Reconstruction Vol. 16, No. 2

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Six-pack Twinks, Lipstick Dipsticks and Twice-touched Teases: Queering the Stereotype in Asian Cinema / James A. Wren

"When a man does a queer thing, or two queer things, there may be a meaning to it, but when everything he does is queer, then you begin to wonder."

― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes

"That's one of the things that 'queer' can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically. The experimental linguistic, epistemological, representational, political adventures attaching to the very many of us who may at times be moved to describe ourselves as (among many other possibilities) pushy femmes, radical faeries, fantasists, drags, clones, leatherfolk, ladies in tuxedos, feminist women or feminist men, masturbators, bulldaggers, divas, Snap! queens, butch bottoms, storytellers, transsexuals, aunties, wannabes, lesbian-identified men or lesbians who sleep with men, or ... people able to relish, learn from, or identify with such."

― Eve Sedgwick

"If that's being queer, then we could do with a bit more queerness in these parts."

― J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings

<1> Long before I began thinking about the issues of regionalism and regional identity, I found myself concerned with the mechanics of and the possibilities inherent to representation, first on the stage and later in film. I well recall having seen Miss Saigon on Broadway and, in spite of a number of exceptional performances, walked away with one very real concern: I found the character of Tran Van Dinh, The Engineer, disconcerting. True to his profession as the owner of "Dreamland," he was clearly a sleazy hustler, but that was not my concern. This ethnicity, as half-Vietnamese and half-French, did not ring true. Regardless of the acclaim—Jonathan Pryce received the Laurence Olivier Award and Tony Award for the role—I could not identify with a Caucasian in the role. [1] Admittedly, I was having an issue on a fundamental level with representation. Were there no actors of mixed race who might perhaps have taken on the challenge?

<2> But allow me to digress for a moment.

<3> At about the same time, I hit the theatre district in New York, a series of gay-centric jokes made the rounds, at least across American university campuses. The typical fare, certainly—a "screaming queen" who made a nose—dive for the local bar while purring with delight, "Oh, a buffet!" or a transvestite who raised her skirt after a one-sided intimate encounter and suggested as she did so, "Now, it's your turn!"—but what I remember about these jokes, I accepted the humor and caught myself laughing almost immediately. The nature of the punchlines, I suspect, already clear enough, I have no intention on elaborating further. But why had I laughed? In hindsight, it had something to do with an overarching "experiential knowledge," in particular that kind found in stereotypes that I readily identified.

<4> Not all such representations, however, were so easy for me to understand. My facilities with spoken English aside, I remained naïve to certain stock characters in the LGBTQ community.

<5> There was, for example, a very close friend of mine in graduate school, affectionately nicknamed "Black Betty." And while the name seems obvious to me now, it was not then. I had, after several months, asked her why people insisted on calling her by such a name. She did not, all said and done, self-identify as a woman of color, her given name had nothing to do with Betty, and she clearly had little affinity for baking. Of course, everyone laughed at my question; about a week later, I got my answer, as she handed me a photograph. Clearly, she was "coming out" to me—no surprises there, since I had heard that she was a "lipstick lesbian"—but to do so with a photograph of an enormous black appliance, a "dipstick" of a sort the size of a Japanese eggplant, clearly needing no batteries, well, that had an impression on me.

<6> That image burned into my psyche, I might have been expected to become a quick study thereafter. That was hardly the case.

<7> Later, at some point in the mid-1980s, I found myself in an American medical as a social actionist who often spoke to student organizations about the need for "safer" sex practices and who had spent several months in a research lab as we tried to understand the possible modes of viral transmission. I had lectured at several Japanese medical schools on the subject. And I had conducted an early survey of sexual practices between Japanese and non-Japanese encounters in Osaka. My reputation as a public spokesman was secure, or so I thought. Then, one day, in the middle of a presentation in gross anatomy, the lecturer—an elderly man who had spent much of his career in Thailand and had yet to learn the finer arts of focus during his lectures—drifted further and further away from the subject at hand. At some point, he paused, shifted directions entirely, and called me out. "Mr. Wren," he began. "What say you? Are 'lady boys' a product of their genetics? You know what I mean. Are 'she males' just born that way?"

<8> I was dumbfounded, gob smacked even.

<9> As classes ended, I headed to the gross lab to continue with my dissections. "Hell, he's just as normal as you or me," I heard a lab partner explain—before a hush came over the bench. In under five minutes, everyone had disappeared, and I was left to finish the dissection alone.

