Assembling Asian American Men in Pornography: Shattering the

Self toward Ethical Manhoods

Celine Parreñas Shimizu

Journal of Asian American Studies, Volume 13, Number 2, June 2010, pp.
163-189 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jaas.0.0082

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/383724

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 Assembling Asian American
Men in Pornography
Shattering the Self toward Ethical Manhoods

celine parreñas shimizu

I n recent years, two pornographic videos identify a crisis of masculinity

for Asian American men in U.S. popular culture. University of California
at Davis Asian American studies professor Darrell Hamamoto’s political
pornography Yellowcaust: A Patriot Act (2004) and its companion
documentary, James Hou’s Masters of the Pillow (2004), received
attention from the popular media, packed audiences in large theaters
of the prominent Asian American film festivals, and toured widely on
the college campus circuit from 2004 to 2007.1 Together, they present an
Asian American anxiety regarding castrated heterosexual manhood, which
they propose to solve with the making and framing of pornography as a
racial project.2 In defining sexuality as a site of racial injury, their solution
privileges access to what feminist media critic Michele Wallace plainly calls
“macho” in reference to gender hierarchy and heteronormative phallic
power.3 Unlike these films’ figuration that sexual fantasies about whiteness
are indications of colonialism upon the deepest parts of the self, I evaluate
fantasies as much more unwieldy. Fantasies about race and sexuality are
“wishes”—they make sense of the past as constitutive of pleasure, express
desires for better possibilities, and exercise the power of the imagination
to reorganize the inequities of the real. As such, enacting fantasies involve
the doing and undoing of power.
In looking at the gender dynamics expressed in the fantasy-produc-
tions4 of Yellowcaust and Masters of the Pillow, my project attends not

jaas june 2010 • 163–189

© the johns hopkins university press
164 • JAAS • 13:2

only to how they describe Asian American masculinity—the character-

istics, traits, and qualities that describe how one is gendered male—but
manhood itself, or the inner life of being and becoming male as well as
the performance of maleness. What makes a man a man is not only his
ability for virility but his being as a self and his formation as a subject in
relations with others. Aiming to free our conceptions of manhood from
the poles of vilified lack and valorized macho, I look to representations of
Asian American men engaged in intimate sexual acts to map an ethics of
manhood. Ultimately, I show how sexual screens provide opportunities
for men to make choices that shapes the self and relations with others
where sex expresses not only pleasure and power but also care for self
and others.

Assembling Asian American Men in Pornography

“The point of having an Asian-American man being with an Asian-

American female Hamamoto says is to send a message, ‘about as
explicit as you can get, that this is the natural order of things: Asian
man, Asian woman, together. Asian-American man, Asian-American
woman, together.’”

—Darrell Hamamoto, in Nick Wong,

Ka Leo O Hawaii, October 29, 2003, 1

In 2004, Darrell Hamamoto completed a short film that garnered the

attention of mainstream media in prime time and late-night shows hosted
by Jon Stewart and Jay Leno, along with Hollywood industry newspapers
such as Variety and others like the Los Angeles Times.5 In these national
media venues, Hamamoto came closer to fulfilling his plans to become
an Asian American Larry Flint who would fund other Asian American
political projects with profits from his full-length pornography title Skin
On Skin and other works.6 The short video Yellowcaust: A Patriot Act is a
pornographic film informed by Asian American race politics. The film-
maker and professor of Asian American studies “wanted to [create] pure
unadulterated physical pleasure between a Yellow couple to cut against the
grain of our common history rooted in U.S. imperialism and the systematic
acts of genocide that have been inflicted upon us in order to sustain that
 Assembling Asian American Men in Pornography • shimizu • 165

social order.”7 His use of the term “Yellow” indicates the Asian American
power movement’s appellation for politically conscious Asian Americans,
an apt use for a film that claims to be the first pornographic film to feature
Asian Americans in racially explicit terms. So years later, as the butt of
jokes and object of puzzlement, why take Hamamoto’s pornography up?
The film persists, with a life of its own in classrooms across the country
and in images on the Internet in ways that need comment beyond ridicule
or puzzlement for this moment in Asian American media visibility.
In Yellowcaust, the professional Cambodian American woman porn
star Leyla Lei and amateur Korean American man Chun Lee perform
explicit hard-core sex acts. Following the conventions of other gonzo
films or professional-amateur pornography—the most popular form of
contemporary pornography today—the acts are shot from a variety of
angles in the standard motel-room setting. However, unlike the traditional
gonzo form, which initiates an amateur woman into the porn industry,
Yellowcaust features a professional woman and amateur man. Here, it is
the Asian American male who stars as the fetishized object to disrobe, re-
veal, and expose his sexuality. Notably, too, the filmmaker is not the actor
featured in Yellowcaust but rather inserts himself in the sex acts via the
intertitle text, which classifies the actions performed by the couple.
Looking back, the filmmakers’ centralizing of Asian American male
sexual problems and using porn to address them generated considerable
response. Hamamoto and Hou indeed succeeded in opening up large-
arena discussions of how Asian American men “lack the success of Asian
American women . . . in interracial relationships—a sensitive fact” of Asian
American gender relations.8 Galvanized by the issues identified in the film,
students and festival programmers organized panels of scholars, filmmak-
ers, and activists to accompany the screening, opening public conversations
about race, sexuality, gender, and representation focused on the problems
of Asian American men. As documented in the media by blogs and festival
Web sites, many faced controversy and “tedious” bureaucracy to get the
porn event funded and sponsored.9 The impact of the film continues. The
Center for Asian American Media blogger Tracy Wang today ponders what
may be Hamamoto’s most effective intervention: to combat sexual lack
with sexual presence through pornography. She says that “Asian American
166 • JAAS • 13:2

Studies Professor Darrell Hamamoto at U.C. Davis brought up an excellent

point when he asked his class what and who exactly from the mass media
did they fantasize sexually about and why. Consensus of his class was that
Asian Americans just didn’t have a role in their fantasies when it came to
pulling figures from popular media.”10 Here, when fantasy is simply the
ideology of victimization by racism, it benefits a particular approach, of
what Viet Nguyen calls “remasculinization”—the process by which men
aspire to gain the patriarchal power and heterosexual privilege that have
been historically denied to them (as exemplified by writer Frank Chin and
the nationalist patriarchal platform advocated in the 1980s).
Years after the two films’ national tours, I take up these twin projects
in order to identify the patriarchal aspirations central to and persistent in
approaches to solving Asian American manhood’s sexual and represen-
tational problems and the role of women as a fetish for the replacement
of the penis and the phallus in social castration. Premised on the belief
that Asian American men have been victimized by the repressive power of
sexuality and racist regimes of representation, both films propose a pa-
triarchal heroism for the filmmakers and a heteronormative prescription
for sexuality. That is, to use Kaja Silverman’s words, “women are exchange
objects that confer symbolic privilege upon the male subject.”11 The sexual
encounter with the Asian female occurs within the social context identi-
fied by the filmmakers as her hypersexuality and hypervisibility and the
Asian male’s asexuality and invisibility. The sex acts in Yellowcaust then
are confrontations with this difference.
However, male subjectivity is privileged as the one in need of care not
only by her but in the name of Asian Americans as a racial group. She, the
fetishized white male object of desire, serves him out of his unpleasurable
and unwanted position. For Hamamoto, racism must be addressed as the
force that gets in the way of Asian American male phallic identification. It
also justifies his assertion of possessing her. For Kaja Silverman, the use of
women to define men as the producers and representatives of their social
fields is the most rudimentary articulation of the Law of the Father, or
reproductive kinship relations, that govern our dominant fiction.12 If these
films attempt to access macho, why is it important for Asian American men
to measure up to normative criteria and vilify the position of lack?
 Assembling Asian American Men in Pornography • shimizu • 167

