Nguyen argues that Anacleto’s performance of bottomhood is actually very successful in critiquing the heteronormative and white military universe on screen. Through the analysis of Anacleto, a Filipino houseboy character in the film, Nguyen argues that the houseboy’s bottom positioning in various ways throughout the film valorizes the association between Asians and their bottom. In Chapter 2 titled Reflections on an Asian bottom, Nguyen analyzes a Hollywood film Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) starring Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor. By using this concept, Nguyen posits that Asian American actors performing an exaggerated stereotype of their own racial backgrounds can provide grounds for subversion of social norms that created those stereotypes in the first place. This concept connects the realm of porn with that of martial arts films as well as any other area of performativity.
Nguyen finishes the chapter by talking about Yiman Wang’s concept of “yellow yellowface”, a strategy that Asian American performers consciously employ when they have to act out an Asian American stereotype in their works. He argues that in both genres of performance, Asian American men are portrayed as asexual and passive.
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Moreover, a legendary martial arts film star Bruce Lee’s son’s name is also Brandon Lee, and through this segue provided through a martial arts movie star and a porn star having the same name, Nguyen draws a link between the martial arts domain that propagates a certain image of Asian American masculinity and that of porn. Drawing from these analyses, Nguyen’s main argument in this chapter is that this rise and fall of an Asian American porn figure affirms the attraction of bottomhood that even the most masculine porn figure cannot avoid. Moreover, to borrow Nguyen’s words, it shows that “even in a media genre inordinately obsessed with the cock, the penetrable ass ultimately beckons” (70). In Nguyen’s reading, this fall from the top performance to the bottom role represents the instability of Lee’s top position even when he was performing as a top. However, according to Nguyen, Brandon Lee strategically fell to the bottom position later in his career. The Introduction broadens out from this particular observation on the gay dating scene to argue that this problematization of Asian masculinity is not an isolated incident.Ĭhapter 1: The Rise, and Fall, of a Gay Asian American Porn Star, analyzes the career of Brandon Lee, an Asian American gay porn star. This observation is significant because it is a perfect example of how Asian masculinity is perceived as a “problem” in the everyday American/Western national imagination.
According to this blog post, Asian American male users of Grindr (a dating application for queer folks) were at the receiving end of most rejections on the application. The Introduction begins with an observation of a blog named “Douchebags of Grindr”.
Prior to plunging into the critical analysis of the media, Nguyen begins the book with a thought-provoking Introduction. Each chapter focuses on a media depiction of Asian American man. Tan Hoang Nguyen, an assistant professor of English and Film Studies at Bryn Mawr College, divides the book into four chapters. Through this way of observing texts, Nguyen argues that instead of attempting to claim Asian American masculinity in society through promoting heteronormative masculine ideals, the Asian American society should embrace bottomhood and queer depiction of Asian American masculinity in the media as the location through which we can create a new masculine ideal that subverts the masculine norm prevalent in our society. How he incorporates “low theory” in this book is well explained in his sentence: “my reading of texts about bottomhood are consistently guided by a mode of reading that is informed by theories and practices deemed lowly, backward, and out of date” (7). He embraces a method that he calls “low theory” derived from Judith Halberstam’s work. Nguyen weaves the critical reading of various films depicting Asian American male characters with theories in various fields including that of Eve Sedgwick, Judith Halberstam, Laura Marks, and Peter Lehman. Tan Hoang Nguyen’s A View from the Bottom deals with the issue of Asian American masculinity as it is depicted in American media.