember, it is also precisely because of the
conflicted affiliations that constitute Wai-Tung’s queer and diasporic
positioning that he is impelled to accept a staged heterosexual marriage
to Wei-Wei. Under the constant goading of his heir-demanding parents
(played by Lung Sihung and Gua Ah-la), who still reside in Taiwan, Wai-
Tung finally acquiesces to the fake marriage and tax break orchestrated
by his white lover Simon (played by Mitchell Lichtenstein). Ultimately,
the creation of a queer diaspora and a new multicultural queer family
(figs. 13 and 14) organized by and around this new type of Asian Ameri-
can male subjectivity are qualified by the demands of enduring hetero-
sexual filiative imperatives. In this manner, The Wedding Banquet might
better be thought of less as a film that inaugurates a successful queer

out here and over there 221

Figures 13 and 14 For better or for worse; for richer or for poorer: Mitchell Licht-
enstein,Winston Chao, and May Chin in Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet (Samuel
Goldwyn Co.)
and diasporic Asian American male subjectivity than as one that is set
in motion by the very question of queerness and diaspora. Queerness
and diaspora function as signs for the very confusion of Asian American
identity that Lee’s film strives to institute, investigate, and resolve.
Might we think of this rather unprecedented portrayal of Wai-Tung
in the realm of the domestic space of the nation-state as one only pur-
chased in the global arena of liberal capitalism through the rescripting
of a quotidian patriarchal narrative? In a compelling reading of The Wed-
ding Banquet, Mark Chiang considers the diasporic representations of
the film in light of its domestic dimensions, noting that the film’s reso-
lution ‘‘depends most intently upon the disciplining of Wei-Wei as the
figure of resistance, so that it is only Wai-Tung’s impregnation of her,
which turns out to be the mechanism of his control over her, that allows
the ending to take place in a configuration that resolves the conflicts be-
tween the men. The consolidation of a transnational patriarchy of capi-
tal is fundamentally dependent upon the subordination of women and
labor, and women and labor are conflated in the film, so that woman
becomes the very sign of labor.’’ 50 Wai-Tung’s position as enfranchised
citizen of the U.S. nation-state (and a subject of capital) is made possible
only through his subordination of the diasporic Third World woman
(as an object of capital). Emancipation for Wei-Wei—her escape from
the global underclass of undocumented workers and migrant laborers—
comes up against emancipation for Wai-Tung, whose fulfillment of his
Chinese father’s paternal mandate demands her acquiescence to keep
and not abort their (male) child.51
This purchase of queer Asian American citizenship is brokered on
the level of the global, enabled only through Wai-Tung’s complicit rela-
tionship with the transnational management of capital, resources, and
labor.52 This management of capital thus qualifies the potential of a pro-
gressive queer and diasporic political project for social transformation.
After all, only by gaining control over Wei-Wei’s material (Wai-Tung is
her slumlord and thereby controls her claims on home) and reproductive
labor is Wai-Tung able to secure his own claims within the borders of the
U.S. nation-state as a legitimate home. As such, queer and feminist dis-
courses are also at odds when considered against the domestic and the
diasporic dimensions of The Wedding Banquet. Wai-Tung’s (potential)
queerness comes to organize a host of conflicting differences—sexual,
gender, race, class, and space—shutting down the position of the Third
World woman through its expansion into both local and global capitalist
arenas.
Like the earlier Asian American cultural nationalist project, Wai-

out here and over there 223

Tung’s access to the domestic space of a public U.S. nation-state finally
depends upon queer control over and possession of a devalued femi-
nine realm—Wei-Wei’s home, privacy, body, labor, and child. Hence, we
might describe queer diaspora in The Wedding Banquet as a formation
that rescripts a domestic patriarchal narrative of home and nation-state,
of private and public, on a global scale. To think about the queer and
diasporic formation of Asian American male subjectivity in The Wedding
Banquet is to understand that the domestic tranquility that marks the
end of the film has been purchased at a high price, one borne by the
figure of the Third World woman. This is a model of queer and diasporic
Asian American subjectivity that, as Sau-ling Cynthia Wong suggests,
might be far more useful if critiqued as ‘‘modes rather than phases’’ of
identity, a cleaving of queerness and diaspora that cannot be ‘‘lauded as
a culmination’’ over the domestic or feminine, ‘‘a stage more advanced
or more capacious.’’ 53
Ultimately, The Wedding Banquet provides a qualified model of a pro-
gressive queer and diasporic Asian American male subjectivity; queer-
ness and diaspora in Lee’s film do not constitute any inherent challenge
to local and global status quos. The Wedding Banquet provides a new
model for thinking about the numerous pitfalls of queerness and dias-
pora as an integral mode of Asian American domestic claims to home
and nation-state at the turn of this past century. At the same time, this
model requires vigilant critical scrutiny for the enabling positions as well
as the disabling violences it effects. It is a tortured model that recontextu-
alizes our very notions of Asian American citizenship in both the larger
global arena and the domestic realm of a liberal, capitalist, U.S. nation-
state, which today is rapidly and urgently (re)consolidating itself as the
preeminent and unforgiving bastion of economic freedom, straightness,
and whiteness.
I would like to end this chapter and Racial Castration with a brief
analysis of R. Zamora Linmark’s Rolling the R’s, a remarkable novella
chronicling the travails of a group of pan-Asian and Pacific immigrant
adolescents and teenagers in Honolulu’s downscale Kalihi district. Like
The Wedding Banquet, Rolling the R’s brings together queerness and dias-
pora in innovative, destabilizing, and compelling ways that contest the
dominant representations comprising the domestic image-repertoire.
Through its multilayered assault of cultural, linguistic, and narrative
hybridity, Rolling the R’s ultimately exposes the uneven production of
abstract nationalist subjects through the management and erasure of a
host of disavowed social identities and differences. Rolling the R’s shat-
ters the popular myth of Hawai‘i as an island paradise and vacation re-
sort free of racial tension and ethnic strife. It presents the reader with

224 racial castration

competing native, local, and mainland nationalisms and an ugly colonial
history of U.S. political domination, economic exploitation, and cultural
hegemony. Set in the manic disco era of the 1970s, Linmark’s novella
accomplishes this shattering not only through its insistent attention to
Hawai‘i’s colonial status in relation to the U.S. mainland but through
its incisive critique and reimagining of the intransigent Asian Ameri-
can and Pacific Islander ethnic hierarchies that organize and divide the
island’s immigrant inhabitants. (This is a social hierarchy with estab-
lished East Asian Japanese and Chinese at the top and new immigrant
Filipinos, Vietnamese, and Pacific Islanders at the bottom).
It is crucial to point out that the possibility of surmounting the vari-
ous internal and external, intersecting and conflicting streams of Asian
American social discord that animate Rolling the R’s is mobilized pre-
cisely through a diasporic immigrant subjectivity organized by queer-
ness. That is, while the disparate ethnic affiliations of the immigrant ado-
lescents who populate Linmark’s novella threaten to divide further their
tenuous loyalties, it is precisely sexuality—an obsessive queer sexuality
that permeates Rolling the R’s from beginning to end—that binds them
together as a social group with a common sense of purpose and esprit
de corps. In this regard, the coalitional possibilities of ‘‘Asian American’’
as a viable or even workable group identity are engaged, renewed, and
rendered efficacious by this detour through queerness. Indeed, while a
recurring queerness orders Linmark’s novella, it functions not just in
the register of sexuality but as an organizing topos that affirms rather
than effaces a host of alternate differences. As a consequence, consti-
tutive differentials of nationality, sexuality, race, and class are rendered
heterogeneous, creating complex and shifting rather than singular and
static social histories of individual development.
The very narrative form that Rolling the R’s assumes—with its hy-
brid episodes of letters, dream sequences, streams of consciousness,
poems, book reports, dramatic monologues, scripts, progress reports,
vocabulary lessons, and songs—might be characterized not only as mim-
ing this heterogeneity but as being distinctly queer. In Linmark’s text,
queerness gains its very meaning and discursive consistency as a critical
terrain on which overlapping histories of sexuality, experiences of racial-
ization and gendering, narratives of immigrant trauma and displace-
ment, and strategies of class oppression and resistance are mobilized.
Linmark’s queer immigrant narratives, Chandan Reddy notes, ‘‘refuse
to either hierarchize historical differentials or provide totalizing view-
points. If one were to discuss an immigrant narrative of formation, for
example, identifying as a ‘queer’ immigrant rather than an American im-
migrant powerfully deflects identification with the U.S. . . . The cultural

out here and over there 225

formation of ‘queer Asians’ establishes ‘queer’ as the subjective site that
registers Asian immigrant displacement, immigrant racialization, and
the continuing force of the historicity of homeland for the racial immi-
grant. . . . These ‘queer’ narratives explore the uneven determinations
of multiple histories ‘piled up,’ ‘over-ripe,’ and ‘decaying’ within their
narrative space.’’ 54
Rather than demanding the abnegation of homeland or the sublation
of it—of Asian—into standard American narratives of immigration, as-
similation, and settlement, the queer diaspora that organizes the six
male and female stars of Linmark’s novella—Edgar Ramirez, Vicente
de los Reyes, Mai-Lan Phan, Florante Sanchez, Loata Faalele, Katherine
Katrina-Trina Cruz—offers something patently different. That is, it em-
phatically substitutes a queer affiliation that preserves individual histo-
ries of development for a more conventional notion of diaspora ordered
by racial filiation and abstract narratives of group identity. This type of
queer affiliation allows us a particular insight into debates on minori-
tarian identity politics. It allows an understanding of queerness as a form
of social and political organization that proffers the provisional identity
of a name. This is a name under which progressive politics can be strate-
gized and rallied, one not predicated on the suppression but rather on
the engagement of racial, gender, class, and national differentials for its
social efficacy and effectiveness. In our contemporary moment, this is
what a diaspora organized around queerness potentially offers.
In Rolling the R’s, Linmark brokers this queer insight and affiliation
across a number of youthful age groups, thus establishing a historical
legacy and an emotional inheritance not just horizontally but vertically
shared across generations. He writes about Orlando Domingo, a senior
at Farrington High School, whose fierce overidentification with Farrah
Fawcett of the television series Charlie’s Angels causes him to insist that
others call him ‘‘Farrah . . . as in Far-Out Farrah, or Faraway Farrah’’
(23). Orlando spends copious amounts of time styling his locks into ‘‘the
million-dollar mane coveted by Farrah wanna-be’s’’ (24).This Farrah Flip
is accessorized with ‘‘a fire-engine red polyester long-sleeved shirt tied
around his 24" waist, yellow bell-bottoms, and Famolare platforms. His
face is painted, courtesy of Helena Rubinstein’s The Paris Boutique Kit,
which includes lipstick and nail lacquer, and Aziza’s Shadow Boutique.
Twelve shimmering eye colors for every occasion’’ (24).
Orlando’s over-identification—indeed, his intense sexual and racial
cross-identifications—with Farrah Fawcett arouses extreme consterna-
tion on the part of agitated Farrington High School authorities. The
football coaches, Mr. Akana and Mr. Ching, as well as the principal,
Mr. Shim, are especially disgruntled. Unable to normalize Orlando as an

226 racial castration

abstract citizen-subject of that particular educational institution, Prin-
cipal Shim considers more drastic measures:

Leaning back in his vinyl chair, Principal Shim considers the pos-
sibility of expelling or suspending Orlando on the grounds that he
is endangering the mental health of other students, especially the
athletes. But he can’t. Not after he examines Orlando’s file:
Born in Cebu in 1962; Immigrated to Hawai‘i at the age of
ten; Lives with mother in Lower Kalihi; Father: Deceased; Speaks
and writes English, Spanish, Cebuano, and Tagalog; Top of the
Dean’s List; Current gpa: 4.0; This year’s Valedictorian; sat scores
totaling 1500 out of 1600; Voted Most Industrious and Most
Likely To Succeed four years in a row; Competed and won acco-
lades in Speech and Math Leagues, High School Select Band, Sci-
ence Fairs, and Mock Trials; Current President of Keywanettes,
National Honor Society, and the Student Body Government; Plans
to attend Brown University in the fall and eventually take up Law.
Principal Shim closes the file and throws it on his desk.
‘‘I can’t expel him. Maybe suspension.’’ He squirms at the
thought of Orlando turning the tables and charging him, Mr. Ak-
ana, Mr. Ching, and the Department of Education with discrimi-
nation against a Filipino faggot whose only desire is to be Farrah
from Farrington, as in Farrah, the Kalihi Angel. (25)

Orlando’s school file reads like a précis of a model minority’s stunning

achievement of the American dream. It illustrates a consistent history
of superior academic accomplishments in face of material deprivation
and in the absence of a traditional nuclear family structure. Orlando’s
file indicates as well a type of well-roundedness (outside of the math and
sciences) not typically associated with the model minority subject, espe-
cially a recent Asian immigrant. Linmark is not content, however, to let
his resignifying project of this queer immigrant rest there. Indeed, Lin-
mark extends this project to its imaginable limits by bringing together
the model minority myth with the image of the flaming Filipino faggot.
Orlando’s outrageous physical comportment as a Farrah Flip, coupled
with his academic achievements as a model minority, forces two dis-
parate and stereotypical images into conceptual overload. This improb-
able bringing together of the model minority myth with a flagrant and
flaming queer sexuality, as well as the stitching together of a racialized
diasporic immigrant identity with dominant images of the (white) drag
queen, mark a novel combination of queerness and diaspora that chal-
lenges, resists, and ultimately explodes the dominant representations
and expectations that crowd our domestic image-repertoire.

out here and over there 227

 Orlando’s Farrah Flip marks both his queerness and his racializa-
tion as a diasporic Filipino. This crossing of queerness and diaspora
disturbs many of his less than generous high school authorities and
peers, all of whom emphatically conclude that Orlando has ‘‘flipped-
out.’’ Nevertheless, Orlando’s outrageous and unwavering composure—
accompanied by his unimpeachable academic achievements, his stellar
social accomplishments, and his stalwart political resistance to conven-
tional norms and ideals—also serves as a point of exuberant identifi-
cation, of unmitigated inspiration, for the younger generation of queer
diasporic children that populates Rolling the R’s. Unlike the constrained
and painful queer childhood that overshadows Kaneko’s young Japa-
nese American boys during wartime internment, for instance, this is a
queer childhood marked by psychic strength and material resistance to
the demands of the law and the demands of others—a flipping of tra-
ditional representations and expectations. It is Linmark’s remarkable
detour through queerness and diaspora that allows this explosion and
reworking of stereotypical images and categories, this wonderfully de-
ranged and transformative bildungsroman. It is this turning to queer-
ness and diaspora that provides us with a new set of images for a differ-
ent type of Asian American male subjectivity in the twenty-first century.

228 racial castration

 NOTES

i n t roduc t ion
1 David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly (New York: Plume, 1989), 83.
2 Jeffery Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong, eds.,
The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American
Literature (New York: Meridian, 1991), xiii.
3 Richard Fung, ‘‘Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Porn
Video,’’ in How Do I Look? ed. Bad Object Choices (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991),
153.
4 Sigmund Freud, ‘‘Fetishism,’’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psycho-
logical Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955),
21:152–57.
5 In the juridical realm, the Gentleman’s Agreement (Act of 2 March 1907,
chap. 2534, §3, 34 Stat. 1228) between the United States and Japan worked
toward this type of racial specificity. The Japanese, agreeing to curtail emi-
gration from Japan, were exempted from U.S. laws barring Asian immigra-
tion.
6 In recent years, several well-known psychoanalytic feminist and queer schol-
ars have written books with individual chapters or sections exploring psy-
choanalysis and racial difference. See, for example, Mary Ann Doane,
Femme Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge,
1991); Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘‘Sex’’
(New York: Routledge, 1993); Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York:
Routledge, 1995); Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New
York: Routledge, 1996); and Ann Pellegrini, Performance Anxieties: Staging
Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (New York: Routledge, 1997). More recently,
several African American feminist scholars have produced notable book-
length examinations of black novels through the lens of psychoanalysis. See
Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in
Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); and
Claudia Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). In the fields of Latino and per-
formance studies, see José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color
and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1999). See also recent anthologies such as Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Chris-
 tian, and Helene Moglen, eds., Female Subjects in Black and White: Race,
Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997);
and Christopher Lane, ed., The Psychoanalysis of Race (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1998).
7 Norma Alarcón, ‘‘The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back
and Anglo-American Feminism,’’ in Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo
Caras, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990), 356–69.
8 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Men-
tal Life of Savages and Neurotics, in Freud, Standard Edition, 13:1.
9 David Kazanjian, ‘‘Notarizing Knowledge: Paranoia and Civility in Freud
and Lacan,’’ Qui Parle 7.1 (fall-winter 1993): 103. Much of my argument on
the crossing of the figures of the primitive and the homosexual is indebted
to Kazanjian’s article as well as his personal discussions of this problem with
me. I would like to thank him for this critical dialogue.
10 Sigmund Freud, ‘‘On Narcissism: An Introduction,’’ in Freud, Standard Edi-
tion, 14:75.
11 See Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1997), 132–66, for an elaboration of how a hier-
archy of gender and a system of compulsory heterosexuality are melancholi-
cally formed through a doubly disavowed repudiation of never having loved
the father and never having lost him.
12 See Daniel Boyarin, ‘‘Freud’s Baby, Fliess’s Maybe: Homophobia, Anti-
Semitism, and the Invention of Oedipus,’’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and
Gay Studies 2.1–2 (winter-spring 1995): 115–47; Jonathan Geller, ‘‘ ‘A Glance
on the Nose’: Freud’s Inscription of Jewish Difference,’’ American Imago
49 (1992): 427–44; Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge,
1991); and Ann Pellegrini, Performance Anxieties. All of these works argue
that Freud enacts a similar displacement of racial difference into the realm
of sexual difference in his theories on hysteria. These critics maintain that
Freud displaces hysterical symptoms from the marked Jewish male body to
the deracinated female body. This displacement symptomatizes the psychic
and material burdens of Jewish racial otherness for Freud, a displaced racial
otherness made legible in the arena of sexual difference. In making hysteria
a mark of female sexual difference, Freud seeks to make possible the Jew-
ish male’s claims on normative masculinity and a Christianized whiteness.
Chapter four of this book explores this problematic. We might also note that
Freud, as Mary Ann Doane points out in Femmes Fatales, uses the term dark
continent to describe female sexuality as ‘‘an unexplored territory, an enig-
matic, unknowable place concealed from the theoretical gaze and hence the
epistemological power of the psychoanalyst’’ (209). Here, the ‘‘dark origins’’
of the primitive converge with female sexuality as the dark continent and a
marker for a displaced racial otherness.
13 Turning to issues of sexuality in Asian American racial formation is espe-
cially important. Questions of sexuality must be considered in relation to
the waning of class-based critiques of race, which have been challenged

