A View from the Bottom - Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation (Paperback)

"A View from the Bottom" offers a major critical reassessment of male effeminacy and its racialization in visual culture. Examining portrayals of Asian and Asian American men in Hollywood cinema, European art film, gay pornography, and experimental documentary, Nguyen Tan Hoang explores the cultural meanings that accrue to sexual positions. He shows how cultural fantasies around the position of the sexual "bottom" overdetermine and refract the meanings of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality in American culture in ways that both enable and constrain Asian masculinity. Challenging the association of bottoming with passivity and abjection, Nguyen suggests ways of thinking about the bottom position that afford agency and pleasure. A more capacious conception of bottomhood--as a sexual position, a social alliance, an affective bond, and an aesthetic form--has the potential to destabilize sexual, gender, and racial norms, suggesting an ethical mode of relation organized not around dominance and mastery but around the risk of vulnerability and shame. Thus reconceived, bottomhood as a critical category creates new possibilities for arousal, receptiveness, and recognition, and offers a new framework for analyzing sexual representations in cinema as well as understanding their relation to oppositional political projects.

General

Imprint:	Duke University Press
Country of origin:	United States
Series:	Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe
Release date:	July 2014
First published:	2014
Authors:	Tan Hoang Nguyen
Dimensions:	229 x 152 x 19mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - Trade
Pages:	304
ISBN-13:	978-0-8223-5684-4
Categories:	Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Films, cinema > Film theory & criticism Books > Humanities > History > History of specific subjects > Social & cultural history Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Gay & Lesbian studies > Gay studies (Gay men) Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Ethnic studies > General Books > History > History of specific subjects > Social & cultural history
LSN:	0-8223-5684-8
Barcode:	9780822356844

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