Racial Castration and Demiboy Joy
The audience roared with laughter. I was attending Kore Asian Media’s 16th annual Unforgettable Gala, an awards ceremony for Asian American entertainment and culture, and listening to Ted Chung give his acceptance speech for the Entertainment Mogul Award. Moments earlier, Chung was reflecting on his experiences of being rejected by women in college: “I realized that the issue was that a lot of people hadn’t seen, like I hadn’t seen, a strong Asian male having sex on screen.” Chung shared how impactful Jason Scott Lee and Lauren Holly’s sex scene in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1993) was for him as a young Asian man. He then recounted a date he once had with a non-Asian woman:
I had a date one time with this girl, she wasn’t Asian, but I brought her back to my crib at the time, which was a small apartment, and I had a joint, I had some wine, and I popped in that Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. And after about an hour and a half of her being mesmerized at this incredible, attractive Asian man and his ability to kill all the stereotypes that exist about us, I was--. It was crackin’, that’s all I got to say.
The audience roared with laughter.
I am sure that there were other attendees that December evening in 2017 who found Chung’s acceptance speech crass and unamusing. However, I am less sure if there were other attendees who felt the same kind of exasperation and failed appellation that I felt as a queer graysexual Asian American demiboy. But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. It’s only now almost four years later that I’ve been able to untie the knot of gender, race, and sexuality that tightened around my experience that night.
Chung’s decision to foreground Jason Scott Lee in his acceptance speech comes as no surprise given the history of how Asian men have been racialized in North America. In his book, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (2001), David Eng analyzes how Asian men in the United States have been construed as effeminate, emasculated, and racially castrated throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Eng’s notion of racial castration draws attention to how the normative white masculine subject “refuses to see at the site of the Asian male body a penis that is there to see” (2, emphasis original). The Asian male body is representationally restricted to a site of phallic absence, consigned to the desexualized gender position of a deficient masculinity as a way to secure the white masculinity of the nation that legally and ideologically excludes Asian men from citizenship and belonging. Racial castration helps us to name the mechanisms through which gender, race, and sexuality mutually rely upon each other to coproduce the particular kind of Asian American masculine plight that undergirds the revanchism of Chung’s speech. Beleaguered by almost two centuries of “all the stereotypes that exist about us,” Chung emphasized that when he first saw Dragon as a high school student when it came out in 1993, it was “really impactful”: “It was Jason Scott Lee and Lauren Holly and there was real sensuality, real sexuality represented for the first time.”
Since Jason Scott Lee’s penis is never shown on screen throughout the film, the audience doesn’t actually see his penis; nevertheless, they “see” it in the sense of a rephallicizing optics that restores what had previously been racially castrated: a virile heteromasculinity. This restoration, what Chung describes as seeing “real sexuality represented for the first time,” is an iteration of the never-ending psychic loop between racial castration and rephallicization that Asian American masculinity—or at least Chung and others like him—seems stuck in. “That VHS tape has been burnt a hundred times, two hundred times over in multiple dates,” gloated Chung. “I know every word in that film.” Indeed, the narrative progression of Dragon itself swings back and forth on this psychic pendulum: Lee faces racism (a white sailor harassing an Asian woman in Hong Kong, a white college student hurling racial slurs at Lee while he is working out at the gym), engages in bouts of violence to reassert his masculinity (beats up said white people), and further rephallicizes his masculinity through sexual activity (has sex with Asian woman and Lauren Holly’s character).
This unending dynamic between racial castration and rephallicization can only be described as gratuitously masturbatory. The hand of history works the detachable Asian phallus, taking it off and putting it back on, off and on, off and on, off and on, off and on, off and on… Chung’s Dragon burning a hundred, two hundred times in the process.
. . . .