230 notes to introduction

 and eroded in the age of globalization. See, for instance, Victor Burgin,
In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1996): ‘‘The enormous wealth accumulating in the
newly ‘global’ economy, however, has yet to ‘trickle down’ to the unem-
ployed, the deranged, and the diseased who accumulate not only at its spa-
tial margins but also at its centers—on the streets of the world’s richest
cities. However, although the economic gap between wealthy and poor has
increased in this last quarter of a century, the rights most conspicuously
claimed today are more likely to be the civil rights of a social minority than
the material rights of a broader economic class. Toward the close of the twen-
tieth century, various forms of ‘identity politics’ have largely superseded the
economic-class politics that was the privileged form of social contestation
at the beginning of the century’’ (193). I will return to this issue of sexu-
ality and race, as well as class and globalization, in the epilogue of this book,
where I discuss queerness and diaspora in a transnational age.
14 See also the introduction to David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom, eds., Q & A:
Queer in Asian America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 1–21.
15 See, for example, the feminist literary criticism in Elaine H. Kim, Asian
American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Con-
text (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); Sau-ling Cynthia Wong,
Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1993); King-Kok Cheung, Articulate Si-
lences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1993); Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cul-
tural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); and Traise Yamamoto,
Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the
Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). More recently, David
Leiwei Li, in his Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural
Consent (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), and David Palumbo-
Liu, in his Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1999), have provided critical studies that focus
in part on issues of masculinity.
16 King-Kok Cheung, ‘‘The Woman Warrior versus The Chinaman Pacific:
Must a Chinese American Critic Choose between Feminism and Heroism?’’
in Conflicts in Feminism, eds. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (New
York: Routledge, 1990), 244.
17 For an elaboration of this women’s studies/gender versus queer studies/sex-
uality distinction, see Judith Butler, ‘‘Against Proper Objects,’’ differences: A
Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6.2–3 (summer-fall 1994): 1–26.
18 Mae Ngai notes that the 1790 naturalization act granted all ‘‘free white
persons’’ (not just, as Lowe writes, white male persons) the right to claim
citizenship. It was not until after the Civil War, with the passage of the
Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution,
that the naturalization statute was enlarged to include free men of African
nativity or descent in 1870. In language, the 1790 statute is technically gen-

notes to introduction 231

 der neutral. As such, definitions of citizenship would also by logical exten-
sion be so. Nevertheless, as women continued to be barred from fundamen-
tal rights of U.S. citizenship such as voting until 1920, with the passing of
the Nineteenth Amendment, Lowe’s larger contention that in this historical
period, ‘‘as the state extended citizenship to nonwhite male persons, it for-
mally designated these subjects as ‘male,’ as well’’ seems justified. I would
like to thank Mae Ngai for discussing this issue with me.
19 See Victor G. Nee and Brett de Bary Nee, Longtime Californ’: A Documen-
tary Study of an American Chinatown (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1972), which documents the range of professions undertaken by Chinese
male immigrants in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
20 For critical studies of these stereotypes in the popular and mass media,
see James S. Moy, Marginal Sites: Staging the Chinese in America (Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press, 1993); Darrell Hamamoto, Monitored Peril: Asian
Americans and the Politics of TV Representation (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1994); and Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in
Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999).
21 Page Act, Act of 18 February 1875, chap. 80, 18 Stat. 318. See also Sucheng
Chan, ed., Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America,
1882–1943 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991); and Bill Ong Hing,
Making and Remaking Asian America through Immigration Policy, 1850–1990
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). In fact, by the time the Supreme
Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia (388 U.S. 1 [1967]) that antimiscegenation
laws were unconstitutional, thirty-eight states had enacted them, sixteen of
which were still in effect. See Leti Volpp, ‘‘American Mestizo: Filipinos and
Antimiscegenation Laws in California,’’ University of California at Davis Law
Review 33 (2000).
22 Jennifer Ting has studied the formation of bachelor communities as queer
spaces. See her ‘‘Bachelor Society: Deviant Heterosexuality and Asian Amer-
ican Historiography,’’ in Privileging Positions: The Sites of Asian American
Studies, eds. Gary Y. Okihiro, Marilyn Aquizola, Dorothy Fujita Rony, and
K. Scott Wong (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1995), 271–79.
23 Magnuson Act, Act of 17 December 1943, chap. 344, §1, 57 Stat. 600.
24 Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 489 (1954).
25 See Butler, Bodies. Writing about the ‘‘reality’’ of the body, Butler states:
‘‘First, psychic projection confers boundaries and, hence, unity on the body
so that the very contours of the body are sites that vacillate between the
psychic and the material. Bodily contours and morphology are not merely
implicated in an irreducible tension between the psychic and the material
but are that tension’’ (66).
26 Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong, eds.,
Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (Garden City, NY: Anchor
Books, 1975), x.
27 The psychic introjection and transformation of debilitating material inequi-

232 notes to introduction

 ties once external as ‘‘feelings’’ of inferiority and self-hate outlines a pro-
cess of melancholic incorporation that various scholars of race are currently
elaborating with extraordinary promise. See, for instance, José Esteban
Muñoz, ‘‘Photographies of Mourning: Melancholia and Ambivalence in Van
Der Zee, Mapplethorpe, and Looking for Langston,’’ in Muñoz, Disidentifica-
tions, 57–74; Anne Anlin Cheng, ‘‘The Melancholy of Race,’’ Kenyon Review
19.1 (1997): 49–61; David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, ‘‘A Dialogue on Racial
Melancholia,’’ Psychoanalytic Dialogues 10.4 (2000): 667–700; and David L.
Eng and David Kazanjian, eds., Loss (forthcoming).
28 This debate between feminism and heroism is also very much alive in Afri-
can American studies. For example, Ishmael Reed has attacked Toni Morri-
son’s work in ways similar to the Aiiieeeee! group’s critique of writers such
as Kingston.
29 Sigmund Freud, ‘‘Femininity,’’ in Freud, Standard Edition, 22:134.
30 Stanley Sue and Derald W. Sue, ‘‘Chinese-American Personality and Mental
Health,’’ Amerasia Journal 1.2 (July 1971): 42.
31 Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 162.
32 See W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: W. E. B. Du Bois, Writings (New
York: Library of America, 1986), 372.
33 See two essays by Homi Bhabha, ‘‘Interrogating Identity: Frantz Fanon and
the Postcolonial Prerogative’’ and ‘‘How Newness Enters the World: Post-
modern Space, Postcolonial Times, and the Trials of Cultural Transmission,’’
in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 40–65, 212–35.
34 Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among
Ghosts (New York: Vintage, [1976] 1989), 5–6.
35 Abel, Christian, and Moglen, Female Subjects, 5.
36 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘‘Negotiating the Structures of Violence,’’ in The
Post-colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (New
York: Routledge, 1990), 150.
37 Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1995). Brown writes: ‘‘Starkly accountable
yet dramatically impotent, the late modern liberal subject quite literally
seethes with ressentiment. . . . But in its attempt to displace its suffering,
identity structured by ressentiment at the same time becomes invested in
its own subjection. This investment lies not only in discovery of a site of
blame for its hurt will, not only in its acquisition of recognition through its
history of subjection (a recognition predicated on injury, now righteously
revalued), but also in the satisfactions of revenge, which ceaselessly reenact
even as they redistribute the injuries of marginalization and subordination
in a liberal discursive order that alternately denies the very possibility of
these things and blames those who experience them for their own condi-
tion. Identity politics structured by ressentiment reverse without subverting
this blaming structure: they do not subject to critique the sovereign subject

notes to introduction 233

 of accountability that liberal individualism presupposes, nor the economy
of inclusion and exclusion that liberalism establishes’’ (69–70).
38 See, for instance, the 1987 debate in African American studies aired in Cul-
tural Critique: Barbara Christian, ‘‘The Race for Theory,’’ Cultural Critique
6 (spring 1987): 1–63; and Henry Louis Gates, ‘‘Authority, (White) Power,
and the (Black) Critic: It’s All Greek to Me,’’ Cultural Critique 7 (fall 1987):
19–46.
39 Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men (New York: Vintage, [1980] 1989), 138.
40 The quotation is from Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of His-
tory,’’ in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York:
Schocken, 1969), 255.
41 Jacques Lacan, ‘‘The Meaning of the Phallus,’’ in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques
Lacan and the École Freudienne, eds. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (New
York: Norton, 1985), 74–85.
42 See Oscar V. Campomanes, ‘‘Filipinos in the United States and Their Lit-
erature of Exile,’’ in Reading the Literatures of Asian America,’’ eds. Shirley
Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992),
49–78.
43 See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capital-
ism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). Lowe in Immigrant Acts, for
example, writes: ‘‘From roughly 1850 to World War II, Asian immigration
was the site for the eruptions and resolutions of the contradictions between
the national economy and the political state, and, from World War II on-
ward, the locus of the contradictions between the nation-state and the global
economy’’ (158–59).

one I’ve Been (Re)Working on the Railroad

1 Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men (New York: Vintage, [1980] 1989); Frank
Chin, Donald Duk (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1991).
2 David Leiwei Li, ‘‘China Men: Maxine Hong Kingston and the American
Canon,’’ American Literary History 2.3 (fall 1990): 482.
3 Tom De Haven, ‘‘He’s Been Dreaming on the Railroad,’’ New York Times Book
Review, 31 March 1991, 9.
4 In addition to railroads, sugar plantations, laundries, and restaurants, Chi-
nese immigrants also found jobs in the mining industry, agriculture, gro-
cery stores, and specialty shops. As in the railroad industry, laborers in
these jobs often fell victim to poor working conditions and low wages. See
Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston: Twayne,
1991), 25–42; and Victor G. Nee and Brett de Bary Nee, Longtime Californ’: A
Documentary Study of an American Chinatown (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1972).
5 In the re Ah Yup (1F. Cas. 223 [C.C.D. Ca 1878]) court ruling, Chinese immi-
grants were deemed ineligible for citizenship because they were not ‘‘white.’’
The first exclusion law against any racial group was the Chinese Exclusion

234 notes to chapter one

 Act of 1882 (chap. 126, 22 Stat. 58), which targeted Chinese immigrant
laborers. Subsequent legislation was enacted in attempts to exclude all Chi-
nese from the United States (Act of 9 July 1884, chap. 220, 23 Stat. 115). The
Geary Amendment (Act of 5 May 1892, chap. 60, 27 Stat. 25) extended Chi-
nese exclusion for another ten years. Further exclusion acts were passed in
1902 (Act of 29 April 1902, chap. 641, 32 Stat. 176) and 1904 (Act of 27 April
1904, chap. 1630, 33 Stat. 428). Finally, the Johnson-Reed Act (Immigration
Act of 1924, chap. 190, §131, 104 Stat. 4978) barred virtually all Asian immi-
gration to the United States. These acts were not repealed until the Magnu-
son Act of 1943 (Act of 17 December 1943, chap. 344, §1, 57 Stat. 600), which
instituted a small quota system that granted Chinese naturalization privi-
leges. See Shirley Hune, ‘‘The Politics of Chinese Exclusion: Legislative-
Executive Conflict 1876–1882,’’ Amerasia Journal 9.1 (1982): 5–27; Sucheng
Chan, ‘‘The Exclusion of Chinese Women, 1870–1943,’’ in Entry Denied:
Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882–1943, ed. Sucheng
Chan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 94–146; Bill Ong Hing,
Making and Remaking Asian America through Immigration Policy, 1850–1900
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); and Lisa Lowe, ‘‘Immigration,
Racialization, Citizenship,’’ in Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural
Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 1–36.
6 Robert M. Utley points out, ‘‘On May 10, 1869, a self-important and some-
what boozy array of frock-coated dignitaries gathered with several hundred
rowdy laborers to drive the last spike in the Pacific Railroad. The site was
Promontory Summit, Utah (not Promontory Point, 30 miles to the south).
The last spike was an ordinary spike (not a ‘golden’ spike, which would have
been crushed by a sledgehammer’s blow).’’ See Robert M. Utley, ‘‘The Spike
Wasn’t Golden,’’ New York Times Book Review, 12 December 1999: 10.
7 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard
Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 65.
8 Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’’ in Illuminations,
ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 255.
9 Kingston, China Men, 138.
10 Benjamin, ‘‘Theses,’’ 255.
11 André Bazin, ‘‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image,’’ in What Is Cin-
ema?, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967),
1:13.
12 Christian Metz, ‘‘Photography and Fetish,’’ in The Critical Image: Essays on
Contemporary Photography, ed. Carol Squiers (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990), 155–
64.
13 Walter Benjamin, ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’’
in Illuminations, 233.
14 Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 13–14.
15 See Rey Chow, ‘‘Walter Benjamin’s Love Affair with Death,’’ New German
Critique 48 (fall 1989): 63–86. Chow provides another suitable place for us

notes to chapter one 235

 to begin, observing that the vertiginous reproducibility of the visual image
implicitly challenges any stable notion of the authentic or the real in pho-
tography. ‘‘Once the process of reproducibility has begun (and it has always
already begun), Chow writes, ‘‘ ‘authenticity’ itself is always on the outside: it
does not really exist’’ (70; Chow’s emphasis).
16 Cadava, Words, 8.
17 See, for instance, Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1983), 194–236.
18 Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge,
1996), 125.
19 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1981), 91.
20 In addition to Silverman’s Threshold, see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the
Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1990); Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1993); and Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in
Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1993). In order to clarify the notion of a geometral point that is given in
advance in any visual image, one need only think of an impressionist land-
scape. When the viewer of the landscape is standing too close or too far from
the canvas, the painting appears only as a series of dots or blurs. It is only
when the spectator occupies a position neither too close nor too far from the
work—the ‘‘ideal’’ geometral point—that Monet’s water lilies or the Rouen
Cathedral, for example, appear to the human eye. The rather obvious opti-
cal positioning around which the impressionist work is organized provides,
then, a lesson in perception that we can apply to photography and its re-
liance on the laws of Renaissance perspective. While the mimetic reality
of the photographic image depends on an occluded geometral point from
which the objects depicted seem to unfold effortlessly before our eyes, when
thought of against the optical configuration of the impressionist landscape
we come to understand the ideal location from where we can ‘‘get’’ the pic-
ture. Though seemingly unmarked and invisible in a Renaissance painting,
the geometral point is nonetheless implicitly there—a pregiven position we
must occupy in order to make sense of the picture, believe in its images,
and invest in its reality. There are numerous examples from Renaissance
painting in which the geometral point is visually encoded against a tradi-
tional Cartesian point of view. See, for instance, Jacques Lacan’s reading of
Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533) in Four Fundamental Concepts, 85–90. I
discuss Lacan’s reading of Holbein later in this chapter.
21 See Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema,
trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977); Daniel Dayan, ‘‘The Tutor
Code of Classical Cinema,’’ in Movies and Methods, ed. Bill Nichols (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1976), 438–51; Stephen Heath, ‘‘Notes
on Suture,’’ Screen (winter 1977–78): 48–76; Jean-Pierre Oudart, ‘‘Cinema