<10> I finished my work at about 2:00 a.m. the following morning, as was my usual routine, so I left and began walking to my apartment, located conveniently enough in a secluded area on the edge of campus. I recall a light rain before everything stopped. Several men jumped me. They were hurling insults at me as they held me to the ground. The last thing I remember, what looked like a knife coming at me.

<11> Sometime later, I awoke. I was hiding myself in my bedroom closet and had managed to pull all of my clothing down around me. There was blood everywhere, and I soon realized that I had been stabbed in my left knee. Instinctively, I understood more, that my knee had not been the intended target. I called a cab and got myself to the emergency room.

<12> Two days later, I returned to lectures. Before entering the auditorium, I needed to collect my atlases and the like from my locker. Scrawled across the door in black paint: "Faggot Die!" I never made it to lectures, opting instead to spend the remainder of the morning cleaning away the graffiti. Students and faculty alike passed on occasion. A few slowed down as they passed; but no one spoke, and no one stepped up with an offer of assistance. As I scraped away the paint, I had ample time to question myself, to wrangle with what it was in my behavior, in the way I had "presented" myself to my colleagues. Just what image of myself was I conveying that would trigger either a verbal attack by an emotionally disconnected professor or the rage and physical brutality from fellow classmates?

<13> But perhaps I digress enough, at least for the moment.

<14> Sometime after the new millennium, I overheard another joke: "What is the difference between a gay man and a straight man?" The answer was hardly surprising. "A six pack." Was it a coincidence that everyone laughed in unison? That they shared an understanding of some fundamental "truth" that made the punchline work? Just how likely was it, I remember thinking to myself, that heterosexual males might engage in homosexual activities after only six beers?

<15> At about the same time, a friend from Korea spent a week with my family as he was making a cross-country trip to see the States. After having gone out one evening, he returned, despondent, lamenting something to the effect, "Where are all the six packs?" Somehow, I understood that he was in this particular instance not referring to alcohol. Rather, in his mind, he had appropriated an image of the idealized gay American male with chiseled abdominal muscles and had expected to walk into a gay bar and find these men in every corner. [2] As he has reminded me since, "reality has a way of biting." It was his bawdy comments on expected "six packs" and his subsequent experiences with "twinks," "rent" and "barflies," framed as they were within larger discussions of a disappointing reality, however, that left me to ponder the issues of representation further.

<16> I had just such an opportunity to explore (my) emerging questions on representation with larger concerns of regionalism and regional identity in an honor's seminar in critical theory I taught at Rhodes College, a particular well-known American liberal arts institution. During one week, I asked my students—a diverse group of seniors from the US and Great Britain, Germany and France, Cambodia and Vietnam, India and Pakistan, China, Japan and Lebanon—to look closely at a number of films, among them the Taiwanese film Niezi (孽子 Outcast, 1986, dir. Yu Kan Ping), the Philippine Macho Dancer (1988, dir. Lino Brocka), the Australian Echoes of Paradise (1987, dir. Phillip Noyce), the British My Beautiful Laundrette (1985, dir. Stephen Frears) and the American Boys in the Band (1970, dir. William Friedkin). Their responses—and mine—were quite unexpected.

<17> In general, all found the depiction of gay characters in the American classic to be in keeping with the era of its filming but hardly remarkable from their vantage. They could relate to certain representations of homosexuality but found several to be overly polished, in certain instances lacking in depth. Likewise, they quickly isolated the melodrama at the heart of the Taiwanese and Philippine films and used this knowledge to facilitate their readings of the various gay characters. They felt comfortable with the likes of handsome, clearly "masculine" Taiwanese men juxtaposed with their effeminate counterparts. And they saw no need to question the fluidity of sexual responses in the Philippine film. There were few issues with the authenticity of such representations—not even with the same-sex relationship in My Beautiful Laundrette. It was only with the Australian film, what I saw as an overly wrought love story between an exiled Balinese dancer (John Lone) and an Australian woman (Wendy Hughes), that gave anyone reason to pause. I had expected students to respond to the miscegenation at the heart of the work—allowing me something of a "teachable moment" along the way. [3 ] Instead, several of the Asian students found the male dancer to be wildly problematic, but not for the reasons I had anticipated. Several were so concerned that they actually looked closer at his movements. The female student from Cambodia forced us to re-evaluate the dance itself, suggesting as she did that the "phenomenology" and the semiotics of motions were "queer." She lacked the specific vocabulary, in the absence of a lengthy analysis—and she would do this by the end of term—but she "felt" that the dance was "somehow" inappropriate.