While straight Asian American men were busy playing with their detachable phallus throughout the 1990s, gay Asian American men—or “gay Asian male” (GAM) as they referred to themselves—were also engaged in their own rephallicization project. In his landmark essay, “Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn,” Trinidadian Chinese Canadian videoartist Richard Fung (2005 [1991]) critically analyzes the privileging of white male pleasure in 1980s gay video porn through the consignment of the Asian male body to racialized tropes of bottomhood, service, and passivity. For instance, Fung analyzes the 1985 production Below the Belt, pointing out how throughout the film, the white lead consistently fucks Vietnamese-American pornstar Sum Yung Manh, “who is always face down” (239) and functions as “a caricature of passivity” (240). The gay white pornographic subject refuses to see the GAM penis and instead insists on seeing an emasculated object whose sole utility is rectal reception. Fung’s analysis is part and parcel of what he describes as his “lifelong vocation of looking for [his] penis, trying to fill in the visual void” (238) and redress the ways in which “Asian and anus are conflated” (240). In other words, the GAM body has been racially castrated, desexualized and absented through the hegemonic topness of white gay men in sexual representations of 1980s gay video porn that cannot fathom the desiring GAM subject. Hence Fung’s ‘lifelong vocation’ of looking for his penis—of rephallicizing his racially castrated Asian male body—and subsequent call for self-representations of GAM subjecthood, pleasure, and agency.
While Fung and Chung are both engaged in rephallicization projects, it is crucial to note that Fung’s career as an artist and intellectual far exceeds the off-and-on looping that Chung, almost two and half decades later, decided to manifest in his 2017 acceptance speech. For instance, Fung’s later works explore a vast range of topics such as 19th century Chinese Canadian railroad laborers in Dirty Laundry (1996) and colonialism and migration across India, the Caribbean, and North America vis a vis culinary history in Dal Puri Diaspora (2012). One could argue, then, that, contra his own proclamation in 1991, Fung (2005 [1991]) has not been spending the rest of his life trying to fill in the specific visual void of “a striking absence down there” (237). Nevertheless, in the words of film artist and scholar Hoang Tan Nguyen (2014): “If we remain wholly within the terms of Fung’s thesis” in “Looking for My Penis,” as some in the GAM community have, “we would discover that to replace Asian-as-anus with Asian-as-penis is to reinscribe the penis and topness, that is, dominant masculinity, as the desirable end point” (19).
In his book, A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation (2014), Nguyen offers a crucial intervention into GAM remasculinization strategies by “reconfiguring Asian American subjectivity and its relationship with bottomhood” (3). Nguyen advances “bottomhood as a critical strategy that allows us to reflect on other meanings feminization and emasculation articulate besides being the effects of white racism on Asian American manhood” (6). Breaking from the logics of rephallicization, Nguyen suggests that the issue is not so much the absenting of the penis vis a vis racial castration but the erasure of the desiring anus vis a vis remasculinization. He goes on to argue that, when freed from the phallocentric binary of penis-top-active-masculine-subject and anus-bottom-passive-feminine-other/object, bottomhood is able to offer a different set of gendered, sexual, social, and political possibilities oriented around receptivity, vulnerability, and connection. Worded differently, Nguyen grabs the detachable Asian phallus from the hand of history and, contra Fung, skillfully guides it into the capacious desire of Asian-as-anus.
While I deeply appreciate Nguyen’s intervention, I am left wondering to what extent his reconfiguration of Asian American masculinity is available to those of us like myself who are on the fringes of compulsory sexuality. It’s not that I am indifferent to the important work of both Fung and Nguyen, it’s that I literally give no fucks, neither as a rephallicized top nor a bossy bottom. Is there a way to reconfigure race, gender, and sexuality for Asian people assigned male at birth without presuming allonormativity? I’m asking for me.
. . . .