By examining the sexual labor and gendered acts in Darrell Hama-

moto’s Yellowcaust, I show its focus on the sexual victimization of Asian
American men while treating Asian American women as bridges for
securing conventional manhood. This actually further embeds Asian
American men in lack and strengthens the gender and sexual hierarchy
that they attempt to critique for their exclusion. Thus, I argue that gender
hierarchy and the heteronormative ideal in the position of asexuality and
effeminacy, or straitjacket sexuality for Asian American men, remains a
powerful disciplining mechanism in the attempt to address their sexual
and screen problems. We need to reimagine and reimage Asian American
masculinities without reinforcing heteronormativity, what I define as the
restrictive roles for men and women that uphold and privilege hetero-
sexuality while discouraging new ways of reinventing gender and sexuality.
These films articulate male aspirations for phallic (symbolic) and penile
(literal) power that ultimately disserve the formulation of socially viable,
ethical masculinities for Asian American men as well as ignore the pain,
anger, and frustrations of their assignation outside the norms of hetero-
sexual masculinity.

Dissonance in Darrell Hamamoto’s Yellowcaust

In a film that proposes to solve Asian American male sexual problems,

men register as passive and perverted in the sense of inadequately meet-
ing the norm. The Asian American male filmmaker’s intertitle texts in
Yellowcaust frame the traditional gonzo porn sex acts. We see the personal
histories of the actors (Korean American male adoptee and female Cam-
bodian American) scroll along a litany of wartime atrocities committed
against various Asian countries and peoples by the United States. While
conventional heterosexual acts including kissing, cunnilingus, and fellatio
on a sofa unfold, followed by missionary, cowgirl, reverse cowgirl, and
doggy-style positions on a motel-room bed, we hear the ghostly wails of
a massacre while we read text about the “kill[ing] of 200,000 Filipinos at
the dawn of the twentieth century . . . yet in the eyes of the colonized, every
American soldier is P. Diddy or Brad Pitt.” Here, racism shapes sexual-
ity repressively—and rears its head in the sexual intimacies between an
Asian man and woman. As a film made by a Japanese American man, the
168 • JAAS • 13:2

film does not account for coethnic exploitation such as Japanese atroci-
ties against Filipinos and Koreans or the long history of strife between
Chinese and Japanese. These include historical scenes of sexual violence
across ethnicity and gender.
The “money shot,” or the visible evidence of male ejaculation, appears
with intertitles, too. Hamamoto names for us its significance in declaring
the importance of sex between Asian Americans as a “reclaiming [of]
pleasure. . . . [T]he joy of Yellow bodies will not be denied by the State. . . .
[D]espite all efforts of eradication . . . Yellow people endure.” Here, the
images function as background while the text guides us into a particu-
lar definition of the sex acts as redemptive of racial wounding by white
structures of power. Among Asian Americans, sexuality is rendered in
harmonious terms. In effect, the intertitle texts act as Hamamoto’s sexual
interventions, functioning as a form of colonizing the meaning of sex
for these two specific actors. And it is a form of “cock-blocking” for the
younger male Asian American actor whose experiences and contributions
are rendered derivative to the filmmaker’s agenda and a simplification of
what sex could be for the Cambodian American woman.
The movie suggests that Asian American sexual problems can be solved
by achieving Asian American male pleasure within an Asian American
heterosexual coupling. The filmmaker’s text privileges not only sexual
reproduction for Asian Americans but also the importance of heterosexual
racial identity within the context of state racism and genocidal acts. Within
this context, the money shot functions very specifically. After the money
shot, the male actor shifts his gaze from the woman to the camera as she
examines his ejaculation on her belly. The film ends with a close-up of
the younger Asian American male’s face as childlike in his thoroughly
happy smile.
In his 1998 essay “Joy Fuck Club: Prolegomenon to an Asian Ameri-
can Porno Practice,” Darrell Hamamoto describes Asian American racial
colonization through the controlling mechanism of sexuality. Here he
points to how Asian Americans desire whiteness that his “anticolonial
porno” practice aims to critique. In the essay, he promotes a totalizing
understanding of how sexual images work. Supposedly, they dominate
Asian American spectators’ most private fantasies so that they desire white-
 Assembling Asian American Men in Pornography • shimizu • 169

ness and despise themselves. For Hamamoto, colonialism at the level of

sexuality and love compels and warrants an Asian American pornographic
practice when Asian American spectators undergo a kind of “self-alienation
that has its material source in a sex/race/power regime so total in scope
and depth that it reaches into the unconscious, shaping the stuff of erotic
imagination.”13 Hamamoto’s solution to this problem is to create videos
representing sexual liberation in order to achieve a kind of social libera-
tion. For Hamamoto, the unconscious, as a site where racism takes hold,
must meet another image: Asian American men, rather than white men,
with Asian American women. He defines in this way the power of sexual
images conventionally as acting upon their viewers rather than using them
to transform and learn about one’s self and others, especially in relation to
manhood. How can sexual images at the site of production and consump-
tion teach us about what happens when an Asian American man hailed as
asexual/effeminate then finds himself as a lead actor in porn?
Hamamoto calls the juxtaposition of hard-core sex with the sounds
of atrocity and suffering meant to symbolize Western imperialism “dis-
sonance” with sexual pleasure as political theater.14 However, a central
dissonance remains unexplored and underexamined in Yellowcaust. The
concept of dissonance usually describes conflict, and in social psychology,
cognitive dissonance describes the process of recognizing the presence of
conflicting ideas in the self—such as in the experience of pleasure during
pain or what Nalini Ambady names as the possession of two identities
in conflict.15 For example, Yellowcaust occurs within a certain context of
dissonance in terms of race and gender. Asian American men benefit from
positive racial stereotypes and are in turn punished by negative gender ste-
reotypes. So this moment of dissonance in the Asian American man’s sexual
act—where he recognizes his stereotyping as asexual while experiencing
the physicality of a sexual act—is, for Hamamoto, political. But how? Is
the sex act political for the Asian man because he is no longer sexually
absent but sexually present? But what comprises his sexual presence? Or
what does Chun Lee bring to these scenes beyond how Hamamoto wants
him to function? And how about Leyla Lei?
In “Sex and the Asian Man,” David Pierson quotes Hamamoto, reveal-
ing the dominance of the repressive hypothesis in his problem identifica-
170 • JAAS • 13:2

