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In “Why Suzie Wong Is Not a Lesbian,” JeeYeun Lee suggests that both…
In “Why Suzie Wong Is Not a Lesbian,” JeeYeun Lee suggests that both American Orientalist gendering and femme/butch discourse are built on white heteronormativity and appearance-based assumptions. The ten women Lee quotes disrupt these binaries, as they inhabit contradictory gender identities and expressions rooted in play, desire, and culture. Ultimately, the collective agency and self-determination of Lee’s interviewees rejects a mere ornamental identity and foregrounds the plurality of Asian queer identity.
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- Creates distance and power differential between the West/East, self/other, subject/object
- The Asian body is a site of Western projection, fantasy, and intellectualism
- Stresses the yellow woman's objecthood proximate to white subjectivity
- The yellow woman is denied fleshliness; her existence is synthetic, portable, and ornamental
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- Imaginings of Asian women in 20th century American film
- Pictured: Nancy Kwan in The World of Suzie Wong (Utica Public Library)
Gender expression is not universal—uniquely informed by Asian skin, hair, frame, etc.
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The different voices expand and complicate Asian queer identity—an intersectional, collective identity
Who you love, how you present, how Americanness informs Asianness, how Asian Americanness informs queerness— all these dynamics are relational
- Returnees to India experience reverse culture shock, complicating notions of gender, family, and local community
- Political and economic systems after 1960 and Asian immigration patterns have shaped each other—dialectical relationship
- US/Philippines nurse exchange programs in the late 1900s shaped social-cultural landscape of nursehood and womanhood
- Driven by a fantasy of America, the blurring of vacation/labor, agency/exploitation
- Loosened immigration restrictions, codified preference for skilled workers
- Decontinentalization—reframing the US in terms of its oceanic boundaries and relations
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- 1941 Life Magazine article on how to "distinguish friendly Chinese from enemy alien Japs" (81)
- "Peasant Jap is squat Mongoloid with flat, blob nose" (81)
- In Appropriate, Paisley Rekdal writes on the politics of inhabiting other bodies in writing
- "Not all works that engage in appropriation are automatically racist, and not all works of appropriation present us with the same ethical problems" (13)
- Halted the immigration of Chinese women on the basis of prostitution and criminality
- “Excremental Colonialism” (Warwick Anderson): medicalizing Filipino bodies in the early 1900s; standards of white American civility
- "If the anus was a synecdoche for the medicalized Filipino body, the mouth just as surely symbolized American presence" (110)
- Dispensability of Asian life—the sexualization of and violence against Asian women against the backdrop of Covid-related AAPI hate crimes
- January 2021—an elderly Thai man was murdered during a morning walk in SF
- Asian/African American tensions at play with the pandemic, AAPI hate crimes, increased policing, Black Lives Matter
- March 2021—a man murdered 8 women at Atlanta spas, 6 of whom were Asian women
- June 1982—Vincent Chin was beaten to death by white men who blamed the Japanese auto industry
- "Justice for Vincent Chin" became a point of Asian American solidarity/organizing
- In Unsustainable Empire, Dean Saranillio writes on a history of Hawai'i statehood (exclusion/inclusion) and native resistance
- In Hawaiian Sovereignty Leader Haunani-Kay Trask Criticizes Asian ‘Settler’ Privilege and Collaboration with Colonialism (2000), Trask criticizes Asians in Hawai'i for contributing to (and benefitting from) the subjugation of native Hawai'ians
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- In "Our Sea of Islands, Epeli Hau'ofa reclaims smallness and centers ancestral/indigenous knowledge in his depiction of Oceania
- Documentary by Curtis Choy on the destruction of the SF Manilatown community in the 1970s
- Explores class struggle, Asian American organizing, urbanism
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- Barred Japanese farmers from purchasing and leasing land
- This article details the Japanese agricultural community's response: court cases, Japanese newspaper coverage, repercussions of the oppressive restrictions
- Complicates the American Black/white binary, calls for visibilizing non-Black POC identity
- Created immigration quotas and codified racial exclusion (Mae Ngai)
- Asian American culture is a site of history and ideology, a counterculture to the state (Lisa Lowe)
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- Accounts of how Vietnamese women engage with their land, each other, societal norms, family, and immigration
- "in post-9/11 processes of racialization, bodily comportment and adornment are increasingly used as instruments of visual racial difference" (336)
- Intersections between the Muslim body and gender, terror, and policing
- The fiction of AAPI collective identity, and importance of delineating Asian America, Pacific Islander, and Hawai'ian identity (Lisa Kahaleole Hall)
- Amy K. Stillman recontextualizes Pacific American history through mapping transportation, markets, colonization, migrations, culture, and the Pacific Rim
- Interrogates the methods and presence of the camera in Asian documentary
- Proposes an anti-aestheticism and willingness to engage contradiction in film
- Manicurists are underpaid and abused, their health compromised
- Intersections with language, gender, class
- On Emma, a Filipino woman and domestic worker who lives apart from her family in New York to provide for them
- Queer Asian Americans write and read letters to family members
- Explores a network of thinkers, artists, and community organizers, brought together by places and people
- A collage of different stories, resources, and art
- Liberation through community and education; panethnic
- Japanese internment history from the perspective of Japanese bodies—decentering the perpetrators
- Fiction as a means for encountering history (Filipino women in domestic work), class, race, and the future
- Display of colonial power, fictionalizing and dehumanizing the Filipino body
- The anticolonial, antiracist 1960s movement led by college students and working-class bodies (Gary Okihiro)
- Gave way to Third World studies (over Chicago race studies)
- From the bottom up: "cultural workers defined the period as a 'decisive moment' for Asian Americans—a time for reclaiming the past and changing the future" (Glenn Omatsu)
- At its core: Third World Liberation Front and Black Students Union at SF State University “Third World Liberation Front: Notice of Demands” (1968)
- The university is a space of negotiating the interests of the institution and the interests of the students, particular students of color, who fight on a diverse set of fronts—interest convergence and divergence (Julie J. Park, Amy Liu)
- Focus has shifted from admissions and Asian American studies (1980s) to establishing sustainable infrastructure within institution and alumni networks (Princeton Asian American Alumni Association timelines)
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- In 1993, AASA brought a comprehensive list of demands regarding admissions, racial harassment, curriculum, and student life (Princeton Asian American Studies Task Force 1993 Report)
- 2013 Princeton and Asian American Studies Report—demand for an Asian American Studies certificate at Princeton and more ASA curriculum
- Did not actually provide many "obvious advantages for prospective Asian immigrants" (Bill Ong Hing 40)—more with southern and eastern Europeans in mind
- "Yellow Power" articulates a movement based on defining oneself—intersects with and diverges from the Black Power movement (Amy Uyematsu)
- How do nations confront the crimes and violence of history?
- "In so many cases the primary agent-subjects of post–Cold War redress culture have also been gendered and racialized minorities, colonial and transcolonial subjects, migrants and diasporic peoples, so-called col- laborators, and the economically and politically disfranchised" (6)
- Tested the limits of citizenship—what makes someone unable to assimilate?
- Established precedent of racialization and inherent Asian Otherness
- Limited immigration of laborers and prohibited citizenship; established a precedent
- California Alien Land Law 1913—targeted at Japanese to prohibit land ownership
- Life of constant movement/refuge—politics of war and knowledge
