Spoiled: Asian American Hostility and the Damage of Repair

by Summer Kim Lee

Overview

In Spoiled, Summer Kim Lee examines how contemporary Asian American artists challenge expectations that their work should repair the wounds of racial trauma. Kim Lee turns to the “spoiled”—the racialized, gendered body and all that it consumes, wrecks, and inflicts in its desire and excess—in visual culture, performance, music, and literature. Reading works by Cato Ouyang, Patty Chang, Wu Tsang, TJ Shin, Jes Fan, and others, Kim Lee highlights moments of hostility and deformation that spoil idealizations of Asian Americanness and incite modes of feeling and relating that relinquish fantasies of wholeness, power, and control. She observes the latent aggressive behaviors and negative affects in Asian American aesthetic practice: the embarrassment of asociality, the imposition of speaking as someone else, and the indulgence of ravenous appetites. In so doing, Kim Lee questions the political desires for repair expressed in “feeling Asian” and stays with the damage that spoilage creates as integral to the kinds of repair that Asian Americans seek.

Duke UniversityPress Scholars of Color First Book Award

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478032052
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	10/21/2025
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Summer Kim Lee is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. Ripe for Spoiling  1
1. Staying In: The Autoeroticism of Asian American Asociality, in Earnest  35
2. Using Quotations: The Risk of Speaking as Someone Else  67
3. Cold Leftovers: Out of Touch with Asiatic Femininity’s Material Remains  99
4. Injured Enough: Depending on the Wounds of Analogy  135
Coda. Sweet, Selfish Ends  169
Notes  177
Bibliography  203
Index

Editorial Reviews

To be spoiled is to be ruined, but to be spoiled also indicates excess, indulgence, and an unfair advantage of power and proportion. Summer Kim Lee offers a brilliant, counterintuitive treatise on the refusal of healing and self-control. Instead, we are presented with a provocative theoretical call for the degraded Asian American subject to reject assimilation and containment and to dwell in unwellness and bad behavior.”—David L. Eng, coauthor of, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans

“Examining what feeling rather than being Asian might be, Summer Kim Lee produces a set of thoughtful close readings that center unruly attachment and a politics of staying with bad feelings. Spoiled is a beautifully written and wonderful contribution to many fields, including Asian American studies, critical race studies, feminist and queer studies, affect studies, and aesthetic inquiry more generally.”—Amber Jamilla Musser, author of, Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined

From the Publisher

Examining what feeling rather than being Asian might be, Summer Kim Lee produces a set of thoughtful close readings that center unruly attachment and a politics of staying with bad feelings. Spoiled is a beautifully written and wonderful contribution to many fields, including Asian American studies, critical race studies, feminist and queer studies, affect studies, and aesthetic inquiry more generally.

Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined - Amber Jamilla Musser

To be spoiled is to be ruined, but to be spoiled also indicates excess, indulgence, and an unfair advantage of power and proportion. Summer Kim Lee offers a brilliant, counterintuitive treatise on the refusal of healing and self-control. Instead, we are presented with a provocative theoretical call for the degraded Asian American subject to reject assimilation and containment and to dwell in unwellness and bad behavior.

Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans - David L. Eng