A View from the Bottom
eBook - PDF

A View from the Bottom

Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

A View from the Bottom

Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation

About this book

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.

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Yes, you can access A View from the Bottom by Tan Hoang Nguyen,Tân Hoàng Nguyen in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Film History & Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
CHAPTER 
ONE
The 
Rise, 
and 
Fall, 
of 
a 
Gay 
Asian 
American 
Porn 
Star
In 
an 
article 
in 
the 
Asian 
American 
pop 
culture 
zine 
Giant 
Robot
, 
journalist 
Claudine 
Ko 
(1999) 
recounts 
her 
search 
for 
Brandon 
Lee. 
She 
refers 
not 
to 
the 
son 
of 
Bruce 
Lee, 
who 
gained 
cult 
stardom 
after 
dying 
mysteriously 
and 
tragically 
at 
a 
young 
age 
while 
shooting 
The 
Crow
(dir. 
Alex 
Proyas, 
1994), 
but 
the 
other 
Brandon 
Lee, 
the 
gay 
porn 
star. 
Ko 
reports 
on 
rumors 
that 
Brandon 
Lee 
the 
porn 
star 
had 
been 
discovered 
while 
delivering 
Chinese 
food 
to 
a 
gay 
porn 
set. 
As 
the 
story 
goes, 
the 
director 
asked 
to 
see 
his 
e 
roll 
and 
was 
so 
blown 
away 
by 
the 
sight 
that 
he 
immediately 
cast 
Lee 
in 
a 
porn 
video. 
Later 
in 
the 
article, 
Ko 
tracks 
down 
Chi 
Chi 
LaRue, 
one 
of 
the 
best-known 
direc-
tors 
in 
gay 
porn, 
who 
straightened 
out 
the 
story. 
LaRue 
claimed 
to 
have 
dis-
covered 
Brandon 
Lee 
at 
a 
gay 
bathhouse 
in 
Los 
Angeles. 
Impressed 
by 
Lee’s 
good 
looks 
and 
ten 
inches 
of 
manhood, 
she 
brought 
him 
to 
Catalina, 
the 
popular 
gay 
video 
company, 
which 
promptly 
signed 
him 
on, 
and 
the 
rest, 
as 
they 
say, 
is 
history.

Table of contents

  1. Contents
  2. Preface
  3. Acknowledgments
  4. Introduction
  5. Chapter One. The Rise, and Fall, of a Gay Asian American Porn Star
  6. Chapter Two. Reflections on an Asian Bottom
  7. Chapter Three. The Lover’s “Gorgeous Ass”
  8. Chapter Four. The Politics of Starch
  9. Conclusion
  10. Notes
  11. Bibliography
  12. Videography
  13. Index