Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies
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Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies
296eBook
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Overview
Depictions of Asian American men as effeminate or asexual pervade popular movies. Hollywood has made clear that Asian American men lack the qualities inherent to the heroic heterosexual male. This restricting, circumscribed vision of masculinity—a straitjacketing, according to author Celine Parreñas Shimizu—aggravates Asian American male sexual problems both on and off screen.
Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies looks to cinematic history to reveal the dynamic ways Asian American men, from Bruce Lee to Long Duk Dong, create and claim a variety of masculinities. Representations of love, romance, desire, and lovemaking show how Asian American men fashion manhoods that negotiate the dynamics of self and other, expanding our ideas of sexuality. The unique ways in which Asian American men express intimacy is powerfully represented onscreen, offering distinct portraits of individuals struggling with group identities. Rejecting "macho" men, these movies stake Asian American manhood on the notion of caring for, rather than dominating, others.
Straitjacket Sexualities identifies a number of moments in the movies wherein masculinity is figured anew. By looking at intimate relations on screen, power as sexual prowess and brute masculinity is redefined, giving primacy to the diverse ways Asian American men experience complex, ambiguous, and ambivalent genders and sexualities.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804782203 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/09/2012 |
| Series: | Asian America |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Straitjacket Sexualities
UNBINDING ASIAN AMERICAN MANHOODS IN THE MOVIESBy Celine Parreñas Shimizu
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7300-3
Chapter One
With Vulnerable Strength Re-Signifying the Sexual Manhood of Bruce Lee
Iconic images of Bruce Lee, one of the most celebrated martial artists and movie stars from the last century, continue to circulate today, most frequently with clothes falling off his bare chest. Big, black, bushy hair tops his handsome face, with lips pursed together and eyes intent in a confident look as the rippling texture of his torso reveals adherence to a disciplined physical regimen and the chiseled, muscled arms affirm his reputation of brute strength made famous by his one-inch punch. With a body on the verge of exploding in its expression of strength and power, this man seems to exemplify a magnificent exception to the supposed problem of Asian American male lack by possessing traits of hegemonic masculinity of strength and power. In protecting the Green Hornet as Kato on television and in beating multitudes of men to death in films that established a new action genre across the world, his image combated the Hollywood tradition of representing Asian men as weak—but did he kiss, love, or possess sexuality? Is he sexy, or does he have sex? These questions seem crucial to the problem of assessing Asian and Asian American men as entrenched in cinematic lack, far away from masculine power.
Most critics say Bruce Lee possesses gender power while lacking sexual prowess. Jachinson Chan, who claims Lee's sexuality reads ambiguously, asserts we can't tell if he's homosexual or heterosexual since he occupies an alternative masculinity. But such an ambiguity may deepen the image of lack and its attendant lowly stature in male hierarchies when we recall that Richard Fung points to the Asian male's sexual illegibility on screen. David Henry Hwang celebrates Bruce Lee's refutation of weakness that dominates the history of Asian and Asian American male representations, but questions why Bruce Lee "never appeared in a love scene though it would seem almost obligatory for heroes in the action and adventure genre." What criteria do these critics use to diagnose asexuality? I will argue that the limited definition of male power does not do justice to its subject's struggles with forging an ethical manhood. Along with his work on screen, Bruce Lee's letters and interviews chronicle the formation of an Asian American male subject wrestling with racial stereotypes, attributions of senseless violence and asexuality, as well as a commitment to acting and the thoughtful interrogation of his choices. Most importantly, he expands our measure of both masculinity and sexuality—beyond gender hierarchy and male power over women.
