Promotional Information

A study of the Asian woman as sexual icon in visual culture

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix
1. The Hypersexuality of Asian/American Women: Toward a Politically Productive Perversity on Screen and Scene 1
2. The Bind of Representation: Performing and Consuming Hypersexuality in Miss Saigon 30
3. The Sexual Bonds of Racial Stardom: Asian American Femme Fatales in Hollywood 58
4. Racial Threat or Racial Treat? Performing Yellowface Sex Acts in Stag Films, 1920–34 102
5. Queens of Anal, Double, Trip, and the Gangbang: Producing Asian/American Feminism in Pornography, 1940s–1990s 140
6. Sex Tourists with Movie Cameras and Prostitutes without Movie Cameras: Politicizing the Bottom in Southeast Asian Sex Tourist Movies 185
7. The Political Power of Hypersexuality in Asian American Feminist Films 226
8. New Horizons in Race-Positive Sexuality 267
Notes 275
Bibliography 301
Index 325

About the Author

Celine Parreñas Shimizu is Associate Professor of Asian American, Film, and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a filmmaker whose movies include The Fact of Asian Women (2002), which won four national festival awards; Super Flip (1997); and Her Uprooting Plants Her (1995).

Reviews

"I find The Hypersexuality of Race nothing short of brilliant, a rigorous and galvanizing scholarly endeavor that promises to make an immediate impact on the fields of Asian American studies, feminist theory, theater and performance studies, and film and cultural studies."--Daphne A. Brooks, author of Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 "The Hypersexuality of Race promises to be an influential and perhaps notorious book. Refusing to shy away from the complexity of sexuality and its contradictory meanings, Celine Parrenas Shimizu does not distinguish between positive (or politically correct) and negative sex acts but rather situates Asian (American) women's expressions of sexuality in relation to racial formation, class consciousness, and other discourses of identity. She emphasizes context and contingency."--Peter X Feng, author of Identities in Motion: Asian American Film and Video