tion: “I refuse to allow Asian Americans to be passive victims. . . . There

has been a slow-motion 100 year holocaust of the Asian people. . . . We
need access”16 of which making porn is part, for it asserts heterosexual
coupling as the normal to which we should aspire. Herein, Hamamoto
indicates a passive victimization to which he responds via pornography
as an assertion of phallic and penile power through heterosexual coupling
that also problematically naturalizes same-race pairing.
Moreover, it is also an uncritical assertion of presence as opposite
to absence. For Hamamoto, pornography seemed to promise more than
the professoriate in terms of impact and reach: “I’ve written thousands
of words, whole books about our exclusion from American culture. . . . I
began to realize: Nobody’s listening to me. . . . This project has done more
to draw attention to these issues than all my other efforts combined.”17
In his understanding of teaching and his filmmaking, the evaluation of
dissonance does not occur. In his interpretation, the self is centered as
the victim that must rise up, speak its pain, and claim its power. It is a
solid identity that is gained, rather than an opening of a learning process
about race, sex, and the self in the movies. In this solution, any visibility
is viable. Dissonance is feared, yet it is precisely the place where men may
account for themselves.
These films, which privilege hegemonic masculinity, are made in the
context of and in response to, according to their authors, Asian American
culture’s repression of sexuality as well as the effeminization and desexual-
ization of Asian American men as part of a racist regime. But how do they
account for their gendered power, especially over women? Or the specific
fantasies and wishes that the actors bring to these sexual scenes from their
particular sexual subjections? James Hou, a former student of Hamamoto’s
and director of Masters of the Pillow, concurs with Hamamoto: “The gen-
eral consensus is we’re stereotyped in a way that dehumanizes our identi-
ties as men and especially in terms of our sexuality, it’s never displayed
on screen or explored. It’s always repressed.”18 Within this context, which
places importance on Asian American men defending their sexual power
and viability in sociality, their films attempt to unbridle the repression of
sexuality for Asian American men. For Hou, Hamamoto speaks of and
shows sexuality within this silencing context—and there is a gendered
dynamic here where male subjectivity is of utmost concern. He says that
 Assembling Asian American Men in Pornography • shimizu • 171

it is “difficult for Asian Americans to take huge risks because of cultural

baggage. . . . That’s why I applaud Hamamoto for taking a risk. Put your
opinion out there, make it known and see where the chips fall.”19 But the
position of victimization within sexuality and race does not account for
how Asian American men can and must emerge with masculine identities
that account for their complicity and conflicts with domination as well
as the richness of sexuality to which we bring our own experiences and
undergo our own transformations.

Male Narcissism: James Hou’s Masters of the Pillow

In Masters of the Pillow, James Hou begins with a shot of the title page of
Hamamoto’s essay “The Joy Fuck Club: Prolegomenon to an Asia American
Porno Practice,” where we glimpse the argument regarding Asian Ameri-
cans sharing “the collective sexual imaginary dominated by whiteness.”
Hamamoto introduces himself, establishing a smarmy presence through-
out the documentary. “I am a Ph.D., professor of Asian American studies at
UC Davis,” while we see him on campus, in his office among books by Asian
American feminists such as Dragon Ladies Breathe Fire by Sonia Shah and
Defending Pornography by anticensorship scholar Nadine Strossen. With
young Asian American students in the classroom, he discusses how Asian
women in porn movies are always paired with white European American
men and how he will bring together Asian American women and Asian
American men—“a very fine sister here and a fine looking Asian male,”
he says, “filming them having sex.” The camera cuts to students listening
and shifting in their seats with discomfort. In the video, Hamamoto is
supported by a young Asian American male media activist who assesses
the context for such images: “A lot of Asian girls, screwed by everyone and
their cousin. When you do find an Asian man, he’s gay and he’s a bottom.”
In this discussion, Asian women are objects for male play and ownership.
They do not have sexual agency—they do not express desire but are simply
used by men, and it functions as an indication of Asian American male
victimization by white men. Accordingly, Asian women are to be returned
to Asian coupling. Meanwhile, the absence of gay Asian manhood and the
bottom position are rendered undesirable within the normative criteria
prominent in the movie’s heteronormativity.
172 • JAAS • 13:2

Through representation such as Masters of the Pillow, we can see how

Asian American men can simultaneously experience stress, pressure, and
pain as well as demonstrate complicity in the domination that produces
their subjectivities not only in relation to women but also in how they de-
fine viable Asian American manhood as the opposite of asexuality and ef-
feminacy or gayness. Asian American men as desexualized and effeminized
in representation are differently racialized from Asian American women,
who are hypersexualized and hyperfeminized. Women, however, as I argue
in The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women On
Screen and Scene,20 engage their interpellation by negotiating its misnam-
ing and recasting it with their concrete experiences in representation. The
men in Masters of the Pillow and Yellowcaust counter their misnaming with
another misnaming if they do not acknowledge their existence as agents of
power and violence. Rendering oneself as victim achieves not what Judith
Butler calls a proper “accounting of the self.”21 If the problematization
here is so severely flawed so as to miss men’s possession of gender power,
the practices recommended do not reflect the possibilities of formulating
responsible, ethical, moral, and sexually desirable manhoods, on and off
screen. Rather than deriving lessons from a concrete project—the pairing
of an Asian American man and woman—the lesson about this pairing is
already decided before the camera rolls. We are shown what needs do-
ing rather than experience what can be remade and imagined anew, in
exploring what Kath Albury describes as “possible sexual stories that can
be tried on for size”22 through pornographic practice.
This is why James Hou’s documentary is important to assess—how
can the practice that emerges from the problematization lead to an ethical
heuristic for Asian American manhood? If we try Hamamoto’s solution of
presenting Asian American men an opportunity to display their sexuality,
what do we learn and discover about what Asian American men want and
need? Jay Leno recounts Hamamoto’s critique as follows: “Asian men ex-
perience low self-esteem” and thus need representation in porn to alleviate
the pain. This comedic reading offers precise analysis. The pornographer’s
privileging of conventional masculinity reveals a lack of security in manhood
outside those norms. However, the critique falls away when The Tonight
Show created a spoof where Asian American men and women attempt to
 Assembling Asian American Men in Pornography • shimizu • 173

