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gay & lesbian / queer / transgender studies
A View from the Bottom
Asian American Masculinity
and Sexual Representation
nguyen tan hoang
“Nguyen Tan Hoang’s exciting book is a compelling account of the aesthetic,
political, and queer possibilities of racialized forms of ‘bottomhood.’
As someone who has been writing about masochism and passivity in
relation to queer femininities for a while, I realize that this is the book
I have needed in sorting through the complex forms of personhood, pleasure,
and power that bottomhood braids into the meanings of race, nation,
and sexuality.”—JACK HALBERSTAM, author of The Queer Art of Failure
A View from the Bottom offers a
major critical reassessment of male
effeminacy and its racialization in
visual culture. Examining portrayals
of Asian and Asian American men in
Hollywood cinema, European art film,
gay pornography, and experimental
documentary, Nguyen Tan Hoang
explores the cultural meanings that
accrue to sexual positions. He shows
how cultural fantasies around the
position of the sexual “bottom” overdetermine
and refract the meanings of
race, gender, sexuality, and nationality
in American culture in ways that both enable and constrain Asian
masculinity. Challenging the association of bottoming with passivity and
abjection, Nguyen suggests ways of thinking about the bottom position
that afford agency and pleasure. A more capacious conception of
bottomhood—as a sexual position, a social alliance, an affective bond,
and an aesthetic form—has the potential to destabilize sexual, gender,
and racial norms, suggesting an ethical mode of relation organized not
around dominance and mastery but around the risk of vulnerability and
shame. Thus reconceived, bottomhood as a critical category creates
new possibilities for arousal, receptiveness, and recognition, and offers
a new framework for analyzing sexual representations in cinema as well
as understanding their relation to oppositional political projects.
Nguyen Tan Hoang is Assistant Professor of English and Film Studies
at Bryn Mawr College. He is also a videomaker whose works include
look_im_azn, K.I.P., PIRATED! and Forever Bottom! His videos have been
screened at the Museum of Modern Art, The Getty Center, and the Centre
Pompidou.
On the Visceral, Part I
Race, Sex, and Other Gut Feelings
sharon holland, marcia ochoa &
kyla wazana tompkins, special issue editors
a special issue of GLQ
Using the gut as a starting point,
this special issue of GLQ focuses
on the idea of the visceral as a
trope for the carnal and bloody
logic that organizes life. It brings
together scholars working in food
studies, American studies, sexuality
and queer studies, and critical
race theory, who are keen not
only to understand patterns of
bodily production and consumption
but also to propose new
theoretical scaffoldings for our
understanding of the intersection
of race, food, the human, and
the animal. These essays highlight
the moments, texts, and
processes that link food, flesh,
and the alimentary tract to
systems of pleasure—as well as to historical and political systems of
inequality. The contributors seek to unearth structures of feeling, sensing,
and embodiment that have been obscured either by colonialist
historiography or political prejudice.
Sweetness January 20, 2006. gimmepicture@
dirtysurface.com.
Contributors
Leah Devun, Sharon Holland, Rachel Lee, Jennifer C. Nash, Marcia Ochoa, Kyla Wazana
Tompkins, Zeb Tortorici
Sharon Holland is Associate Professor of English at Duke University.
She is the author of The Erotic Life of Racism and Raising the Dead:
Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity, both published by Duke
University Press. Marcia Ochoa is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies
at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Queen for
a Day: Transformistas, Beauty Queens, and the Performance of Femininity
in Venezuela, also published by Duke University Press. Kyla Wazana
Tompkins is Associate Professor of English and Gender and Women’s
Studies at Pomona College.
PERVERSE MODERNITIES
A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe
26
QUEER THEORY/ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES
July 312 pages, 39 illustrations
paper, 978–0–8223–5684–4, $24.95/£15.99
cloth, 978–0–8223–5672–1, $89.95/£59.00
CULTURAL STUDIES/QUEER THEORY
September 140 pages, 2 illustrations Vol. 20, no. 4
paper, 978–0–8223–6816–8, $12.00/£9.99