Reconstruction Vol. 16, No. 2
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Nguyen, Hoang Tan. A View from The Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. ISBN: 13-978-0822356844 (hbk). xvi + 304 pp. / Dai Kojima
<1> Nguyen Hoang Tan's A View from The Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation, a compelling new queer film studies text, begins its inquiry with the polemic that we must shift our perspective on race and sex to a "view from the bottom" so that we might render questions of agency, politics and ethics differently than what is currently available in our critical theorizations of sex, gender and race. Drawing upon feminist, queer Asian and film studies, Nguyen mobilizes an archive of filmic representations of gay male porn and other intimacies concerning Asian men in order to re-examine the sexual "scripts" of these moving images that signal different possibilities, powers and relationalities beyond the binary of exploitation and complicity.
<2> At their core, Nguyen's analyses of filmic texts and representations are concerned with the well-documented legacy of gendered racism against Asian male subjects in North America--often described as "effeminization" and "racial castration" (Eng 2001)--and how these racialization effects are seen through polarized sexual positions. That is, because Asian masculinity is always-already in a negative relation to white masculine ideals due to Asian men's supposed lack of physical, economical and sexual prowess, Asian male bodies occupy the asexual or passive position at best, and the abject status for the performance of white masculinity at worst. In terms of sexual scripts in gay male porn, as Nguyen translates, the vernacular gay sexual terms and relations of "top/bottom" place Asian men ("bottoms") literally under the white performers ("tops"); the bottoms receive, endure and enable tops' masculinity and dominance.
<3> Given the pervasiveness of such established sexual scripts afforded Asian men in gay porn and other filmic texts, however, Nguyen cautions against the literal reading of these scenes as just another case of oppression that would omit a more nuanced consideration of counterpower and pleasure negotiated by bottoming subjects. More critically, Nguyen articulates how such a narrow perspective on racialized sexual positions, while politically necessary, leads to an uncritical evaluation of Asian masculinity that equates femininity, passivity and bottoming as various forms of psychic damage to Asian male subjects.
<4> To counter this anti-feminist frame often employed in Asian American male politics and scholarship, Nguyen argues for "critical bottomhood," which is:
a new framework for oppositional politics through a reassessment of male effeminacy and its racialization. It challenges the strategy of remasculinization employed by Asian American and gay male critics as a defence against feminization…this book conceives of bottomhood capaciously, as a sexual position, a social alliance, an affective bond, and an aesthetic form. (p. 2)
Nguyen convincingly maps out the ubiquitous nature of heteronormativity in Asian American politics of recognition and visibility wherein the undoing of racism is often aimed at a reclamation of masculinity through politically correct representational strategies (e.g. more just and authentic expressions and placements of Asian masculinity in visual fields). In a truly queer manner, Nguyen argues for bottomhood as an ethical reading and viewing practice that enables more expansive understandings of power and social recognition by refusing the persistent binary of heteronormative sex and gender relations that assign agency and self-determination to masculinity (the "penetrating" subject), at the expense of femininity (the powerless, shamed and, ultimately, abject object of masculine desire).
<5> In each chapter, Nguyen takes us through the other side of "otherwise" (Muñoz 2009) glimpsed through his imaginative and "reparative" reading for bottomhood's world-making potentialities that unfold through an intricate and powerful reading across the various scenes of an archive of bottomhood (24).
<6> Chapter 2 engages with a collection of gay male porn and the rise and fall of the first visible Asian top gay porn star, Brandon Lee. Lee's unusually large penis (that betrays the stereotype of Asian men as poorly endowed), racial ambiguity (as Filipino-Latino-Chinese mix) and perfect American English accent (unlike his heavily accented Asian bottom counterparts) allows Lee to retain his masculinity, therefore hired as a top/fucking performer, an exception to Asian male performers typecast as bottoms/fuckees. However, Nguyen carefully avoids an exaltation of Lee as a corrective to the mainstream representation of gay Asian men by focusing on Lee's eventual "fall" into bottoming. By tracing how the exceptional Asian top is nevertheless haunted by the scripts of an FOB (Fresh-Off-the-Boat) immigrant figure written into the performances and scenes of these porn videos--through accent, low-class labor and uncultured mannerisms--and how Lee aggressively embraces and enthusiastically acts out these FOB characteristics in playing bottom roles, Nguyen points out not only the national dimensions of Asian American masculinity and its confinement; but he also offers a meditation on how "Lee's transition to bottomhood speaks differently to his gay Asian viewers. Unlike other manifestations of Asian bottomhood in gay porn…[the transition reads as] a complex negotiation of racial, gender, national, and economic meanings attached to this most loaded of sexual positions" (70).