get it on but Godzilla interrupts them and chases them naked down the
street. Leno says it was fun to shoot.
In Masters of the Pillow, we see Hamamoto attempt to pick up his
male star at SFO airport, but Hamamoto cannot find him. So the cam-
era follows him as he moves from the lower-level arrivals to upper-level
departures while talking on a cell phone—“Where are you? What do you
look like?”—with no success of finding his actor, who finally meets him
at the car, all loaded up without Hamamoto’s help. This subtle ridicule of
Hamamoto contextualizes his presentation of the movie’s goal: “making
a porn sends a message that this is the actual order of things—Asian man
and Asian woman together—Asian American man and Asian American
woman together.” This claim is immediately followed by an interview
with his considerably younger girlfriend, Funie Hsu, who, when asked
about their age difference, says her twenty-something peer group finds
him “easy to talk to . . . he acts immature—not fifty.” The description of
immaturity from his closest collaborator Hsu bookending his declaration
discredits Hamamoto as he goes on about how white male supremacy in a
patriarchal society determines who can choose sex partners. His platform
identifies a system of sexual colonialism that sees Asian female outmarriage
to the master race. “A white male sex complex won’t permit” Asian male
competition, he continues. In this sequence, Hou establishes Hamamoto
as easy-going and silly. Hsu concludes her part by describing Hamamoto
as into “popular culture and he won’t judge you.” Hou then interviews a
set of established and respected intellectuals and cultural producers who
provide contextual information that ultimately and (seemingly) unwit-
tingly support Hamamoto’s claims regarding Asian American male sexual
problems.
Tony-award winning playwright David Henry Hwang, prominent film
festival director Chi-hui Yang, celebrated film directors Justin Lin and Eric
Byler, and renowned Berkeley Asian American feminist professor Elaine H.
Kim chime in on Hamamoto’s project of proposing the solution to Asian
American men’s sexual problems through pornography. They confirm the
lack of Asian American male representations in the media: Lin critiques the
racially fetished presence of Asian Americans in the media; Byler diagnoses
the lack of Asian American power at the site of film reception; and both
174 • JAAS • 13:2

Kim and Hwang attest to racism in the representations but question the
appropriateness of porn as a solution. Through the documentary’s editing,
they provide the discursive context for Hamamoto to declare: “Given [the
problems mentioned by those above] why wouldn’t Asian people have an
alienated consciousness?” For him, no one has come out with an agenda for
regaining Asian American wholeness again, and his pornography project
is an actual agenda for confronting Asian American sexual domination
by white racism that we are waiting for.
Critics of Hou have commented on how the documentary demon-
strates a “reluctance to question Hamamoto more on his controversial
opinions and methods, which occasionally makes the film feel as though
it’s a de facto endorsement of such beliefs.”23 To help identify both Masters
of the Pillow and Yellowcaust’s project of male narcissism in the name of
racial freedom for the whole, I ground it in the discourse of gender hier-
archy and heteronormativity in Asian American sexuality studies. I also
provide a larger intertextual context by presenting other Asian American
cultural productions that focus on men in order to map how others frame
and address these sexual problems of racialization. The first example takes
up the debate between male and female genders in the establishment of
Asian American literary studies. Frank Chin, Jeffrey Paul Chan, and the edi-
tors, in their introduction to Aiiieeeee! (the foundational Asian American
movement literary collection), privilege normal, white masculinity that
negates feminist and queer critique.24 According to Asian Americanist and
feminist literary critic King-Kok Cheung, the critical battle in early Asian
American literature between Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston
centered on gender. Cheung explains how Chinese American male critics
responded with vehement anger to Kingston’s Woman Warrior, particu-
larly regarding its feminist centering of women’s experiences, as part of
a Western “feminization” of Asian American men.25 Cheung identifies
how the critiques that uphold manhood or womanhood in this battle
are “wishes for self-empowerment . . . remain in thrall to the norms and
arguments of the dominant patriarchal culture, unwittingly upholding the
criteria of those whom they assail.”26 Cheung compels us to ask, in the site
of performance and cinema, if we can better use the genre of representa-
tion, and its attendant tasks of representing reality or alternatives to it,
 Assembling Asian American Men in Pornography • shimizu • 175

to rethink our visions for other racialized masculinities and femininities

beyond the eunuch and the fetish. The racial heteronormativity in Yel-
lowcaust takes the form of male narcissism that centers the penis and the
phallic economy, exemplified in the representation of male orgasm as
emotional and political joy. Who does this catharsis serve if it leads to a
compulsory heterosexual demand that Asian American women occupy a
derivative sexual object status to men? Is this dominant heterosexuality
for men good if it is a fearful heterosexual response to the attribution of
queerness and male effeminacy for Asian American men?

Shattering the Self in Scenes of the Sex Act

Unlike maintaining a coherent and cohesive self, I assert the importance

of embracing the shattering of the self in scenes of the sex act so as to
intervene in the binary understanding of manhood as penile power. The
identity of asexuality is not simply countered by the occurrence of pen-
etrative sexuality in the act. Its significance is generated in the moments
prior, during, and after as ones that require reading and analysis. As the
first heterosexual Asian porn star Keni Styles attests, “The whole size is-
sue is ridiculous. You don’t just (have sex) with your penis. You use your
whole body, your attitude, your presence.”27 Sexuality cannot be limited
to the penis or penetration. Similarly, identities do not travel coherently
through the sex act but undergo in that encounter instability and even
shattering. As such, an opportunity to disassemble the self within racist
regimes can be taken up in a new self-assembly rather than an aspiration
to phallic power or white patriarchal manhood and the literal power of
the penis. This is precisely why I take up these specific films, which created
a great stir in the beginning of the twenty-first century.
In a work meant to undo the female misrepresentation and male in-
visibility of Asian American sexualities, the professional-amateur gender
dynamic, the casting of a passive man served by an aggressive woman
repeats the stereotypes of Asian male passivity and Asian female sexual
power. Closing on the ecstatic face of the Asian American man shows how
the film is profoundly male in its interests by celebrating male orgasm as
racial and sexual healing for the sake of group emancipation. This occurs
176 • JAAS • 13:2

in the professional and servile hands of a woman relegated even more

severely to a sexually limited role. The psychic life of sexual coloniza-
tion is redeemed through the money shot. At the level of the racial and
representational, the transformation occurs in the man’s climax and not
in the physical or emotional aspects of the encounter between the man
and the woman. Leyla Lei even seems to sense her marginalized role in
the story here as she indicates her desire to start her own production
company as well.
In reading closely the sexual labor of the film and its performers, the
overall character of the man is that of the eager sexual virgin. His sexual
retardation is helped by the professional woman who initiates him into
the sexual world. The emotions of the sex acts arise from these clearly
delineated roles as determined by the casting. An on-line review com-
ments, “The interaction between the adult actors seemed dull because
(the male actor) Chun’s nervousness is so evident,” while Lei takes charge
with a professional calm.28 At some point she suggests various positions
to help Hamamoto refocus their interrupted sex scene. All the while she
is tender and kind, rather than domineering, lending to an assured stance
that Funie Hsu comments on as a kind of confidence and professionalism
in Lei, especially when finding out that her parents know about her work
and plans for expanding stardom. The woman’s calm confidence and the
man’s palpable anxiety present a very visible contrast.
How does this confident and assured Asian female sexuality and
anxious and nervous Asian male sexuality produce a gender dynamic
in Yellowcaust and Masters of the Pillow? The Asian Week review offers
a harsh critique by asking, “Why does [Masters of the Pillow] fall limp?”
The critic Phillip Chung demands more from the filmmaker, focusing on
the compelling figure of Chun Lee, the amateur actor. Why did Chun Lee
agree to engage in “sex with a stranger?” What did his family and friends
think of his “foray into porn”?29 Chung points to the emotional centrality
necessary for us to understand the Asian American male’s history beyond
a superficial registry of his presence as a Korean American man. Where
is his particularity in the scene, beyond the intertitle text that simply lists
his background as adoptee? How is he and his sexual specificity narrated
and his bodily image dramatized? In Masters of the Pillow, we indeed see
 Assembling Asian American Men in Pornography • shimizu • 177