236 notes to chapter one

 and Suture,’’ Screen (winter 1977–78): 35–47; and Laura Mulvey, Visual and
Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
22 See Siegfried Kracauer, ‘‘Photography,’’ trans. Thomas Y. Levin, Critical In-
quiry 19.3 (spring 1993): 421–34.
23 Siegfried Kracauer, History: Last Things before the Last (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1969), 191, quoted in Dagmar Barnouw, Critical Realism: His-
tory, Photography, and the Work of Siegfried Kracauer (Baltimore: Johns Hop-
kins University Press, 1994), 12–13.
24 Kracauer, ‘‘Photography,’’ 425.
25 My analysis and deconstruction of the photograph’s visual realism is in-
debted to Silverman’s analysis of gaze, look, and screen in Male Subjectivity
at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Threshold.
26 Homi Bhabha, ‘‘The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination, and the
Discourse of Colonialism,’’ in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge,
1994), 66.
27 Carol E. Neubauer, ‘‘Developing Ties to the Past: Photography and Other
Sources of Information in Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men,’’ MELUS
10.4 (winter 1983): 27; my emphasis.
28 See Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). Writing on the widespread
refusal to recognize the existence of Hong Kong culture, Abbas notes that
this ‘‘refusal to see what is there is an example of reverse hallucination, or
what Sigmund Freud in his essay on Wilhelm Jensen’s ‘Gravida’ called ‘nega-
tive hallucination.’ If hallucination means seeing ghosts and apparitions,
that is, something that is not there, reverse hallucination means not seeing
what is there’’ (6; Abbas’s emphasis).
29 The Chinese called the United States ‘‘Gum Sahn’’ or ‘‘Gold Mountain.’’ First
called ‘‘Gum Sahn’’ because of the discovery of gold in California, ‘‘Gold
Mountain’’ also suggests the notion of the United States as a land of oppor-
tunity.
30 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith
(New York: Pantheon, 1972), 7.
31 King-Kok Cheung, Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kings-
ton, Joy Kogawa (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 112.
32 Silverman, Threshold, 182. See the discussion of Camera Lucida on pages
181–83, to which this argument is indexed.
33 Kracauer, ‘‘Photography,’’ 425; Kracauer’s emphasis.
34 Ibid., 432.
35 It seems important to note that Kingston reworks both Eastern and West-
ern myths, legends, and fables, making a special effort to question both
traditional American and Chinese points of view. Consequently, if myths,
legends, and fables are those privileged cultural narratives that provide con-
sistency to a society’s conception of itself, then Kingston uses the vicissi-
tudes of personal memory to displace these stories, which would create an
imaginary community through the exclusion of sexual and racial minorities.

notes to chapter one 237

36 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 85–90. This skull is visible only when
one looks at the painting anamorphically, that is, from the extreme edge of
its frame.
37 The following biographies of the ‘‘Big Four’’ robber barons, whose names are
still prominent and visible both inside and outside of California, are drawn
from George Kraus, High Road to Promontory: Building the Central Pacific
(now the Southern Pacific) across the High Sierra (Palo Alto, CA: American
West, 1969), 294–97.
Collis P. Huntington (b. 22 October 1821, d. 13 August 1900), born in
Harwinton, Litchfield County, Connecticut, in 1821, was the ‘‘most hated
and longest lived of the Big Four’’ (294). Huntington began his business
career as a general merchant in Oneonta, New York. Motivated by gold rush
fever, he left Oneonta in 1849. Settling in Sacramento, he returned to his life
as a merchant, opening a small store with a business partner, Mark Hopkins.
By 1856, the Huntington and Hopkins store was one of the most prosperous
on the West Coast. It was at Huntington and Hopkins that Theodore Judah
convinced Huntington to invest in the transcontinental railroad. Hunting-
ton later claimed that he was largely responsible for bringing in the other
three powerhouses who ultimately financed the railroad deal. Huntington’s
role in the railroad focused primarily on management and finance.
Mark Hopkins (b. 1 September 1813, d. 29 March 1878), born in Hender-
son, New York, began his career in 1825 as a clerk in a mercantile company
in Niagara County, but he quickly worked his way up in the business world,
becoming a leading partner in the company Hopkins and Hughes. In 1849,
Hopkins moved to San Francisco, where he established a wholesale grocery
business with E. H. Miller Jr., who later became secretary of the Central
Pacific Railroad. He partnered with Huntington in 1855. No project of the
Big Four commenced without his approval—his partners felt that nothing
was ‘‘finished until Hopkins looked at it’’ (295).
Leland Stanford (b. 9 March 1824, d. 21 June 1893), born in Watervliet,
New York, was the first president of the Central Pacific Railroad and gover-
nor of California. He is perhaps best known for the university he founded
in memory of his only son. Stanford grew up in upstate New York, where
he studied law and was admitted to practice in the Supreme Court of New
York. In addition to the law, Stanford began his business career with a small
horseradish and chestnut business that he ran with his brothers. His inter-
est in the railroad was sparked in part by his father, who graded a part of
the nation’s first railroad between Albany and Schenectady. Following in
the footsteps of his brothers, who later provided him a job in their store,
Stanford headed west. Soon the Stanford brothers became members of the
wealthy elite of the mining region. After several failed bids for public office,
Stanford left for Washington, D.C., where he became a confidant of Presi-
dent Lincoln, exerting, many believe, a strong influence over Pacific coast
policy. When he returned to California, he was nominated in for governor
and overwhelmingly elected to a two-year term in 1861. Stanford’s influence

238 notes to chapter one

 in government was the decisive factor that allowed him to join to the ranks
of the Big Four (296).
Charles Crocker (b. 16 September 1822, d. 14 August 1888), born in Troy,
New York, was already a successful merchant when he began working for the
railroad. He began his business career as a paperboy in Troy. By the time he
left for California in 1850, he had acquired enough business experience to
open a dry goods store in Sacramento. In 1860, he was elected to the Califor-
nia legislature for a two-year term, but he served only one, choosing instead
to focus on the development of the Pacific Railroad enterprise. He was con-
sidered the ‘‘ideal head’’ (296) of the Big Four, and it was under his direction
that the railroad was completed seven years ahead of schedule. In addition to
the Central Pacific Railroad, Crocker also helped build the Southern Pacific
transcontinental line across the American Southwest.
38 Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Women and Men (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage,
1997), 17.
39 Chan, Asian Americans, 81.
40 Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans
(New York: Penguin, 1989), 85–86.
41 For a history of this consolidation of whiteness, see Alexander Saxton,
The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); and The Rise and Fall of the
White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America
(New York: Verso, 1990). See also David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness:
Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991);
Ruth Frankenburg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of
Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); and George
Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from
Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998).
42 Low pay coupled with poor working conditions led to several strikes, one
of the largest of which occurred in 1867. Chan writes in Asian Americans
that ‘‘unhappy with their lot, 2,000 men digging tunnels in the high Sierras
went on strike, demanding $40 a month, 10 hours of work a day for those
laboring outdoors and eight hours for those inside the tunnels, an end to cor-
poral punishment, and the freedom to leave whenever they desired. Their
strike lasted a week—until their food ran out. The railroad company simply
stopped bringing them rations, thus starving them back to work. The com-
pany also took the precaution of asking employment agencies to stand ready
to supply it with black workers should the Chinese strike again’’ (81–82).
43 Kingston chronicles in ‘‘The Laws,’’ the chapter following ‘‘The Grandfather
of the Sierra Nevada Mountains,’’ a long history of congressional and state
exclusion acts directed against the Chinese. These laws and treaties formal-
ized the legal disenfranchisement of Chinese immigrants from naturaliza-
tion and citizenship precisely through, among other measures, the state-
enforced separation of Chinese American male laborers from their wives
and families.

notes to chapter one 239

44 Fae Myenne Ng, Bone (New York: Hyperion, 1993), 61.
45 Somewhere wafting through the Chinatown streets ‘‘comes what sounds
like Julio Iglesias singing ‘To All the Girls I Loved’ in Cantonese’’ (59).
46 See Kracauer’s 1927 essay ‘‘The Mass Ornament,’’ trans. Barbara Correll and
Jack Zipes, New German Critique 5 (spring 1975): 67–76. In this essay, Kra-
cauer asserts that ‘‘the mass ornament is the aesthetic reflex of the ratio-
nality aspired to by the prevailing economic system’’ (70). Kracauer was one
of the first critical theorists to suggest the monopolization of leisure time as
a commodity for the purpose of distraction—what Horkheimer and Adorno
label the ‘‘culture industry.’’ In his pioneering 1929 study, Die Angestellten
[The white-collared workers], Kracauer connects industrial regimentation
with the leisure industry, describing the amusement spots of the bourgeoi-
sie as ‘‘pleasure barracks.’’ See Karsten Witte, ‘‘Introduction to Siegfried Kra-
cauer’s ‘The Mass Ornament,’ ’’ New German Critique 5 (spring 1975): 64.
47 See, for example, the preface to Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fu-
sao Inada, and Shawn Wong, eds., Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American
Writers (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1975), ix–xx, as well as Chin’s ‘‘Come All
Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and Fake,’’ in The Big Aiiieeeee!: An
Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature, eds. Jeffrey
Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong (New York:
Meridian, 1991), 1–92.
48 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘‘Sex’’ (New York:
Routledge, 1993), 223.
49 Chin et al., Aiiieeeee!, x.
50 See Butler, Bodies, 227.
51 For an elaboration on cultural atavism, see Rey Chow, ‘‘Where Have all the
Natives Gone?’’ in Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary
Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 27–54.
52 See chapter 6, ‘‘The Dream-Work,’’ of Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of
Dreams, in Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychologi-
cal Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955), 4
and 5: 277–508.
53 See J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans.
Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973), 125.
54 Silverman, Threshold, 180.
55 See Laplanche and Pontalis, Language, 111.
56 Ibid., 112. Laplanche and Pontalis note three main characteristics of Freud’s
theory:

a. It is not lived experience in general that undergoes deferred re-

vision but, specifically, whatever it has been impossible in the first in-
stance to incorporate fully into a meaningful context. The traumatic
event is the epitome of such unnassimilated experience.
b. Deferred revision is occasioned by events and situations, or by an
organic maturation, which allow the subject to gain access to a new
level of meaning and to rework his earlier experiences.

240 notes to chapter one

 c. Human sexuality, with the peculiar unevenness of its temporal de-
velopment, provides an eminently suitable field for the phenomenon
of deferred action. (112)

57 See Louis Althusser, ‘‘Contradiction and Overdetermination: Notes for an

Investigation,’’ in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Verso, 1990),
87–116.
58 See Laplanche and Pontalis’s entry ‘‘Phantasy (or Fantasy),’’ in Language,
314–18. See also their essay ‘‘Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality,’’ in For-
mations of Fantasy, eds. Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan (New
York: Methuen, 1986), 5–34.
59 Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among
Ghosts (New York: Vintage, [1976] 1989), won the National Book Award in
1976. It is by many accounts the most widely taught work of fiction by
a living author on university campuses today. See L. A. Chung, ‘‘Chinese
American Literary War,’’ San Francisco Chronicle, 26 August 1991, D3–4.
For a summary of Chin’s criticisms of Kingston, see Frank Chin, Jeffrey
Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Hsu Wong, ‘‘An Introduction
to Chinese- and Japanese-American Literature,’’ in Chin et al., Aiiieeeee!, 3–
36. See also the editors’ introduction to Chan et al., The Big Aiiieeeee, xi–
xvi. In addition, see Frank Chin, ‘‘Backtalk,’’ in Counterpoint: Perspectives on
Asian America, ed. Emma Gee (Los Angeles: Asian American Studies Cen-
ter, UCLA, 1976), 556–67; ‘‘Come All Ye Writers’’; and ‘‘Uncle Frank’s Fake-
book of Fairy Tales for Asian American Moms and Dads,’’ Amerasia Journal
18.2 (1992): 69–87.
60 The editors also write in The Big Aiiieeeee! about David Henry Hwang and
M. Butterfly. They state that ‘‘the good Chinese man, at his best, is the ful-
fillment of white male homosexual fantasy, literally kissing white ass. Now
Hwang and the stereotype are inextricably one’’ (xiii). Hwang’s response was
to dub Chin ‘‘the ayatollah of Asian America’’ (Chung, ‘‘Chinese American
Literary War,’’ D4).
61 Chan et al., The Big Aiiieeeee!, xii.
62 Chung, ‘‘Chinese American Literary War,’’ D4.
63 Chin and Kingston came of age as contemporaries. Both were undergradu-
ates at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1960s.
64 Frank Chin and Jeffery Paul Chan, ‘‘Racist Love,’’ in Seeing through Shuck,
ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Ballantine, 1972), 68.
65 Chan et al., The Big Aiiieeeee!, xiii.
66 Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity
to Extravagance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 153. Wong
writes of Chin’s Donald Duk that instead of focusing on the ‘‘intense contra-
dictions involved in creating a Chinese American mobility myth around the
symbol of the railroad, . . . after struggling for years with raw and impossible
contradictions, Chin has decided to settle for a defanged version of Chinese
American history and the simple warm glow of ethnic pride’’ (146, 153).

notes to chapter one 241

67 Robert Murray Davis, ‘‘West Meets East: A Conversation with Frank Chin,’’
Amerasia Journal 24.1 (1998): 88–89.
68 Freud writes in ‘‘On the Mechanism of Paranoia’’: ‘‘After the stage of hetero-
sexual object-choice has been reached, the homosexual tendencies are not,
as might be supposed, done away with or brought to a stop; they are merely
deflected from their sexual aim and applied to fresh uses. They now combine
with portions of the ego-instincts and, as ‘attached’ components, help to con-
stitute the social instincts, thus contributing an erotic factor to friendship
and comradeship, to esprit de corps and to the love of mankind in general’’
(Freud, Standard Edition, 12:61).

t wo Primal Scenes
1 Report of Curtis B. Munson, ‘‘Japanese on the West Coast,’’ attached to a
memo from John Franklin Carter to President Roosevelt, 7 November 1941
Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library [(fdrl], psf 106, Stimson, Commission
on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians [cwric] 3673–89; Mun-
son’s emphasis).
2 Memo from J. Edgar Hoover to Attorney General, 2 February 1942, fbi,
cwric 5794.
3 Executive Order 9066, 19 February 1942, National Archives, General Re-
cords of the U.S. Government, Record Group 11.
4 Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Ameri-
cans (New York: Penguin, 1989), 387. Chapter 10 of Strangers and Sucheng
Chan’s Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston: Twayne, 1991),
chap. 7, contain detailed histories of Japanese American internment. For
a comprehensive juridical history of the internment, see Personal Justice
Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of
Civilians (Washington, DC: Civil Liberties Public Education Fund; Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1997). For a visual history of the intern-
ment, see Deborah Gesensway and Mindy Roseman, Beyond Words: Images
from America’s Concentration Camps (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987).
Visual media, such as Rea Tajiri’s stunning video History and Memory
(Women Make Movies, New York, 1991), also explore the psychic impact of
incarceration on the children of internees.
Although officials at the Department of Justice initially opposed the
mass evacuation of Japanese Americans and its flagrant abrogation of civil
liberties, proponents of ‘‘relocation’’ at the War Department strongly argued
for this suspension of constitutional rights in the interests of national secu-
rity and military necessity.
While one would expect that war panic against the Japanese would be
most virulent in Hawai‘i, the site of the Pearl Harbor bombing, the fact
that 32 percent of Hawai‘i’s population was of Japanese descent made it im-
possible to evacuate them without destroying the islands’ economy and the
war effort. General Delos Emmons, the U.S. commander in Hawai‘i, man-

242 notes to chapter two

 aged the military situation without ordering a mass evacuation, showing
that order could be maintained without the abrogation of civil liberties. In
Hawai‘i, no acts of subversion occurred and due process was preserved.
Curiously enough, while the days following the United States’ entry into
World War II witnessed the seizure of weapons, radios, cameras, binocu-
lars, and other instruments of surveillance from ‘‘enemy’’ aliens of Japanese,
German, and Italian ancestry, only the Japanese, along with their American-
born children, were subsequently evacuated to makeshift assembly centers
and then incarcerated in ten concentration camps inland: Manzanar and
Tule Lake in California; Minidoka in Idaho; Poston and Gila River in Ari-
zona; Rohwer and Jerome in Arkansas; Amache in Colorado; Topaz in Utah;
and Heart Mountain in Wyoming.
This egregious act of racial discrimination, fbi director J. Edgar Hoover
later noted, was based primarily upon public and political pressure rather
than factual data or any real threat of espionage on the part of individu-
als of Japanese descent. The lack of any factual basis for the internment
was dismissed by various government reports and investigative agencies. At
the heart of Executive Order 9066, then, was the assumption that Japanese
Americans remained continuously loyal to Japan, their land of ‘‘origin,’’ and
thus were disloyal to the United States. To be a Japanese American during
the war and after the promulgation of Executive Order 9066 was conse-
quently to be constituted as an enemy of the state.
By contrasting ‘‘white’’ groups with the Japanese and relying on visual
markers of race, Executive Order 9066 generated its own (il)logical consis-
tencies. Indeed the court cases that tested the constitutionality of intern-
ment illustrate this point. Hirabayashi v. U.S., 320 U.S. 81 (1943); Yasui v.
U.S., 320 U.S. 115 (1943); Korematsu v. U.S., 323 U.S. 214 (1944); and Ex Parte
Endo, 323 U.S. 283 (1944) challenged the constitutionality of detention and
internment before the U.S. Supreme Court. While the Court found that the
government could no longer detain Endo, it upheld Korematsu’s conviction,
holding in the case that ‘‘the exclusion of a single racial group [is] within the
war powers of the Congress and of the President.’’ Ironically, the Korematsu
and Endo decisions were filed on the same day.
5 Telephone conversation between DeWitt and McCloy, 3 February 1942,
National Archives and Records Service [nars], Record Group 107, cwric
131–40. The conversation continues: ‘‘The same applies in practically the
same way to alien Germans and alien Italians but due to the large number
of Japanese in the State of California (approximately 93,000), larger than
any other State in the Union, and the very definite war consciousness of the
people of California, as far as pertains to the Japanese participation in the
war, the question of the alien Japanese and all Japanese presents a problem
in control, separate and distinct from that of the German and Italian.’’
6 Chan, 124. On 13 April 1943, General Dewitt defended the internment be-
fore a congressional committee (Testimony before House Naval Affairs Sub-
committee, 13 April 1943, nars, Record Group 338, cwric 1725–28):

notes to chapter two 243

 general dewitt: I have the mission of defending this coast and
securing vital installations. The danger of the Japanese was, and is
now,—if they are permitted to come back—espionage and sabo-
tage. It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen, he
is still Japanese. American citizenship does not necessarily deter-
mine loyalty.
mr. bates: You draw a distinction between Japanese and Italians and
Germans? We have a great number of Italians and Germans and
we think they are fine citizens. There may be exceptions.
general dewitt: You needn’t worry about the Italians at all except in
certain cases. Also, the same for the Germans except in individual
cases. But we must worry about the Japanese all the time until he
is wiped off the map. Sabotage and espionage will make problems
as long as he is allowed in this area—problems which I don’t want
to have to worry about.

