Ren Zhang

Asian American: A Study of Emasculation

Ren Zhang

In 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. 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.

The 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

and heterosexual/homosexual binaries enables the dominance of white male sexuality over Asian male sexuality to emasculate Asian men. Eng writes that “If Asian American male subjectivity is psychically and materially constrained by a crossing of racial difference with homosexuality—what Fung describes as the conflation of ‘Asian’ and ‘anus’ —then its relation to these dominant social norms and prohibitions takes on a distinctive critical cast and an urgent critical dissonance” (14).

While the sexual emasculation of Asian American males may find itself in such a “queering” of heterosexual Asian Asian men, the dominance of white men and masculinity can be found within homosexual spaces in both the figurative and the literal sense. The sexual submissiveness and therefore lack of masculinity is perpetuated within both heterosexuality and homosexuality. Similarly to heterosexual intercourse, the nature of homosexual intercourse finds itself as also constructed of a sexual dominance because there is a literal physical penetration that imposes the body and sexuality of the dominant onto, and into, the submissive. Nguyen provides a very thorough discussion of the portrayal of homosexual Asian men in gay male society through their representation in gay pornography. In his book A View From the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation he writes that Asian men are depicted in gay pornography as possessing “a working-class status, Chinatown address, bad accents, bad hair, flat faces, small dicks, and propensity for bottomhood” (Nguyen 61). Such a representation seeks to continue the establishment of the sexual binary of the white top and the Asian bottom through sexual dominance, implying the generalized racial, cultural, and social dominance white masculinity over Asian masculinity. 2

According to a 2012 Pew Research Center study, Asian Americans are the “highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States” (1). Given their early history as poorly paid unskilled laborers, it is easy to look upon Asian Americans as the personification of the “American Dream,” where America provides the opportunities and liberties for immigrants to achieve upward social and economic mobility. Due to their perceived higher degree of socioeconomic success compared to the rest of the United States, Asian Americans occupy a unique space within the group of American racial minorities. In fact, Asian Americans as a group are often scapegoated in that they are used as an example of successful racial minorities, thus disproving the notion that racial minorities in the United States are inherently disadvantaged in the American socio

2 It should be noted that it can be perhaps dangerous to completely conflate the idea of sexual bottomhood with a submissiveness that goes beyond the bedroom. As Nguyen points out, “for some gay Asian male subjects, adopting the bottom position can be an enjoyable and affirming sex act. To invoke the title of the well-known sex-positive feminist, lesbian magazine, they are perfectly happy ‘on their backs’”(Nguyen 61). economic system. 3 This directly attempts to imply that the failures of other racial minorities such as African Americans to reach a similar status to that of Asian Americans is not the product of an American system of socioeconomic white supremacy. By pitting racial minority groups against each other in this way, the underlying causes of institutional racism that create these barriers and are responsible for these disparities are left unaddressed and unscathed.

Additionally, western portrayals of Asian Americans tend to be limited to East Asians, erasing the cultural identities and struggles of other Asian Americans such as South Asians and Southeast Asians who do not fit within this umbrella. Lisa Lowe criticizes this homogenization of Asian American identity by arguing that it “implies we are ‘alike’” and that it reduces “racial and ethnic diversity into a binary schema of ‘the one’ and ‘the other.’” Therefore, if one intends to examine Asian America as a single entity, when it is in fact a body of people diverse in “national origin, generation, gender, party, class,” one then begins to forget about the “differences and hybridities among Asians” (Lowe 1037). We are then faced with a narrow- minded analysis that simultaneously ignores the struggles of Asian Americans who are unable to live up to the model minority stereotype and depreciates the accomplishments of those Asian Americans who are able to be successful (Pew 2). Much of the underlying cause of this problem can be directed to the issue of selective immigration, where the plight of first-generation Asian American refugees who immigrated in search of asylum is overlooked in comparison to more established Asian American communities. Groups such as these become vulnerable to suffering from much higher rates of poverty when compared to other Asian American groups and even the United States as a whole. In addition, they also tend to be underrepresented in areas that are typically associated with model minority Asian Americans such as institutions of higher education (Suzuki 25). On the other hand, Asian American men who are academically and financially successful lack recognition and acknowledgement when compared to their peers because their accomplishments are simply seen as meeting what is already expected of them. This creates a catch-22 situation where Asian American men are effectively emasculated through both their achievements and their failures.

It is also important to recognize the influence of media upon perceptions of Asian American men and their masculinities. We have already touched on this in a way in our previous discussion about Asian men in gay pornography but here I would like to focus on their presence in film and television. We can essentially establish that the media impacts Asian American masculinity through the manners in which they are portrayed upon the screen and not portrayed

3 It is crucial to note that holding economic power is distinct from holding political or social power.

on the screen.

Though we have since moved on from a time that portrayed Asian men with white actors in yellow face, such as Mickey Rooney playing the character of Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the fact remains that when a film or a television show contains male Asian American characters, they are inevitably pigeonholed into a few select character tropes because of their race. The male character is imagined in universal or racially unmarked terms, while the Asian-American male is constructed according to the racist conventions of Asian difference. As Iwamoto and Kaya note, “these heroic portrayals rely heavily on Asian masculine stereotypes, such that the Asian male hero often relies on ancient or mysterious martial arts, thus continuing the tradition of exoticizing and ‘othering’ Asian men” (Iwamoto and Kaya 287). The lack of romantic interests for the Asian male character invokes an asexuality that then removes any ideas of masculinity that may have been previously afforded to him by his physical characteristics. We can then also consider male Asian characters on the other side of the spectrum of personality such as Rajesh Koothrappali from the tv show The Big Bang Theory or Long Duk Dong in the movie Sixteen Candles. While such representations may be seen as jokes, they are nevertheless instrumental in the reinforcement of these systems of oppression that aim to strip Asian American men of their control on gender expression.