<18> As it turned out, there was something inappropriate: John Lone had learned the Balinese dance from a female dancer, and his movements, as such, were not those of the male dancer. Inadvertently assuming the role of the female dancer, he opened his representation of a heterosexual Asian male involved in a sexual relationship with a Caucasian woman to increased scrutiny.

<19> The student reading of the film, in fact, depended upon a queer lens. [4] Her early insights into the interaction between film scholarship, performance and representation from my perspective both enriched and evolve the philosophical nature of representation and identity for all who participated in the seminar. Her insights would find wider expression in the likes of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990), Lee Edelman's No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), and J. Jack Halberstam's In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005), works that have since shaped the lively and ongoing discussion of queer politics and theory.

<20> That same reading suggested the particular nature of national and regional representations that we would later see in Andrew Grossman's Queer Asian Cinema: Shadows in the Shade (2001) and Lim Song Hwee's Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas (2006). The former was the first full-length book in English solely devoted to examining the aesthetics and politics of homosexuality in Asian films; the latter demonstrated the importance of queer studies in the field of transnational Chinese cinemas.

Nature of the Beasts

<21> Realizing that Jean-Luc Godard's famous proclamation that there is "no difference between cinema and life" (quoted in Morrey 2005: 25), this issue of Reconstruction was originally conceived—in the style of Godard—as a montage of articles exploring issues of Asian queerness in sociopolitical and cinematic contexts respectively. The goal here is to jump cut between cinematic explorations and articles on "real world" issues in the Asian context. The issue itself, then, is meant to have a sort of jarring effect, as readers move between articles that, while all falling under the keyword of "Asian Queer Studies," with the goal of activating new interventions both in the academic field and "in the field," on the ground in Asia. Central to contemporary understandings of queerness in Asia are the LGBTQ representations in Asian cinema. How do processes like mainstreaming and international proliferation affect queer cinema as a genre and queers as a community? And how can we assess the contemporary situation of queer film in the context of dominant developments in our society concerning homosexuality and alternative life models?

<22> More concretely, how do understanding of regionalism and regional identity contribute toward richer, compelling readings of Queer Asian cinema? Regionalism—the purpose of which is to moderate the behavior of political states in such a way to facilitate communication and to build additional recognizable layers of identity beyond that imposed by the state and, in doing so, to restrain conflict—is largely excluded from any and all discussions, but can we continue to ignore this concept and, in particular, the lively debates that will likely ensue? Heretofore, when we speak of Chinese film, for example, we concomitantly speak of a paradox, of a homogeneous entity that we somehow have "pulled together" as a singular, clearly defined mediation of time and space. Yet an examination of the regional nature of particular representations holds many of the solutions to a successful reading of these bodies of work. For even the most cursory examination of the long history of the film in Chinese and its sophisticated development and evolution into the multifaceted products we witness today suggest an obvious different view. In place of a single China, we speak of China (or Mainland China/Han China/ Beijing-focused film), alongside Hong Kong Film, Macao Cinema, Taiwanese Film, Diaspora Film (hua chao, or "foreign-born," film as but an example, but including Peranakan Chinese film, Ethnic Chinese American or Chinese-in-Japan Filmmakers), immediately, the potential for cultural difference—real difference—ought be obvious.

<23> Or were we to recast the entire subject in the unfamiliar, consider the various association and characteristics attached to such terms as Han, Tibetan, Fujian or Shandong. To illustrate this point, ask, for example, someone on the Chinese Mainland the question: "Which region of China has the most 'masculine' men? While the answers may vary considerably, obvious stereotypes begin to emerge. In fact, having posed this question on several occasions, I have been told that men in Shandong are most handsome—obviously a stereotype co-opted and widely expressed. Invariably, in the same breath, Shandong men are described as being "less educated" or "less sophisticated." Similar subjectivities are linked with the mention of Singapore, Hong Kong or even with Gansu, Anhui or Fujian. In truth, it appears that certain images of gender identity and construction exist throughout the various venues we term China and that these differ one from the other, oftentimes in significant and important ways (insofar as they mediate how we view the text and its dealings with sexual orientation).