7 This quotation is taken from the television adaptation of Jeanne Wakatsuki

Houston and James D. Houston’s Farewell to Manzanar (1973), which was
broadcast on 11 March 1976 on nbc. It is quoted in Darrell Y. Hamamoto,
Monitored Peril: Asian Americans and the Politics of TV Representation (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 67.
8 Chan, Asian Americans, 136.
9 Arguing on behalf of the government and mandatory internment, the U.S.
solicitor general stressed the ‘‘preventive’’ aspects of detention, which was
being ‘‘undertaken to protect persons of Japanese ancestry from hostile pub-
lic reception and to prevent potential racial outbreaks in society at large’’
(quoted in ibid., 138).
10 Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944). Sanda Mayzaw Lwin, at
Columbia University, wrote a 1999 dissertation, ‘‘The Constitution of Asian
America,’’ in which she offers a notable analysis of the Korematsu case and
John Okada’s No-No Boy.
11 ‘‘How to Tell Your Friends from the Japs,’’ Time, 22 December 1941, 33; ‘‘How
to Tell Japs from the Chinese: Angry Citizens Victimize Allies with Emo-
tional Outburst at Enemy,’’ Life, 22 December 1941, 81–82.
12 The visual policing of the Japanese American racial image during World
War II should not be characterized as an anomalous historical occurrence,
the exigent result of war panic. This is an optic regime that not only affects
all Americans of Asian descent but continues to persist in contemporary
American society.One of the most alarming recent cases of this was the 1982
murder of the Chinese American Vincent Chin, who was beaten to death by
two unemployed Detroit autoworkers who mistakenly assumed that he was
Japanese. See William Wei’s account of the murder of Vincent Chin in The
Asian American Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993);
and Christine Choy’s and Renee Tajima-Pena’s documentary film Who Killed
Vincent Chin? (New York: Filmmakers Library, 1988).

244 notes to chapter two

 13 Homi Bhabha, ‘‘The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination, and the
Discourse of Colonialism,’’ in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge,
1994), 66.
14 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1996), 18–19.
15 Writing about what Evelynn Hammonds terms the ‘‘politics of articulation,’’
Ann Pellegrini makes the following remarks about the political theater of
Anna Deveare Smith: ‘‘However tempting it might be to counter ‘negative’
images of blackness with ‘positive’ images, this political and psychological
response to the deprivations of being identified from without cannot go all
the distance. We can no more predict what actions or identifications ‘posi-
tive’ representations will give rise to than we can be certain to capture the
all of us in ‘our’ would-be positive images. Can any campaign for ‘positive’
images reckon with the unconscious and its unpredictable uptake of ‘the’
image? Will ‘our’ images be any less normalizing than ‘theirs’?’’ See Ann
Pellegrini, Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (New
York: Routledge, 1997), 81.
16 Lonny Kaneko, ‘‘The Shoyu Kid,’’ Amerasia Journal 3.2 (1976): 1–9. The story
is reprinted in Jeffrey Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and
Shawn Hsu Wong, eds., The Big Aiiieeeee: An Anthology of Chinese American
and Japanese American Literature (New York: Meridian, 1991), 304–13.
17 Frank Chin, in particular, often writes about white American male cine-
matic idols. In addition to Donald Duk, see his novel on Hollywood images,
Gunga Din Highway (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1994); and his short
story ‘‘Riding the Rails with Chickencoop Slim,’’ Greenfield Review 6.1–2
(1977): 80–89.
18 Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis,
trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973), 331–33.
19 Jacques Lacan, ‘‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as
Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,’’ in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 1–7.
20 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II, The Ego in Freud’s
Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli
(New York: Norton, 1991), 54.
21 Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge,
1996), 9–37. Silverman cites Freud’s assertion that the ego is ‘‘first and fore-
most a bodily ego’’ to conclude that ‘‘our experience of ‘self ’ is always cir-
cumscribed by and derived from the body’’ (9). It is through this brief but
provocative statement in The Ego and the Id—as well as through a footnote
in the body of its text describing the ego as derived from bodily sensations—
that Silverman argues for not only a specular but a bodily (or ‘‘sensational’’)
theory of the ego. Freud’s states in his footnote that ‘‘the ego is ultimately
derived from bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the sur-
face of the body. It may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the surface
of the body, besides, as we have seen above, representing the superficies

notes to chapter two 245

 of the mental apparatus’’ (Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, in The Stan-
dard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James
Strachey [London: Hogarth, 1955], 19:26). Indeed, Lacan’s theory of the mir-
ror stage is commonly seen as the conceptual elaboration of the second part
of this footnote, that the ego must ‘‘be regarded as a mental projection of
the surface of the body.’’
22 Freud, Ego, 26.
23 As such, the imago must be understood as more than a mere reflection
of the infant’s specular corporeal outline; it is fundamentally an (unattain-
able) image of anticipated unity—what Jane Gallop has labeled, borrowing
a grammatical term, ‘‘the future perfect.’’ See Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 81.
24 Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans. Douglas Brick
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 49.
25 See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans.
Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1981), for his discussion of screen, look,
and gaze. For an explication of these three Lacanian concepts, see Kaja
Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992),
125–56.
26 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, Seminar XI, 106. Silverman argues in
Threshold, chap. 4, that the gaze has for the past hundred years found in the
camera its most influential metaphor. See also Jonathan Crary, Techniques
of the Observer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990).
27 Silverman, Threshold, 10.
28 See Alan Read, The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representa-
tion (Seattle: Bay Press, 1996); Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York:
Routledge, 1995); and Bhabha, The Location of Culture.
29 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New
York: Grove, 1967), 109–10.
30 Two Lies, dir. Pamela Tom, UCLA Film School, Los Angeles, 1989. For a
guide to independent Asian American cinema, see Russell Leong, ed., Mov-
ing the Image: Independent Asian Pacific American Media Arts (Los Angeles:
Asian American Studies Center, UCLA, 1991).
31 See Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1953); and Rea Tajiri’s film Strawberry Fields (Open City Films, New York,
1997), for eloquent testimonies to this purging of Japanese artifacts.
32 The ‘‘No-No boy’’ phenomenon, so well documented in John Okada’s novel
No-No Boy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, [1957] 1979), refers to
President Roosevelt’s 29 January 1943 directive offering interned Japanese
American males the chance to volunteer for military combat. Prior to his
induction, however, each internee first needed to submit to a loyalty oath,
which was administered by military recruiters in the camps.
Questions 27 and 28 of the loyalty questionnaire became the ultimate
litmus test for acceptable political allegiance and national identity: ‘‘Are
you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat

246 notes to chapter two

 duty, wherever ordered? Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United
States of America and forswear any form of allegiance to the Japanese Em-
peror of any other foreign power or organization?’’ Sanda Mayzaw Lwin
points out that for ‘‘Issei, Japanese-born U.S. residents whose ‘ineradicable
brownness’ had precluded them from becoming citizens because of the
1790 ‘whites-only’ naturalization law—and the alternate naturalization req-
uisite for ‘African’ blood—to answer ‘yes’ would mean to renounce the one
form of citizenship they possessed and thus render themselves stateless. For
Nisei, American-born citizens of Japanese ancestry, the question assumed
that their loyalties were already divided, and thus already interpellated them
as treasonable subjects from the onset’’ (107). From a slightly different angle,
the first question is ironic, to say the least, asking one to serve the nation
even as one’s constitutional rights have been abrogated and one has been
jailed by the government. The second question is a no-win proposition. An-
swering yes or no served only to confirm the respondent as a disloyal sub-
ject, assuming an initial or subsequently forsworn allegiance to the Japanese
emperor.
Nevertheless, answering yes to both questions provided the burden of
proof necessary for military induction. Answering no confirmed what the
U.S. government had suspected all along—that the presence of Japanese
American bodies on national soil posed a dangerous threat to national secu-
rity. This questionnaire, cast as a positive affirmation of one’s allegiance to
the nation, in fact, becomes an exercise in what Althusser terms ‘‘interpella-
tion’’ and the production of bad subjects. See Louis Althusser, ‘‘Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses,’’ in ‘‘Lenin and Philosophy’’ and Other Essays,
trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–86. Put
otherwise, the loyalty questionnaire might be described less as a juridical
mechanism proving one’s loyalty and more as a punitive legal exercise pro-
ducing one’s presumed treason.
See Leslie T. Hatamiya, Righting a Wrong: Japanese Americans and the Pas-
sage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1993); and David O’Brien and Stephen S. Fugita, The Japanese American Ex-
perience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
33 Notice, of course, that all the Japanese Americans incarcerated in Minidoka
are literally prisoners of war, and all are under suspicion of espionage. This
ironic disavowal on the part of the three boys results in increasing psychic
pressure as the story progresses.
Here I use the term abject in reference to its social, as well as its psycho-
analytic, connotations. The abject signifies socially that devalued zone out-
side of subjecthood proper that nevertheless sustains sociality as a silenced
but constitutive part of it. Psychoanalytically, it signifies that domain—
Lacan’s ‘‘real’’—foreclosed through the barring of the primary signifier and
the production of an unconscious and its prohibitions. See Judith Butler,
Bodies That Matter, On the Discursive Limits of ‘‘Sex’’ (New York: Routledge,
1993) as well as her ‘‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination,’’ in The Les-

notes to chapter two 247

 bian and Gay Studies Reader, eds. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and
David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 307–20. See also Julia
Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1982); and Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis’s entry on ‘‘fore-
closure’’ in The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith
(New York: Norton, 1973), 166–69, for a further elaboration of the abject.
34 Homi Bhabha, ‘‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Dis-
course,’’ October 28 (1984): 130; Bhabha’s emphasis.
35 See Althusser, ‘‘Ideology,’’ 127–186.
36 See Jacques Lacan, ‘‘Some Reflections on the Ego,’’ International Journal of
Psycho-Analysis 34 (1953): 11–17.
37 See Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1989).
38 The example of Sartre’s voyeur is invoked in Lacan, Four Fundamental Con-
cepts, 84.
39 Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to
Extravagance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 100.
40 Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 102. In The Language
of Psycho-Analysis, Laplanche and Pontalis mention three primal fantasies,
calling them original fantasies ( fantasmes originaires) or fantasies of origin
( fantasmes des origines): the primal scene, the seduction scene, and the cas-
tration scene. These three fantasies of origin, taken together, constitute an
entire Oedipal history of the subject. Like myths, they claim to provide a rep-
resentation of, and a solution to, the major enigmas that confront the child:
‘‘In the ‘primal scene,’ it is the origin of the subject that is represented; in
seduction phantasies, it is the origin or emergence of sexuality; in castration
phantasies, the origin of the distinction between the sexes’’ (332).
41 The ‘‘spying’’ infant cannot be in an actively voyeuristic position. The in-
fant by definition occupies a passive role precisely because of its inability to
understand or control the events it witnesses.
42 Lee Edelman, ‘‘Seeing Things: Representation, the Scene of Surveillance,
and the Spectacle of Gay Male Sex,’’ in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theo-
ries, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 95.
43 Silverman, Male Subjectivity, 164.
44 Freud coined the term stereotype plate in his earliest writings in The Interpre-
tation of Dreams (Standard Edition, vols. 4, 5). He returns repeatedly to this
concept, most notably in ‘‘The Dynamics of Transference’’ (Standard Edi-
tion, 12:99–100). He discusses the concept of the readymade in chapter 6
of The Interpretation of Dreams.
45 Sigmund Freud, ‘‘Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Dis-
tinction between the Sexes,’’ in ibid., 19:241–60.
46 Silverman, Male Subjectivity, 165.
47 Sigmund Freud, ‘‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (The ‘Wolf
Man’),’’ in Freud, Standard Edition, 17:1–122.

248 notes to chapter two

48 Lee Edelman writes: ‘‘Insofar as the participants in the primal scene are as
yet undifferentiated sexually to the infant who observes them—both, that
is, in the logic of Freudian theory, are seen as phallic—it is no small won-
der that he has little difficulty in experiencing an identification with each of
their positions; but insofar as that scene must thereafter bear traces of sod-
omitical phantasy and homosexual desire, it is small wonder that Freud has
great difficulty indeed in allowing himself or his psychoanalytic practice to
be implicated in this scene at all’’ (‘‘Seeing Things,’’ 101).
49 Ibid. Laplanche and Pontalis in Language define the primal scene as a ‘‘scene
of sexual intercourse between the parents which the child observes, or infers
on the basis of certain indications, and phantasies. It is generally interpreted
by the child as an act of violence on the part of the father’’ (335). They go on
to state the ‘‘the act of coitus is understood by the child as an aggression by
the father in a sado-masochistic relationship; secondly, the scene gives rise
to sexual excitation in the child while at the same time providing a basis of
castration anxiety; thirdly, the child interprets what is going on, within the
framework of an infantile sexual theory, as anal coitus’’ (335).
50 The emasculation of the Asian American male—a youngster in this in-
stance—follows the strict logic of French active / Greek passive.
51 Teresa de Lauretis, The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 82–83.
52 See also the installation work of artist Ik Joong Kang. At the Whitney Mu-
seum of American Art, Kang recently installed ‘‘8490 Days of Memory,’’ a
work with 8,490 squares of chocolate hung on foil-covered walls. This same
number corresponds to the polished clear plastic cubes amassed on the floor
below, under the feet of a solid chocolate-covered Douglas MacArthur. Each
three-inch square on the wall consists of an insignia from the U.S. Army
cast in relief. Each three-inch cube on the floor contains a memento from
Kang’s childhood—marbles, wind-up toys, and dice preserved in resin.
53 See R. Zamora Linmark, Rolling the R’s (New York: Kaya Production, 1995);
Shyam Selvadurai, Funny Boy (New York: Morrow, 1994); and Norman
Wong, Cultural Revolution (New York: Persea, 1994).
54 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘‘How to Bring Your Kids up Gay: The War on Ef-
feminate Boys,’’ in Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 161.
55 For a feminist critique of Fanon, see Fuss, Identification Papers, as well as
Gwen Bergner, ‘‘Who Is That Masked Woman? or the Role of Gender in
Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks,’’ PMLA 110.1 (January 1995): 75–88. For
a queer critique of Fanon, see Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay
Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994), 42–75.
56 Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage, 1983), 200.

three Heterosexuality in the Face of Whiteness

1 For instance, Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (New York: Random House,
1952); Christine Choy’s Out in Silence (San Francisco: National Asian Ameri-

notes to chapter three 249

 can Telecommunications Association, 1994), a documentary on aids in the
Asian Pacific American community; and act up’s chant of queer affirma-
tion and protest, ‘‘We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!’’ are examples that
collectively emphasize—even demand—the need for the disenfranchised
subject to emerge into the domain of visibility and speech.
2 Kobena Mercer, ‘‘Skin Head Sex Thing,’’ in How Do I Look, ed. Bad Object
Choices (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), 206. See also ‘‘White Like Who? Notes
on the Other Race,’’ a special issue of the Village Voice, 18 May 1993, 24–41.
This special issue is a compendium of articles examining whiteness as an
invisible racial identity.
3 Ping-hui Liao’s article, ‘‘ ‘Of Writing Words for Music Which Is Already
Made’: Madama Butterfly, Turandot, and Orientalism,’’ Cultural Critique 16
(fall 1990): 31–59, provides an excellent summary of Puccini’s opera and its
critical antecedents. According to Liao, the opera was originally based upon
a drama, Naughty Anthony, written by American playwright David Belasco
(see Six Plays: Madame Butterfly, Du Barry, The Darling of the Gods, Adrea,
The Girl of the Golden West, The Return of Peter Grimm [Boston: Little Brown,
1928]). Belasco adapted the story from a novella by American author John
Luther Long (see Madame Butterfly, Purple Eyes, A Gentleman of Japan and
a Lady, Kito, Glory [New York: Century, 1898]). The original story line is ap-
parently based on the actual suicide of a Japanese geisha, a story notably
recorded by the French writer Pierre Loti in Madame Chrysanthème (Paris:
Calmann-Levy, [1887] 1922).
4 David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly (New York: Plume, 1988), 91.
5 See, for example, Gabrielle Cody’s article, ‘‘David Hwang’s M. Butterfly: Per-
petuating the Misogynist Myth,’’ Theatre 20.2 (spring 1989): 24–27; and
John Louis DiGaetani’s interview with the playwright, ‘‘M. Butterfly: An
Interview with David Henry Hwang,’’ Drama Review 33.3 (fall 1989): 141–53.
6 Majorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New
York: Harper Perennial, 1992), 243; Garber’s emphasis.
7 Here Garber quotes Hwang.
8 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘‘Sex,’’ (New York:
Routledge, 1993), 18; Butler’s emphasis.
9 Ibid., 182; my emphasis.
10 Ibid.
11 Eve Sedgwick, ‘‘White Glasses,’’ in Tendencies (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1993), 255.
12 Frank Rich, ‘‘M. Butterfly: A Story of a Strange Love, Conflict, and Betrayal,’’
New York Times, 21 March 1988, C13.
13 Moira Hodgson, ‘‘M. Butterfly,’’ Nation, 23 April 1988, 577.
14 See Miriam Horn’s review of M. Butterfly, ‘‘The Mesmerizing Power of Racial
Myths,’’ U.S. News and World Report, 28 March 1988, 52–53. In this article,
Horn compares Hwang to African American film director Spike Lee. For an
excellent summary of the material conditions prohibiting the Asian Ameri-
can artist from full participation in the American mainstream of artistic