This chapter studies how Bruce Lee expanded our understanding of sexuality beyond the conflation of the penis and the phallus where the on-screen appearance of a biological man needs to signify power over others. Between ferocity and tenderness, vulnerability and strength, and caring not only for the self but others—especially friends, family, and women—Bruce Lee formulates an ethical manhood not aligned with patriarchy alone but with a larger field of social relations. Unlike the literature that emphasizes Bruce Lee's invincibility as one that secures nationalist pride or what Vijay Prashad calls antiracist polyculturalism, I instead highlight his specific theorization of racialized gender and sexuality through performances of violence and sex. I argue that Bruce Lee's expressions of vulnerability disclose the emotional costs of violence, and the performances of intimacy that bookend the explosion of his body in committing violence captures his formation of gender and sex as both exposure of self and confrontation with others. His definition of sexuality in film and beyond is powerful in making legible sexualities beyond sexual intercourse or promiscuity. He expands available standards for recognizing viable masculinity. Bruce Lee's performances of sex and violence are moments for the making of ethical manhoods that acknowledge the power one holds in relation to the power that holds one down—by cultivating a physical power that ultimately prioritizes, through his facial and bodily expressions, the fraught meaning of wielding strength against others toward violent ends as well as the significance of a sexual coming together. My attention to Lee's sexual and intimate interactions restores what has been castrated in the analysis of his work on film: sexuality as larger and more expansive than the limited criteria privileged by hegemonic masculinity.
In assessing Bruce Lee's legacy as such, I underline his vulnerability in displaying his different formulation of manhood. The victim position of asexuality and effeminacy and the emasculated rendering of homosexuality so permeate our measure of manhood that Bruce Lee's major contribution, primarily located in his cinematic visage and in the sinews of his body in accounting for one's power and subjugation, is ignored. In contrast, I evaluate how intimate relations of violence and sexuality that produce the expressions of his face and his physical countenance describe an ethical conundrum of manhood itself.
Bruce Lee's characters deploy violence only when compelled to do so in order to defend self and community. Fighting is an ongoing negotiation where the participants agree to stop, or the one with the upper hand always offers a way out before dealing death to his opponent. When the fight moves toward the taking of a life, the culmination is a glimpse into a great culpability that confesses the steep costs of that brutality—besieging the one who wields death as well. Bruce Lee uses his face and tenses his body to express his ethical struggle with the meaning of violence and as I will show later, the meaning of wielding male privilege in sexual relations.
In terms of violence, Bruce Lee's characters conduct amazing feats that brutalize a tremendous number of men. They perform these acts for a greater good, but still they accept responsibility and punishment for killing and hurting others. In Love and Arms, Helen Douglas charts as an ethical dilemma the use and justification of violence against the paradoxical formation of more unjust forms of violence. Unlike contemporaneous action heroes such as those played by Clint Eastwood, who never regret their acts of violence (until later in life, with Eastwood's own films that reflect upon war and violence), Bruce Lee's characters demonstrate a manhood that is ethical in its accountability. Thus, I will show what is so effective about Bruce Lee's expression of emotional intelligence and regret at committing violence that leads to his opponents' deaths. The revelation of consciousness catching up to the body's conducting an injustice shows an ethical manhood aware of the well-being of others and civil society beyond gains for the self. Through Bruce Lee's performance and experience of violence and sexuality as powerful and thus deserving of accountability, we learn how he refuses to celebrate violence in the sense of justifying murderous acts or both structural and individual violence against women—whether in the traffic of groups or individual acts by men toward a single woman.
My readings of Bruce Lee's films go against the grain by instantiating how racial masculinity can be nuanced, especially extending to an ethics that revolves around his characters' relationships to others with less power, such as women or physically less capable, thus weaker men. Moreover, previous criticism shows the tendency to look for the penis or for phallic representation in love scenes as well—when a larger repertoire of sexuality, romance, love, and desire actually transpires. Bruce Lee expands our recognition of sexuality to include forms of courtship, gallantry, romance, kissing, touching, flirtation, and even long-term investment in love and marriage in, for example, Fist of Fury, fantasy and sex in The Big Boss, and flirtation and camaraderie in The Way of the Dragon and Enter the Dragon. The struggle for ethical manhood—the need to account for power in addressing injustice—is laid bare as both a psychic and physical struggle in Bruce Lee's performances of sex and violence. Thus, this chapter recasts Bruce Lee not only through a masculinity that relies on his ability to brutalize and physically dominate other men or conquer women, but a very problematization of that violence and sexuality as defining his character and hegemonic manhood itself, which I consider a poor frame for privileging Asian American manhoods on screen. I argue that Lee's manhood is contingent upon a larger field that must account for his ethical relations with male friends, romantic relationships, and his protection of community as well as nation.