<24> Or consider the connotations that a "Seoul Man" carries when compared to someone originating in Korea's Busan region. Invariably, individuals from Busan and localities nearby will note that Seoul masculinity is "tainted," affected, at times overtly "homocentric" or gay. Likewise, individuals from Seoul are quick to point out that Busan masculinity is built upon an artifice of machismo, that individuals are intentionally uncultured and rude—and that these are the marks of a "manly" (non-gay) Korean man.

<25> These are but a few examples of regional differentiations and stereotypes that, just as in American cinema, inevitably find themselves entering, more or less directly, into the visual landscape that represents Queer Asian cinema. What does it mean when, to borrow a phrase from Roland Barthes, "the stereotype goes queer"? (Barthes 1963; de Villiers 2012) How do various films or directors invoke, promote, and subvert regional stereotypes relating to representations of LBGTQ individuals and communities? What do we learn about various subcultures and regions throughout Asia when the traditionally straight lens of anthropology is given a queer twist?

Figure 1. Map of Asia (courtesy of Myles Carter, property Manager for WorldAtlas.com.)

<26> But can a cinematic work be acclaimed a "masterpiece" even as it embraces both its regional heritage and the transnational forces at work in the artistic community? I wholeheartedly answer in the affirmative. I contend that Queer Asian Cinema provides a wealth of narratives that are likely to function as alternative history beyond the generic cultural and geographical assumptions of the history of the region and its role in the global/transnational community (Figure 1). The latter best understood in cultural terms or in social scientific systems is discussed here. It also deals with the temporal conditions (premodern, modern, postmodern) assumed to hold for globalization. The polyphonic potential of these narratives ought be explored in multiple ways, among them the historical and literary, as well as the sociological and political.

Reading Representations

<27> I am left to ask how to rectify my understanding of national and transnational cinematic trends with what I see as clearly 'regional" instances of experiential knowledge. Certainly, Ôshima Nagisa had admonished us to the effect: "Japanese cinema will have matured when we do not recognize it anymore as Japanese, only as cinema" (Turmin 1998: 271; Davis 2001). While I accept his assertion to a large degree, I am also reminded that the emergence of queer theory from the fields of poststructuralism and feminism in the 1990s served to destabilize identity and its attendant heteronormative and cis-gendered ideological constructions. Grounded in discussions of gender and sexuality as social constructs subject to flux, such an approach resists the violence of identity politics and challenges the idea that gender and sexuality are part of the essential self. Queer is most often associated with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBTQ) communities, to include cross-dressing, intersex and gender ambiguity, as well. Less an identity than a critique of identity, it challenges the male/female binary and to the heteronormative while eschewing entrenched classifications of deviant sexuality.

<28> For as we speak of these representations so, too, are we necessarily speaking of its inherent or internal ideological framework, but in a world where "human thoughts and ideas" exist within a discernible context and are always as much historical as they are rhetorical, ideology is left exposed for what it is: an historical process framed by the very machinations of rhetoric. By boldly applying such a situational approach (in this instance, arising from Martin Heidegger's work) to literary theory, for example, Hans-Georg Gadamer reintroduces the notion of culture as text into our discussions of representations; as he does so, he simultaneously divests and disabuses ideology of its universalist pretensions. Put differently, what we abstract as the marvelous, neatly parceled bundle of meaning inherent to a work in general does not suddenly materialize sui generis into the world as a finished product but arises, instead, out of the multifaceted, complex relationships between culture and ideology. His argument, furthermore, implies that representation in particular finds its continued existence within any given number of ideological fields, not the least of which is the introduction of difference into personal reading by an individual reader. Existing in time and space and ranging across cultural contexts, it nonetheless does not transcend these dimensions but rather must be perceived through them.

<29> Accepting that cinematic representation is inseparable from the totality of culture and cannot be studied divorced from its cultural contexts, ideology included, I am left to question those very characteristics heretofore valorized as "serious" and "relevant" to modern film and media studies. Put unceremoniously, the hunted, haunted individuals whose arduous labors and oppressive isolation, whose thoughts, feelings and actions now merit our closer scrutiny deviate in no significant ways from a character type originating with the Sturm und Drang, with Goethe's Young Werther and Höderlin's Hyperion, for example. Certainly, the emergence and, to differing degrees, the dispersion of a monological idiom of representation, based upon the demands and complexities of one's own private being, provided not only a means to place this newfound self at the center of literary pursuits but also established a viable vehicle by which disenfranchised or marginalized characters might "confirm their isolation" upon the screen as they "pondered larger questions of human life." The most unforgettable characters exhibit, in accordance with current scholarly prejudices, a monolithic sameness. They are, we are told, heroic figures whose role vis à vis society typically assumed precisely the moral isolation and spiritual autonomy common to all such disaffected rebels.

