Fantasies of Asian American Kinship Disrupted

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critical philosophy of race, vol. 4, no. 1, 2016Copyright © 2016 The Pennsylvania

State University, University Park, PA

Abstract

This article interprets Michael Kang’s independent feature The Motel (2005) as a critique of the Asian American fantasy of post- 1965 incorporation into the multicultural US polity. The film dis-closes that this Asian American Dream is normatively constituted by heteronormative, middle-class, intra-racial kinship. The pro-tagonist Ernest Chin’s longing for this kind of normative Asian American family is symptomatic of his identification with the exclu-sionary norms of the incorporative fantasy. In a moment of disiden-tification, though, Ernest is able to release his grip on the dream and its reciprocal grip on him. Disidentification, in my usage, is a kind of political action that both disrupts and reworks processes of social formation from within. As a contribution to the critical phi-losophy of race, my rendition of disidentification draws on recent developments in cultural studies and political theory to address the critical theoretical question of the psychic life of domination.

Keywords: psychoanalysis, agonism, queer theory, Asian American studies, continental political philosophy

fred lee The University of Connecticut, Storrs

fantasies of asian

american kinship

disrupted

Identification and

Disidentification in

Michael Kang’s The Motel

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There is no one law of kinship, no one structure of kinship,

no one language of kinship, and no one prospect of kinship.

Rather, the feeling of kinship belongs to everyone.

— david eng, The Feeling of Kinship

Asian American Kinships in Asian American Dreams

A meet-the-parents scenario goes awry for an Asian American couple in Wong Fu Production’s new media short “Meet the Kayak” (2013): the boyfriend arrives at a spacious suburban home before his girlfriend gets off work, only to be mistaken by her father as a potential buyer for the kayak her mother is selling over the internet.1 The short gently mocks the notion that today’s professional woman can be exchanged between her father and her boyfriend like a piece of lightly-used sporting equip-ment. The short also quite seriously anticipates a middle-class, heterosex-ual, intra-racial marriage in the spirit of post-1965 US multiculturalism.2 Its representation of Asian American kinship expands the terrain of American identity to accommodate diasporic affiliations and transna-tional practices— including the bilingual father’s clarification that he can speak English, the boyfriend’s random “kow-towing,” and the usage of (un- subtitled) Chinese dialects.

“Meet the Kayak” marks the distinctiveness of Chinese American fami-lies, but it pronounces such differences normal and hence unremarkable. The Wong Fu Asian American takes what Ange-Marie Hancock calls the “but for” approach to equality: “we are just the same as you (other American couples or families), but for our differences (ethno-racial identities).”3 While challenging the monopolization of national identity by whiteness, this “but for” claim shores-up hegemonic sexual, gender, and class inflections of the nation. The specifically Asian American appeal of Wong Fu Productions depends on the immigrant family as the signifier of America’s choice-worthiness and the middle-class family as the signifier of “the good life” of liberal-democracy.4 It is as if nineteenth- to twentieth-century histories of Asiatic exclusion and Orientalist exoticism have conjured up fantasies of US nation-state incorporation without remainders. This fantasy, as it is both enjoyed and suffered by Asian Americans themselves, is what I call the Asian American Dream.

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The postwar American Dream arose out of the growing distance of white suburban affluence from black urban poverty.5 An always-receding Gemeinschaft fantasized under material conditions of Gesellschaft, the good life of US liberalism is pitched against the ideal “city life” of social plurality and of open-access public space.6 Today’s update on the American Dream is no longer explicitly reserved for groups that can lay claim to phenotypical whiteness or Anglo-conformity; indeed, the post-1965 Asian American Dream even proposes that the telos of the “model minority” fam-ily is not complete assimilation, but rather the selective incorporation of “the best of both cultures.”7 However, this seemingly inclusive model of Americanization and immigrant incorporation pathologizes any “culture” deemed incompatible with American cultural norms (e.g., black “culture of poverty”) and any “monoculture” deemed inimical to US multicultural citi-zenship (e.g., Islamic “fundamentalism”).8 Moreover, even if 1940s–1960s reforms in immigration, civil rights, and naturalization law have made the American Dream increasingly available as a site of Asian American identi-fication,9 the Asian American Dream remains normatively constituted by English-language proficiency, citizenship or legal residency, middle-class status, and heteronormative kinship.

Michael Kang’s independent film The Motel (2005) explores the perils of identification with and the promise of disidentification from the Asian American Dream.10 It does so by telling the story of an Asian American family that at first “fails” and finally declines to live up to the exclusionary norms of this fantasy of multicultural US incorporation. Far from the spa-cious, two-parent household of “Meet the Kayak” is the small-town “love motel” that Ernest Chin inhabits with his younger sister Katie, his mother, and his grandfather. The whereabouts of Ernest’s father are unknown. Enter the father figure Sam, a Korean American professional staying at the motel to bed prostitutes and brood over his estranged wife, Grace. Sam learns that Ernest, a Chinese American adolescent, has a crush on his best friend, Christine, who waitresses at her parent’s Chinese restaurant and—to his dismay—has a crush on Toby, a white skater boy. Sam’s attempts to teach Ernest how to seduce Christine lead to Ernest’s falling out with both Christine and Sam. At the end of the film, Ernest renews his relationship with his estranged mother (whom I will call “Ma Chin” below).

The Motel ties the gender, sexuality, and kinship formations of the Chin family to the racial, class, and national formations of Asian America.

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The Chin household is haunted by a collective past that encompasses, as David Eng puts it, a “[large] Asian American constituency—whatever their sexual identities or practices—whose historically disavowed status as US citizen-subjects . . . renders them ‘queer’ as such.”11 Represented in the film by the father’s absence, a trajectory of legal exclusion from naturalization and immigration cleaves Chinese males from the working-class Chinese American family. The heteronormative Chinese suburbia of Wong Fu’s “Meet the Kayak” may have displaced historically homosocial Chinatowns for some of Asian America’s largest population. But to tap quer, the German root of “queer,” an identification with US suburbs is still a boundary-cross-ing for the Wong Fu Asian American—hence “Meet the Kayak” insists upon a “but for” claim to equality. Such an identification is all the more so for the working-class Chins.