Nguyen describes his redeployment of gay bottomhood as indebted to Joon Oluchi Lee’s (2005) embrace of racial castration as a “willingness to embrace femininity as a race and, vice versa, race as femininity” (44). In his essay, “The Joy of the Castrated Boy,” Lee writes that “while Eng locates the system and mechanics of racial castration, he does not provide an instance in which the sociopsychic position of the castrated boy is so embraced” (42). Like Eng, Lee’s analysis of racial castration is framed through Freudian psychoanalysis, and in particular the supposed role of castration anxiety in Freud’s heteronormative developmental theory of the Oedipal complex. As such, racial castration is primarily theorized and subverted as it pertains to emasculation and feminization. Lee writes: “I have always considered myself a castrated boy and learned to be happy in that state because that was the only way I could live my life as the girl I knew myself to be." (37)
Lee gets closest to my desire to withhold the presumption of allonormativity in reconfiguring Asian American subjectivity through a joyful occupation of the castrated boy position. But because Lee conceptualizes “the castrated boy’s self-definition as psychically ‘female’” (38), his embrace of the castrated boy remains closed off to other forms of gender identity that are neither “male” nor “female.” Like Lee, I too am seeking a way to joyously occupy the sociopsychic position of the castrated boy. However, the joy that I am after is not articulable through a psychosymbolic embrace of femininity. How might we reconceptualize the joy of the castrated boy with a focus on desexualization and the ways in which the knot of gender, race, and sexuality can fray into an expanse of nonbinary Asian American aspec possibilities?
While we end up in vastly different places, I am indebted to Lee—and Eng, Fung, and Nguyen—for charting the paths from which I diverge. All of these authors, in their own ways, refuse the heteromasculine rephallicization of Ted Chung’s Dragon and hence open up a space for alternative forms of queer (post)masculine embodiment, a space which I partially occupy. Yet none of these authors have been able to fully account for the exasperation and failed appellation that I experienced during the night of Chung’s speech, let alone speak directly to the intersections of Asian racialization, demigender identification, and graysexual orientation in which I am positioned. And so I am left to my own words to construct a more habitable world for my joyfully castrated subjectivity.
. . . .
It’s a hot summer day between first and second grade and I am cooling off in a crowded swimming pool. The slice of watchful parental concern and the splash of children hollering fill the air. Water sloshes down my lower body as I pull myself up the ladder, out of the pool, and onto the concrete. A light breeze blows past me and I realize that there is a hole in the crotch of my swimming shorts. I am exposed, my prepubescent penis in plain sight for everyone to see. But nothing happens, no one sees it, or at least nobody points it out. The children are too caught up in their own elation and their parents are too set on preventing any sort of mishap. I have the faintest premonition of an older Asian man suggesting to me that I should yell out and demand that everyone turn their heads and look at the penis nobody saw, as if the coherence of my gender and sexual subjectivity hinged on a single metonymic glance. The gaze of a magpie turns my way. It swoops down and pecks off what it mistakes for a worm, leaving just enough for me to still stand and pee.
Or at least that’s how that episode plays out in my mind now. In reality, I simply readjusted my swim trunks and went about my day. At the time, my seven-year-old self didn’t have the language to adequately understand how the structural co-productions of race, gender, and sexuality entwined in my lived experience, and so the non-event of my exposure that day did not register in any of these terms. It wouldn’t be until much later that I would both understand the mechanisms of racial castration impinging on my embodiment and realize that I feel most comfortable in this supposed state of loss. Rather than constitute myself in relation to a normatively desired object’s absence, I find myself daydreaming about what is possible in the wake of non-arrival. The magpie never came back.
I exist in the liminal space between masculinity and something else, an inertial nothing that frees me from the orbit of rephallicization, frees me to pursue a vast range of pleasures and erotics beyond the genital-sexual fixations of compulsory sexuality. I told the hand of history to keep my detachable Asian phallus. This way, I have more room in my pockets for other joyous things: unrealistic ideas, mental notes of my friends’ favorite foods, my pet rock, quiet mornings spent in the garden planting Totoro’s acorns, cups of tea in the company of challenging questions and the books that purport to answer them, stares long enough to watch the grass grow, afternoons spent writing, new words, the many faces of cats, awe at the sound of heavy rain, the possibility of practicing new forms of relation, the pulse of an ever-changing world.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Ariel Chu for her feedback and comments on an earlier draft of this piece.
References
Eng, David. Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America. Duke University Press.
Fung, Richard. 2005 [1991]. "Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn." In Kent A. Ono's (ed.) A Companion to Asian American Studies, first edition, pp. 235-253. Blackwell Publishing
Lee, Joon Oluchi. 2005. "The Joy of the Castrated Boy." Social Text 84-85 23(3-4): 35-56.
Nguyen, Tan Hoang. 2014. A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation. Duke University Press.
