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Celine Parreñas Shimizu ,Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2007, 340p,
ISBN 978-0-8223-4012-6
(cloth : alk. paper), $84.95;
ISBN 978-0-8223-4033-1
(pbk : alk. paper), $23.95
In The Hypersexuality of Race , Celine Parreñas Shimizu interrogates Western culture's fascination with the hypersexuality of Asian and Asian/American women with sensitivity and tenacity. Her main argument is that Asian/American women are hypersexualized in their framings and representations at the 'sites of production, consumption, and criticism' (p. 24). Therefore, she insists, it is through sex that Asian/American women can resist and subvert these representational tropes in order to form a race-positive sexuality. Her argument stresses 'that pleasure and fantasy from the sexualization of race must be part of race politics' (p. 6).
Parreñas Shimizu proves her argument through a close reading of several types of texts featuring sexualized Asian/American women. She investigates the performance of hypersexualization, including Miss Saigon's singing Vietnamese prostitutes and the Asian/American femmes fatales of mainstream Hollywood. She also considers at length the performance of sex acts onscreen, including white women in yellowface in early stag films, Asian/American stars of mainstream pornography and the Asian prostitutes who appear in gonzo sex tourism videos....