Ernest’s relationships to his missing father and the father fig-ure, Sam, speak to his desire to negate the “‘queer’ as such” figura-tion of Asian American families and especially Asian American males. Ultimately, however, Ernest relinquishes his attachment to father figures and reworks his relationship to his mother, exemplifying the intertwined processes of what I call disruptive disidentification and productive disiden-tification below. The moral of the story is that the queerness of Asian American kinship cannot be fully identified with and, in some respects, must be disidentified with the post-1965 politics of US multicultural-ism.12 While I read The Motel as an allegory of identification/disidentifi-cation, I acknowledge that this potential meaning can only be disclosed within certain theoretical frameworks relevant to the critical philosophy of race.

This essay constructs agonistic disidentification in both its disruptive and productive modes as a conceptual bridge between psychoanalytic cul-tural studies and agonistic political theory. My exercise in conceptual con-struction also relies to a significant degree on queer-of-color critique and feminist intersectional analysis. The frameworks I have drawn from these discourses are critical in their orientation to social domination and political emancipation, while they are philosophical in their engagements with tra-ditional questions of social formation and political action. In these senses of “critical” and “philosophical,” I offer the concept of agonistic identifica-tion as an interdisciplinary, if not “creolized” contribution to the critical philosophy of race.13


Melancholic Identifications and Agonistic Disidentifications

This section shows that disidentification, as the concept has been devel-oped by cultural studies scholars, responds to a classic critical theory problem—namely, that of identities invested in their own domination. Disidentification, in this philosophical context, works in both disruptive and productive modalities of power: it can bracket processes of identifica-tion for minority subjects as well as inaugurate new possibilities within their everyday lives. My key claim is that disidentification as a kind of politi-cal action has the power to interrupt processes of social reproduction and initiate projects of social transformation. Although I hold that identification and disidentification are always dialectically related, I associate the most problematic aspects of identification with social domination and I align the most promising aspects of disidentification with agonistic politics.

Critical theorists have long raised questions of subjects who psychically sustain their own subjection. Here early-twentieth-century explanations of why the European proletariat is not a revolutionary force leave traces in late-twentieth-century accounts of why the subject can only come-to-be as subjected to dominant ideologies, discursive regimes, and the like.14 Such accounts inform Wendy Brown’s argument that the late-modern politics of identity is attached to the very disciplinary, capitalist, and stat-ist forces of which it is (in part) an effect. This is why Brown thinks US identity politics often seek legal redress for harms measured against the liberal-democratic “good life,” for “without recourse to the white masculine middle-class ideal, politicized identities would forfeit a good deal of their claims to injury and exclusion.”15 This logic of identification is psychically conservative in its sustaining of social injuries and politically conservative in its investment in the status quo of domination.

Brown levels a powerful critique against an “identity politics” which should not be confused with all practices which might travel under that sign. I would only add that what Brown describes as a wounded attachment to an ideal often entails what I would describe as a melancholic preserva-tion of that ideal. For at least some injured identities are the consequence of the loss of something impossible to attain. In psychoanalytic theory, mel-ancholia replaces an attachment to a lost “object” with an identification with that object or, in Freud’s words, “taking flight into the ego love escapes extinction.”16 A melancholy of race, Anne Cheng argues, produces a “white national ideal”—the equivalent of Brown’s “middle-class ideal”—through

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the “exclusion-yet-retention of racialized others.”17 Retained-as-excluded others, in turn, sustain their status as such through their loss of the exclud-ing-yet-retaining ideal. Perversely, the racial melancholic who identifies with the exclusionary ideal cannot renounce it without imperiling their own identity.

The Motel proposes that disidentification meets the challenge of iden-tifications invested in injury and, more specifically, Sam and Ernest’s mel-ancholic identifications with a perpetually lost Asian American Dream. Disidentification is the term cultural studies scholars use to describe criti-cal responses to, contingent misfires of, or even simple hiatuses within the identification process. Lisa Lowe contends that “imperatives that the subject identify” under materially stratified conditions “simultaneously produce disidentification out of which critical subjectivities may emerge.”18 Lowe’s insight is roughly that while no subject is without an identity, no identification can be totally encompassing or completely fixed because it is always at least potentially ruptured from within by disidentification. Disidentification in this disruptive mode is a refusal on the part of the minority subject to be subjected to an exclusionary regime of identification.

That said, disidentification can also address the imperative to identify on behalf of the minority subject. Disidentification in its productive mode, according to José Esteban Muñoz, exposes the exclusionary mechanisms of a “cultural text” and reworks them to include minority identifications.19 Disidentification in this case works both against and on dominant identi-fications in search of their emancipatory potential. The movement of dis-identification from the interruption of social identities into the initiation of new social possibilities can be schematized as two successive moments. First, disruptive disidentification punctures where identification processes and sunders what identification sutures. Secondly, productive disiden-tification—working within the space opened by disruptive disidentifica-tion—reconstructs the fragments of ruptured identifications into (what is hopefully) a more just or less oppressive social formation.

My concept of agonistic disidentification bridges the cultural studies notion of disidentification as the limit of identitarian closure and the politi-cal theoretical notion of agonism as the limit of social closure more generally. I subsume, albeit incompletely, both disruptive and productive disidenti-fication under the broader category of agon (struggle or contest), which agonistic theorists claim guarantees that any social order—even the most consensually-based—can never be fully fixed or totally unified. What I call


the disruptive and productive modes of disidentification respectively map onto what Hannah Arendt calls action’s “tendency to force open all limita-tions” and its ability to newly “[establish] relationships.”20 Disidentification as a kind of Arendtian action has the power to “disarticulate” and “rearticu-late” who selves are and what they want or, put in critical theoretical terms, it has the power to break from social domination and begin again social processes.21

At the intersection of psychoanalytic cultural studies and agonistic political theory, The Motel appears to be the story of how Ernest Chin turns from a subject invested in subjection into an enactor of agonistic disiden-tification. Marking the limits of racial kinship and national belonging, the Chins’ disidentifications are “agonistic” in the sense of struggling for the new without being “antagonistic” in the sense of being for or against, say, the Asian American Dream.22 Their exploration of the terrain of identifi-cation and disidentification in this way resonates with recent attempts in cultural studies and feminist theory to re-imagine political agency as some-thing other than either acquiescence or resistance to racism, patriarchy, and other forms of domination.23 It is the task of the following interpreta-tion to explain how Ma Chin and Ernest disidentify with heteronormative kinship and US nationalism as these problematics are intersected by race, sexuality, gender, and class. But it is toward Ernest’s and Sam’s melancholic identifications with such differences that we must first turn.

