The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene

Shimizu combines theoretical and textual analysis and interviews with artists involved in various productions. She complicates understandings of the controversial portrayals of Asian female sexuality in the popular Broadway musical Miss Saigon by drawing on ethnographic research and interviews with some of the actresses in it. She looks at how three Hollywood Asian/American femme fatales—Anna May Wong, Nancy Kwan, and Lucy Liu—negotiate representations of their sexuality; analyzes 1920s and 1930s stag films in which white women perform as sexualized Asian characters; and considers Asian/American women’s performances in films ranging from the stag pornography of the 1940s to the Internet and video porn of the 1990s. She also reflects on two documentaries depicting Southeast Asian prostitutes and sex tourism, The Good Woman of Bangkok and 101 Asian Debutantes. In her examination of films and videos made by Asian/American feminists, Shimizu describes how female characters in their works reject normative definitions of race, gender, and sexuality, thereby expanding our definitions of racialized sexualities in representation.

• Romance and the Yellow Peril: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction
• Asian Americans and the Media: Media and Minorities
• Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe)
• Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics (Decolonizing Feminisms)
• Haunting the Korean Diaspora
• Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies
• Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)
• The Pornography Industry: What Everyone Needs to Know
• Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right
• Comfort Woman