250 notes to chapter three

 production, see Sau-ling Cynthia Wong’s Reading Asian American Litera-
ture: From Necessity to Extravagance (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1993), chap. 4.
15 John Simon, ‘‘Finding Your Song,’’ New York, 11 April 1988, 117.
16 In ‘‘An Actor Despairs,’’ New York, 24 October 1988, 145–46, which Simon
wrote after M. Butterfly won the Tony Award, he retracts his earlier state-
ment and responds to the issue of white masculinity: ‘‘While sharing in the
shame and heartbreak of René Gallimard as embarrassingly well conveyed
by Lithgow, I let the quality of the play slip out of my focus’’ (146). For an
analysis of Simon’s admission of a vexed (dis)identification with Gallimard’s
failed white manhood, see Angela Pao, ‘‘The Critic and the Butterfly: Socio-
cultural Contexts and the Reception of David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly,’’
Amerasia Journal 18.3 (1992): 1–16.
17 For a similar debate on the use of yellowface by a white actor, see Yoko Yoshi-
kawa’s analysis of the Miss Saigon controversy, ‘‘The Heat Is on Miss Sai-
gon Coalition: Organizing across Race and Sexuality,’’ in The State of Asian
America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s, ed. Karin Aguilar–San Juan
(Boston: South End, 1994), 275–94.
18 Sigmund Freud, ‘‘The Dissection of the Psychical Personality,’’ in The Stan-
dard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James
Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955), 22:79.
19 Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, in Freud, Standard Edition, 19:18.
20 Sigmund Freud, ‘‘Splitting of the Ego in the Defensive Process,’’ in Freud,
Standard Edition, 23:275.
21 Ibid., 276.
22 I place castration in quotation marks since one can technically be castrated
only when one loses something that one once had. The idea of female cas-
tration is problematic, since the woman never had a penis to lose in the first
place. Freud’s conflation of female penis envy (and the notion of clitoris as
an inferior penis) with loss and castration is both slippery and overdeter-
mined. I thank David Hirsch for discussing this issue with me.
23 Freud, ‘‘Splitting of the Ego,’’ 277.
24 Ibid., 275–76.
25 Indeed, M. Butterfly was based on the actual story of a low-level attaché in the
French Foreign Service, Bernard Boursicot, and a Chinese opera diva, Shi
Pei Pu, who had an on-again, off-again affair for nearly eighteen years (from
about 1965 to 1983). Shi Pei Pu regularly dressed as a man but confided to
Boursicot that she was, in fact, a woman who had been raised as a boy by her
family. During the course of their relationship, Boursicot not only ‘‘sired’’ a
son but passed on several hundred documents from the French embassies
in Beijing and Ulan Bator, Mongolia, to the Chinese authorities. In 1983,
after Boursicot had returned and Shi Pei Pu had emigrated to France, they
were both charged with espionage. During various medical examinations re-
sulting from the espionage charges, French officials discovered that Shi Pei
Pu was a man, despite Boursicot’s belief to the contrary. In 1987, Boursicot

notes to chapter three 251

 and Shi Pei Pu were given presidential pardons due to the inconsequential
nature of the stolen documents as well as the embarrassment this unimpor-
tant legal case caused the Chinese and French governments. The story of
Boursicot and Shi Pei Pu is chronicled by Joyce Wadler in Liaison (New York:
Bantam, 1993).
26 See Robert J. Corber, Homosexuality in Cold War America (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1997); and Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Lit-
erary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994), esp. chap. 9.
27 Commenting on this crossing of homosexuality and racialization, Edel-
man notes in Homographesis that ‘‘the historical pressure upon the post-
war American national self-image found displaced articulation in the phobic
positioning of homosexual activity as the proximate cause of perceived dan-
ger to the nation at a time of unprecedented concern about the possibility of
national—and global—destruction. Revising late nineteenth-century argu-
ments about racial degeneration and bringing them to bear upon mid-
twentieth-century social and political conflicts, historically deployed read-
ings envisioning male homosexuality in terms of the abjection associated
with the men’s room could complain of the threat homosexuality posed to
the continuity of civilization itself ’’ (168).
28 I do, of course, make ironic reference to this abduction of Gallimard into
heterosexuality and whiteness over and against the hysterical accusations of
those who would say that homosexuality is given over to the logic of recruit-
ment in its ‘‘reproductive’’ affiliative capacities.
29 Sigmund Freud, ‘‘Fetishism,’’ in Freud, Standard Edition, 21:154.
30 It is interesting to note that Freud ends ‘‘Fetishism’’ with a gesture toward a
race-psychological parallel to this psychic mechanism of denial and projec-
tion: the Chinese custom of foot binding, of ‘‘mutilating the female foot and
then revering it like a fetish after it has been mutilated’’ (157). ‘‘The Chinese
male wants to thank the woman for having submitted to being castrated’’
(157), Freud claims. Here, he seems to raise this racial example only to fur-
ther his assertions of fetishism’s role in the anatomical distinction between
the (white) sexes.
31 Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge,
1996), 31.
32 Here I am allowing a certain slippage from Asian to Asian American not
only because Hwang’s text functions within the politics of Asian America
but also because, to many a Western eye, Asians and Asian Americans all
‘‘look alike.’’
33 Richard Fung, ‘‘Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Porn
Video,’’ in How Do I Look? ed. Bad Object Choices (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991),
153.
34 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1996), 151.
35 Kaja Silverman, ‘‘The Lacanian Phallus,’’ differences: A Journal of Feminist
Cultural Studies 4.1 (spring 1992): 113.

252 notes to chapter three

36 This scene suggests that Renée neutralizes the gender of the phallus. As
Jane Gallop notes in Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985),
the typographical error concerning the definite article la, which marks the
‘‘phallus’’ in the French publication of Lacan’s ‘‘La Signification du phallus,’’
speaks to a breakdown in symbolic structuration: ‘‘If ‘the phallic signifier
is intrinsically neutral,’ then the signifier ‘phallus,’ the word in language,
might be either feminine or masculine, epicene’’ (137).
37 Eve Sedgwick, for example, argues that the homosocial order annexes the
figure of woman as the conduit through which homosexual desire is chan-
neled. See Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
38 Freud, ‘‘Fetishism,’’ 154.
39 Ibid., 153.
40 See Freud’s discussion of anaclitic and narcissistic love in ‘‘On Narcissism:
An Introduction,’’ in Freud, Standard Edition, 14:87–91. In this essay, Freud
names homosexuals, females, children, cats, and criminals as exemplary
narcissists. See also Judith Butler’s excellent discussion of normative hetero-
sexuality as a melancholic renunciation of homosexual desire in Gender
Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1993),
57–72 and The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1997), 132–50.
41 A suitable parallel can be drawn from Freud’s admonition in The Ego and the
Id that, although the superego comes about through an abjection of homo-
sexuality, it cannot ultimately enforce this prohibition, from which it is pro-
duced.
42 Earl Jackson Jr., ‘‘Scandalous Subjects: Robert Glück’s Embodied Narra-
tives,’’ differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 3.2 (summer 1991):
121.
43 In an earlier reading of the drama, I explored the material conditions around
which Rice Queens might choose to pass. The identitarian bent with which
I approached this first reading of M. Butterfly remains crucial in debates
on identity-based politics. See my ‘‘In the Shadows of a Diva: Committing
Homosexuality in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly,’’ Amerasia Journal 20.1
(1994): 93–116. I hope that the current reading of M. Butterfly provides a
supplementary angle from which to merge my arguments on the material
and psychoanalytic levels.
44 Freud, ‘‘Fetishism,’’ 156.
45 Mark Chiang, ‘‘A White Thing: Fetishism and Paranoia in the Nation,’’ paper
presented at the annual conference of the Association of Asian American
Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, April 1994, 5. I thank Mark
Chiang for allowing me to quote from his manuscript.
46 Lacan, in ‘‘Signification of the Phallus’’ (in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan
Sheridan [New York: Norton, 1977], 281–91), states: ‘‘But one may, simply
by reference to the function of the phallus, indicate the structures that will
govern the relations between the sexes.

notes to chapter three 253

 ‘‘Let us say that these relations will turn around a ‘to be’ and a ‘to have,’
which, by referring to a signifier, the phallus, have the opposed effect, on
the one hand, of giving reality to the subject in this signifier, and, on the
other, of derealizing the relations to be signified’’ (289).
47 As Lacan points out: ‘‘It should not be forgotten that the organ [the penis]
that assumes this signifying function [of the phallus] takes on the value of
a fetish’’ (ibid., 290).
48 Freud, ‘‘Splitting of the Ego,’’ 276.

f ou r Male Hysteria—Real and Imagined—in

Eat a Bowl of Tea and Pangs of Love
1 Some prominent female hysterics in Asian American literature include
Miss Sasagawara in Hisaye Yamamoto’s ‘‘The Legend of Miss Sasagawara,’’
in Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories (Latham, NY: Kitchen Table/Women
of Color Press, 1988), 20–33; Hualing Nieh’s split narrator Mulberry/Peach
in Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China, trans. Jane Parish Yang with
Linda Lappin (Boston: Beacon, 1981); the narrator in Wendy Law-Yone’s The
Coffin Tree (Boston: Beacon, 1983); and Jessica Hagedorn’s Baby Alacran in
Dogeaters (New York: Pantheon, 1990).
2 Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among
Ghosts (New York: Vintage, [1976] 1989), 181–82.
3 Louis Chu, Eat a Bowl of Tea (New York: Lyle Stuart, [1961] 1990); David
Wong Louie, Pangs of Love (New York: Knopf, 1991).
4 For a brief overview of the history of female hysteria, see Charles Bern-
heimer, ‘‘Introduction: Part One,’’ in In Dora’s Case: Freud—Hysteria—Femi-
nism, eds. Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane, 2d ed. (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1985) 1–18. For a more detailed history of female
hysteria, see Ilza Vieth’s Hysteria: The History of a Disease (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1965). For a psychoanalytic account of female hysteria,
see Monique David-Menard’s Hysteria from Freud to Lacan: Body and Lan-
guage in Psychoanalysis, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1989).
5 Magnuson Act, Act of 17 December 1943, chap. 344, §1, 57 Stat. 600; and
War Brides Act, Act of 28 December 1945, Pub. L. No. 271, 59 Stat. 659.
Sucheng Chan notes that the 1945 War Brides Act, which ‘‘had initially ex-
cluded veterans of Asian ancestry, was amended in 1947 to include them.
That fact enabled GIs to marry in Asia and to bring their brides back to the
United States, where they started families. From the late 1940s through the
1950s and the first half of the 1960s, the number of Asian women entering
the country exceeded the number of men.’’ Asian Americans: An Interpretive
History (Boston: Twayne, 1991), 140.
6 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘‘Scattered Speculations on the Question of Cul-
ture Studies,’’ in Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge,
1993), 255–84; ‘‘Culture,’’ in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a His-

254 notes to chapter four

 tory of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999),
312–421. Spivak defines the ‘‘new immigrant’’ in relation to the continuing
influx of immigrants since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1 Octo-
ber 1965—as those ‘‘groups escaping decolonization one way or the other’’
(393). New immigrant refers primarily to immigrants from Asia, the Carib-
bean, Central America, and Mexico. See also Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On
Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996);
and Aiwha Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logic of Transnationality
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).
7 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 113.
8 See Bernheimer, ‘‘Introduction,’’ on which the following historical summary
of female hysteria draws.
9 Gerard Wajeman, Le Maître et l’hystérique (Paris: Navarin, 1982), 127.
10 Even as late as 1855, for instance, the Dictionnaire de médecine by Littré and
Robin continued to deny the possibility of a male diagnosis of hysteria: ‘‘If
one does not want to confuse hysteria with a great many other illnesses,
one cannot locate the originary locus of this affliction in the brain. One can
also not accept that such hysteria could be observed in the male sex: hyste-
ria is an illness that is peculiar to the female sex’’ (Emile Littré and Albert
Robin, Dictionnaire de médecine [Paris: J. B. Baillière, 1855]). It was not until
1878, with the publication of the fully revised fourteenth edition of the Dic-
tionnaire de médecine, that this entry was emended, leaving out the claim
that hysteria could not be observed in the male sex. Quoted in Ursula Link-
Herr, ‘‘ ‘Male Hysteria’: A Discourse Analysis,’’ Cultural Critique 15 (spring
1990): 203.
11 See Jean-Martin Charcot, Lectures on the Diseases of the Nervous System, trans.
George Sigerson (London: New Syndenham Society, 1877). See also Mark S.
Micale, ‘‘Charcot and the Idea of Hysteria in the Male: Gender, Mental Sci-
ence, and Medical Diagnosis in Late Nineteenth-Century France,’’ Medical
History 34 (1990): 363–411.
12 Sigmund Freud, ‘‘Observation of a Severe Case of Hemi-Anaesthesia in a
Hysterical Male,’’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955), 1: 25. In-
deed, Freud’s first medical lecture upon returning to Vienna from Charcot’s
clinic specifically concerned male rather than female hysteria. Daniel Boya-
rin writes that it is ‘‘well known that what most aroused the ire of the Vien-
nese medical audience that heard Freud’s first lecture upon returning from
Charcot was the fact that it was about male hysteria’’ (‘‘Freud’s Baby, Fleiss’s
Maybe: Homophobia, Anti-Semitism, and the Invention of the Oedipus,’’
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 2.1–2 [1995]: 118; Boyarin’s em-
phasis).
13 Jacques Lacan, ‘‘Kanzer Seminar at Yale University,’’ trans. Barbara Johnson
(1975), quoted in Shoshana Felman, What Does a Woman Want? Reading and
Sexual Difference (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993), 101.
14 Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, ‘‘On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysteri-

notes to chapter four 255

 cal Phenomena: Preliminary Communication,’’ in Studies on Hysteria, trans.
James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1961), 7.
15 Ibid. Freud tells us that the most common memories of sexual seduction
are female reminiscences of paternal seduction. It was the high incidence
of female patients claiming seduction by the father that led Freud to posit
the category of false, or screen, memories.
16 Ibid., 86.
17 Jacqueline Rose, ‘‘Dora: Fragment of an Analysis,’’ in Bernheimer and
Kahane, In Dora’s Case, 138.
18 See Freud, Standard Edition, 1:262, in which Freud describes himself as a
male hysteric.
19 For a history of male hysteria and Jewish identity, see Sander Gilman, The
Case of Sigmund Freud: Medicine and Identity at the Fin de Siècle (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993; Jonathan Geller, ‘‘ ‘A Glance on the
Nose’: Freud’s Inscription of Jewish Difference,’’ American Imago 49 (1992):
427–44; and Ann Pellegrini, Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis,
Staging Race (New York: Routledge, 1997). For an analysis of male hyste-
ria in relation to the traumas of modernity and industrialization, see Neil
Hertz, ‘‘Medusa’s Head: Male Hysteria under Political Pressure,’’ Represen-
tations 4 (fall 1983): 26–54; Lynne Kirby, ‘‘Male Hysteria and Early Cinema,’’
Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism and Film Theory 17 (1988): 113–31;
Paul Smith, Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1993); and Paul Smith, ‘‘Vas,’’ Camera Obscura: A Jour-
nal of Feminism and Film Theory 17 (1988): 89–111.
20 See Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, ‘‘The Untenable,’’ in Bernhei-
mer and Kahane, In Dora’s Case, 276–93. This essay is a dialogue between
Cixous and Clément. As such, subsequent citations from this dialogue will
be attributed to the specific speaker.
21 Philip Rieff, Introduction to Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, ed. Philip
Rieff (New York: Collier, 1963), 10.
22 In an increasingly industrial society, Bernheimer comments in ‘‘Introduc-
tion,’’ ‘‘the Victorian woman was looked up to as representative of the purity,
order, and serenity of earlier, less anxious times. Gentle, submissive, naive,
and good, she was also expected to be strong in her righteousness, perfectly
controlled in her decorous conduct, and skilled in her domestic manage-
rial capacities. Faced with this conflict, numerous Victorian women devel-
oped unconscious defensive strategies whereby they disavowed the intense
anger and aggressive impulses for which the culture gave them no outlet.
Thus were generated the conversion reactions, prevalent throughout the
latter part of the nineteenth century, whereby women transformed their
repressed hostility and desire into physical symptoms that simultaneously
acknowledged and disowned those feelings’’ (5–6).
23 In another respect, this refusal is politically ambivalent insofar as it is at least
partly, if not mostly, unconscious. As such, this protest paradoxically marks
the inability to protest as well.