Masochistic Investments in Straightjacketed Masculinities

This section explores how excluded-yet-retained others live racial melancho-lia as what Natasha Behl calls an “exclusionary inclusion” into the nation-state.24 Asian (American) melancholics might appropriate and re-articulate (white) American ideals, but the resultant Asian American identities can only attach to these ideals as loves lost. As exemplars of this process, Ernest and Sam cannot give up their unattainable kin and elusive kinships with-out giving up their very identities. Ernest’s loss of a father as well as Sam’s loss of a wife are experienced as abject exclusions from the Asian American Dream. Freud’s portrait of the melancholic is particularly well-drawn here: “he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in [them].”25 I argue that attachments to lost kin are both the conditions and costs of Ernest and Sam becoming Asian American according to not-queer kinship ideals.

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An excessive parody of straight masculinity, Sam arrives at the motel with a blonde prostitute, an open bottle of liquor, and a lit cigarette. Inside his room, Sam enacts what Ernest, listening curiously at the door, experi-ences as a primal scene. Ernest is fascinated by his imagination of Sam’s assertion of Asian manhood with a white woman and, a while later, a black one. That night, Ernest rubs his penis against the front desk he is “man-ning” to pornographic images of Asian women. Unlike the Wolf Man of psychoanalytic lore, whose primal fantasy presupposes a two-parent set-ting,26 Ernest is compelled to find substitutes for birth parents by the sexual economy of the motel. What Ernest heard Sam doing with prostitutes from the other side of the door, he pretends to do with pornographic actresses from behind the front desk. Identifying with Sam as a consumer of sexual-ity, Ernest is learning how to genitally organize his pleasure around hyper-sexualized images of women.

The irony of this pedagogical situation is that Sam, the teacher, feels just as compelled as Ernest to exorcise the specter of racial “lack.” He practically accuses Ernest of perceiving him as a non-English speaker when Sam came “barreling in with that big blond bitch drunk off [his] ass.” “Nah,” Ernest replies, matter-of-factly. “I knew you spoke English . . . you walk like you speak English.” Sam, having established his misogynistic “Americanness,” explains that his comportment is “a Korean thing” and kicks the air with a yelp in the style of Bruce Lee. This interaction draws our attention to what Celine Parreñas Shimizu calls “‘straightjacketed’ criteria for evaluating male gender.”27 Their relationship begins with Ernest’s reassurance that Sam walks and talks as a Korean American and Sam’s pan-ethnic glissade from Korean swagger into Chinese martial valor. Racial affiliation, thusly figured, is a racial filiation which gender difference enables and imperils. Hence we soon see female figures as threats to masculinity—Ma Chin, Ernest’s mother—or objects to be exchanged between brothers—Christine, Ernest’s love interest.

Particularly attractive to Ernest is that Sam seems to have reconciled his Asian masculinity with his American nationality. Their friendship/kin-ship is built upon formal “Asian” appropriations of “American” content; as Kang comments, a “Korean man and a Chinese boy would not have this same kind of relationship in Korea or China—only in America do they have to navigate the same murky waters.”28 Take the scene in which Sam and Ernest scrounge up something to eat. A low-angle shot from the perspec-tive of an unseen object shows Sam and Ernest looking down suspiciously.


A reverse shot from their perspective focuses on a box of stale fast-food chicken that, like the pornographic magazine to which Ernest mastur-bates, a guest has left behind. The shot cuts to some grass outside, where chicken bones are landing. The reverse shot is Ernest and Sam tossing the remains of their meal from atop a car hood. They smile, silently enjoying a post- festum satisfaction. The two shot/reverse shot sequences invert one another: the first shifts from gazing objects to looking subjects, whereas the second goes from looking subjects to gazing objects.

This deployment of the shot/reverse shot device is suggestive of a dynamic wherein the consuming subject identifies with the incorporated objects. It is noteworthy that this staging of identification and desire does not display the act of consumption. In Kang’s redeployment of a classic Hollywood device, a “bromantic” variation on the cut-away from the con-summation of a love relationship keeps the ambiguous appropriation of the leftovers of US consumerism off-screen. Negotiated in this gap are Sam’s and Ernest’s identifications as Asian not-quite-Americans, their melancholic incorporations into and of the nation. They somatically incor-porate what has symbolically expulsed them—American fast-food available as consumable items, but not as tokens of national belonging.29

Ernest and Sam partake of “oral” identificatory practices that come at the cost of self-impoverishment. The self who becomes the other to pre-serve the ambivalent attachment to the nation also becomes the target of displaced reproaches against the beloved.30 This turning-around of hatred is a self-reflexive incorporation of the white American ideal that deems the self in its Asian identity to be other. Ernest is always eating junk food by himself (as distinguished from home-cooked meals with his family) and oral pleasure accompanies his onomastic practices (e.g., he plays with his junk food before playing with himself). Ernest is identified and identifies as that Asian kid who cleans up after the “Johns” frequenting the Chin motel. The more Ernest actively inserts himself into the rites of American consumerism, the more Ernest passively suffers his subjection to the iden-titarian norms which support them.

In this respect akin to the overweight service-worker Ernest, the con-ventionally attractive professional Sam finds pleasure in his morbid over-stimulation from cigarettes, alcohol, and sex. As the perverse underside of post-1965 US multiculturalism, Sam seeks out substitutes for his Asian American wife in a multiracial array of sex workers, none of whom read as Asian and each of whom he employs “as a masturbatory prop.”31 Grace

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is surely dear to him, but he least of all wants to be reminded of his wife while doing everything in his power to prevent her return. The anti-model minority compulsively restages the traumatic loss of his bourgeois mascu-linity as a farcical escape into the oblivion of sex tourism. As suggested by Sam and Ernest’s bonding over fried chicken, racial melancholia is a mas-ochistic enjoyment of displaced hostilities.

Consumerism, even in its harmful excess, grants the pair a tenuous access to US national identity. Baseball is likewise accessible, yet barred in the scene where Sam invites Ernest to play catch outside the motel. The one glove they share between them marks Asian males as lacking the “equip-ment” for America’s national pastime, an early twentieth-century vehicle for the inculcation of patriotism in Americanization programs targeting European immigrants and in mass spectacles of white male athleticism.32 Sam asks if his father plays with him, insinuating that Ernest needs a father figure. “He’s not around anymore,” Ernest responds. “That’s why you throw like a girl,” Sam says, knowingly. Hardly encouraged, Ernest soon calls it quits. Ernest’s disinterest in this call to American masculinity is at odds with Sam’s pedagogical interests. The father-son game of catch misfires, in part, because Sam acts too much like a friend to stand in for a father and, more importantly, because the motel is a distinctively non-oedipal, non-heteronormative space.