I begin my analysis here by giving a sense of the transnational nature of Asian American manhood in the body and work of Bruce Lee. I then evaluate the discursive context that situates Bruce Lee within a racial frame and provides a traditional masculine solution to Asian American male queerness as emasculation, asexuality, and effeminacy in popular culture. I show how the literature that primarily frames Bruce Lee in singularly racial terms attests to the difficulty of identifying heteronormativity and gender hierarchy, or straitjacket sexuality, when reading the screens and scenes of male encounters with others in violence and sex. This difficulty so limits our analysis of representations of Asian American men that we neglect to ask some important questions about the structures of manhood in the movies: How does vulnerability make a scene of violence successful or make a sexual encounter on screen meaningful and significant? Within the context of his own letters and interviews, as well as scholarly writings and popular articles and reviews about Bruce Lee's life and work, I closely read his films in terms of the expressions of his body's vulnerability through violence and the demonstrations of expanded forms of sexualities in his films and his life. That is, vulnerability in violence exceeds the celebration of brutish male power as antiracist and anticolonial redemption and in sexuality goes beyond genital love and phallic power as selfishly and narcissistically prioritizing male pleasure and privilege in sex.
Close readings of Bruce Lee's first three Hong Kong–made films make an argument that he redefines gender not as a certainty but as that which involves uncertainty in the expression of both vulnerability and strength. It's not merely the jumping, flying, and superheroic strength but the explosive emotional vulnerability that precedes and secures each expression of violence as well as the tenderness that he demonstrates in scenes of love, desire, sex, and romance that makes his manhood. I present these readings against the assessment that Bruce Lee did not have sex or that he had ambiguous sex. I show how Bruce Lee's characters definitely demonstrate desire and desirability, as well as romantic and sexual hunger and fulfillment. I then conclude my close readings with the last films of his life. Against the popular interpretations of his sexuality in Enter the Dragon (1973), his Hollywood film, as the quintessential illustration of Asian male sexual inadequacy in comparison to normative white and excessive black manhoods, I reframe his acts as a refusal to participate in the patriarchal trafficking of women. I then analyze the casting of a fake Bruce Lee in the posthumously released Game of Death (1978) and Game of Death 2 (1981) to show how the missing emotional exposure of the face reveals the inadequacy of framing Bruce Lee as embodying violence as a solution to Asian American male effeminacy and asexuality in popular representation. Moreover, it is vulnerability and power together, as well as the simultaneity of tenderness and ferocity in his touch, that forms Bruce Lee's manhood on screen. This definition makes his manhood captivating today as we seek viable manhoods, in terms of gender, race, and sexuality, for and beyond Asian American men in representation.
The chapter then links Bruce Lee's films with three other films that comment on, continue, and claim his legacy. The popular film Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1993) about Bruce Lee's life further mythologizes his manhood as Asian American, but it adds the emotional intimacy of his family as well as his endurance of racism. What's fascinating in Dragon is the performance of Jason Scott Lee, whose stardom in the 1990s seemed to promise a response to Asian American male asexuality and effeminacy in the movies. The Justin Lin film Finishing the Game (2007) presents the inadequacy of mimesis—the repetition of the same—in imagining Asian American manhoods on screen. Notable too is Lin's career of producing both independent and Hollywood films that explore and create compelling manhoods for racialized men. The video JJ Chinois (2002) is Lynne Chan's transgender appropriation of both Bruce Lee's aesthetic and sexuality. Playfully, it expands the relevance of Lee's male iconicity beyond heteronormative sexuality. These films help me to formulate the significance of ethical manhoods in their accounts of both the flagellations and lacerations of power that men take and give where strength registers as uncertain, where touch is powerful in its susceptibility, and where male power can be responsible and giving.