256 notes to chapter four

24 Jane Gallop, ‘‘Keys to Dora,’’ in Bernheimer and Kahane, In Dora’s Case, 203.
25 See Louis Althusser, ‘‘Lenin and Philosophy’’ and Other Essays, trans. Ben
Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 174–75.
26 Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor
(New York: Verso, 1991), 101.
27 Quoted in Henry Abelove, ‘‘Freud, Male Homosexuality, and the Ameri-
cans,’’ in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle
Aina Barale, and David Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 387.
28 Smith, ‘‘Vas,’’ 109.
29 Smith, Clint Eastwood, 170.
30 Link-Herr, ‘‘Male Hysteria,’’ 216.
31 Jane Gallop offers an incisive analysis of class difference in female hysteria.
She writes: ‘‘One of psychoanalysis’s consistent errors is to reduce every-
thing to a family paradigm. Sociopolitical questions are always brought back
to the model father–mother–child. Class conflict and revolution are under-
stood as a repetition of parent–child relations. This has always been the per-
nicious apoliticism of psychoanalysis. It has also been hard to argue against
without totally rejecting psychoanalysis, since it is based upon the funda-
mental notion that everything we do as adults must repeat some infantile
wish, and for most of us, the infantile world was the family. What is nec-
essary to get beyond the dilemma is a recognition that the closed, cellular
model of the family used in such psychoanalytic thinking is an idealization,
a secondary revision of the family. The family never was, in any of Freud’s
texts, completely closed off from questions of economic class. And the most
insistent locus of that intrusion into the family circle (intrusion of the sym-
bolic into the imaginary) is the maid/governess/nurse. As Cixous says, ‘She
is the hole in the social cell’ ’’ (‘‘Keys,’’ 213).
32 The racial subject as the ‘‘native question’’ is expressed in Žižek’s The Sub-
lime Object of Ideology when the author observes that the mainstream media’s
coverage of the 1988 presidential election insistently configured Jesse Jack-
son’s initial political successes by asking ‘‘What does Jackson really want?’’
Žižek continues: ‘‘The conclusion that we are here dealing with racism is
further confirmed by the fact that this ‘Che vuoi?’ erupts most violently in
the purest, so to say distilled form of racism, in anti-Semitism: in the anti-
Semitic perspective, the Jew is precisely a person about whom it is never
clear ‘what he really wants’—that is, his actions are always suspected of
being guided by some hidden motives’’ (114).
33 The first immigration exclusion law directed against Chinese immigrants
was passed in 1882 (Chinese Exclusion Act, chap. 126, 22 Stat. 58). Exclusion
was subsequently renewed by Congress as well as extended to other Asian
immigrant groups in 1892 (Act of 5 May 1892, chap. 60, 27 Stat. 25); 1902
(Act of 29 April 1902, chap. 641, 32 Stat. 176); and 1917 (Act of 5 February
1917, chap. 29, 39 Stat. 874). It was extended indefinitely in 1924 (Immigra-
tion Act of 1924, chap. 190, §131, 104 Stat. 4978). In addition, the Tydings-
McDuffie Act (Act of 24 March 1934, 48 Stat. 456) restricted Filipino immi-

notes to chapter four 257

 gration to fifty individuals a year. It was not until 1943, in response to a politi-
cal and military alliance between China and the United States during World
War II, that Congress repealed these discriminatory laws and legally paved
the way for Chinese women to enter the country with the War Brides Act of
1945 (Act of 28 December 1945, Pub. L, No. 271, 59 Stat. 659). For a history
of this exclusion, as well as a description of antimiscegenation laws and laws
barring the entry of Chinese wives (such as the Page Act Law, Act of 18 Feb-
ruary 1875, chap. 80, 18 Stat. 318), see Sucheng Chan’s Asian Americans: An
Interpretive History (Boston: Twayne, 1991); and Bill Ong Hing, Making and
Remaking Asian America through Immigration Policy, 1850–1990 (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1993).
34 Even the suggestion that Ben Loy’s eroded manhood is the result of organic
causes, the dissipated result of too many prostitutes and venereal disease,
takes on a racialized inflection. The prostitutes Ben Loy frequents before
marriage are all white women, their whiteness a metonymic inflection of
the mainstream community that unmans the Chinese American male.
35 Sigmund Freud, ‘‘Femininity,’’ in Freud, Standard Edition, 22:134.
36 Richard Fung, ‘‘Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Porn
Video,’’ in How Do I Look? ed. Bad Object Choices (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991),
153.
37 Eat a Bowl of Tea, dir. Wayne Wang (New York: American Playhouse, 1989).
38 William Shakespeare, Othello, the Moor of Venice (New York: Penguin, 1971).
39 Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic,
and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997), 73. Departing from Sturken, Sanda Mayzaw Lwin writes about Ichiro
and the wounded Kenji in John Okada’s novel No-No Boy: ‘‘Although both
men were born on ‘the dirt of America,’ in Ichiro’s eyes, Kenji’s stump pro-
vides visible proof not only of his military service—but also of his right as
a full-fledged citizen to claim America as his land. Ironically, it is his par-
tial limb—the stump—that Ichiro reads as a sign of full membership in the
U.S. nation.’’ See ‘‘The Constitution of Asian America,’’ Ph.D. diss., Colum-
bia University, 1999, 122. This discussion of the U.S. military also brings to
mind the segregated 442nd regiment of Japanese American soldiers dur-
ing World War II, the most highly decorated battalion and the battalion that
suffered the most casualties.
40 Victor Burgin, In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1996), 130.
41 Edward W. Said, ‘‘Secular Criticism,’’ in The World, the Text, and the Critic
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 17.
42 Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, ‘‘Chinese/Asian American Men in the 1990s: Dis-
placement, Impersonation, Paternity, and Extinction in David Wong Louie’s
Pangs of Love,’’ in Privileging Positions: The Sites of Asian American Studies,
eds. Gary Y. Okihiro, Marilyn Alquizola, Dorothy Fujita Rony, and K. Scott
Wong (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1995), 187–88.
43 Wong uses the original Aiiieeeee! introduction from 1975 to analyze the

258 notes to chapter four

 concept of an ‘‘ever-evolving Asian American culture unencumbered by ex-
pectations of ‘authenticity.’ ’’ In the era of the Asian American model mi-
nority—the era of Asian American citizenship—this promise seems to re-
main unfulfilled. In a current Asian American era no longer under the threat
of biological extinction, the Aiiieeeee! group has insistently turned to the
idea of cultural authenticity and biological purity. Indeed, the publication
of Chin et al.’s The Big Aiiieeeee! in 1991 witnessed the insistent return to
(heterosexual) debates about ‘‘realness’’ and ‘‘fakeness’’ in Asian America, a
topic explored in the epilogue.
44 Jeffery Chan, introduction to the 1979 edition of Eat a Bowl of Tea, 5.
45 Not all of Louie’s short stories are set in the multicultural 1980s, although
nine of eleven are.
46 In fact, the term Chinatown, the ghettoized urban communities that ini-
tially formed in response to racial discrimination, no longer adequately de-
scribe Chinese American demographic patterns. See Timothy Fong’s study
of Monterey Park in The First Suburban Chinatown: The Remaking of Monterey
Park, California (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994).
47 Manini Samarth, ‘‘Affirmations: Speaking the Self into Being,’’ Parnassus
Poetry in Review 17.1 (1992): 99.
48 For an exploration of this dynamic of racial melancholia and assimilation,
see David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, ‘‘A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia,’’
Psychoanalytic Dialogues 10.4 (2000): 667–700.
49 Bob H. Suzuki, ‘‘Education and the Socialization of Asian Americans: A
Revisionist Analysis of the ‘Model Minority’ Thesis,’’ Amerasia Journal 4.2
(1977): 23–51. See also Mari J. Matsuda, ‘‘We Will Not Be Used. Are Asian-
Americans the Racial Bourgeoisie?’’ in Where is Your Body? And Other Essays
on Race, Gender, and the Law (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 149–59.
50 Homi Bhabha, ‘‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Dis-
course,’’ October 28 (spring 1984): 126, 130; Bhabha’s emphasis.

e p i lo g u e Out Here and Over There

1 For a summary of the sojourner and model minority theses, see Sucheng
Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston: Twayne, 1991). It is
worth considering how the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which
facilitated an explosion in Asian American immigration, contributed to the
historical rise of the model-minority myth in the late 1960s. To what extent,
one might ask, does 1965 provide a pivotal moment in which the image of
Asian Americans as ‘‘alien’’ (sojourners, the yellow peril) shifted into a more
common stereotype of Asian Americans as ‘‘whiter than white’’ (the model
minority)? To what extent did this shift occur earlier in relation to Brown v.
Board of Education and its juridical proclamation of a color-blind society?
2 The diaspora debate in Asian American studies is now a heated one, and
the place of transnational issues within the field is the subject of wide de-
liberation. In the late 1990s, the question of diaspora became the ques-

notes to epilogue 259

 tion gripping Asian American studies on its twenty-fifth anniversary in the
academy. This chapter intervenes by exploring how queerness functions in
this debate. For the diaspora debate, see Amerasia Journal 22.1–2 (1995), a
special issue on ‘‘Thinking Theory in Asian American Studies,’’ and Amer-
asia Journal 22.3 (1996), a special issue on ‘‘Transnationalism, Media, and
Asian American Studies.’’ In this chapter, I use diaspora in a rather capacious
manner to encompass several meanings and contemporary phenomena:
the global scattering of peoples of Asian origin; the shifting critical empha-
sis from domestic to global in the study of nationalism and nation-states;
the transnational movement of both economic, cultural, and intellectual
capital; the global commodification of sexuality; the transnational displace-
ment of flexible labor; and the increasing permeability of national borders
through electronic media, communications, and international travel. While
recognizing the historical specificites of these various issues and trends, my
hope is to provide some speculations that may serve to anchor future inves-
tigations of diaspora and queerness in Asian American studies.
3 A quick survey of recent book titles in Asian American studies—includ-
ing my own—illustrates this Asian America phenomenon. For instance, see
Emma Gee, Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America (Los Angeles: Asian
American Studies Center, UCLA, 1976); Roger Daniels, Asian America: Chi-
nese and Japanese in the United States since 1850 (Seattle: University of Wash-
ington Press, 1988); Bill Ong Hing, Making and Remaking Asian America
through Immigration Policy: 1850–1990 (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1993); Karin Aguilar–San Juan, ed., The State of Asian America: Activism
and Resistance in the 1990s (Boston: South End Press, 1994); and Lane Hira-
bayashi, ed., Teaching Asian America: Diversity and the Problem of Commu-
nity (Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997). We might consider the term
Asian America along with spatial terminology in other ethnic studies fields.
Scholars in ethnic studies do not, for example, use the term African America
or Latino/Chicano America with any notable frequency. However, the term
Black America in African American studies and Aztlán in Latino/Chicano
studies may gesture toward a set of concerns similar to those invoked by
Asian America, warranting a more thorough comparison.
4 Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, ‘‘Denationalization Reconsidered: Asian American
Cultural Criticism at a Theoretical Crossroads,’’ Amerasia Journal 21.1–2
(1995): 4. Against this idea of landlessness and psychic dispossession of
home, how might we think about the history of alien-land laws that barred
Asian Americans from owning property and current stereotypes of Asians
and Asian Americans as voracious consumers and collectors of ‘‘prime’’
national real estate?
5 Oscar V. Campomanes, ‘‘Filipinos in the United States and Their Literature
of Exile,’’ in Reading the Literatures of Asian America,’’ eds. Shirley Geok-lin
Lim and Amy Ling (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 51.
6 If social affirmation is unrealizable for queers, then ‘‘in’’ and ‘‘out’’ of the
closet is equally nebulous. The closet becomes an impossibly blurred space

260 notes to epilogue

 of private concern and public regulation. This continual blurring of in and
out—and of public and private space—divests queer subjects of access to
traditional notions of citizenship (e.g., the right to privacy) in a bourgeois
ordering of the nation-state and public sphere. See Jürgen Habermas’s Struc-
tural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bour-
geois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989). See also
Bruce Robbins, ed., The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993), for critical readings of Habermas and the public
sphere in relation to queer and feminist issues.
7 Paris Is Burning, dir. Jennie Livingston (New York: Off-White Productions,
1991).
8 This loss of home is a function not only of queerness but of racism and
poverty. Livingston’s film is exemplary insofar as these three axes of social
difference are highlighted in their multiple crossings.
9 See, for example, Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman, ‘‘Queer Nation-
ality,’’ in Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City:
Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 145–
73; and Lisa Duggan, ‘‘Queering the State,’’ in Lisa Duggan and Nan D.
Hunter, Sex: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture (New York: Routledge,
1995), 179–93.
10 Khachig Tölölyan, ‘‘The Nation-State and Its Others: In Lieu of a Preface,’’
Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1.1 (spring 1991): 4–5.
11 JeeYeun Lee, ‘‘Toward a Queer Korean American Diaspora,’’ in Q & A: Queer
in Asian America, eds. David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1998), 194.
12 See Martin Manalansan, ‘‘In the Shadows of Stonewall: Gay Transnational
Politics and the Diasporic Dilemma,’’ in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow
of Capital, eds. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (Durham: Duke University Press,
1997), 485–505; and Gayatri Gopinath, ‘‘Nostalgia, Desire, Diaspora: South
Asian Sexualities in Motion,’’ positions: east asia cultures critique 5.2 (fall
1997): 467–89.
13 See Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and
Identities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992); and William Wei,
The Asian American Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1993), for their historical accounts of the emergence of the Asian Ameri-
can movement and the development of Asian American studies within the
academy.
14 Michael Omi and Dana Takagi, ‘‘Thinking Theory in Asian American
Studies,’’ Amerasia Journal 21.1–2 (1995): xii.
15 Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong, pref-
ace to Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, eds. Frank Chin,
Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong (Garden City, NY:
Anchor, 1975), x.
16 The key question here is how public agency and the nation-state, which are
constituted as male, depend upon the possession and control of the popu-

notes to epilogue 261

 larly devalued private realm of the home, which is constituted as female and
homosexual. The seamless narration of the nation is thus dependent upon
subordinating and disciplining the feminine and homosexual to the mas-
culine. See Nancy Fraser’s analysis of Habermas’s public sphere in relation
to gender, ‘‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of
Actually Existing Democracy’’ in Robbins, Phantom Public Sphere, 1–32. See
also in the same volume Michael Warner’s queer analysis, ‘‘The Mass Public
and the Mass Subject’’ (234–56).
17 Chin et al., Aiiieeeee! x.
18 It is important to remember the historical roots of the term Asian Ameri-
can: it has always served as a coalitional label under which different Asian
groups have come together for the promotion of common interests and for
purposes of political representation, economic action, and cultural identifi-
cation (e.g., in census counts, voting issues, and cultural and social services
funding). As a label, Asian American implies a certain unified identity that
works to smooth over diverse racial, ethnic, and national backgrounds, lan-
guages, sexualities, and religions.
19 Jeffrey Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong,
introduction to The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japa-
nese American Literature (New York: Meridian, 1991), xiii.
20 The phrase ‘‘devoid of manhood’’ is from Frank Chin and Jeffery Paul Chan,
‘‘Racist Love,’’ in Seeing through Shuck, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York:
Ballantine, 1972), 68.
21 See King-Kok Cheung, ‘‘The Woman Warrior versus The Chinaman Pacific:
Must a Chinese American Critic Choose between Feminism and Heroism?’’
in Conflicts in Feminism, eds. Marriane Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (New
York: Routledge, 1990), 234–51, for an excellent discussion of the femi-
nism/heroism debate in Asian American studies.
22 Chin and Chan, ‘‘Racist Love,’’ 68.
23 The paternal complicities of nationalist projects are most incisively critiqued
by feminists in postcolonial studies such as Rey Chow, Chandra Mohanty,
and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Much of this critique still needs to be ab-
sorbed in Asian American studies.
24 In highlighting the private/public contradiction of the domestic, I intend to
claim both realms for Asian Americans and queers and not privilege one
over the other. The issue of private/public that I engage here in relation to
the national terrain is expanded in the final section to include a discussion
of private/public in relation to the global arena. In terms of claiming the
public sphere on both the domestic and diasporic levels, one might consider
the concept of oppositional public spheres, what Fraser, in ‘‘Rethinking the
Public Sphere,’’ calls subaltern counterpublics.
25 This claim of vexed hyphenation is not a difficult one to substantiate. Pick
up any mainstream—even Asian American—newspaper or magazine to see
how the hyphen appears with confounding arbitrariness.
26 While many non-Western ethnic groups have tenuous claims on the nation,