Ernest lacks the “mommy-daddy-me” household which serves as the functional equivalent for the European bourgeois family—that is, the pro-totypical site of oedipal fantasy—in the Asian American Dream. Assuredly not a universal structure of sexual taboo or psychic development, “oedipus” names a heterosexual matrix through which hegemonic race, class, and gender identities are socially generated and epistemically secured.33 The oedipal complex, on Kaja Silverman’s account, is the consequence of an interpellation into the “dominant fiction” of a patriarchal household—but, as I demonstrate in the next section, far from the only possible response to the inherently unstable “ideology of the family.”34 For now, let us observe that the sexual economy of the household/the motel already operates somewhat outside the oedipal dynamic: while the household is neutered of normative sexuality between parents, the motel overflows with “deviant” exchanges between sex workers and their clients.

Therefore, the problem, which the film eventually unmasks as the result of fantasmatic investment, is that Ernest Chin’s oedipal complex is “incomplete.” Within what Freud terms the “complete” oedipal complex,


the boy feels rivalry toward his father and affection for his mother (the “positive” moment) as well as affection for his father and rivalry toward his mother (the “inverted” moment).35 Without assuming that Freudian “inver-sion” is the paradigmatic instance of “queerness,” assume that Ernest’s white middle-class doppelgänger loves and then renounces his father while rivaling and then identifying with his mother. This double would be queer in the sense of gendered sexuality. By contrast, Ernest Chin is already queer in racial-national terms, appearing especially so under a regime of white US masculinity (e.g., the local bully, Roy, calls Ernest both “queer” and “chink”).

Ernest pushes for a “straight-forward” resolution of his oedipal prob-lematic in renouncing the mother and identifying with the father. His desire for Christine (the mother substitute) and his identification with Sam (the father substitute) asserts that Ernest is a potential father who is not-queer and an Asian American who is not-a-chink. Ernest seeks a father substitute in Sam, the sole sexually–active Asian American male present, with whom Ernest overidentifies in his primal scene of sexuality. In turn, Sam seeks a son figure in Ernest, the only other English-speaking Asian American male around, whom he will initiate into the masculine art of “pick up.” Caught between his own racial “lack” and gendered “macho,”36 Sam exaggerates performances of a non-optional, homophobic masculinity. “Do you like girls?” Sam asks while teaching Ernest the analogized arts of driving and seduction. “It’s okay if you don’t. That’s what they say at least.” Sam goes on to assert that women “all get wet” if shown “hi-quality amateur porn,” assuming that this instance of female arousal could confirm the seducer’s identity as a not-queer/not-chink, desirable Asian American man.

Sam delivers this object-lesson on sexual access to any woman’s body en route to the suburban house he once shared with his lost love Grace, where Sam and Ernest move the furniture of the living room back to “the way it was.” Then Sam puts a wedding picture of himself and his wife on the mantle; in it, Grace’s face is overshadowed by Sam’s. Sam and Ernest, in restaging “the trauma of suffering,” reassure themselves that “what we need or love—the social order that originally hurt or failed us but to which we were and remain terribly attached—is still there.”37 This interment rite for an idealized household cannot recover Asian American Marriage, much less call for something other than the Asian American Dream. The racial melancholic who perpetually loses, yet cannot renounce normative kin-ship, is the obverse of the US nationalism that excludes, yet incorporates

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its racial others. Is this doubled-articulation of “the American family” not the psychically and politically conservative mode in which the racialized household keeps the dream alive for the national family?

Three Moments of Agonistic Disidentification

This section interprets Ernest’s negotiation of heteronormative kinship as an allegory of the multicultural incorporation of Asians into the US pol-ity. It traces out how Sam and Ernest take racial melancholia to its self- destructive conclusion before Ernest strikes out on a new trajectory toward Ma Chin. If Ernest and Sam’s fantasies of Asian American kinship are deadlocked within a melancholic frame, the real question is how Ma Chin and Ernest come to live their relation to Asian America as something other than an injurious loss. I argue that Ernest and Ma’s contestation of hege-monic identities—one which is importantly anticipated by Ernest’s interac-tions with two other female characters—exemplifies how Asian America can operate as a site of agonistic disidentification. The Chins will show us, in David Eng’s words, that “Oedipus is not the only story of being in the world.”38 Nor can the US nation-state be the whole of the Chins’ life-stories.

The non-totalizing character of nationalist and oedipal fictions is rep-resented by Christine and Ma Chin’s relationship to Ernest’s life-story, a fictionalized version of which he submits to a writing contest at Christine’s behest and to Ma Chin’s chagrin. Ernest’s necessity-minded mother, for her part, sees writing as an extravagant distraction from schoolwork.39 Ma Chin calls “stupid” the story her son will not let her read. “I hate you!” Ernest screams in response. “You make everyone [read: Pa Chin] go away.” As a male adolescent in a fatherless household, Ernest perhaps aspires to rival a mother who (somewhat queerly) takes on father-like roles in the post-1965 Chinese American family. In her first scene, for example, Ma wields a bat and kicks in the door as a response to a white male john who refuses to leave and calls her a “ching-chong bitch.” Ma’s “fatherly” dis-approval cuts Ernest so deep because he wants to be a writer not only to express himself, but also to find a way out of his employment as motel lobby boy and cleaning staff.

Ernest’s effeminized and racialized position within the service indus-try is not entirely different than that of Christine, who waitresses at a fam-ily owned Chinese restaurant, or that of the sex workers who frequent the


Chin motel. This latter parallel is apparent in the sexual encounter staged by Roy, the teenage guest and local bully, for his white male viewing plea-sure. “You’re queer, aren’t you?” Roy asks Ernest. “My dad said you look like you’ll grow up to be queer.” Roy issues a threat that Ernest either fight him or kiss Jess, his adolescent sister, on the pretense that his heterosexist guid-ance, no matter what Ernest chooses, will straighten Ernest out. However, Ernest is queer either which way for Roy. An Asian male kissing a white female is a strange imitation of “the real thing” of white masculinity. So the negation of racial queerness—one, as the reader will recall, that broadly characterizes Asian America—would also be a confirmation of it.

