The affirmative is a formula for resilient Asian subject formation: The 1AC’s hyper-fixation on epistemic interventions into Asian identity formation is an explicit concession to the psychosocial order – they take for granted the desire for inclusion inherent to semiocapitalism – this has empirically traded off with material political strategies and rendered assimilation more diffuse, leading to a centering of a cisheterosexual Asian subject

Yet Sedgwick’s analysis neglects the fact that in the war on effemi nate boys some racialized communities are indeed produced precisely as feminized, homosexualized, queer. In “The Shoyu Kid,” the hetero sexual stability of the patriotic white American male icon emerges only in contrast to the resolute linking of queerness with Japaneseness. In this manner, normative masculine self-representation con stitutively de pends upon the sexual “perversion” and pathologizing of the racialized masculine subject. The solution to such warfare on a racialized and ef feminized Japanese American childhood, however, cannot be to reify or aspire toward those normative masculinized images underwritten by mainstream society—a version of Frank Chin and his Auiieeeee! group’s political prescription. We cannot place our psychic hopes in this type of so-called limited, positive imagery; we cannot place our political hopes in the extension of masculine, patriarchal privileges to these Japanese American youngsters. In the final analysis, we must not conserve but proliferate the idealized images of the screen. The struggle to recompose the psychic and material body of the racialized masculine subject can often result in the ascribing of conservative norms to emancipatory political projects. For instance, Fanon—in re constructing the black male body that lias “burst apart”—has often been criticized by feminist and queer commentators for building his incisive critique of French colonialism on the reassertion of woman as lack and on the linking of racism with homosexuality rather than homophobia.31 Countering stereotypes of Asian American male subjectivity as the conflation of “Asian” and “anus” by valorizing whiteness and heterosexuality would not only serve to reinforce the racist and homophobic logic that produces these limited and debilitating roles from the onset but also sanction the racist and homophobic logic that understands Japanese American internment as having been both legitimate and necessary in the first place. Psychic salvation for the Asian American male cannot be the monopoly of a masculinist compulsory heterosexuality. To accept this racial and (hetero) sexual logic— to aspire to the presumed material rewards it offers—amounts to what Angela Y. Davis calls “accepting a bribe”— an illusory compensation for powerlessness.56 Redeeming Japa nese American queer childhood does not require, then, material and psychic strategies to maintaîn the dominant order of things. On the contrary. it requires renewed material and psychic challenges to the structures of domination altogether. For some time now, critics in gender, ethnic, queer, and cultural studies have stressed the importance of giving disenfranchised subjects — women, people of color, gays, and lesbians—”voices,” full subjectivities, visibilities in the face of invisibilities.’ In my discussion of photography and national history in China Men and Donald Duk, I noted the great psychic and material difficulties encountered by marginal Asian American male subjects who attempt to emerge from a domain of silence and in visibility into an order of speech and visibility. However, this emergence into history, as it were, is only one part of a larger cultural politics of difference. My analysis of the hypervisibility of the young Japanese Ameri can male during wartime internment in “The Shoyu Kid” expands my critique of the discursive mechanisms by means of which Asian Americans continue to be rendered speechless and invisible despite their appearance in the visual field. Chapter two takes into consideration the particular historical conditions of World War lito explore the psychic constraints under which Japanese American male subjectivity is allowed to emerge within the realm of the visible. Chapter two concludes with a caveat on the false promises of investing in a dominant ideology of heterosexuality and whiteness, the psychic costs of valorizing this hege monic pairing instead of making a concerted attempt to contest and dis- mantle it. The present chapter extends the critique of heterosexuality and whiteness from yet another perspective. Reading M. Butterfly allows us to discover the costs of heterosexuality and whiteness not just from the Asian American male’s point of view but from that of the putatively normative, straight white male. Kobena Mercer provides an initial entry point for this investigation by insisting that we initiate a critical examination of whiteness and its strategic occlusion from the visible domain. for “all our rhetoric about ‘making ourselves visible; “he asserts, “the real challenge in the new cul tural politics of difference is to make ‘whiteness’ visible for the first time, as a culturally constructed ethnic identity historically contingent upon the disavowal and violent denial of difference.”1 Mercer’s intervention is significant. Whiteness—in its refusal to be named and its refusal to be seen — represents itself as the universal and unmarked standard, a ubiq uitous norm from which all else and all others are viewed as a regrettable deviation. I would like to take up Mercer’s challenge to make whiteness visible, then, by investigating not only its conditions of possibility but its mo ments of failure. Consider the remarkable closing scene of David Henry Hwang’s Tony-Award-winning drama M. Butterfly, which takes place mo ments before the demise of the French diplomat. Donning the robes of the forsaken Japanese geisha Cio-Cio-San (memorialized in Puccini’s 1904 opera Madama Butterfly and its numerous antecedents),3 René Gallimard commits seppuku, but only after uttering these final words: “There is a vision of the Orient that I have. Of slender women in chong