262 notes to epilogue

 the persistent mainstream configuration of Asian Americans as exterior to
the nation-state takes on particular historical dimensions and distinctions
through the orthographic hyphen. This debate has not, to my knowledge,
been as widely deliberated in other fields of ethnic studies.
27 The mistaken perception of Chinese American Vincent Chin for a Japanese
autoworker is only one of many unfortunate manifestations of this phe-
nomenon. In 1982, Chin was murdered by two unemployed Detroit auto-
workers who mistook him for a Japanese.
28 Risking the hyphen would also force us to confront the status of American
in the term Asian American, making us consider American studies outside
its domestic locale and in multiple spaces. While there has been a long his-
torical antagonism between East Asian Studies—perceived as orientalist—
and Asian American studies, any serious consideration of Asian in Asian
American would warrant the theoretical linking of these two fields.
29 Sucheta Mazumdar, ‘‘Asian American Studies and Asian Studies: Rethink-
ing Roots,’’ in Asian Americans: Comparative and Global Perspectives, eds.
Shirley Hune, Hyung-chan Kim, Stephen S. Fugita, and Amy Ling (Pull-
man: Washington State University Press, 1991), 29–44. It might be useful
to note that as a group that has experienced the longest and most specific
legacy of racial exclusion from the United States, it would be impossible
to understand the legal status of Asian Americans outside a transnational
model of racialization. How do we bring together current shifts in immigra-
tion patterns with the hyphen debate on alienness?
The sojourner paradigm of Asian American settlement and the status
of the legal citizen-subject of the U.S. nation-state were at odds from the
nineteenth century until the 1943–65 period. Prior to the Magnuson Act
(Act of 17 December 1943, chap. 344, §1, 57 Stat. 600), the McCarran-Walter
Act (Act of 27 June 1952, chap. 477, 66 Stat. 163), and the Immigration and
Nationality Act (Act of 1 October 1965, Pub. L. No. 89-236, 79 Stat. 911),
race was the determining factor for exclusion laws that prevented the unifi-
cation of non-European families and the naturalization of Asians. The first
of these restrictions, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (Chinese Exclusion
Act, chap. 126, 22 Stat. 58), was passed in response to a national economic
recession and the perception of Chinese immigrants as unassimilable coolie
labor. The 1882 act was followed by similar renewals in 1892 (Act of 5 May
1892, chap. 60, 27 Stat. 25), 1902 (Act of 29 April 1902, chap. 641, 32 Stat.
176), 1907 (Act of 2 March 1907, chap. 2534, §3, 34 Stat. 1228), and 1917
(Act of 5 February 1917, chap. 29, 39 Stat. 874), which also expanded exclu-
sion to other Asian immigrant groups. The 1924 Immigration Act (Immigra-
tion Act of 1924, chap. 190, §131, 104 Stat. 4978) extended these provisions
indefinitely while establishing immigration quotas for Northern European
nations alone.
30 Wong, ‘‘Denationalization,’’ 3.
31 See, for example,Carlos Bulosan’s 1943 novel America Is in the Heart (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1973), for a narrative of American school

notes to epilogue 263

 missionaries and their teaching of nationalist ideology. In chapter 9, for
example, the protagonist learns about Lincoln, ‘‘a Poor boy [who] became
President of the United States!’’ and who ‘‘died for a black person’’ (69–70).
32 See Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Dur-
ham: Duke University Press, 1996), 159.
33 Jenny Sharpe, ‘‘Is the United States Postcolonial? Transnationalism, Immi-
gration, and Race,’’ Diaspora 4 (fall 1995): 188.
34 Satellite people (a.k.a. ‘‘Astronauts’’) maintain residences in several coun-
tries, traveling back and forth in accordance with immigration residency re-
quirements and job demands. Parachute children, the offspring of satellite
people, are left alone in the United States for schooling and separated from
their parents for long periods. Reverse settlers are Asian Americans who
emigrate to Asia for job-related economic opportunities. See Aihwa Ong,
Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logic of Transnationality (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1999).
35 The September 1996 passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immi-
grant Responsibility Act (much of which went into effect on 1 April 1997),
Pub. L. No. 104-208, 110 Stat. 3009-546, is but one unanalyzed effect. The
increase in Asian American immigration from outside of East Asia (China,
Japan, and Korea) and the Philippines is another.
36 Saskia Sassen, ‘‘Whose City Is It? Globalization and the Formation of New
Claims,’’ Public Culture 8 (1996): 213.
37 The national anxiety produced by contemporary global formations of capi-
tal and labor have caused nation-states to clamp down on their borders—
literally and figuratively—both in the form of patrolling national boundaries
and the form of patrolling what constitutes good citizenship. In the United
States, this focus on borders, for instance, has resulted not only in the pre-
vention of illegal immigrants and immigrants of color from entering the
nation but in the criminalization of African Americans, poor people, single
mothers (welfare reform), and even Asian/American lobbyists. See Saskia
Sassen, ‘‘Beyond Sovereignty: Immigration Policy Making Today,’’ Social Jus-
tice 23 (fall 1996): 9–19.
38 Lisa Lowe, ‘‘Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Asian American Differ-
ences,’’ in Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 83.
39 Amerasia Journal is one of the oldest serial publications in the field of Asian
American studies. Founded at Yale University, it is now housed at UCLA’s
Center for Asian American Studies.
40 Dana Takagi, ‘‘Maiden Voyage: Excursions into Sexuality and Identity Poli-
tics in Asian America,’’ Amerasia Journal 20.1 (1994): 2.
41 I use gay and lesbian to describe the largely identity-based political and
academic movements that arose after Stonewall in response to the domi-
nant, pathologizing medico-legal discourse of the ‘‘homosexual.’’ In its pub-
licness, as Rosalind Morris suggests, the notion of gay is often conflated
with the issue of same-sex practices—practices that are often thought to be

264 notes to epilogue

 symptomatic of identity. I differentiate gay and lesbian from the term queer,
which I believe eschews a political platform based exclusively on sexual
identity and practices, and the polarization of homo- and heterosexuality.
Use of the term queer is not just generational; as Michael Warner points
out, ‘‘ ‘queer’ gets a critical edge by defining itself against the normal rather
than the heterosexual’’ (Introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics
and Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner [Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1993], xxvi). Initially a designation of terror and shame, queer in
contemporary usage has been resignified in a rather open and capacious
context—one that can be used simultaneously to discuss the politics of
the personal, to question a spectrum of personal identities, to act against
normalizing ideologies, and to resist the historical terror of social phobia
and violence. We must remember that gay, lesbian, and queer are not mutu-
ally exclusive terms. Gayness might provide an ideal, though not exclusive,
grounds for queer practices, and queers can often be ‘‘lesbians and gays
in other contexts—as for example where leverage can be gained through
bourgeois propriety, or through minority-rights discourse, or through more
gender-marked language (it probably won’t replace lesbian feminism)’’
(Warner, Queer Planet, xxviii).While queer has been used as a shorthand term
to name a population of individuals with a stake in nonnormative, opposi-
tional politics, the term also harbors homogenizing impulses that serve to
erase some of the racial and gendered differences (lesbian feminism being
one example) that I explore in this chapter.
42 Omi and Takagi, ‘‘Thinking Theory,’’ xiii.
43 Certainly not immune to similar accusations concerning the co-optation of
special rights, members of mainstream gay and lesbian organizations must
think through the particular political difficulties and contradictory agendas
that national issues like gay marriage and affirmative action pose, both for
individual queers of color who hold multiple affiliations with various politi-
cal causes and for the politics of coalition building. The consideration of
Asian American identity in a queer and diasporic context is complicated by
mainstream gay and lesbian activism’s resistance to theorizing itself outside
of U.S. national borders. That the dominant focus of current gay and lesbian
activism is on domestic issues and the claiming of equal rights obscures the
international genealogy of queer activism and its reliance on the global. In
claiming equal rights and access to the queer nation, queer activism reifies
the U.S. nation-state as the privileged site for oppositional politics in ways
reminiscent of the Asian American cultural nationalist project, which calls
for vigilant interrogation.
44 See Masao Miyoshi, ‘‘A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnation-
alism and the Decline of the Nation-State,’’ Critical Inquiry 19 (1993): 726–
51, for a concise summary of the economic and political shifts in the 1980s
that allowed for the rampant spread of multinational capital and the global
restructuring of these economic resources as transnational institutions.

notes to epilogue 265

45 However, given the current mainstreaming of the gay and lesbian move-
ment and the waning public attention to the aids crisis, the future of queer
activism looks rather bleak.
46 The gay and lesbian liberation movement that emerged following the Stone-
wall era was largely based on a politics restricted to sexual identity and prac-
tices. The new queer social movements are often based, instead, on the cri-
tique of identity politics and the discursive production of the subject. Queer
activism’s critique of the subject and its reorganization of coalitional inter-
ests along the lines of political goals needs to be considered in the context
of racial differences.
47 The Wedding Banquet, dir. Ang Lee (Taipei: Central Motion Pictures Corpo-
ration, 1993); R. Zamora Linmark, Rolling the R’s (New York: Kaya Produc-
tions, 1995).
48 See filmmaker Richard Fung’s ‘‘Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized Asian
in Gay Porn Video,’’ in How Do I Look? ed. Bad Object Choices (Seattle:
Bay Press, 1991), 145–60. Fung writes that in Western society ‘‘the Asian
man is defined by a striking absence down there. And if Asian men have
no sexuality, how can we have homosexuality?’’ (148). In the mainstream
heterosexual community, Asian American men have had to contend with
the pervasive stereotype of themselves as the ‘‘emasculated sissy’’ (Frank
Chin’s Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu syndrome). These mainstream por-
trayals of enervated Asian American members recirculate within gay com-
munities, where queer Asian American men find themselves repositioned
as passive and feminized ‘‘bottoms’’—impotent Cio-Cio-Sans plucked from
the orientalized stages of Madama Butterfly.
49 David L. Eng, ‘‘The Wedding Banquet: You’re Not Invited and Some Other
Ancillary Thoughts,’’ Artspiral 7 (fall 1993): 8–10.
50 Mark Chiang, ‘‘Coming out into the Global System: Postmodern Patriar-
chies and Transnational Sexualities in The Wedding Banquet,’’ in Q & A: Queer
in Asian America,’’ eds. David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1998), 383.
51 Chiang adds that the ‘‘multicultural, non-heterosexual family formed by
Wai-Tung and Simon at the end of the film is in sharp contrast to the repre-
sentation of women’s liberation offered to Wei-Wei. Although it is unclear
what kind of arrangement she and Wai Tung will eventually come to, the
decision to keep the baby drastically reduces her options, foreclosing the
possibility of withdrawal from the global system’’ (ibid., 384).
52 Leslie Sklair labels this class of global citizen the transnational capitalist
class. See Leslie Sklair, Sociology of the Global System, 2d ed. (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
53 Wong, ‘‘Denationalization,’’ 17; Wong’s emphasis.
54 Chandan Reddy, ‘‘History, Allegory, Sexuality: The Minors of Linmark’s
Rolling the R’s.’’ Paper presented at the annual conference of the American
Studies Association, Kansas City, Missouri, 31 October 1996. I thank Chan-
dan Reddy for allowing me to quote from his essay.

266 notes to epilogue

 BIBLIOGRAPHY

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The Wedding Banquet. 1993. Directed by Ang Lee.Taipei: Central Motion Pictures
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Who Killed Vincent Chin? 1988. Directed by Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-
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Act of 17 December 1943, chap. 344, §1, 57 Stat. 600 (Magnuson Act).
Korematsu v. U.S., 323 U.S. 214 (1944).
Ex Parte Endo, 323 U.S. 283 (1944).
Act of 28 December 1945, Pub. L. No. 271, 59 Stat. 659 (War Brides Act).
Act of 27 June 1952, chap. 477, 66 Stat. 163 (McCarran-Walter Act/Immigration
and Nationality Act of 1952).
Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 489 (1954).
Act of 1 October 1965, Pub. L. No. 89-236, 79 Stat. 911 (Hart-Geller Act/Immigra-
tion and Nationality Act Amendments).
Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967).
Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, Pub. L.
No. 104–208, 110 Stat. 3009-546.

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 INDEX

Abbas, Ackbar, 237 n.28 16. See also Aiiieeeee! group; Chin,
Abel, Elizabeth, 20 Frank; Kingston, Maxine Hong
Abject, 143, 247–48 n.33 Assimilation, 180–81, 185–87, 193,
Affiliation vs. filiation, 190–93, 197, 194–95, 199, 203, 204; contradic-
200, 202, 207, 221 tions of, 21–22; and psychic health,
African American studies: feminism 167–68. See also Chu, Louis; Hys-
vs. heroism debate in, 233 n.28 teria; Impotence; Louie, David
Agency. See Subjectivity: and agency Wong; ‘‘Marginal Man’’
Aiiieeeee! group (Chan, Chin, Inada,
Wong), 1, 20–21, 23, 31, 72; Barthes, Roland, 36, 38–40, 44, 56,
heterosexism and sexism of, 21, 79–80, 212; punctum, 54–55,
90, 92, 136, 191, 208–11, 241 studium, 54
n.60 Bazin, André, 38
Alarcón, Norma, 5 Benjamin, Walter, 36, 38–39, 65, 69,
Althusser, Louis, 23, 83; interpella- 75, 76, 81, 83, 86, 90, 91, 102. See
tion, 119, 141, 176, 246–47 n.32 also Photography: and history, and
Archive, 49–50, 67. See also Foucault, memory
Michel Bernheimer, Charles, 171, 256 n.22
Asian America: location of, 204–5 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud),
Asian American(s): cultural nation- 56
alism, 20–21, 92–93, 208–11; Bhabha, Homi, 24, 119; on mimicry,
definition of, 102, 252 n.32, 262 201–2; stereotype, 30, 37, 44,
n.18; hyphenated identity of, 211– 56–57, 109
15, 260 n.3, 262 n.18, 262–63 Blade Runner (film; Scott), 36, 63
n.26, 263 n.29 See also Aiiieeeee! Big Four (Crocker, Hopkins,
group; Subjectivity: split Huntington, Stanford), 61, 65,
Asian American studies movement: 238–39 n.37; labor practices of,
feminism vs. heroism debate in, 61–63, 239 n.42. See also Prom-
15; history of, 208–11, 212–13, ontory Summit; Transcontinental
217–19; and Marxism, 15, 208– Railroad
9; and poststructuralist theory, Body: Japanese-American, 105–10,
26–28; and psychoanalysis, 19– 137; materiality of, 184–87; muti-
24, 28; and queerness, 216–20; lation of, 117; speaking through,
sociological emphasis of, 19–22; 172–73. See also Fetishism; Hyste-
and Women’s and Queer studies, ria; Lacan, Jacques: mirror-stage;
Body (continued ) 16–17, 35–37, 61–64, 109, 137, 169,
Primal scene; Silverman, Kaja: 234 n.4
self-same body Chow, Rey, 235–36 n.15
Bone (Ng), 67 Christian, Barbara, 20
Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel, 113 Citizenship: Asian American, 180–
Boyarin, Daniel, 173, 179, 230 n.12, 82, 193–95, 200, 202–3, 221; and
255 n.12 Asian-American males, 16–19,
Breuer, Joseph, 196 34, 36; contradictions of, 65–67;
Brown, Wendy, 26, 233–34 n.37 and heterosexuality, 182. See also
Brown v. Board of Education, 20, 169, Law(s): immigration/exclusion;
193, 198, 259 n.1 Lowe, Lisa; Paper sons
Bruno, Giuliana, 35 Cixous, Hélène, 179, 187, 257 n.31;
Burgin, Victor, 188, 231 n.13 and Catherine Clément, 174–77
Butler Judith, 13, 27, 70–71, 141, 160, Cold War, 147–49; and homosexu-
162, 232 n.25 ality, 148; and immigration,
169. See also Law(s): immigra-
Cadava, Eduardo, 39 tion/exclusion
Campomanes, Oscar V., 204–5 Colonialism, 134; fantasies of, 1–4,
Capitalism: global, 169, 264 n.37; 138, 147–49, 151, 153, 158–60; and
and nation-state; 33–34; racialized psychoanalysis, 9–10, 148–49;
foundation of U.S., 61–63. See also symbolic ideals of, 164–66. See
Globalization; Labor; Nation-state also M. Butterfly; Totem and Taboo
Central Pacific Railroad. See Trans- Corber, Robert, 148
continental Railroad Cronenberg, David: M. Butterfly,
Chan, Jeffery, 191–92 140
Chan, Sucheng, 61–62, 105, 254 n.5 Cultural Revolution (Wong), 135
Charcot, Jean-Martin, 171, 178 Culture, 33–34
Cheung, King-Kok, 15–16, 51, 97
Chiang, Mark, 164, 222, 266 n.51 Davis, Angela Y., 136
Chin, Frank, 21, 29, 30; Donald Duk, De Haven, Tom, 36
35–37, 45, 69–103; heterosexism de Lauretis, Teresa, 132–33
and sexism of, 90–91, 92–98, 136, Deferred action. See Nachträglichkeit
204; relationship to Maxine Hong Democracy: and education, 74–77,
Kingston, 90–103, 241 n.63. See 88–89, 167–68, 226–27; ideals
also Aiiieeeee! group of, 22, 148. See also Althusser,
Chin, Vincent, 244 n.12, 263 n.27 Louis: interpellation; Citizenship;
China Men (Kingston), 35–37, 45–67, Equivalence, Abstract; Laws(s):
69, 86, 90–92, 98–103, 237 n.35, immigration/exclusion
239 n.43 Dewitt, John L., 105, 243–44 nn. 5–6
Chinatown: as bachelor community, Diaspora, 204–28, 259–60 n.2;
17–18, 32, 168–69, 180, 181, 183, definition of, 206–7; exile and
189–92, 196, 198, 259 n.46 emergence vs. immigration and
Chinese American(s): during in- settlement, 33, 205; and queerness,
ternment, 107–10; male laborers, 204–27, 265 n.43