The white bully enjoins the Asian male to enjoy his white sister, deriv-ing a sadistic pleasure from the assumption that these figures are unattract-ive to one another. Ernest and Jess exceed the limits of Roy’s ambivalently straight/queer scenario in partaking of compulsory heterosexuality on their own terms. Jess expresses solidarity for a fellow victim of Roy’s bullying and, feeling Ernest’s hand on her thigh, sets a ground rule of “just kiss-ing.” Ernest complies with her request and asks Jess if everything is “okay.” Jess comments that the bulge in Ernest’s pants means he loves her. In a way, Jess is right. Exploring the other in a face-to-face mutuality of looks and touches, each is able to suspend specific inequalities of gender and race:40 Ernest checks wandering male hands, Jess makes no assumption of white desirability, and both countermand Roy’s order that Ernest “put [his] tongue in her.” The looks on their faces say it all: “Shut up, Roy.” As Homi Bhabha might put it, Roy’s desire to surveil Ernest as “a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” is returned by Jess and Ernest “as the displacing gaze of the disciplined.”41

This first moment of disidentification is, but is much more than, an age-appropriate make-out session. Ernest and Jess’s transformation of what Roy scripts as a freakish spectacle into a rite of sexual initiation is—to redeploy Arendt’s keywords of political action—an inauguration of the unforeseeable.42 Ernest and Jess are neither “for” nor “against” heterosexu-ality, that is, they neither acquiesce to Roy’s requests nor outright rebel against him. Instead, their disarticulation from assigned parts qua their rearticulation of the script exploits the unevenness of cultural hegemony to instantiate new possibilities within it. Their agonistic contest in this man-ner passes imperceptibly between the disruptive and productive modes of disidentification. Disidentification clears a space of freedom from Roy’s quasi-pornographic narrative, out of which emerges the freedom to craft

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Ernest and Jess’s story of ethical relation. Jess and Ernest’s achievement of interracial sexuality anticipates a fuller interruption of Ernest’s fantasy of intra-racial kinship.

Ernest establishes a loving relationship with Jess in the face of a vio-lent threat from Roy. In contrast, Ernest’s missed connection with his love interest, Christine, is scripted to the letter. Some of these scripts are less authored by Ernest and Sam themselves than authorized by the white por-nographic gaze that oversees Ernest’s relationships with Jess and Christine. Outside of her family’s Chinese restaurant, Ernest presents Christine with the pornographic magazine featuring “Oriental Women” he found at the motel. “This is disgusting,” Christine says. “Let’s go check it out.” Both mocking and embracing her legibility as an “already consenting” Asian female,43 Christine sarcastically reads captions about the “deep and myste-rious” vaginas of the Orient out loud. When he “playfully” wrestles her to the ground, though, Christine orders Ernest to “get [his] boner out of [her] face” and knocks the heavier Ernest off of her.

Ernest experiences the insecurity of adolescent masculinity as the threat of racial queerness. Christine’s reassurance that Ernest, as a “boy,” is “supposed to” like pornography made for white males is not enough. What Ernest needs—as in what Sam teaches him to want—is to “get [himself] laid” as an Asian man. The potential difficulty is that Ernest and Sam sus-pect that Ernest’s ethnicity is keeping him from intra-ethnic bliss. “You’re Chinese, man,” Sam remarks. “She’s looking for some guy to save her from all that. All you do is remind her of it.” Sam’s assertion that all women can be seduced by “hi-quality amateur porn” is belied by his understanding that intra-racial attraction cannot be assumed under a pornographic regime which hyper-sexualizes Asian women and emasculates Asian men.44

Still, Sam promises deliverance. The older Asian brother will grant the younger one sexual access to the Asian woman through a “foolproof plan” to “save” her from the white boy the brothers assume she wants (not without reason—Ernest did catch Christine pining over Toby, a local skater boy). The catch is that women must give their consent to this rescue-and-reclaiming operation to signify both their freedom in and subordination to a fraternal form of patriarchy. Sam and Ernest script their masculini-ties through normative (e.g., dating, marriage) and stigmatized variants (e.g., prostitution, pornography) of what Carole Pateman terms “the Sexual Contract.”45 The Asian woman must choose an Asian man to guarantee that heteronormative affiliation underwrites not-queer Asian American


brotherhood. The precariousness of Ernest and Sam’s heterosexuality stems, in part, from this semiotics of and dependence upon Asian female consent.

Everything seems to be going according to plan as Ernest, show-ing off his newly acquired driving skills, commandeers the Chin station wagon to take Christine on a joyride. But as Sam’s plan starts to go awry, Ernest makes his move out of desperation. After Christine shoves aside his lewd advances, Ernest starts spilling his daydreams of them “married and stuff . . . like, in the future.” However, Christine declines to consummate racial brotherhood by refusing to sign the heterosexual contract drawn up by Sam and Ernest. She will identify with neither the future wife of the Asian American Dream nor the “already consenting” (Shimizu) woman of Orientalist pornographic fantasy. This second moment of disidentification is far more disruptive than productive, as Christine opts to end her friend-ship with Ernest rather than rework the strained terms of their affiliation.

As tired as he is with playing with himself, Ernest is even more tired of Sam’s fooling around. To expulse Sam from the motel, Ernest must beat Sam at his own game—a brutal variation on the all-American game of base-ball. His mother’s bat in hand, Ernest tells Sam to leave. Sam challenges Ernest to make him, lashing out with effeminizing “bitch” slaps. The inad-equate son in the father-son game of catch no longer, Ernest as the head-of-household batters down an uncooperative guest. That is, Ernest occupies Ma Chin’s position to negate the racial queerness of his family. Through his own provocations, Sam stages a childhood fantasy of “being beaten by [a] father” in which violence “is not only the punishment for the forbidden” relation to bourgeois respectability, “but also the regressive substitute for it.”46 Sam admits that he feels “12 years old again” (about Ernest’s age) to acknowledge that Ernest has just assumed the mantle of fatherhood that Sam cannot.

