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IN RECENT YEARS, TWO PORNOGRAPHIC VIDEOS identify a crisis of masculinity for Asian American men in U.S. popular culture. University of California at Davis Asian American studies professor Darrell Hamamoto's political pornography Yellowcaust: A Patriot Act (2004) and its companion documentary, James Hou's Masters of the Pillow (2004), received attention from the popular media, packed audiences in large theaters of the prominent Asian American film festivals, and toured widely on the college campus circuit from 2004 to 2007.1 Together, they present an Asian American anxiety regarding castrated heterosexual manhood, which they propose to solve with the making and framing of pornography as a racial project.2 In defining sexuality as a site of racial injury, their solution privileges access to what feminist media critic Michele Wallace plainly calls "macho" in reference to gender hierarchy and heteronormative phallic power.3 Unlike these films' figuration that sexual fantasies about whiteness are indications of colonialism upon the deepest parts of the self, I evaluate fantasies as much more unwieldy. Fantasies about race and sexuality are "wishes"-they make sense of the past as constitutive of pleasure, express desires for better possibilities, and exercise the power of the imagination to reorganize the inequities of the real. As such, enacting fantasies involve the doing and undoing of power.
In looking at the gender dynamics expressed in the fantasy-productions4 of Yellowcaust and Masters of the Pillow, my project attends not only to how they describe Asian American masculinity-the characteristics, traits, and qualities that describe how one is gendered male-but manhood itself, or the inner life of being and becoming male as well as the performance of maleness. What makes a man a man is not only his ability for virility but his being as a self and his formation as a subject in relations with others. Aiming to free our conceptions of manhood from the poles of vilified lack and valorized macho, I look to representations of Asian American men engaged in intimate sexual acts to map an ethics of manhood. Ultimately, I show how sexual screens provide opportunities for men to make choices that shapes the self and relations with others where sex expresses not only pleasure and power but also care for self and others.
ASSEMBLING ASIAN AMERICAN MEN IN PORNOGRAPHY
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