Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe) - Softcover

Eng, David L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822326361 ISBN 13: 9780822326366

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2001

Synopsis

Racial Castration, the first book to bring together the fields of Asian American studies and psychoanalytic theory, explores the role of sexuality in racial formation and the place of race in sexual identity. David L. Eng examines images—literary, visual, and filmic—that configure past as well as contemporary perceptions of Asian American men as emasculated, homosexualized, or queer.
Eng juxtaposes theortical discussions of Freud, Lacan, and Fanon with critical readings of works by Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Lonny Kaneko, David Henry Hwang, Louie Chu, David Wong Louie, Ang Lee, and R. Zamora Linmark. While situating these literary and cultural productions in relation to both psychoanalytic theory and historical events of particular significance for Asian Americans, Eng presents a sustained analysis of dreamwork and photography, the mirror stage and the primal scene, and fetishism and hysteria. In the process, he offers startlingly new interpretations of Asian American masculinity in its connections to immigration exclusion, the building of the transcontinental railroad, the wartime internment of Japanese Americans, multiculturalism, and the model minority myth. After demonstrating the many ways in which Asian American males are haunted and constrained by enduring domestic norms of sexuality and race, Eng analyzes the relationship between Asian American male subjectivity and the larger transnational Asian diaspora. Challenging more conventional understandings of diaspora as organized by race, he instead reconceptualizes it in terms of sexuality and queerness.

About this title

About the Author

David L. Eng is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and coeditor of Q & A: Queer in Asian America, winner of a 1998 Lambda Literary Award.

From the Back Cover

"With consummate lucidity and analytical skill, David Eng demonstrates how intimately related are Asian American identity and generic U.S. nationality--and how central to both are the contestations of masculine subjectivity. A powerful contribution to Americanist and transnational studies, "Racial Castration" more generally demonstrates the potential of psychoanalytic theory as an element in rigorous social critique."--Phillip Brian Harper, New York University

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822326361
• ISBN 13: 9780822326366
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 300