From start to finish, Sam enjoys within the oedipal structure from which the melancholic is banished. His self-infantilization at Ernest’s hands is the ultimate consequence of his deep attachment to patriarchal authority. Before leaving the motel, Sam warns Ernest that he will not come back “just like your dad.” “I don’t need anyone,” Ernest snaps back. At this point, Ernest has externalized his melancholic self-aggression only to take the logic of incorporating lost “objects” to its violent extreme. The loss of the father-substitute reiterates the loss of the father: Ernest becomes the father/baseball player Sam once aspired to be in order to expulse the

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already de-idealized or “lost” Sam. Ernest, in fighting Sam, is still playing the same old game. Only in turning toward his mother does Ernest seek out real alternatives to the reified names Oedipus and America.

As opposed to the first moment of disidentification, where Jess and Ernest close physical distance, the third moment of disidentification is achieved in the intersubjective distance between Ernest and Ma Chin. Neither sentimentally embracing nor hysterically confessing, mother and son stand silent in the motel lobby after Ma has finally read Ernest’s short story. A close-up captures Ernest’s face as he lifts his eyes to meet his mother’s. The reverse shot close-up is Ma Chin looking back. Both are visi-ble in the next shot, where Ernest looking at his mother is partially reflected in a half-length mirror. That Ernest stands at some remove from his mirror image is the key detail. Disruptive disidentification opens up this distance between his self-articulation and his social image, while productive disiden-tification works upon the maternal bond in that space “in-between” which “relates and separates [Ernest and Ma] at the same time.”47 This sequence closes with a close-up of a tear rolling down Ernest’s face, a reverse shot of Ma’s anguished eyes, and a reverse shot of Ernest looking away, blinking, and reestablishing eye contact. The camera, shaking, cuts abruptly to black.

The final sequence of shot/reverse shots is suggestive not of the subject/object dialectic of an identity politics (recall the scene with fried chicken), but the identification/disidentification dialectic of an agonistic politics. The final cut into a black screen is formally composed as a rupture within and reworking of the social order of identity and desire. The Chins disidentify with “injurious interpellations” and their idealized obverses (e.g., “ching-chong bitch”/strong immigrant mother) to open that “place of ‘freedom from’ which is not yet the freedom to make the world.”48 The Chins say “no thanks” to the identity repertoires through which they have hitherto attained any visibility or intelligibility at all. They concurrently say “yes” to sharing a social space shot through with the irreducible alterity of one selfhood to another.

This denouement that refuses narrative closure is not a “fairy tale” resolution wherein lack (e.g., a father is missing) is fulfilled by acquisi-tion (e.g., a father returns or a father-substitute is found).49 A resolution of this sort would affirm the ideological fiction of a family made complete by a father figure—a father-figuring that reconstitutes the bond between a Latina single mother and her teenage daughter in a comparable coming-of-age film, Patricia Riggen’s Girl in Progress (2012).50 The actual ending of


The Motel displaces the lack from the Chin family, which ends up with no father, to the social, which lacks authorized alternatives to oedipal kinship.51 The father no longer registers as “lack” once the oedipal problematic has been revealed to be fantasmatic. The shaky camera work of the final shot signals that the Chins have disidentified with the unstable oedipal gaze that has hitherto framed the narrative. It turns out that Ma and Ernest Chin have been “queer” all along.

Michael Kang denies that any “reconciliation” transpires in the final scene. He construes the looks exchanged between Ma and Ernest as a “final confrontation” on the grounds that “the reality for these characters is that not everything is going to be resolved, but what they can gain is one moment of clarity.”52 This “final confrontation,” if screened as an instance of Arendtian beginnings, has a fiercely agonistic valence. The struggle is to “imagine otherwise,” in Kandice Chuh’s phrase, rather than to fulfill or subvert the Asian American Dream. This contestation guarantees that the sign “Asian America” cannot be permanently fixed or all consumed by het-eronormative kinships and nationalist imaginaries. Agonistic disidentifica-tion reveals that competing articulations of that “empty signifier” are just as conceptually unfixed as they are historically inscribed.53 Asian America in this case signifies the unpredictable and unforeseen in the formation of Asian American family, gender, and sexuality. The disruption of fantasies of Asian American kinship thereby gestures toward the production of new terms of Asian American belonging.

Disidentifying as Asian Americans with the US Nation-State

This essay has explained how Ernest Chin invested his kinships in a per-petually lost Asian American Dream and eventually divested himself from this perverse dynamic. We started with an account of how Ernest and Sam forged their brotherhood within a straightjacketed matrix of masculinity to negate the queerness of Asian America. Yet we ended with an account of how Ernest’s and Ma’s turns toward one another concretely suspended and potentially transformed matrices of race, class, gender, and sexuality. This concluding section concerns the stakes of my reading of The Motel for the critical philosophy of race and Asian American cultural politics. At a philosophical level, I propose that agonistic disidentification is a nonantag-onistic, critical alternative to oppressive forms of “identity politics.” In the

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register of political strategy, I claim that Asian American disidentification can serve as a much needed counterweight and counterpart to Asian American identification.

Disidentification as a kind of agonistic politics is a partial “solution” to the problem of subjectivities invested in their own subjection. The ago-nistic self’s enactment of contestation intervenes into the process of social reproduction from another time-space—from the punctuated rhythms of the political realm.54 There the Arendtian self is most at odds with the psychoanalytic subject: the actor as the former exists most strictly in their action, while the identity of the later is configured by desire. Ma Chin and Ernest’s achievements of selfhood suggest that the political parameters of cultural formation are more the activities of breaking from and beginning again than the polarities of identity and desire. Their action-in-common suggests that the agonistic theory of Hannah Arendt can dissolve certain dilemmas insoluble within subject-centered theories of subordination—including those, such as psychoanalysis, that have radically de-centered the subject.55 Arendtian action is the crucial supplement to Brown’s pro-posal that supplanting the “I am that” with an “I want this for us” can reopen the desire for a different future.56 Action, in this sense, mediates the specifically-political transformation of social reproduction into social contest.

It is worth reemphasizing that the agency of the agonistic disidentifier cannot be reduced, in Saba Mahmood’s terms, to the antagonistic “narra-tive of succumbing to or resisting relations of domination.”57 One might take Ernest Chin’s story as an example of how political agon can bracket the social order from which it breaks and within which it begins again. Ernest must accept the oedipal machinations which break him down as the price of admission into social legibility, but he eventually breaks from the hege-monic norms that secure his identities of fatherless son and freakish ado-lescent. He distances himself from Asian American identities that openly or secretly invest themselves in “the white masculine middle-class” (Brown) as the standard against which injuries are measured. Disidentification in Ernest’s case withdraws desire from oedipal configurations and dreams of national plenitude, two complexes built up from an identification with Sam’s ideal of intra-racial, middle-class heterosexuality. Paradoxically, Ernest disidentifies as an Asian American (the sign which cannot but be associated with him) with the US nation-state (its ideal of the suburban good life).