<30> But what of difference?

<31> We are virtually never told that such readings of these representations depend upon the most distinct and commanding features of an alien realist practice for their very existence and that they grant cultural authority to a distant entity from without at precisely that moment when regions are grappling internally with the notions of identity, self, and modernity.

<32> But it is less the characters and their representations than their intricate boundedness with culture and ideology as physical, corporeal, and linguistic sites of multiple and inextricable histories, however, that concern me here. When appropriated and rendered indigenous, twisted to form vibrant new figures for regionally-grounded Angst against a background of rapid and uncertain social change, Asian LGBTQ representations expose in one way or another the gap between themselves and the cultural milieus into which they were born. Possessed of an alien voice with which they have yet learned to cope, they shape their lives as texts in effect to become the bodies of their learning, the instruments by which they may eventually become the owner of their voices. Concomitantly fixed and trying to find some ever-elusive place within a larger cultural process they still cannot understand, they have little choice but to negotiate unendingly their positions in order to lend some validity to their very "being." Unambiguously chauvinistic, their quest for for representations and voice in the singular, I believe, arrogantly presumes both the existence of a cohesive, self-contained "whole," to be conceived of, grasped, condensed and, through dissection, understood and controlled—or, in the case of writing, articulated within existing frames of knowledge.

<33> Representation, then, as such is a product of language, and as a representation, it reflects the various aspects of an emerging—or renewed interest in—regionalism. As a cultural construct, prevailing notions of depictions of the LGBTQ communities are reducible to matters of "cinematic representation." Put differently, however transparent and unmediated, however quotidian and parochial these narratives of everyday life may appear on the surface, as "recognizable individuals" they are rendered intelligible to us as outside viewers only via a profound, culturally-sanctioned illusion, namely an image of wholeness premised upon a unified autonomy created within discernable parameters of convention that take into account the particular historical circumstances and the generative principles that lend unity to its particular cultural contexts.

<34> Insofar as they rescue queer Asian cinema from the passive category of display discourse by privileging an activist perspective and emphasizing its impact as well as its subversive potential, they require the construction of a poetics of narrative that defamiliarizes, as it accounts for, the importance of reginal representations, not by subordinating or reducing particular characters to the unilateral intentions of their directors/actors/external Gaze—already a commonplace in film criticism—but by positioning texts, narrative voice and the authority inherent to such representations into the larger, far more dynamic poesis of the culture itself. But perhaps most important, by breaching a point heretofore almost completely neglected, the very presence of such depictions demonstrate that the very terminology necessary to describing such representations is not universally applicable. It must of necessity address concerns with regionalism and regional identity.

<35> Put differently, the technological, commercial, and political imperatives that produce and constitute "reginal identity" do so in tandem with specific regional needs. Cultural stereotypes as filmic and narrative representations, are successful with local and global audiences alike, but to different ends. Stereotypes about LGBTQ cultures, as a form of representation, cannot simply be exposed by peeling off their deceptions to reveal a truthful core or by identifying ruling colonial discourses on whose behalf they serve. It is not the inevitability of cultural stereotypes but their "exteriority" that requires our attention (Said 1978: 20-21), for they are given currency and circulate through popular culture—as they are replicated, accelerated, and catalyzed through intertextual, intercultural fertilization. In short, such regional representations are distinguished and enhanced by their durability, precisely because these qualities remain malleable, adaptable to larger localized needs.

<36> Earlier discussions of literary and cultural regionalism have frequently tended to cluster around specific regions and their relations to the nation, as Krista Comer suggests, "figure regions and regionalism in far more comparative and multilingual ways" (1999). Within the global where contemporary representations are routinely rendered as transnational spaces, it is the intersections of gender, postcolonial and queer studies that might best challenge the Eurocentric bias of predominate theoretical and critical paradigms. Whether defined as "knowledge without power" by Trinh T. Minh-ha as the lacunae between knowledge and power, seen as a reconfiguration of the frontiers between bodies and discourses and as a shift, both personal and conceptual, by Teresa de Lauretis (cf. 1990), or as a theory in the flesh-"where the physical realities of our lives …, our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings …, all fuse to create a politic born of necessity" by Cherríe L. Moraga (1983), such readings simultaneously encourage the decentralization and the opening of "friction spaces." From this plurality of worlds, fragmented, contradictory and plural identities emerge, invalidating a supposedly universal subjects in favor of transversal, transgressive and transfeminist/transgender subjectivities. To express these emerging subjectivities, thereby reclaiming their bodies through performance, happening, and dance, and by redefining themselves through visual strategies, promises to open and thereafter sustain a wider, richer project of deconstruction and re-creation.