Additionally, in American cinema, when the Asian American man is not portrayed as a racist caricature, he is often not seen at all. As Asian American screenwriter Alan Yang said in his 2016 Emmy Speech, “There is seventeen million Asian Americans in this country and there is seven million Italian Americans. They have The Godfather, Goodfellas, Rocky, The Sopranos. We got Long Duk Dong...So we got a long way to go” (Mardo). When Asian American males are denied the roles of leading characters, and at best reduced to the sidekick who inevitably sacrifices themselves at the climax of the conflict, they are denied the masculinities that are afforded to their white male replacement protagonists. Additionally, female Asian characters frequently find themselves portrayed as cold and asexual while they star alongside the white male protagonist until they reveal romantic interest later on in the movie. This trope is known as the white male gaze, where in the Asian female is presented as an object of desire for the white male in way that implies the dominance of the white male over the Asian male. Only the white male is able to release the repressed sexuality of the Asian female, further perpetuating the emasculation of Asian men in not being able to be sexually successful.

Masculinity is the resultant product of the culture and the society (Iwamoto and Kaya 285). In this case, masculinity for Asian American men is shaped by the predominantly white notions of masculinity imposed upon them that at times exclude them from masculinity altogether. Let us assume that gender identity is, as Judith Butler theorized, a series of performances, that “the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all” (Butler 903). If that is the case, it would seem that Asian American men have little freedom in such “gender performances.” The narrative that they attempt to construct, the acts they perform to determine gender, is forced upon them through societal pressures because they are continuously growing up in and being influenced by a society that has already situated them racially by regimenting their behaviors and expectations. Consequently, such a performance is evaluated both consciously and unconsciously by others, leaving such a hijacking of Asian American masculinity. Chen writes that “when White American men are used by popular culture as standard bearers of masculinity, Asian Americans are forced to accept the racial hierarchy embedded in the discourse of American manhood. In effect, Asian American men are given a false choice: either we emulate White American notions of masculinity or accept the fact that we are not men” (Chan 156). Unfortunately, the decision for an Asian American man to attempt to conform to white masculinity often comes at the expense of women, particularly Asian American woman. 4 The linking between patriarchy and masculinity presents the temptation and possibility of ignoring the hegemony of masculinity in an attempt to acquire patriarchal power. Such desires may manifest in the form of Asian American men attempting to reclaim their masculinities through the acquisition of white women, a symbol of patriarchal power (Nemoto 82-83). Such a technique would be considered regressive and antifeminist because of the way it views women merely as a tool used in moving up the hierarchy of masculinity; it also prizes white women over Asian American women. The attempt of Asian American men to adopt white masculine norms is a losing battle, for even if one does manage to emulate all the prized qualities of the masculine white man, the Asian American man will still never be fully accepted into white masculinity. This is resultant of underlying racism, one that lies in the physical differences and long established stereotypes. For Asian American males, attempting to don white masculinity is merely a facade that will eventually fade and

4 Though emasculated, Asian American men still belong to the hegemonic masculinity that oppresses women and are willing to barter their low positions as an Asian American for a high position as a male. Kobena relates this exchange to black men by writing that machismo, the attempt to reclaim masculinity through macho behaviors as such as toughness and physical aggressiveness, is “shaped by the challenge to the hegemony of the socially dominant white male, yet it assumes a form which is in turn oppressive to black women, children and indeed, to black men themselves, as it can entail self-destructive acts and attitudes” (Mercer and Julien 113). Mercer, Kobena, and Isaac Julien. “Race, Sexual Politics and Black Masculinity: A Dossier.” Male Order: Unwrapping Masculinity. Ed. Rowena Chapman and Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996. 97-164. Print.

expose the Asian American hidden beneath. 5

What options does that leave the Asian American male then? Lowe argues that it would be dangerous for them to oust white masculinity and simply replace it with their own Asian American masculinity by referencing Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon argues that “the challenge facing any movement dismantling colonialism (or a system in which one culture dominates another) is to provide for a new order that does not reproduce the social structure of the old system” (Lowe 1038). He fears that such a reproduction would continue the injustices of the previous system under new rulers. This obsession with reclaiming one’s Asian American masculinity can be found in such a manner that it attempts to establish an “authentic Asian masculinity” that is often rooted in patriarchal tradition and dominates Asian American identity. 6 This necessitates the use of a third unique option. Because Asian American men are simultaneously emasculated of their own masculinity and refused entry into white masculinity, they are then given,as Chan suggests, an opportunity, however anguished and injurious, to construct a new “alternative” Asian American masculinity that is “non patriarchal, anti-sexist, and anti-racist” (Chan, 10-11).

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5 Eng writes that one must remember what Miss Wakasuki said to her son in Houston’s Farewell to Manzanar, “Look in the mirror, Richie. We can change our names, but we can never change our faces” (Eng 116).

6 Asian American writer Frank Chin for instance, has been criticized for connecting “the lack of a male-oriented Asian American heroic tradition and the invisibility of Asian American cultural expression” and “effectively ignoring women” (Ling 318-319). 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.