What Ernest’s disidentification with the Asian American Dream offers to Asian American cultural politics is a critical rejoinder to post-1965 multicultural incorporation. Ernest and Sam’s project of “straight-line assimilation” into the straightjacketed nation-state is undercut by diasporic histories of queerness.58 Their Asian American desire for “but for” incor-poration (Hancock) is the psychic correlate of the “exclusionary inclusion” (Behl) of US racial melancholia. Their liminal position is an indication that Asian American immigration is situated at the contradiction between US nation-state boundaries and regional capital/labor flows.59 In contempo-rary immigration debates, for example, Asian families reinvigorate both postwar imaginations of hard-working potential Americans and longstand-ing nativist anxieties over political-economic “perpetual foreigners.”60 Here Ma and Ernest refuse the binaries of model/anti-model minorities, intact/broken families, and good/bad immigrants to challenge these hegemonic terms of incorporation into the US nation-state. The Chins defer the ambiv-alent desire of the minority subject for insertion into the post-1965 trajec-tory of multicultural belonging.

Ma and Ernest Chin’s disruptive disidentification draws attention to its own limits, however. Their final turn to face one another does not rearticulate their kinship or reimagine the nation in any determinate fash-ion. Only productive disidentifications could carve out a stable place in the United States for agonistic Asian American subjectivities and queer Asian American kinships. Exemplifying such an attempt are Helen Zia’s Asian American Dreams (2000) of pan-ethnic solidarity, mass mobilization, and feminist empowerment. A wedding photo of Zia’s sister, Humane, and a white male, Kevin, illustrates the point that whites can belong to Asian America and America already belongs to Asian Americans.61 The lesbian-identified Helen stands to the right of the newly-weds, though, sig-naling that this rearticulation of race and nation centers on heterosexual monogamy. Zia’s remains a “but for” (our race) claim of inclusion in this respect. Suppose that Zia, who is well aware of the identificatory allure of imagoes, replaces this picture in a subsequent edition with one from her legally recognized marriage to Lia Shigemura, which only became possible in California after the original publication date. This move would expose the heteronormativity of the Asian American Dream to envision the Zia’s incorporation into a gay-and-lesbian friendly United States to come.

The revised image would also take the “but for” strategy of incorpora-tion twice as far (“we are just like other American families, but for our

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sexuality and our race . . .”), but even it would accept too much of Zia’s premise that one’s country is like one’s family. If it is pessimistic to under-estimate the degree to which the US nation-state has served social justice, it is shortsighted to overestimate the degree to which US national solidarities have facilitated Asian American social justice efforts.62 The best reasons to connect demands for legal citizenship, poverty alleviation, or simple dig-nity to the empty signifier “America” are politically strategic, whereas the worst reasons are related to American Dream fantasies of transparency, community, and belonging. A sensible strategy might be to temper a Helen Zia-like politics of rearticulation with a Michael Kang-like politics of disar-ticulation. We as Asian Americans could aim to expand and pluralize the terrain of Asian/American identity while simultaneously questioning the affective and strategic value of entering it.

The Motel’s dialectical theorization of identification and disidentifica-tion, in short, is Kang’s distinctive contribution to the critical philosophy of race and Asian American cultural politics. That Kang’s account of Asian American kinship takes the form of an independent movie is significant insofar as cinematic representations of action respect the unpredictable, unforeseeable aspects of political experience.63 Agonistic conflict must infuse Asian American film production insofar as Asian American film-makers find evading the politics of racial representation to be as impossible as agreeing upon the best strategy of responding to it. Both Michael Kang and Wong Fu Productions, for instance, seek to contest Asian stereotypes in their respective narrative genres and media formats.64 However, Kang’s and Wong Fu’s strategies of representation respectively align with queer, working-class disidentification and heterosexual, middle-class identifica-tion on the shared terrain of mass-media production, distribution, and reception.

This set of political alignments indicates Asian American cinema is demonstrably, and perhaps constitutively, open to both disidentification and identification. The disarticulation with multicultural America in The Motel reminds us that any articulation of Asian identity is bound to its remainders, while the re-articulation of Asian identity in “Meet the Kayak” forgets itself in an idealized Asian American kinship. A simple way of seeing that “Asian America” is less a fixed identity than a floating signi-fier is to recognize that Wong Fu Productions portrays an identification and Kang posits a disidentification at the very same site. Wong Fu depicts the Asian American Dream as that which Asians marginalized within


Hollywood film and other institutions of mainstream US life cannot but want. Kang poses Ernest and Ma Chin as the critical alternative—“Yes, we can.”

notes

The author would like to thank Jeehyun Lim, Cathy Schlund-Vials, Kevan Yenerall,

Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh, and the anonymous reviewers at Critical Philosophy of Race

for their insightful comments on previous drafts of this essay.

1. “Meet the Kayak,” YouTube video, 6:15, posted by “Wong Fu Productions,” Mar. 31,

2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGwsa3QX1nE. In 2003, Philip Wang,

Wesley Chan, and Ted Fu started Wong Fu Productions, an independent produc-

tion company with a sizeable online following.

2. Post-1965 US multiculturalism reworks earlier, Eurocentric notions of cultural

pluralism to at least nominally include blacks, Asians, and Latino/as; it repudi-

ates Anglo-conformist models of immigrant incorporation and Americanization.

Desmond King, Making Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

2000), chaps. 1–2.

3. Ange-Marie Hancock, Solidarity Politics for Millennials (New York: Palgrave

McMillan, 2011), 111.

4. On the work immigrants do for “us,” see Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 94; on the good life of liberalism,

see Wendy Brown, States of Injury (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1995), 61.

5. Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action was White (New York: Norton, 2005),

chap. 2; cf. Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight (Berkeley: University

of California Press, 2004), 227–29.

6. Iris Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, rev. ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 2011), 238–41.

7. “Success Story of One Minority Group in U.S.,” U.S. News and World Report,

Dec. 26, 1966, 8. “Both cultures” in this passage refers to Asian national and white

American values and practices.