284 index
‘‘Dissection of the Psychical Person- Feminism: and psychoanalysis, 14
ality, The’’ (Freud), 145 Feminization. See Emascula-
Doane, Mary Ann, 230 n.12 tion/feminization
Donald Duk (Chin), 35–37, 45, 69–103 Fetishism, 2–3, 32, 144, 146–47, 150–
Dreamwork, 30, 69, 74, 77–84, 66; and female castration, 146,
86–89, 91, 94–97; and precon- 150, 153, 251 n.22; and homosexu-
scious, 78–79. See also Memory; ality, 157–61; and racial castration,
Nachträglichkeit 2–3, 150–66
Du Bois, W. E. B., 24 ‘‘Fetishism’’ (Freud), 2, 32, 146, 150,
161–62
Eat a Bowl of Tea (film; Chu), 32, 168, Filiation: vs. affiliation. See Affiliation
179–93, 198, 204 vs. filiation
Economics. See Capitalism; Glob- Filipino Americans, 204–5, 225, 228
alization; Labor; Model minority Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-
myth analysis (Lacan), 43–44, 59, 114–15
Edelman, Lee, 129, 148, 249 n.48, Fraser, Nancy, 262 n.24
252 n.27 Freud, Sigmund, 33, 79–81, 111, 125–
Education. See Democracy 29, 130–31, 144, 153, 154, 157, 170,
Ego and the Id, The (Freud), 145, 253 171–73, 177–78, 255–56 n.15; Be-
n.41 yond the Pleasure Principle, 56; ‘‘The
Emasculation/feminization, 102; of Dissection of the Psychical Per-
Asian American males, 1–4, 16–18, sonality,’’ 145; The Ego and the Id,
64, 72–74, 75, 98, 180–81, 183; and 145, 253 n.41; ‘‘Fetishism,’’ 2, 32,
hysteria, 178–81; through racial- 146, 150, 161–62; Group Psychol-
ization, 49, 64, 72–74, 150–51, ogy and Analysis of the Ego, 25, 96;
184, 249 n.50; through U.S. immi- Interpretation of Dreams, 77–79;
gration law, 92, 99–100. See also ‘‘Observation of a Severe Case of
Chin, Frank; Fetishism: castration, Hemi-Anaesthesia in a Hysteri-
racial; Hwang, David Henry cal Male,’’ 171, 255 n.12; ‘‘On the
Equivalence: abstract, 23, 26–27, Mechanism of Paranoia,’’ 96; ‘‘On
36, 76, 85, 109–10, 134, 135, 169– Narcissism,’’ 10–13, 96; ‘‘Some
70, 181–82, 185, 198, 203, 213, Psychological Consequences of the
224, 226. See also Citizenship; Anatomical Distinction Between
Democracy the Sexes,’’ 128; ‘‘Splitting of the
Espiritu, Yen Le, 61 Ego in the Defensive Process,’’
Ethnicity. See Race and ethnicity 145–47, 148; Totem and Taboo, 6–
Ethnic studies, 4, 19. See also Asian 13, 76; ‘‘Wolf Man,’’ 128. See also
American studies movement Dreamwork; Fetishism; Hysteria;
Executive Order 9066, 105, 243–44 Nachträglichkeit; Oedipus complex;
n.4. See also Internment Primal scene; Unconscious
Foucault, Michel, 49–50, 51
Fanon, Frantz, 115–17, 136 Fung, Richard, 1, 14, 151, 184, 266
Farewell to Manzanar (Houston), 105, n.48
116 Funny Boy (Selvadurai), 135
Felman, Shoshana, 173 Fuss, Diana, 25; on Fanon, 6, 9, 22

index 285
Gallop, Jane, 176, 246 n.23, 253 n.36, 203; and sexual difference, 173;
257 n.31 spatial, 180–81, 196–203; and
Garber, Marjorie, 139–41 the unconscious, 171–72. See also
Gay and Lesbian studies. See Queer Žižek, Slavoj
studies
Geller, Jonathan, 230 n.12 Identification, 111–17; fiction of, 20–
Genthe, Arnold, vii, 68 28; historical constraints of, 133–
Gilman, Sander, 230 n.12 34; and identity, 25–28; and the
Globalization, 206–8, 212–14, 218– nation, 23, 74–75. See also Lacan,
20, 222–23. See also Diaspora; Jacques: mirror-stage
Multiculturalism; Universalism Image-repertoire, 69, 80–89; re-
Golden Spike ceremony. See Promon- signification of, 57, 69–71, 89–91,
tory Summit 102, 220, 221, 224, 227. See also
Group Psychology and Analysis of the Dreamwork; Silverman, Kaja:
Ego (Freud), 25, 96 productive look
Immigration: ‘‘new immigrant,’’
Hawai’i, 224, 242 n.4 169, 254–55 n.6. See also Law(s):
Heterosexuality. See Sexuality immigration/exclusion
Hippocrates, 170. See also Hysteria Imperialism. See Colonialism
Historical materialism. See Impotence, 180–81, 187, 189, 195. See
Benjamin, Walter; Kracauer, Sieg- also Assimilation; Hysteria
fried Internment, 30–31, 104–36; and Chi-
History: alternative, 35–36, 81–89, nese Americans, 106; and Japanese
91; dominant, 75–77, 100–101, 181; Americans, 104–10, 118–19, 136,
production of, 75–76; repression 247–48 n.33; justifications for,
of, 181; and the visual, 36. See also 104–6, 242–44 nn. 4–6, 9
Image-repertoire; Silverman, Kaja: Internal exile, 188, 197–98
productive look Interpretation of Dreams (Freud),
Hodgson, Moira, 143 77–79
Home. See Nation-state: as home
Homosexuality. See Sexuality Jackson, Earl, Jr., 160
Hopkins, Mark. See Big Four Jameson, Fredric, 33
Horn, Miriam, 250 n.15 Japanese American(s): during intern-
Humanism. See Democracy; ment, 104–9, 117–36
Equality: abstract
Huntington, Collis P. See Big Four Kang, Ik Joong, 249 n.52
Hwang, David Henry, 2, 31, 204; M. Kazanjian, David, 9, 10
Butterfly, 1–4, 5–31–32, 138–66, 241 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 21, 30, 204;
n.60, 251–52 n.25 China Men, 35–37, 45–67, 69, 86,
Hysteria: and the body, 188; female, 90–92, 98–103, 237 n.35, 239
167–68, 170–77, 255–56 n.15; n.43; kinship, 221–24; Woman
male, 168, 170–71, 173, 177–203, Warrior, The: A Memoir of Girlhood
255 nn.10, 12, 258 n.34; and Oedi- among Ghosts, 24–25, 167–68, 241
pal complex, 177–78; as psychic n.59. See also Diaspora; Paternity;
protest, 174–77, 181; racial, 181– Patriarchal privilege

286 index
Kirby, Lynne, 178 Act, 169, 180, 254 n.5, 257–58 n.33;
Kracauer, Siegfried, 42, 55, 240 n.46. 1790 Naturalization Act, 232 n.18;
See also Photography: and history, 1924 Immigration Act, 263 n.29
and memory Lee, JeeYeun, 207
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 174
Labor: Chinese immigrant, 16–17, 36, Li, David Leiwei, 35–36
61–64, 109, 137, 169, 234 n.4; and Liberia, 48
gender, 222; gendered, 216; racial- Louie, David Wong, 32, 168, 193–203,
ized, 61–63, 85, 179, 216; white, 204, 259 n.45
63. See also Lowe, Lisa Lowe, Lisa, 16–18, 23, 34, 62, 66,
Lacan, Jacques, 120, 173; Four Funda- 85, 109, 169–70, 213, 215, 216, 231
mental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, n.18, 234 n.43
43–44, 59, 114–15; gaze, 43, 114, Lwin, Sanda Mayzaw, 188, 258 n.39
123; geometral point, 41, 236 n.20;
given-to-be-seen, 37, 43–45, 51– M. Butterfly (Hwang), 1–4, 5, 31–32,
64, 69, 77–78, 80, 83–84, 86, 87, 138–66, 241 n.60, 251–52 n.25;
89, 91–92, 94, 98, 101; look, 43; reviews of, 143–45
mirror stage, 31, 74, 111–17, 133, Madama Butterfly (opera; Puccini),
246 n.23; name-of-the-Father, 31; 138, 144, 147, 158, 160, 165, 220,
screen, 43, 44, 74, 86, 92, 114, 117, 250 n.3, 266 n.48
136; signification of the phallus, Manifest Destiny, 61, 85
164, 253–54 n.46 Mapa, Alec, 90
Laplanche, Jean, and Jean-Bertrand ‘‘Marginal Man,’’ 21–22, 24
Pontalis, 79–80; on primal scene, Masculinity: Asian American, 1–4,
111, 125–26, 130, 240–41 n.56, 248 14–17, 93–96, 120–24, 132–33, 135–
n.40, 249 n.49 36, 151–53, 157–59, 180–203; black,
Law(s): alien-land, 260 n.4; anti- 150–51; white, 110–11, 118–20, 123,
miscegenation, 17–18, 232 n. 1; 143–44, 147–49, 151–66
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Mazumdar, Sucheta, 212
263 n.29; Ex Parte Endo, 243–44 McCloy, John J., 105, 243 n.5. See also
n.4; Gentleman’s Agreement, 229 Internment
n.5; immigration/exclusion, 17– Melancholia: and race, 75, 199, 232–
18, 92, 168–70, 180, 182, 234–35 33 n.27
n.5, 257–58, n.33; Immigration and Melting pot. See Assimilation
Nationality Act of 1965, 169, 193, Memory, 30; and history, 55, 63–65,
213, 259 n.1, 263 n.9; In re Ah Yup, 91; unreliability of, 53–54, 56–58,
234–35 n.5; Korematsu v. United 69. See also Photography
States, 105–6; liberalizaton of, 193, Mercer, Kobena, 138
213; Loving v. Virginia, 232 n.21; Metz, Christian, 38
Magnuson Act of 1943, 18, 169, Mimicry. See Bhabha, Homi; Primal
234–35 n. 5, 263 n.29; McCarran- scene
Walter Act of 1952, 169; National Minidoka concentration camp. See
Origins Law, 168; Page Act Law Internment; Kaneko, Lonny
of 1875, 17; Tydings-McDuffie Act Miscegenation, 194–95. See also
of 1934, 257–58 n.33; War Brides Paternity

index 287
Model minority myth, 24, 169, 193, Archive; Citizenship; Foucault,
194, 198–99, 203–4, 227, 259 n.1; Michel
as used against blacks and latinos, Paris is Burning (film; Livingston),
199 205–6, 261 n.8
Moglen, Helene, 20 Paternity, 99–101, 152–57, 190–98,
Morris, Rosalind, 264–65 n.41 200. See also Patriarchal privilege
Multiculturalism, 193–203. See also Patriarchal privilege, 153–55, 161–
Assimilation; Diaspora; Universal- 66, 190–93, 196, 222. See also
ism Paternity
Mulvey, Laura, 71, 123 Pellegrini, Ann, 14, 230 n.12, 245 n.15
Munson, Curtis B., 104. See also Phallus: having/being, 164–65; vs.
Internment penis, 155–56. See also Fetish;
Hwang, David Henry; Silverman,
Nachträglichkeit (deferred action), 79– Kaja
81, 125–29. See also Dreamwork Phillips, Adam, 167, 176
Nation-state: and Asian Americans, Photography: and citizenship, 66–
111, 206, 211; and culture, 33– 67; and history, 42, 55, 63–66,
34; and global capitalism, 214, 84–89, 91; as lamination, 39–
264 n.37; as home, 204–2, 223– 40; and memory, 54–58, 63–65;
24, 261–62 n.16, 262 n.24; and pose, 45–46; ‘‘reality effect,’’ 30,
nuclear family, 92, 180; and racial- 36, 38–39; suture, 41–42
ized labor, 170. See also Capitalism; Popular culture: 69–72, 110–11,
Democracy; Equivalence: abstract 118–20, 226–27
Neoimperialism: U.S., 148–49. See Primal scene, 31, 111, 125–33, 248
also Colonialism n.41, 249 n.48
Neubauer, Carol E., 45 Promontory Summit, 30, 60, 63,
Ngai, Mae, 231–32 n.18 64, 66–67, 84–86, 88–89, 97,
No-No Boy (Okada), 188 104, 235 n.6. See also Big Four;
‘‘No-No Boy’’ phenomenon, 118, 246 Transcontinental Railroad
n.32. See also Internment Psychoanalysis: and colonialism,
9–10, 148–49; and race, 4–15, 20
‘‘Observation of a Severe Case of
Hemi-Anaesthesia in a Hysterical Queer Nation, 205–6
Male’’ (Freud), 171, 255 n.12 Queer studies: and activism, 265
Oedipus complex, 11–12; negative, n.45, 266 n.46; and Asian Ameri-
128, 130–31; positive, 128–29, 131, can studies, 216–20; and child-
154 hood, 128–36, 154, 226–28; as crit-
‘‘On the Mechanism of Paranoia’’ ical methodology; 215–19; vs. gay
(Freud), 96 and lesbian, 264–65 n.41; and psy-
‘‘On Narcissism’’ (Freud), 10–13, 96 choanalysis, 14. See also Sexuality
Othello (Shakespeare), 179–80, 187
Race and ethnicity: and sexuality, 2,
Pacific Islander(s), 225 15–19, 92, 94–102, 111, 124, 129–
Pangs of Love. See Louie, David Wong 36, 137–38, 141–44, 150–52, 157–
Paper sons, 67, 102, 190. See also 61, 168, 202, 216. See also Chinese

288 index
 American(s); Citizenship; Filipino Silverman, Kaja, 41, 44, 54, 56, 59,
American(s); Japanese Ameri- 98–99, 150–51, 246 n.26; lin-
can(s); Labor; Pacific Islander(s); guistic and paternal castration,
Sexuality; Vietnamese American(s) 154–55; productive look, 57, 80, 87;
Racial castration. See Fetishism self-same body, 111, 112–15, 130–
Racism: internalization of, 20–21, 31, 245–46 n.21. See also Fetish;
72–73, 81 Phallus
Reddy, Chandan, 225 Simon, John, 143, 251 n.16
Rice Queen, 158–59, 220, 253 n.43. Sklair, Leslie, 266 n.52
See also Colonialism Smith, Paul, 177–78
Rich, Frank, 143 ‘‘Some Psychological Consequences
Robber Barons. See Big Four of the Anatomical Distinction
Rolling the R’s (Linmark), 33, 135, 220, Between the Sexes’’ (Freud), 128
224–28 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 25, 169,
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 105. See 254–55 n.6
also Internment ‘‘Splitting of the Ego in the Defensive
Rose, Jacqueline, 172 Process’’ (Freud), 145–47, 148
Rubin, Gayle, 174 Stanford, Leland. See Big Four
Stereotype, 49, 56, 106, 109. See also
Said, Edward, 190 Bhabha, Homi
Samarth, Manini, 194 Sturken, Marita, 187–188
Sassen, Saskia, 214 Subjectivity: and agency, 25–28, 98,
Sedgwick, Eve, 135, 142, 253 n.37 189; split, 72–74, 201–3, 209,
Self-hatred. See Racism: internaliza- 211–15; and subject, 24–28; and
tion of subjection, 119, 123, 213. See also
Sexuality: compulsory heterosexu- Althusser, Louis: interpellation
ality, 13, 94–98, 127–29, 141–42, Sue, Derald, and Stanley Sue, 21–23.
165, 205, 210; heterosexuality and See also ‘‘Marginal Man’’
domestic, 33, 148, 210–11; hetero- Suzuki, Bob H., 199–200
sexuality and whiteness, 5–15,
139–45; homosexuality, 10–15, 95– Taiwan, 48, 221
96, 135, 202, 242 n.68, 252 n.28; Takagi, Dana Y., 215–16; and Michael
homosexuality and communism, Omi, 217–19
148; homosexuality and diaspora, Takaki, Ronald, 61–62
33, 204–8, 215–28, 260–61 n.6; Tate, Claudia, 25
invisibility of heterosexuality, 142; Timaeus (Plato), 170
and racial difference, 2, 5–15, 92, Tölölyan, Khachig, 206–7
94–102, 111, 124, 129–36, 137–38, Totem and Taboo (Freud), 6–13, 76
141–44, 150–52, 157–61, 198, 202, Transcontinental Railroad, 16–17, 30,
216; sexual difference, 51, 127, 179; 36, 60, 61–63, 84, 102–3. See also
sexual passing, 158–61. See also Big Four; Promontory Summit
Cold War; Hwang, David Henry; Two Lies (film; Tom), 116–17
Race: sexuality
‘‘Shoyu Kid, The’’ (Kaneko), 30, 105, Unconscious: and dreamwork, 78–
110–11, 117–36, 204, 228 79; and hysteria, 171–72

index 289
Union Pacific Railroad. See Trans- Whiteness: historical development of,
continental Railroad 63, 85; invisibility of, 138, 141–44.
Universalism, 185–88, 198–99, 203. See also Race/ethnicity
See also Assimilation; Multicultur- Williams, Raymond: structure of
alism feeling, 198
Utley, Robert M., 235 n.6 Woman Warrior, The: A Memoir of
Girlhood among Ghosts (Kingston),
Vietnamese American(s), 225 24–25, 167–68, 241 n.59
Visuality: and alterity, 79–80; and Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia, 93, 98, 124,
gender, 51; and history; 81–89; and 130, 190–91, 194, 204, 212, 224,
queerness, 121–24, 148, 249–50 241 n.66, 258–59 n.43
n.1; and race, 49, 104; and race
and sexuality, 122–24; relationship Yellow fever, 158–59. See also Colo-
of identity to, 36–37, 135. See also nialism
Photography; Sexuality: sexual Yellow Peril: myth of, 24, 168–69,
difference 199, 203, 204, 259 n.1

Wajeman, Gerard, 171 Žižek, Slavoj, 170, 257 n.32; hysteria

Warner, Michael, 264–65 n.41 as failed interpellation, 176–77
Wedding Banquet, The (film; Lee), 33,
220–24

290 index
 David L. Eng is Assistant Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at Columbia University and coeditor
of Q & A: Queer in Asian America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Eng, David L.
Racial castration : managing masculinity in Asian America / David L. Eng.
p. cm. — (Perverse modernities)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-8223-2631-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 0-8223-2636-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Asian Americans—Race identity. 2. Masculinity—United States.
3. Sex role—United States. 4. Race—Psychological aspects.
5. American literature—Asian American authors—History and criticism.
6. Asian Americans in literature. I. Title. II. Series.
e184.o6 e53 2001
305.38'895073—dc21 00-057807