<37> Likely, such an exercise will lead to a critical re-examination of regionalism and ensuing notions of regional identity in transnational, hemispheric, and even (anti-)global contexts. This requires that we shift the focus away from the region-nation dichotomy towards more dynamic and, I suggest, more productive concepts of regionalism to generate empowering, pluralist discourses of regionalism rather than dualist hegemonies of regions vs. nations&mdash;ultimately to include previously marginalized voices. To do so, we must deliberately re-evaluate (and revalue) already existing regional cultural forms of representation as we question any centrally focused and governed but regionally oriented and constructed images upon the screen. Ultimately, we are left to ask whether such readings go far enough toward establishing political consensus between periphery and center.

<38> With these many questions still fresh, I now direct our readers' attentions to our special issue on regionalism, regional identity and queer Asian cinema.

Acknowledgements: In addition to the dedicated staff at Reconstruction and the many outside readers who tirelessly offered their insights along the way, the author expresses his heartfelt appreciation to the many individuals who have supported this issue over the last several years, among them Hideko Abe, Hongwei Bao, Chris Berry, Jose Cabaltera, Myles Carter, Kenneth Chan, JungBong Choi, Joshua Paul Dale, Benjamin Fraser, Manas Ghosh, Julia Griffin, Vince Ha, C. Winter Han, Kathryn Hemmann, Jeffry Hester, Kunisuke Hirano, Ruth Hsu, Robert Huey, Kyle Keoni Ikeda, Alicia Izharuddin, Yuka Kanno, Anysay Keola, Yuki Kihara, Tommaso M. Milani, Maud Lavin, Emmanuele Lazzara, Helen Hok-Sze Leung, Lupi Li, Martin Lopez, Sheng-mei Ma, Jill Murphy, Ben Murtagh, Vicente L. Rafael, Renato Rivera Rusca, Sophia Shek, Liang Shi, NIshant Shihani, Erin Suzuki, Nguyễn Quốc Thành, John Treat, Sarah Toce, John Wei and Miyabi Modry Yamamoto. If I have inadvertently overlooked anyone along the way, I express my sincerest apologies.

Notes

[1] Issues with non-Asians in Asian roles are but the tip of a much larger, often unspoken reality in the performing arts. The limited range of "acceptable" relationships-how refreshing it is to find John Cho's having an Asian partner in the latest Star Trek franchise-for example continues to undermine creative endeavors in the film industry. Equally egregious is the all-too-predictable casting of white male characters in otherwise Asian-related words. At the one extreme, we suffer through four years and eleven films with Sidney Toler (1874-1947) as Charlie Chan; at the other, with Matt Damon in the upcoming Great Wall.

[2] In hindsight, I find myself laughing at what he might think of the current trend in so-called "dad bodies" we see out and about as erstwhile bar-hoppers age and gray with the times.

[3] In September 1897, Noguchi Yone (1875-1947) embarked upon a passionate correspondence with Charles Warren Stoddard. Noguchi's intimacies point to little-known realities of race and sexuality in turn-of-the-century America to illuminate how Asian immigrants negotiated literary and arts community in the US. His interracial and same-sex affair attests to the complex interaction between lived sexualities and socio-legal mores as it traces how one man negotiated affection across cultural, linguistic and moral divides to find fulfillment in unconventional yet acceptable ways.

[4] Her precocious reading also signals a larger, positive change in film and media studies, namely the appearance of "queer"-in the absence of any sense of Orientalism or the like that would have determined and framed representations by, say, E. M. Forster (1879-1970), André Gide (1869-1951), Jean Genet (1910-1986), Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), William S. Burroughs (1914-1997), Gregory Corso (1930-2001), Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997), Paul Bowles (1910-1999), Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), Truman Capote (1924-1984), Francis Bacon (1909-1992), Gore Vidal (1925-2012), Joe Orton (1933-1967) and Brion Gysin (1916-1986).

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