The Enduring Legacy of Bruce Lee
Early in his career, Bruce Lee was rendered a figure hard to read. Born in the United States, raised in Hong Kong, educated in both Hong Kong and the United States, he became the first Asian American male star of global proportions, from the Golden Age of U.S. television in the 1960s to the box-office-record-smashing kung fu artist and actor in Hong Kong and posthumously, the world—and has remained legendary for more than forty years since his sudden death at age 32 in 1973. In an early article written soon after his return to the United States at age 18 from a childhood spent in Hong Kong, Bruce Lee, "movie star from China," is described as unusual and ambitious. As one writer put it, if a dojo formed in every town, Mike Lee would be "velly happy." The writer for this Seattle newspaper article did not even get Lee's name right and used disparaging Orientalisms and distorted English language throughout the article. And even later in Lee's career, at a retrospective screening of his work in New York in the 1990s, New York Times film reviewer Vincent Canby comments on Bruce Lee's audition tape for The Green Hornet, saying Bruce Lee seems so American but also so not. Throughout his life and beyond, Bruce Lee has been the subject of an Asian American racialization in the press: unrecognizable and illegible for his experiences as an immigrant and as an Asian American.
Bruce Lee, according to Penny Von Eschen, is a product of globalization in that an exchange of culture enabled his traveling opera singer Chinese father and German and Chinese mother to have him born in the United States. Later, the circulation of his films expanded from Asia to be shown to millions all over the world. "For audiences from Calcutta to Los Angeles and Hong Kong to New York, Lee embodied anti-racist and anti-imperialist yearnings," showing that "while audiences interpret popular culture in their own image, it is also produced, distributed and consumed in unequal and hierarchical relations of power." At the time of his death, Bruce Lee lived a transnational life of shuttling between Hong Kong and Hollywood in a time when these patterns were first possible with the ease of air travel and the rise of mass culture in entertainment—attesting to the transnational structure of image-making in his negotiations with being too exotic or too Western. In one of his later interviews, Bruce Lee said, "sometimes I feel a little schizophrenic about it. When I wake up in the morning, I have to remember which side of the ocean I'm on and whether I'm the superstar or the exotic Oriental support player." Struggling with Hollywood's stereotype assignation, he moved to Hong Kong to make films. He first broke box-office records in Hong Kong before setting new records all over Asia, Europe, Latin America, Australia, and the United States. Unlike other scholars who study Bruce Lee's representations through a primarily racial lens—which sees gender and sexuality through race—I use a sexual and gendered analytic of race in order to assess how Lee's legacy in the movies breaks the racial pride = male pride equation to open up a different measure of manhood.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Straitjacket Sexualities by Celine Parreñas Shimizu Copyright © 2012 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: Ethics and Responsibility: The Sexual Problems of Asian American Men in the Movies 1
The Slanted Screen (2006), Transgressions (2002) and Some Questions for 28 Kisses (1994)
1 With Vulnerable Strength: Re-Signifying the Sexual Manhood of Bruce Lee 33
The Big Boss or Fists of Fury (1971), The Chinese Connection or Fist of Fury (1972), The Way of the Dragon or Return of the Dragon (1972), and Enter the Dragon (1973)
2 On the Grounds of Shame, New Relations: Asian American Manhoods in Hollywood 82
Eat a Bowl of Tea (1989), The Wedding Banquet (1993), and Sixteen Candles (1984)
3 The Marvelous Plenty of Asian American Men: Independent Film as a Technology of Ethics 123
The Debut (2000), Charlotte Sometimes (2002), and Better Luck Tomorrow (2003)
4 Assembling Asian American Men in Pornography: Shattering the Self toward Ethical Manhoods 165
Yellowcaust: A Patriot Act (2003), Masters of the Pillow (2003), Dick Ho: Asian Male Porn Star (2005), Asian Pride Porn (2000), Forever Bottom! (1999), and the blog of Keni Styles (2010)
5 Unbinding Straitjacket Sexualities: The Calm Manhoods of Asian American Male Hollywood Stars 201
The Crimson Kimono (1959), Map of the Human Heart (1993), Rapa Nui (1994), and The Jungle Book (1994)
Epilogue: Claiming the Power of Lack in the Face of Macho: Asian American Manhoods in the Movies 233
Gran Torino (2008)
Notes 245
Bibliography and Suggested Readings 257
Index 269