Chun Lee request that their camera leave in order to complete the sex act
away from the documentary eye.
If Masters of the Pillow presents an inadequate telling of the sexual
problems Asian American men and women face in terms of racialization,
Chung expresses related dissatisfaction with Yellowcaust as well. He finds
it “just plain boring. . . . Lee and Lei engage in the standard sex found
in adult films but there is no energy, no joy, and nothing would suggest
this as a revolutionary act in any way. It’s devoid of all sexiness. It feels as
passionate as someone mowing the lawn.”30 What is revolutionary about
Yellowcaust, according to Hamamoto, is that it shows “the natural order
of things” or the achievement of racial belonging and recognition that
same-race partnering supposedly enables. But we don’t see it. Instead,
the story told about the sexualization of race is male bewilderment and
female expertise. The story of the confusion, pain, joy, and happiness of
the racial experience is unengaged. Would partnering with other races in
the film show more about the process of racialization?
In my work on race and pornography, I find that Asian American
women must play the version of Asian women that spectators expect,
and their resistance occurs in performances that exceed these demands.
For example, pre-1950s white women in yellowface costume and makeup
established a particular standard—both visible and performative—that
Asian women also perform. Similarly, how can we identify racialization if
we do not see it against other racializations? We see the gendering of race
in the form of female servility and male domination, albeit through inac-
tion on his part. Thus, in Hamamoto’s work, sexuality is defined without
more careful consideration of gender and its varying inflections for men
and women; therefore, the possibility that what is sexually empowering
for men may be disempowering to women is not considered.
Here, the emergence of the male Asian American as sexual actor in
representation essentializes sexuality rather than indicates its potential
role in the production of identity. The production of an ethical identity
is crucial in crafting politics out of pornography, however. To follow Kath
Albury, who turns to Foucault’s “late work on ethics, which frames an
ethical sensibility as ‘care for the self ’ and ‘care for the other/others,’”31 she
works to consider porn in ethical terms rather than a paranoid reading that
178 • JAAS • 13:2

already seeks to “uncover secret meanings and hidden subtexts but does
not consider the ways that other readers might reshape or make sense of
the texts that it ‘exposes.’”32 Similarly, I am concerned with manhood as
formed by an ethical process made available for analysis in representing
the experience of sexual acts.
In an article in which he “defends” himself against his critics, Hama-
moto defines sexuality as “the sheer majesty and oceanic pleasure that lies
in potential within this boundless realm of human expression.”33 Such a
definition relies on sexuality as intrinsic, transcendent, and based on a
natural drive rather than a force that is shaped by the dialectic of subject
formation—in the interchange of both individual (internal) and social
(external) forces. Instead, Hamamoto frames Asian American (male) sexu-
ality as coherent and victimized. He says that “Asian American sexuality
. . . [is] warped by Euro-American colonization, occupation, and genocide
in Asian countries; exclusion, expulsion and incarceration in the United
States.”34 Such a definition of sexuality is not only simplistic but restrictive
for disallowing the complexity of desire, including heterosexuality, and
unequal relations across different categories and experiences as well as the
way we use different sexual acts to remake ourselves, our pasts, and our
future worlds of desire. Sexuality—as racialized neither negatively nor
positively in terms that are inherent and given—works as a living social
force that requires individuals and institutions to act and interact in order
to make its meanings. The solution of representation and visibility for
Asian American men in pornographic roles ultimately leads us to stereo-
typed logics of racial representation. Positive images cannot simply undo
the negative, especially when they do not uniformly affect Asian Americans.
It is at the site of gender where we see this inequality.
In terms of a theory of representation under which Yellowcaust oper-
ates, the equation of positive versus negative images ultimately disserves
the way sexuality works on Asian American men in a more complex
way. Can any positive or negative image do justice to the experiences of
sexuality by Asian American men on and off screen? How does the sexual
fantasy offered by Yellowcaust, as it comes tinged with genocide and racial
atrocity, exceed group identification? That is, Hamamoto’s definition of
sexuality is so limited it does not reimagine power. It is simply about sexual
 Assembling Asian American Men in Pornography • shimizu • 179

liberation on screen as social liberation on scene. But even our desires and
pleasures can involve one’s subjugation, or its agent, and cannot simply
be, but must also engage the binds of power and domination. So it seems
that Hamamoto actually unwittingly demonstrates this through the film’s
gender dynamics. Does the film ultimately desire for Asian American
women to occupy traditional roles but not for other men and only for
Asian American men? Must the remasculinizing act assert Asian American
men’s ownership of Asian American women?
In “Queering Asian American Masculinity,” Crystal Parikh describes
the “incomplete incorporation”35 of Asian American men into heteronor-
mative definitions of masculinity. This exclusion allows for the “possibility
for redefinition” of a feminist and queer friendly, even heterosexual, mas-
culinity or what she broadly calls an “alternative subject formation.36 The
lack of representation of Asian American men in heterosexual pornography
indeed represents such an opportunity. That is, Asian American men’s
near-invisibility in heterosexual pornography actually provides another
opportunity for them to redefine their images in popular culture. They
could appear in pornography in a different way, as in Greg Pak’s Asian
Pride Porn (2000), a fake commercial that features playwright David Henry
Hwang marketing an Asian American porn series that empowers Asian
American viewers through its reclaiming of stereotypes such as the Chinese
delivery boy as erotic object. With a wink, Pak’s film smartly offers racial-
ized porn that alleviates guilt for the politicized Asian American viewer.
Hamamoto’s work focuses specifically on the Asian American presence in
pornography, but because Asian American men have so few opportunities
to establish their own representations, the field for redefining existing roles
must remain wide open. More precisely, the direction in which Hamamoto
takes us enables us to think more deliberately about the role of race in
eroticism and how to think about representation not only as the articula-
tion of historical inequality but how it can be productive as well.
Because sexuality in representation has disciplined Asian American
men, must the solution to their subjugation also be found in sexual rep-
resentation? Hamamoto’s formula to address the lack of sexually affirm-
ing images by showing Asian American men having sex on screen seems
similar to my approach in The Hypersexuality of Race. However, while
180 • JAAS • 13:2