8. Jodi Melamed, “The Spirit of Multiculturalism,” Social Text 24, no. 4 (2006): 17–18.

9. See Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004),

261–62; see also David Eng, Racial Castration (Durham, NC: Duke University

Press, 2001), chap. 4.

10. The Motel, DVD, directed by Michael Kang (New York: Palm Pictures, 2005). The

movie is an adaptation of Ed Lin, Waylaid (New York: Kaya, 2002).

11. David Eng, “Out Here and Over There,” Social Text 15, nos. 3 and 4 (1997): 40–41.

12. Here Kang is in the good company of independent filmmakers who treat Asian

America as a space of queer critique and diasporic connection. E.g., Saving Face,

DVD, directed by Alice Wu (New York: Sony Picture Classics, 2005); The Wedding

Banquet, DVD, directed by Ang Lee (Beverly Hills: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 2004).

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13. Robert Bernasconi, Kathryn Gines, and Paul Taylor, “Letter from the Editors,”

Critical Philosophy of Race 1, no. 1 (2013): iv–v; Jane Gordon, Creolizing Political

Theory (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), chap. 2.

14. E.g., Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quentin Hoare

and Geoffrey Smith (New York: International, 1971); Herbert Marcuse, Eros and

Civilization (Boston: Beacon, 1966).

15. Brown, States of Injury, 61; see also 64–65.

16. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the

Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, ed. James Strachey (1917;

London: Hogarth, 1955), 257.

17. Anne Cheng, The Melancholy of Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 8–9.

18. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 103–4.

Italics removed.

19. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 1999), 31.

20. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, rev. ed. (1958; Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1998), 190.

21. Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics (London: Verso, 2013), 93.

22. Arendt, The Human Condition, 180; Mouffe, Agonistics, 9–11.

23. E.g., Viet Thanh Nguyen, Race and Resistance (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2002); Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

2004).

24. Natasha Behl, “Situated Citizenship,” Politics, Groups, and Identities 2, no. 3 (2014): 2.

25. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 245. Italics original.

26. Sigmund Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” in Three Case Histories,

ed. Philip Rieff (1918; New York: Collier, 1963), 202–3.

27. Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Straitjacket Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University

Press, 2012), 80. Shimizu would point out that Sam badly misinterprets Bruce

Lee’s ethics of masculinity.

28. Michael Kang, e-mail message to the author, Jan.22, 2015.

29. Fried chicken is still seen as more “American” than, say, the probably “Americanized”

fare served at Christine’s family-owned Chinese restaurant—despite the higher

number of Chinese restaurants in the United States than all the McDonald’s,

Burger Kings, and Wendy’s combined. Jennifer Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles

(New York: Hachette, 2008).

30. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 251.

31. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 191.

32. Robert Carlson, “Americanization as an Early Twentieth-Century Adult Education

Movement,” History of Education Quarterly 10, no. 4 (1970): 453; Avila, Popular

Culture in the Age of White Flight, 149.

33. David Eng, The Feeling of Kinship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 87.

34. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), 40–41;

cf. Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Desiring Whiteness (New York: Rouledge, 2000), 20.


35. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Rivere (1923; New York: Norton,

1960), 29.

36. Shimizu, Straitjacket Sexualities, 124.

37. Wendy Brown, Politics out of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

2001), 56.

38. Eng, Feeling of Kinship, 89.

39. “Extravagence” and “Necessity” are intertextual topoi of Asian American litera-

ture. Sau-Ling Wong, Reading Asian American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 1993), chap. 4.

40. Shimizu, Straitjacket Sexualities, 163.

41. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 86, 89. Italics

original. I cite Bhabha to imply that Ernest’s Asian American experience resonates

with the “mimicry” discourses of (post)colonial India.

42. The caveat is Arendt claims that “love” and related passions are as destructive to the

political realm as it is to them. Arendt, The Human Condition, 51–52; cf. Hannah

Arendt, On Revolution (1963; New York: Penguin, 2006), 63–78.

43. Celine Parreñas Shimizu, The Hypersexuality of Race (Durham, NC: Duke University

Press, 2007), 52, 146.

44. Darrell Hamamoto, “The Joy Fuck Club,” New Political Science 20, no. 3 (1998): 335,

345. Identification plays out differently in mainstream gay pornographic contexts,

e.g., Nguyen Tan Hoang, “The Resurrection of Brandon Lee,” in porn studies, ed.

Linda Williams (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 238.

45. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Oxford: Polity, 1994), chap. 7.

46. Sigmund Freud, “A Child is Being Beaten,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 1,

no. 4 (1920): 381; cf. Brown, Politics out of History, 49–50.

47. Arendt, The Human Condition, 52.

48. Wendy Brown, Edgework (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 96.

49. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott (1928; Austin:

University of Texas Press, 1968), 67.

50. Girl in Progress, DVD, directed by Patricia Riggen (Los Angeles: Pantelion Films,

2012).

51. The authorized alternatives are arguably domesticated ones. New legal rights sub-

mit newly enfranchised gay and lesbian U.S. citizen-subjects to “normative dictates

of bourgeois intimacy.” Eng, Feeling of Kinship, 45.

52. Michael Kang, e-mail message to the author, January 22, 2015.

53. Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003),

27, 75–76.

54. Arendt, The Human Condition, 178.

55. For an Arendtian critique of “the subject question,” see Linda Zerilli, Feminism and

the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), chap. 1.

56. Brown, States of Injury, 75

57. Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 174.

58. Eng, Racial Castration, 219.

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59. Lowe, Immigrant Acts, chap. 1.

60. Ali Behdad, A Forgetful Nation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 108–9.

61. Helen Zia, Asian American Dreams (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,

2000), 313.

62. On the underestimation, see David Hollinger, Postethnic America, rev. ed. (New

York: Basic, 2000), 216, 235; on the overestimation, see Chuh, Imagine Otherwise,

124–25.

63. Davide Panagia, “Why Film Matters to Political Theory,” Contemporary Political

Theory 12, no. 1 (2013): 19.

64. Michael Kang, interview by Raafio Rivero, Raafio Rivero (blog), accessed

January 8, 2015, http://raafirivero.com/filmmakers-michael-kang/; Alan Van,

“Wong Fu Productions | Filmmakers,” New Media Rockstars, July 21, 2013, http://

newmediarockstars.com/2013/12/wong-fu-productions-filmmakers/3/.

Documents

Fantasies of Asian American Kinship Disrupted