<7> In Chapter 3 and 4, Nguyen expands his bottomhood reading to less explicitly queer moving-images, while remaining critically attentive to the ways in which scripts and representations in standard films nonetheless queer Asian men and emplace them in the murky space of bottomhood, where alternative relationalities--or in his own words, "a social alliance, an affective bond, and an aesthetic form"--between differently racialized, gendered and socially displaced characters can be found. These include an outlandish and pathetically portrayed Filipino house servant and a depressed and damaged housewife at a military base in the South (Reflections in a Golden Eye), and a rich, older Chinese man and a poor young French woman in colonial Saigon (The Lover). These chapters vividly demonstrate the generative power of Nguyen's bottomhood framework that seeks what Roland Barthes (1977) calls the "third meaning" in filmic texts, where seemingly insignificant or ordinary characters, props and still images deviate from the plotlines and cultural references of the film itself and to unexpected effects. Nguyen deftly employs theories of affect, gaze and colonialism to demonstrate bottomhood's world-making function that enables these precarious characters from different times and places to touch, survive and make love to and with each other because and despite of unbearable regimes of race, gender and class that would tear them apart otherwise.
<8> In Chapter 5 and in the Conclusion, Nguyen returns to considerations of the political utility of bottomhood for "gaysian" struggles against race and gender in contemporary queer Asian American lives. Upon taking stock of bottomhood's travels through US-based gay porn to transnational films, Nguyen re-examines experimental documentaries, including his own, that advocate for politically correct and socially just sexual practices among gaysian men, often seen as the victims of the colonial legacy in the US where desiring another Asian man becomes impossible. As such, "sticky rice" politics (157) call gaysian men to reorient their desire for white men to fellow gaysians, to practice topping and bottoming equally, and to celebrate gaysian-to-gaysian love as revolutionary. While its political necessity is acknowledged, for Nguyen the sticky rice politics and the policing of interracial sex reinforces the equation of bottomhood as powerless and complicit with Asian racism. This is an argument that dangerously orbits anti-feminism and relegates women and other nelly, flaming bottom queens as liabilities to politically correct expressions of Asian masculinity. To this end, Nguyen calls for a different kind of political imagination through taking up the bottom position:
Instead of advocating for an equal-time, reversible S/M scopic and sexual play or to legislate meaningful sex acts with partners of the right race, a more radical lesson would be to endorse a politics that enables a multiplicity of desires and identifications, including those that insist on fixity rather than mobility. (156)
<9> In summary, Nguyen offers unflinching engagements and revaluations of queer negativity and feminist sensibilities that exceed racialization in normative sexual scripts. As with any ground-breaking text, such engagements always produce further directions. Nguyen's focus on bottomhood is consciously limited to the Asian American political context and, at times, such a limit elides the transnational dimension of production and viewing of these sexual moving-images. For example, the discussion of "Iron Pussy" in Chapter 4 somewhat obscures the video's geopolitically situated commentaries on intra-Asian racial politics and international sexual tourism in Thailand in Nguyen's decidedly Asian American frame of reference.
<10> The reader is left to wonder whether the "Asian" in "Asian America" can (or should) hold its national boundary. In addition, Nguyen's strictly film-based analyses could benefit from more embodied accounts of the dis/continuities between representations and everyday enactments of danger/pleasure of interracial sex; it sometimes feels as if Nguyen asks too few video images to speak for a great many complex social issues, leaving out a consideration of how these images are taken up, put into use or eroticized by diverse locations and populations covered under the term "gaysian." However, these limits strongly reinforce the relevance and productive field of inquiry opened by Nguyen's novel interventions and this book performs a much-needed pedagogical work that extends queer Asian theorizing beyond the contemporary plotlines of Asian American politics and scholarship in gender and sexuality studies, Asian and Asian American studies and film studies in order for us, along with Nguyen, to carry these conversations forward.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. Image music text. Trans. S. Heath, S. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1977.
Eng, D. Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.
Muñoz, José Estaban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2009.
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