both our works focus on sexuality, they differ in gender-object priori-

ties. Whereas Hypersexuality shows how the sexual subjection of Asian
American women finds its undoing in sexual representations by Asian
American women, who use the tools of their subjugation to recast and
rewrite their roles, Yellowcaust men use tools of domination that assign
women sexual object roles, and male power over women becomes the basis
for establishing the male racial self. Thus, Hamamoto’s project forces us
to take seriously the ways in which the sexualizations of Asian Americans
differ according to gender.
While Hamamoto’s definition of sexuality and representation remain
organized by a binary framework, he provokes and widens what I consider
a productive debate. He opens up the space for me to articulate the urgent
need for recasting how we measure manhood beyond sexual virility and
conventional gender norms. Yellowcaust’s dissemination certainly accom-
plishes an important goal of helping us to see concretely how sexuality is
a key issue in the gender formations of Asian Americans and how sexual-
ity, especially sexual acts and practices in representation and in everyday
life, are understudied sites in Asian American studies. His definition of
sexuality in moving image representation, however, simplifies the more
complex and unwieldy operation not only of desire and fantasy but of the
multivalent possibilities of interpretation present in the consumption of
any image.
Ultimately, Hamamoto comes up with an equation regarding sex/
race and cinema that reduces race and sexuality to subordination and
domination.37 Such an analysis simplifies the complexities of Asian Ameri-
cans’ representation and of their sexual object choices and experiences.
For example, Jessica Hagedorn and Peter X. Feng both describe viewing
practices that reject the narrative lines of Hollywood movies that present
Asian American characters as simply bad. Rather than following the lesson
filmmakers may be teaching regarding Asian American subservience or
malevolence, spectators have the power to turn away, reject the moral, or
invent alternative fantasies. Pornography is met by people who can and
do make their own meanings from these works and perspectives. The film
Yellowcaust operates under the assumption that representation has the
power to dictate sexual and social realities, but it does not directly account
 Assembling Asian American Men in Pornography • shimizu • 181

for how cross-race allegiances and intimacies can be part of antiracist

spectatorial practices as well.
Thus, we need a psychoanalytic map of sexuality in terms of race and
a broader definition of representation that accounts for the incoherence
of fantasy articulated there—as well as the dissonance and narcissism
that define our sexual, racial, and gendered problems. That is, we need
an understanding of sexuality that accounts for the unwieldy dynamic of
the subconscious ways we make sense of our sexual realities as well as an
understanding of representation not simply prescribed as good and bad
images. The terrain of representation in terms of fantasy, consciousness,
and the unconscious may be explained via Kaja Silverman’s theorization of
what she terms the “dominant fiction,” and here I emphasize its production
in terms of the social categories and experiences of race, class, gender, and
sex. In theorizing the process of consent in Gramscian hegemony, Silver-
man argues that “the ideology of a particular class cannot simply impose
itself upon a socius; in order to command collective belief it must intersect
with the society’s reality which does not belong to any class.”38 Society’s
reality is determined by individuals and group epochs—this is most clear
when Silverman defines the dominant fiction to “consist of images and
stories through which a society figures consensus.”39 The dominant fic-
tion is “significantly inflected by the ideologies of gender, class, race and
ethnicity,”40 which, Silverman argues, call upon the male subject to see
himself and the female subject to recognize and desire him only through
the mediation of images of an unimpaired masculinity. It urges both the
male and female subject to deny knowledge of male castration by believing
in the commensurability of the penis and phallus, actual and symbolic
father.41 How does this process occur, or not, in the scenes between Leyla
Lei and Chun Lee?
In the examples from Yellowcaust above, heteronormativity is claimed
as a right. While the exclusion from heteronormative standards of mascu-
linity creates a great deal of pain, how can racial anger about masculinity
produce an aesthetic that does not simply hold up identities that require
the subjugation of others? In an essay on the comic series Secret Asian
Man,42 Tasha Oren describes how anger can be a powerful and useful
emotion if part of a productive critical project—wherein content also
182 • JAAS • 13:2

shapes the form in a fashion so original as to shock our assumptions of

what emotions are proper to Asian American men. Hamamoto’s film does
not achieve this. After a screening of Yellowcaust, Phillip Chung writes:
“At a post screening Q&A session, (Darrell Hamamoto’s girlfriend and a
Yellowcaust cameraperson) Hsu said simply seeing an Asian American man
and woman having sex is what makes the project revolutionary. That’s
like saying simply seeing two Asian American leads in [a] feature film is
enough to make it revolutionary. But I like to think quality still matters
even in the world of porn. If the revolution is going to be televised, it has
to be worth watching.” Beyond visibility, quality and content matter—as
does form. How will these actors contend with their problems, whether
racial, sexual, or gendered? Moreover, how will these heterosexual figures
converse with queer people and others whose subjectivities and futures
are entwined in terms of group identity and individual relations?
In the documentary Masters of the Pillow, the cultural producers David
Henry Hwang, Justin Lin, and Eric Byler all insist upon the achievement
of great art in the work. Hwang proposes that any stereotype must be
countered by three-dimensionality. Lin and Byler insist that the work
must be compelling—defining good art as necessary to political work in
representation. In Masters of the Pillow, we see Hamamoto’s presence as
coitus interruptus, what I termed earlier as a form of “cock-blocking” for
the sexual actors in the film. When they begin to shoot, Hamamoto says
to Leyla Lei: “You look beautiful, lovely.” And to Chun: “She’s warmed up,
nice and hot. Prepared for you. Fresh! She is beautiful. You’re a very lucky
guy.” “You’re a hot dude too,” he says, somewhat extraneously. The couple
does not affirm the compliments but meets him with silence and discom-
fort. Later, as the couple entangles in the bed, Hamamoto interrupts the
sex scene to insert himself directorially. Upon the couple’s disentangling,
Hamamoto addresses and directs Chun to do it “doggy style” now. At this
awkward moment, Chun is certainly not passive although we can see that
he is now palpably nervous and full of anxious energy as he walks off to
the side of the screen and away from the bed. As they stop, Hamamoto
comments: “She’s so sexy”—again inserting himself as both actors catch
their breath mid-coitus. Leyla Lei gives in to the break in the proceedings
and smiles, returns to follow Hamamoto’s instructions. Hamamoto’s
 Assembling Asian American Men in Pornography • shimizu • 183

presence is extraneous to the sexual dynamics between the two actors—it

is a problematic one that does not account adequately for his power in
the scene as a director. His interruptions generate discomfort. This is the
extent of the sex we see in Hou’s documentary. Chun asks for Hou and his
documentary collaborators to leave. At this halt in the action, we then hear
Hamamoto once again attempt to insert his directives for the meanings
of the scene: “Asian men definitely have it. No doubt about it—even as
it’s been repressed, suppressed, and denied.” We conclude with his verbal
insistence and the assertion of his unchanged agenda even as we see the
sex stop dead.
The repressive hypothesis shows up as the wounding of Asian Ameri-
can manhood that shapes sexual practices in Hamamoto’s project. Byler
says: we need to retrain Asian American men to have sex, to retrain Asian
Americans how to have sex. Not just: “I want to be your friend but just
ask women to go out.” Byler says refuse your assignation and play in the
heterosexual game—up your self-image to participate. In this vein, Hama-
moto insists upon the evolutionary step of the work—to push the discourse
to a much higher level through the porn project. David Henry Hwang
expresses skepticism and asks if what we will see in the porn transcends
regular porn, or is it simply two bodies? Indeed, what do we learn about
Asian American bodies entwined here? This is the question that needs
asking rather than accepting the sight of Asian American heterosexual
coupling as correction to the Hamamoto assessment that “we are more
than we are made out to be.” Hou asks Leyla Lei what is the difference
between Asian men and white men as sexual partners. Lei says white men
are rough and Asian men are more tender, there’s more love. Hamamoto
asks if Chun’s doing “good”? How about his dick? It is a question that
once again ensures a cock-block, as he inserts himself in the sex through
verbal intrusion. We then see Hamamoto share his dreams in a close-up:
“Someday I hope to be the Asian American Larry Flint—to have stores, a
website, DVD, products, everything. I want to buy the Hustler building—
occupy that building with my name up there as Hamamoto Enterprises
Worldwide.” The fantasy extends to his assessment of the responses to his
work. He repeats often that the response to his work is “overwhelmingly
enthusiastic from everyone in their early 20s-to mid 70s—that it’s a project
184 • JAAS • 13:2

