Abstract
In Western gay sexual cultures that privilege white masculine bodies, Asian men have long been feminized and perceived as less attractive or only desirable as bottoms. But how do these dynamics of racialized eroticism play out among gay Asian men?
Focusing on “sticky rice,” Asian men who are primarily interested in developing sexual and romantic relationships with Asian men, Shinsuke Eguchi’s Asians Loving Asians: Sticky Rice Homoeroticism and Queer Politics investigates how the trope of Asian intraracial couplings is encountered in personal, relational, and media representational contexts. Building on queer of color critiques and critical intercultural communication studies, Eguchi reveals the way sticky rice simultaneously reproduces and resists settler colonialist logics of whiteness and its quotidian operation in gay sexual cultures. Moreover, Eguchi examines how the desiring interactions among Asian diasporas are intricately embedded within the intra-regional political, economic, and historical tensions in and across Asia. Finally, Eguchi moves beyond the sexual and romantic dimensions of sticky rice and explores its political potential as a site of collective resistance for queer Asians and an alternative form of queer relationality.
The book is structured into three parts, divided by both focus and methods of analysis (e.g., in-depth interviews and performative writing). A recurring approach throughout the book is an embodied one where Eguchi unapologetically treats their body as a platform on and through which knowledge is produced. Their own positionality and experiences as a racialized Asian queer man living in the US shape the origin and scope of the project.
Eguchi shows that media representation of sticky rice is politically powerful and problematic. Chapter 1 focuses on two films (Yellow Fever, 1998 and Front Cover, 2015) that depict how an Asian British/American man first despises but gradually falls in love with a newly migrated Asian man. Both media texts de-essentialize the stereotypes of Asian men as feminine and submissive, but not without problems. The paradigm of “old-new immigrant” hints at a linear growth model of immigrants that reinforces the ahistorical notion of homeland and normalizes the Western gaze on Asian foreigners. Chapter 2 analyses On Koreatown, an episode of the TV series Falls for the Angels that narrates the intra-Asian encounter between a younger Taiwanese American and an older adopted Korean American. Despite the conscious intervention against a white masculine ideal, Eguchi argues that the episode reproduces the gay economies of desires that reinforce inequality.
In the second part, Eguchi employs “an auto/ethnographic approach to interviewing” (p.84) to illustrate how the vernacular discourses of sticky rice unfold in the lived experiences of racialized Asian queer men in the US. Using queer diasporas as “a border-crossing analytic” (p.79), Chapter 3 troubles the monolithic category and experience of Asian queer subjects by documenting incoherence of identity/reality across communities and their ambivalent senses of (un)belongings shaped by document status, degree of Americanization as well as intra-Asian political rivalries, economic competitions, and historical struggles. Eguchi demonstrates how ostensibly shared position and coalitional space coexists with the problematic situation of Asians competing for white partners. In Chapter 4, Eguchi also examines the coalitional potential of sticky rice by interpreting intraracial pairings as a pedagogy of unfreedom for Asian gay men to reflect on their (in)ability to perform desires and un/learn the stigmatization of Asian men loving Asian men. Furthermore, the stickiness (sameness) generates a site of queer relationalities that counter the constraints of (queer) freedom and develop the collective among the racialized Asian queer subjects.
In the third part, Eguchi autoethnographically examines themselves, scrutinizing their own sticking relationship with Hikawa Kiyoshi, a Japanese genderqueer singer. Here, stickiness moves beyond its sexual and romantic connotation and signifies, in Eguchi’s words, “an idolized worship of the celebrity who represents some social and performative aspects of who I am, what I do, and how I make sense of what I do” (p.138). Hikawa’s genderless presence disidentifies with the onē-kei genre, a pejorative term denoting MTF trans, non-binary, and cismale cross-dressing performers, and thus challenges Japanese logics of cisheterosexism. Through juxtaposing their own position as an effeminately queer Japanese American with Hikawa’s genderqueerness, Eguchi re-interprets sticky rice as a “sisterly” concept that envisions the Japanese queer collective.
Despite the proliferating attention on race in both queer studies and communication studies, intraracial relationships remain understudied. Studies on queer people are predominantly US-centric and white-focused, while research on race is often limited to the normative White-Black binary. Eguchi’s Asians Loving Asians centers on the intersection between race, sexuality, and transnationality in ways that ought to motivate future scholarship. It advances feminist and queer scholarship on intraracial relationships and our understanding of the mundane operation of whiteness among queer people of color.