Asian American Females in Prostitution & Globalization of Human Trafficking and Prostitution

Please respond to one or more of the following (or provide a response to a prompt of your own making):

1. Both the NYT article (Goldberg) and the Counterpunch article (Rosen) open with anecdotes of sexual violence: the former traces the story of a 23-year-old survivor of human trafficking while the latter describes the discovery of four murdered prostitutes. Discuss the ways in which these articles use these stories (or not use them) to expose societal problems. Do the authors succeed in conferring agency to the victims, or do they merely exploit their examples? How does one draw the line between sensationalism and respectful analysis?

2. Respond to the following excerpt from a May 1891 petition by the Greater Japanese Association to bar the exportation of sex workers from Japan (Ichioka, 16):

"These women are a blot on our national image and national morality...The reasons for the ban on Chinese immigration and the call for the expulsion of the Chinese were many and varied, but the main one was that Chinese women were prostitutes...It is evident that, if this notorious vice spreads, America will adopt measures against us in the same manner as she did formerly against the Chinese."

3. How might one consider these readings in the context of previous readings and topics--or broadly speaking, in the context of "queering Asian America"?

Finally, we will be discussing the role of the facilitator as well as the instructor in class on Wednesday, so it would be a good idea to start reflecting on how you might define these roles for next year's syllabus.

Week 8: Asian American Pornography

1. Both pieces treat pornography as a site of political and cultural struggle and treat sexuality not only as orientation but also as the explicit acts engaged in. How does this broader idea of sexuality activism fit into the larger API/LGBTQ movement?

2. Both Hamamoto and Fung emphasize the need for API producers and actors in pornography. Does this seem like a valid strategy for broader API and queer representation, or is this merely trying to reform an already corrupt system? Do we need to think about pornography outside of its current corporatist model?

3. Fung connects current representations of submissive/passive queer API men in pornography to historically racist stereotypes of passive API folks, and emphasizes a need for a greater range of representations that include active/top API folks. Do you think Fung is perpetrating a too simplistic dichotomy of active/good and passive/bad? Where might the desires of submissive or masochistic API men be represented?

4. If you were in charge of creating a pornographic movie featuring Asian Americans in interracial sexual encounters, how would you film/write/edit it to ensure equality on set and freedom of stereotypes and power politics in the film?

You can respond to these or with whatever else you are thinking about. Also, be thinking about anything you might want to ask Brandon Lee at dinner.

Asian Pride Porn!

This is too great not to share (don't worry, it's not actual porn.)

http://www.atom.com/funny_videos/asian_pride_porn/

Week 7: Asian American Literature

Hey everyone, please answer one of the three questions:

Rolling the R's

Describe your reaction to the selections from Rolling the R's. What story is Linmark telling, and where does the author position the reader in his construction of queer Asian American subjects?

Chickencoop Chinamen

What kind of distinctions does Chin draw between being "made" through language and biological birth? How does Chin "gender" certain language and do you feel that Chin's language could be described as masculine? Is it appropriate to speak of Asian American subjectivity as being a product of language and not birth? Does it make sense to even "speak" of it at all?

On language

Neither grammar nor style are politically neutral. Learning the rules that govern intelligible speech is an inculcation into normalized language, where the price of not conforming is the loss of intelligibility itself...It would be a mistake to think that received grammar is the best vehicle for expressing radical views, given the constraints that grammar imposes upon thought, indeed, upon the thinkable itself. (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, xix)

What sort of political work does language perform in Linmark and Chin's texts? How do their words relate to "intelligible speech" and "normalized language," and how do the authors frame what is "thinkable"?