that’s long overdue. Asia is the most densely populated part of the world.
Asians are the masters of the pillow,” to which the film concludes. Here
the film ends not with what we discover through the sexual acts between
the Asian American man and woman but with Hamamoto’s articulation
of his desire for the phallus—to achieve symbolic and literal power of
conventional and dominant manhood in the form of capitalist ownership
of part of pornography as industry.
Hamamoto’s demands for Asian American men to be considered
viable pornographic subjects and his goal to achieve visibility involve
narcissism, defined in the simplest terms as the assertion of the self as
central, important, and a love object.43 Narcissism is not the right solution
for the ethical dilemma of Asian American sexual problems, which need
care and concern for the self and others. Indeed, the political act of mak-
ing demands for social recognition by those without access to it requires
a self-centralizing frame. However, narcissism can lead to the repression
of others, in this case non-heteronormative subjects or practices and the
return of the sexually powerful/servile Asian American woman. Placing
Asian American men in a forum, in this case pornography, where they are
not represented fulfills the search for oneself in representation, but when
that representation is not problematized for its marginalization of others,
then it becomes an affirmation of a desire for the way things are. If, as Mi-
chael Warner alerts us in Crystal Parikh’s work, ego-erotics are present in
all identity politics, how then do we assess the necessity of narcissism and
the possible costs to others? That is, if narcissism is essential for Hamamoto
to assert the importance of Asian American male heterosexual representa-
tions in pornography, is it acceptable for individual self-love to forsake love
for racial community, including women? Ultimately, Hamamoto rejects
Parikh’s identification of the potentiality for alternative masculine subject
formation—as powerful for redefining Asian American masculinity—for
a form of racial compulsory heterosexuality that ultimately aspires to the
self-serving, or to fulfill a form of male narcissism that forsakes others
within the very racial group for which the case of inequality is made.
How do we make sense of this oft-played performance of speaking for
others or further rendering them into marginality within Asian Ameri-
can genders and sexualities? First, we revisit Adrienne Rich’s classic essay
 Assembling Asian American Men in Pornography • shimizu • 185

“Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”44 and Gayle Rubin’s

foundational essay “Thinking Sex,”45 as they both carefully consider the
importance of hierarchies of normalcy. While Adrienne Rich’s analysis of
pornography hails an era where pleasure in pornography for women can
be more deeply theorized, she effectively identifies the force of sexual nor-
malcy as so powerful that one cannot get out of it regardless of entry into
other spaces of privilege. Such is the nature of what Rich calls “compulsory
heterosexuality,” what she defines as the domestication and disciplining
of women to serve men sexually so that the love for women, including the
self that prioritizes women-identification rather than male-identification,
becomes completely outside the norm.46 In the case of Hamamoto, com-
pulsory heterosexuality is not only unquestioned but privileged as a way
of being to which Asian American men must aspire.
Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex” allows me to clarify how Yellowcaust fails
to explore the possibilities for reimagining Asian American masculinity.
The film subscribes to a definition of sexuality as a natural, transhistori-
cal, and unchanging inherent force in all of us. Sexuality, as the work of
Foucault helps us identify, is historically produced into hierarchies of acts
and identities. For Rubin, sexual morality has quite a lot in common with
racial hierarchy, so that sexual hierarchies are actually hierarchies of race as
well.47 When Hamamoto’s Yellowcaust privileges the form of male hetero-
sexuality that does not address gender inequalities in that experience, the
costs of racial narcissism are revealed. In the name of racial grievance, the
film does not address hierarchies within racial identities and sexual acts.
Instead, the focus remains on securing phallic and penile power. A more
ethical masculinity would account for one’s power and privilege as well as
one’s subjugation. Yellowcaust and its making-of documentary Masters of
the Pillow presumes that the racial problem is really the feminine—based
on an inherent gender hierarchy. As such, the solution to this problem is
the adding of the phallus, which ultimately reproduces heterosexism and
gender hierarchy. As such, both heteronormative sexuality and gender
hierarchy organize the perceptions, projections, and imaginings of Asian
American manhoods in these movies. For these Asian American male
producers, this crisis leads to solutions that actually deepen and further
emphasize Asian American masculinity as lacking.
186 • JAAS • 13:2

Conclusion

By engaging the films above, I offer an ethical form of manhood that uses
sexual intimacy as the opportunity for reflection and uses representation as
a process of exploration rather than an imposition of fantasies and identi-
ties. Ethical manhoods are formed in the shattering of the self through
intimacy, particularly in the sexual encounter as sites for disassembling
and reassembling one’s identity, occurring only with reflection in the work
of sexual representation. If the sexual act witnesses the shattering of the
coherency of the self in jouissance—what Juliana Chang translates from
Jacques Lacan as the simultaneity of enjoyment and trauma in the racial
scene of subject formation48—it offers in my study the opportunity for
evaluating the self in relation to others and the social world.
Manhood is authored by the self in many sites including the moment
of intimacy, in the context of one’s conditions, and thus affords the op-
portunity to reflect upon the meaning of the sex act and its implications
for and beyond the self. The following questions emerge from my own
reflections on these films. They are designed to identify how scenes of
sexual acts explicitly show what comprises an ethical manhood: What
are the conditions for developing Asian American manhoods on screen?
How are these social forces mapped, in terms of individual and social
arrival into this moment of sex as the opportunity to form an ethics of
manhood? How do the gestures and acts performed by the men on screen
formulate Asian American masculinities good for Asian American men
and the social relationships contextualizing their subject formation? How
does the experience of masculine anxiety lead to imagining and creating
new worlds that directly confront and critique the hierarchies of masculine
subjectivities? Or in other words, how does Darrell Hamamoto’s or James
Hou’s images of the male body and fantasy inform their filmmaking?
I study Asian American male engagements with pornography, the
genre intent on arousing pleasure, for in it we see crystallized the powerful
search not only for the penis but a specific kind of wrestling with phallic
power’s elusiveness. The U.S. porn industry undergoes an absence of Asian
American men in straight porn and a prominence of Asian American bot-
toms in gay porn. At first glance and in the literature, the framework of
asexuality/effeminacy seems a precise diagnosis for Asian American men in
 Assembling Asian American Men in Pornography • shimizu • 187

this multibillion dollar industry of representation. Pornography, however,

tells us about not only the power of cinema in relation to fantasy but about
the centrality of the body and the penis in our ideas about manhood as
well. In Hamamoto’s work, sex acts are finite and predictable lessons about
manhood and not an opening into the unpredictability of the body and
the psyche when engaging another. Men hold a lot of pain in this area of
inquiry, and Hamamoto and Hou encourage Asian American men to be
conscious of their victimization, but not their power. For those deprived
of manhood in American culture, we need to go beyond identifying men
as simply the object upon which power operates but as subjects capable
of action. In order to better attend to the problem of sexuality, men must
also recognize themselves as causes for and as agents of power through
their own actions. To escape a racial narcissism that may be good for one
person or constituency, but negative for others, one has to formulate an
ethical manhood that de-centers oneself and accounts for one’s role in the
encounter of power in and out of sexual and cinematic representation.

