17
Asian American: A Study of Emasculation Ren Zhang
I
n April of 2004, American men’s magazine Details published an article entitled “Gay or Asian?” The column consisted of an image of Asian man with various racist and homophobic commentaries on his outfit and appearance. It begins: “One cruises for chicken; the other takes it General Tso-style. Whether you’re into shrimp balls or shaved balls, entering the dragon requires imperial tastes.” The article then proceeded with comments on the model such as “Delicate features: Refreshed by a cup of hot tea or a hot night of teabagging” (McNalley 52). The exotic Orientalist imagery that the article attempts to juxtapose with stereotypes of gay men invokes a message that the two are related or perhaps the same. Like femininity, homosexuality, as Connell writes, is “the repository of whatever is symbolically expelled from hegemonic masculinity, the items ranging from fastidious taste in home decoration to receptive anal pleasure. Hence, from the point of view of hegemonic masculinity, gayness is easily assimilated into femininity” (Connell 78). To associate homosexuality with femininity is to argue for the subordination of both gay and Asian men and all women to a certain racialized version of masculinity. Before continuing such a discussion, it is important that we provide definitions and distinctions between words such as “masculinity,” “femininity,” “emasculation,” and “feminization,” for they are words that often appear together. We can establish that as result of patriarchal histories, the idea of masculinity is constructed through both physical appearance and behavior and is often assigned traits that have been deemed as desirable and dominant such as physical strength, intellect, and leadership. Femininity is then defined as the opposite, a lack of masculinity.1 Both femininity and homosexuality become ascribed to the behaviors that masculinity and heterosexuality repudiate. Although “Gay or Asian” was certainly not the first time 1 As Ling notes, it is important to distinguish “emasculation” and “feminization” as not occupying the same lexical space as they apply to history and culture. Within the context of Asian America, he argues that emasculation can be considered the product of the oppressions faced by Asian American men, with feminization being just one of the methods in which such oppressions occur (Ling 314). The idea of feminization is important to consider because the patriarchal nature of society establishes masculinity and femininity as a gender binary where masculinity is composed of many desirable traits such as strength, courage, and sexual desirability. Femininity is then defined as a lack of these traits. Ling, Jinqi. “Identity Crisis and Gender Politics: Reappropriating Asian American Masculinity.” An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature. Ed. King-kog Cheung. N.p.: Cambridge UP, 1997. 312-37. Print.
North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics
I was introduced to stereotypes that aimed to erase Asian American masculinity, something about the pure absurdity of the article and its coarse insinuations sparked a need to better understand this violence. I sought to better understand this as not merely a series of punctuated incidents, but as the product of a hegemonic system of race and gender whose origins can be traced to the historical encounters of the earliest Asian American immigrants with an emergent white nationalist masculinity. My attempts to seek such an understanding have resulted in a discovery that such an emasculation originates and is sustained through a racism that is, like so many other racisms, the result of a perceived threat to the white supremacist society by people of color. This emasculation occurs in many forms, including the form of a normative heterosexuality developed through the characters of the homosexual and the asexual and is normalized and instituted through societal constructs such as the model minority and the bamboo ceiling. In modern times, much of Asian American masculinity or lack thereof is defined through a frequent misrepresentations of Asian American men in media forms such as film or television.
T
he emasculation of Asian American men is a reaction to their perceived threat to white society; such a threat justifies the renewed dominance of white men over Asian American men in order to assert and maintain their higher position within the social hierarchy. Such a need for dominance is often expressed in terms of the sexual dominance of an unruly racialized nature. The assertion of this sexual dominance establishes the supremacy of white male sexuality over Asian male sexuality. Eng recognizes this when he writes that “the Westerner monopolizes the part of the “top”: the Asian is invariably assigned the role of the “bottom” (1). Because of the hegemony of heterosexuality and patriarchy, the male is established as the sexually dominant, on top, which forces the female into the role of the sexually submissive, on bottom. Therefore when the Asian American man is portrayed as the sexually submissive, the bottom, he is inevitably feminized, thus eliminating all forms of maleness or identity which do not conform to white heterosexual masculinity. If heterosexuality and masculinity are to be considered the dominant forms of sexuality and gender respectively, then it suggests that the two of them are mutually constitutive. When masculinity is articulated to heterosexuality, femininity is then identified with homosexuality. The construction and correlation of the male/female
