Description
Book SynopsisBring together the fields of Asian American studies and psychoanalytic theory and explores the role of sexuality in racial formation and the place of race in sexual identity. This title examines images - literary, visual, and filmic - that configure past and contemporary perceptions of Asian American men as emasculated, homosexualized, or queer.
Trade Review“David Eng’s excellent book shows not only how psychoanalysis can—and must—read race but how race revises psychoanalytic theory fundamentally. Wide-ranging and lucid, this work offers a theoretically rich set of cultural readings, making us know in new ways the proximities of racial difference, desire, anxiety, and visual representation.”—Judith Butler, University of California at Berkeley
“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
Table of ContentsPreface vii
Introduction: Racial Castration
1
1. I’ve Been (Re)Working on the Railroad: Photography and National History in
China Men and
Donald Duk 35
2. Primal Scenes: Queer Childhood in “The Shoyu Kid” 104
3. Heterosexuality in the Face of Whiteness: Divided Belief in
M. Butterfly 137
4. Male Hysteria—Real and Imagined—in
Eat a Bowl of Tea and
Pangs of Love 167
Epilogue: Out Here and Over There: Queerness and Diaspora in Asian American Studies 204
Notes 229
Bibliography 267
Index 283
