David L. Eng

Shinhee Han

David L. Eng and Shinhee Han draw on psychoanalytic case histories from the mid-1990s to the present to explore how first- and second-generation Asian American young adults deal with difficulties such as depression, suicide, and coming out within the larger social context of race, immigration, and sexuality.

On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans

Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation

In The Feeling of Kinship, David L. Eng investigates the emergence of “queer liberalism”—the empowerment of certain gays and lesbians in the United States, economically through an increasingly visible and mass-mediated queer consumer lifestyle, and politically through the legal protection of rights to privacy and intimacy. Eng argues that in our “colorblind” age the emergence of queer liberalism is a particular incarnation of liberal freedom and progress, one constituted by both the racialization of intimacy and the forgetting of race. Through a startling reading of Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark legal decision overturning Texas’s antisodomy statute, Eng reveals how the ghosts of miscegenation haunt both Lawrence and the advent of queer liberalism. Eng develops the concept of “queer diasporas” as a critical response to queer liberalism. A methodology drawing attention to new forms of family and kinship, accounts of subjects and subjectivities, and relations of affect and desire, the concept differs from the traditional notions of diaspora, theories of the nation-state, and principles of neoliberal capitalism upon which queer liberalism thrives. Eng analyzes films, documentaries, and literature by Asian and Asian American artists including Wong Kar-wai, Monique Truong, Deann Borshay Liem, and Rea Tajiri, as well as a psychoanalytic case history of a transnational adoptee from Korea. In so doing, he demonstrates how queer Asian migrant labor, transnational adoption from Asia, and the political and psychic legacies of Japanese internment underwrite narratives of racial forgetting and queer freedom in the present. A focus on queer diasporas also highlights the need for a poststructuralist account of family and kinship, one offering psychic alternatives to Oedipal paradigms. The Feeling of Kinship makes a major contribution to American studies, Asian American studies, diaspora studies, psychoanalysis, and queer theory.

Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy

The Feeling of Kinship

David Kazanjian

"If catastrophe is not representable according to the narrative explanations which would ‘make sense’ of history, then making sense of ourselves and charting the future are not impossible. But we are, as it were, marked for life, and that mark is insuperable, irrecoverable. It becomes the condition by which life is risked, by which the question of whether one can move, and with whom, and in what way is framed and incited by the irreversibility of loss itself."—Judith Butler, from the Afterword "Loss is a wonderful volume: powerful and important, deeply moving and intellectually challenging at the same time, ethical and not moralistic. It is one of those rare collections that work as a multifaceted whole to map new areas for inquiry and pose new questions. I found myself educated and provoked by the experience of participating in an ongoing dialogue."—Amy Kaplan, author of The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture

The Politics of Mourning

Loss

José Esteban Muñoz

Judith Halberstam

This special double issue of Social Text reexamines the term queer and the mainstreaming of gay and lesbian identity in context of the global crises of the late twentieth century. These include the growth of neoliberalism; the clash of religious fundament

What's Queer about Queer Studies Now?

Jasbir K. Puar

The contributors to Left of Queer offer a detailed examination of queerness and its nearly three-decade academic institutionalization. They interrogate contemporary material conditions that create socially and politically acceptable queer subjects and identities; trace the development of queer studies as a brand of US area studies predicated on American culture and exceptionalism; and bring together queer theory and Marxism to reject claims that the two fields are incompatible. In examining these themes, the contributors explore how emergent debates in three key areas--debility, indigeneity, and trans--connect queer studies to a host of urgent sociopolitical issues. Taking a position that is politically left of the current academic and political mainstreaming of queerness, the essays in this issue examine what is left of queer--what remains outside of the political, economic, and cultural mandates of the state and the liberal individual as its prized subject. Contributors. Neel Ahuja, Aren Z. Aizura, Paul Amar, Toby Beauchamp, Marquis Bey, Jodi A. Byrd, Christina Crosby, Aniruddha Dutta, Treva Ellison, Fatima El-Tayeb, David L. Eng, Jules Gill-Peterson, Cristina B. Hanhardt, Kwame Holmes, Janet R. Jakobsen, Eng-Beng Lim, Petrus Liu, Tavia Nyong'o, Jasbir K. Puar, Sherene Seikaly, Eliza Steinbock

Left of Queer

David Eng explores the material & psychic impact of Asian transnational & queer social movements on family & kinship in the late 20th century.

Racial Castration, the first book to bring together the fields of Asian American studies and psychoanalytic theory, explores the role of sexuality in racial formation and the place of race in sexual identity. David L. Eng examines images—literary, visual, and filmic—that configure past as well as contemporary perceptions of Asian American men as emasculated, homosexualized, or queer. Eng juxtaposes theortical discussions of Freud, Lacan, and Fanon with critical readings of works by Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Lonny Kaneko, David Henry Hwang, Louie Chu, David Wong Louie, Ang Lee, and R. Zamora Linmark. While situating these literary and cultural productions in relation to both psychoanalytic theory and historical events of particular significance for Asian Americans, Eng presents a sustained analysis of dreamwork and photography, the mirror stage and the primal scene, and fetishism and hysteria. In the process, he offers startlingly new interpretations of Asian American masculinity in its connections to immigration exclusion, the building of the transcontinental railroad, the wartime internment of Japanese Americans, multiculturalism, and the model minority myth. After demonstrating the many ways in which Asian American males are haunted and constrained by enduring domestic norms of sexuality and race, Eng analyzes the relationship between Asian American male subjectivity and the larger transnational Asian diaspora. Challenging more conventional understandings of diaspora as organized by race, he instead reconceptualizes it in terms of sexuality and queerness.

Managing Masculinity in Asian America

Racial Castration

DIVA psychoanalytic study that argues for the centrality of sexuality in the construction of Asian-American identity, and of racial identity in general./div

Alice Y. Hom

What does it mean to be queer and Asian-American at the turn of the century? The writers, activists, essayists, and artists who contribute to this volume consider how Asian-American racial identity and queer sexuality interconnect in mutually shaping and complicating ways. Their collective aim (in the words of the editors) is "to articulate a new conception of Asian-American racial identity, its heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity-concepts that have after all underpinned the Asian-American moniker from its very inception. Q & A approaches matters of identity from a variety of points of view and academic disciplines in order to explore the multiple crossings of race and ethnicity with sexuality and gender. Drawing together the work of visual artists, fiction writers, community organizers, scholars, and participants in roundtable discussions, the collection gathers an array of voices and experiences that represent the emerging communities of a queer Asian-America. Collectively, these contributors contend that Asian-American studies needs to be more attentive to issues of sexuality and that queer studies needs to be more attentive to other aspects of difference, especially race and ethnicity. Vigorously rejecting the notion that a symmetrical relationship between race and homosexuality would weaken lesbian/gay and queer movements, the editors refuse to "believe that a desirably queer world is one in which we remain perpetual aliens-queer houseguests-in a queer nation. Author note: David L. Eng is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University. Alice Y. Hom is a doctoral candidate in history at Claremont Graduate University.

David L. Eng

Books

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