Abstract
Nguyen Tan Hoang calls for a politics of ‘bottomhood’ that disrupts Asian American and gay male respectability politics. Asian American men of all orientations and gay men of all races are often stigmatized as effeminate, and have often sought respectability through remasculinization: denouncing femininity and approximating normative (white, straight) masculinity. Nguyen rejects this heteronormative strategy, which rests on misogyny. Instead, Nguyen extends David Eng’s concept of ‘racial castration’ to assert that Asian American men need not experience their racial-sexual-gender abjection solely as an injury. Rather, he argues that this ‘racial castration’ offers a preferable site for subjectivity, from which men can articulate more ethical modes of relation based in receptivity to others.
This productive abjection is what Nguyen terms bottomhood, which he defines not only as a sexual position in gay male intercourse, but also a ‘social, affective, political, aesthetic’ position (p. 3) and ‘a mode of relationality that is nurtured by alignments with femininity and the feminine’ (p. 194). To illustrate this definition of bottomhood, Nguyen analyzes an exciting archive of texts featuring Asian men, both gay and straight, as sexual and/or social bottoms. This ‘bottom archive’ (p. 2) encompasses gay pornography, European and Hollywood films, documentaries by queer diasporic Asian men, gay online profiles, and even the erstwhile blog, ‘Douchebags of Grindr’. Through these readings, Nguyen conveys the harms of seeking heteronormative respectability, and demonstrates the critical power of ‘a politics of bottomhood that opposes racism and heteronormativity without scapegoating femininity’ (p. 14).
This monograph is a generative work for scholars who center comparative racialization and queer diaspora, as well as gender, sexuality, and media representation more broadly. Nguyen deftly engages numerous conversations in queer studies, film studies, Asian American studies, and queer of color critique. For example, Nguyen extends Katherine Bond Stockton’s notion of ‘blended’ racial-sexual shame to address Asian American abjection. Additionally, Nguyen broadens the archives of queer studies and Asian American studies by explicitly selecting texts that have been historically ‘dismissed as too stereotypical, damaging, and offensive for serious academic study’ (p. 21).
As this quotation suggests, the monograph’s strengths also include its dexterous dialogue between ‘high’ and ‘low’ texts. Nguyen fluidly reads scholars like José Muñoz, Richard Dyer, Jasbir Puar, and Leo Bersani in conversation with Grindr profiles and gay porn. Most compelling for Nguyen’s argument is his reading of the Thai film, Adventures of Iron Pussy III (p. 179). Occupying the social and sexual bottom of Thai society, the film’s eponymous drag queen/hustler protagonist fights to protect go-go boys from abusive Chinese, Japanese, and Western imperialists. Kicking ass while selling her own, Iron Pussy calls out the Thai state for lethally neglecting the sex workers whose orifices economically sustain it. Iron Pussy’s name, vigilantism, and ironic wit exemplify Nguyen’s vision of embracing bottom subjectivity to disrupt oppressive norms.
Another strength is Nguyen’s move to historicize ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ gay social identities, which have only emerged in recent decades (p. 11). This little-known history should inform any analysis of contemporary western homosexualities. Most important to this account is Nguyen’s claim that the term ‘bottom’ emerged precisely to help ‘masculinize’ gay men by severing the sexual act of penetration from connotations of effeminacy. Nguyen strongly opposes this detachment. Within his broader project to valorize the bottomhood of all Asian American men, Nguyen seeks to re-suture effeminacy to gayness, and especially to the sexual act of bottoming (p. 80).
Although I applaud Nguyen’s rejection of gay masculine homonormativity, this project of embracing feminization sometimes risks collapsing effeminacy with the actual desire or practice of anal bottoming. For example, when analyzing the ‘flaming’ Filipino houseboy Anacleto in John Huston’s 1967 film, Reflections in a Golden Eye, Nguyen writes that ‘[u]nlike the assortment of perversions frankly depicted in the film, Anacleto’s bottomhood is never allowed to manifest itself as a viable sexual practice’ (p. 97). This statement implies that because Anacleto gleefully rejects white masculine norms, he of course must be gay, and must specifically desire to be anally penetrated. Appearing occasionally throughout the book, such assumptions risk treating effeminate gender performance and sexual bottomhood as synonymous, rather than arguing that we should value the sites where they happen to coincide.
Finally, one of Nguyen’s most exciting contributions appears in the conclusion. Here, Nguyen explains that his vision of a revalorized Asian American bottomhood draws inspiration from the image of the lesbian femme, who has been described by some feminist authors as performing ‘a femininity that is transgressive, disruptive, and chosen’ (p. 194). Especially given the ongoing tensions between mainstream gay male and lesbian communities, this connection offers intriguing new possibilities for scholarly inquiry and political coalition.
In conclusion, Nguyen’s innovation of ‘bottomhood’ and his extension of shame theory will surely enhance scholarship on many racialized groups. Since Nguyen articulates these concepts around abjected cisgender men, it might prove especially valuable to theorize how they apply to queerly racialized cisgender women and to transgender people. Likewise, though Nguyen does not center empirical data, his intellectual tools can reach across disciplines to enrich the frameworks of queer and feminist scholars who do explore ‘real-world’ experiences with empirical methods.