The Joy Fuck Club
The Joy fuk Club: Prolegomenon to an Asian American Porno Practice
An earlier version of this chapter was published in New Political Science 20, no. 3 (1998).
Getting Off
The students enrolled in "Theoretical Perspectives in Asian American Studies" at the University of California, Davis, were taken aback one class meeting when I posed the question of whether their collective sexual imaginary was indeed dominated by non-Yellow people. Without prurient intent on my part, I had them contemplate and discuss the content of their sexual fantasy life in trying to demonstrate how even the most intimate of thoughts are linked materially to social relations. What types of faces and bodies were conjured when trying to "get off"? Which media personalities made them "hard" or "wet" while indulging in fantasy? How comfortable did they feel in their Yellow skin? Why did the tired topics (unbidden by me) of "interracial" dating, "intermarriage," body image, and other A. Magazine-type editorial fodder keep working their way into classroom exchanges and written assignments, no matter how hard I tried to lead the students toward a more elevated and sophisticated level of theoretical inquiry?
As I had expected, what few responses there were evinced equal measures of defensiveness and evasion. After all, the sexualized semiotic universe of these representative Asian American students is overwhelmingly inhabited by Euroamericans, to the virtual exclusion of all but a select few people of color. Their subject position is not unlike that of ten-year-old Yoneko Hosoume (Tricia Joe) in the film Hot Summer Winds (1991), written and directed by Emiko Omori. The story is told from the perspective of the pensive child Yoneko, who looks at the outside world through the narrow windows of a cardboard playhouse whose walls are decorated with paper dolls and cutouts of White people. She marvels at the looming presence of White America even in the shack of the...
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