Notes
1. Yellowcaust: A Patriot Act is the “political porn” video work by Darrell Hama-
moto. It is a short video derived from the longer work Skin on Skin, which
James Hou describes as “straightforward adult film” available to a mass
audience. It is difficult to find the film commercially, and it is not listed on
Internet Adult Film Database www.IAFD.com. William Nakayama. “Liber-
ating the Asian American Libido,” http://goldsea.com/Mediawatch/Pillow/
pillow.html (accessed October 1, 2008).
2. Racial project is a concept from Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial
Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 1994), to describe an
effort to define and redefine racial dynamics.
3. Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (London:
Verso, 1990).
4. I use Neferti Tadiar’s term so as to mark the individual fantasies of the
filmmakers as not apart from larger fantasies of regimes of inequality. See
Neferti Tadiar, Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine
Consequences for the New World Order (Seattle: Washington University Press,
2004), 6.
5. The Daily Show aired the segment “They So Horny” featuring Professor
Hamamoto. He appears as if in on the joke here and on The Tonight Show,
where his pornography work is mocked by host Jay Leno.
6. Julie Kim, Daily Titan Opinion Editor, May 9, 2005: “The motive was acces-
sibility. It’s easier to make money in the multibillion dollar porn industry
188 • JAAS • 13:2

which he planned to invest in works by other Asian American moviemak-

ers.”
7. Amy Ikeda, “Yellowcaust Director Darrell Hamamoto Interviewed,” VCOn-
line, http://www.vconline.org/ff04/intervhamamoto.html (accessed October
1, 2008).
8. David Pierson, “Sex and the Asian Man,” May 12, 2004, LATimes.com, 3,
http://articles.latimes.com/2004/may/12/entertainment/et-pierson12 (ac-
cessed May 6, 2009).
9. Nichole Ng, “Adult Film Aims to Dispel Stereotype” Daily Titan, CSU Ful-
lerton, May 3, 2009, http://apsanews.blogspot.com/2005_06_01_archive.html
(accessed December 17, 2009).
10. Tracy Wang, Center for Asian American Media Blog, August 4, 2009, http://
festival.asianamericanmedia.org/in-depth/2009/08/04/sfiaaff-video-blog-a-
peek-into-the-life-of-dick-ho/ (accessed December 17, 2009).
11. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity in the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992),
36.
12. Ibid.
13. Darrell Y. Hamamoto. “The Joy Fuck Club: Prolegomenon to an Asian
American Porno Practice,” New Political Science 20, no. 3 (1998): 323–345;
emphasis added.
14. Dorothy Korber, “Porn as Commentary: Film on Asian Issues Grabs Atten-
tion Stirs Debate,” California State University Daily News Clips, November
3, 2003, http://www.calstate.edu/pa/clips2003/november/3nov/porn.shtml
(accessed June 6, 2009).
15. Nalini Ambady, “Social Identities, Behavior, and Performance” talk delivered
at Stanford University, October 1, 2009.
16. Korber, “Porn as Commentary.”
17. See ibid.
18. In Andrew Sywak, “Sunset Filmmaker Examines Asian American Sexuality”,
Sunset Beacon, May 2004, Sunsetbeacon.com/archives/SunsetBeacon/2004edit
(accessed June 4, 2009).
19. Ibid.
20. Celine Parreñas Shimizu, The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/
American Women on Screen and Scene (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
2007).
21. See Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1997).
22. Kath Albury, “Reading Porn Reparatively,” Sexualities (2009): 12, 647, 652,
http://sexualities.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/12/5/647.
23. Blog on Toronto: Masters of the Pillow Premiere and Panel by Shuriken, YW
Mafia, August 28, 2005.
24. Frank Chin et al., The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Literature
(New York: Signet, 1991).
 Assembling Asian American Men in Pornography • shimizu • 189

25. Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts
(New York: Vintage International, 1989).
26. King-Kok Cheung, “The Woman Warrior versus the Chinaman Pacific: Must
a Chinese American Critic Choose between Feminism and Heroism?” in
Conflicts in Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1990), 158.
27. Jeff Yang, “Mightier Than the Sword,” in SF GATE, www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/
article.cgi?file=/g/a/2010/03/25/apop032510.DTL (accessed April 6, 2010).
28. LeRoid, AA Rising, Risings.com/review/Oct2004.htm (accessed May 6,
2009).
29. Phillip Chung, “Porn Losers Fail to Flesh Out Vision,” Asian Week, June 4,
2009, asianweek.com/2004/06/04/porn-losers-fail-to-flesh-out-vision (ac-
cessed May 6, 2009).
30. Ibid.
31. Albury, “Reading Porn Reparatively,” 1997.
32. Ibid., 648.
33. Darrell Y. Hamamoto, “On Asian American Sexual Politics,” National Sexuality
Resource Center, SRC.SFSU.edu http://nsrc.sfsu.edu/MagArticle.cfm?SID=
6B786CB66D85582DB9D8A70805CCA650&DSN=nsrc_dsn&Mode=EDIT
&Article=564&ReturnURL=1 (accessed October 1, 2008).
34. Ibid., 1.
35. Crystal Parikh, “‘The Most Outrageous Masquerade’: Queering Asian-
American Masculinity,” Modern Fiction Studies 48, no. 4 (2002): 860.
36. Ibid., 890.
37. Hamamoto, “Joy Fuck Club.”
38. Silverman, Male Subjectivity in the Margins, 20.
39. Ibid., 30.
40. Ibid., 32
41. Ibid., 42
42. Tasha Oren, “Secret Asian Man,” in East Main Street: Asian American Popular
Culture, ed. Leilani Nishime, Shilpa Davé, and Tasha Oren (New York: NYU
Press, 2005).
43. Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex (Charleston, S.C.: BiblioBazaar,
2007); Sigmund Freud, On Narcissism: An Introduction (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1991).
44. Adrienne Cecile Rich, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence
(London: Onlywomen, 1981).
45. Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of
Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (London:
Pandora, 1992).
46. Rich, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, 644.
47. Rubin, “Thinking Sex”, 283–284.
48. Juliana Chang, Traumatic Enjoyment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, forthcoming).