sams and kimonos who die for the love of unworthy foreign devils. Who are born and raised to be the perfect women. Who take whatever pun ishment we give them, and bounce back, strengthened by love, uncondi tionally. It is a vision that has become my i4 I read this final scene of the drama in contrast to the unveiling of opera diva Song Liling’s penis at the opening of act Ill. Gallimard is so committed to Puccini’s Madama Butterfly fantasy of “the submissive Oriental woman and the cruel whîte man” (17) that it is impossible for him to imagine an alternative outcome to this dreary story of heterosexual domination and white supremacy. Indeed, because he cannot relinquish his colonial fantasy of “slender women in chong sams and kimonos who die for the love of unworthy foreign devils,” the diplomat must “turn somersaults” (60) in order to protect the psychic integrity of his farce. Vigilant in his desire to maintain this particular vision of a submissive Orient, Gallimard is forced to counter the disrobed diva with a trans vesting act of his own: now that Song is publicly the man, Gallimard must publicly become the woman. “Get away from me!” he orders Song petulantly. “Tonight, I’ve finally learned to tell fantasy from reality. And, knowing the difference, I choose fantasy” (go). Rejecting the psychoana lytic axiom that posits a constitutive relationship between fantasy and reality—that what is most real to the subject is fantasy—the diplomat re- frises to face the real world effects of his geisha dream. He assumes the sartorial role of Cio-Cio-San and thus recedes into the imagined realm of his Mactuna Butterfly fantasy by “straightening” his relationship to the exposed Chinese man. He returns it once again, in the realm of his imagination and in the domain of the vîsible, to a normative hetero sexual union. This concluding scene is of course an ironic rendering of Puccini’s dictum that “death with honor is better than life . . . life with dishonor” (92; Hwang’s ellipsis), for the price of Gallimard’s phantas matic sartorial conversion — the death of the white man — is materially high. Gallimard commits suicide, bitt he dies with his orientalist fantasy intact and, most importantly, as a nominal member of the acceptably heterosexual community. I would like to isolate a striking visual detail emphasízed in this concluding scene both in Hwang’s stage version and in David Cronen berg’s film adaptation of the drama. Before Gallimard dons his wig and kimono, lie careftilly—even methodically—applies a thick layer of white makeup to his face, appearing literally in whiteface (figs. 8 and 9). Sev eral commentators have read this cosmetic transformation as a faithful rendering of the aesthetic protocols of Japanese theater, relating G allí mard’s application of whiteface to the traditional makeup of the orino- gata in Kabuki theater.3 Majorie Garber, however, expands the possible interpretations of this critical moment by analyzing the diplomat’s bad makeup job in the confluence of various ethnic channels: The whiteness of the makeup is traditíonal in Japanese theater as a sign of the ideal white complexion of the noble, who can afford to keep out of the sun, and the pallor of the protected young woman (or trained geisha) even today. We might note that in Chinese opera face-painting participates in an entirely different sign system, in which white on an actor’s face symbolized treachery, as red does loyalty, yellow, piety, and gold, the supernatural. In this story of spies and treason the Chinese and Japanese significations are at odds with one another, and Song has already warned Gallimard not to conflate the two.6 Although Garber’s analysis of this scene largely focuses on Gallimard’s egregious misreading of disparate East Asian cultural aesthetics — the conflation of Chinese chong sams and Japanese kimonos—she sub sequently appends a final and provocative interpretation: “The white makeup has yet another significance, since [Gallimard] is continually described as a ‘white man’ throughout the play, even in France, where ‘There’re white men all around” (244)7 Garber proffers a triple reading of Gallimard’s bad makeup job through this condensed cuihiral survey, but I would like to elaborate on her final point: Gallimard is continually described by Song as a white man; the visible face underscoring Galli mard’s failures, demise, and swan song appears to its literally as a white face; the Orientalist and heterosexist fantasy for which Gallimard ulti mately dies is achieved only in the face of whiteness. Judith Butler insists that we must begin to theorize the compulsory regimes of the symbolic order — the numerous interpellations and coercive prohibitions by which individuals are rendered legible as subjects— through the lens not only of (hetero)sexual but also racial difference. “The symbolic — that register of regulatory ideality—is also and always a racial industry, indeed, the reiterated practice of racializíng interpella tions.” She continues: Rejecting those models of power which would reduce racial dif ferences to the derivative effects of sexual difference (as if sexual diffèrence were not only autonomous in relation to racial articula tion but somehow more prim; in a temporal or ontological sense), it seems crucial to rethink the scenes of reproduction and, hence, of sexing practices not only as ones through which a heterosexual imperative is inculcated, but as ones through which boundaries of racial distinction are secured as well as contested. Especially at those junctures in which a compulsory heterosexuality works in the service of maintaining hegemonic forms of racial purity, the “threat” of homosexuality takes on a distinctive complexity.8 p. 230s As we have witnessed in the works of Kingston, Chin, Kaneko, Hwang, Chu, and Louie issues of home for Asian Americans are particularly vexed. Historically configured as either unassimilable aliens or perversely assimilated and thus ‘‘whiter than white’’ (the sojourner/yellow peril thesis versus the model minority myth), Asian Americans have at best a dubious claim to citizenship and a place within the U.S. nation- state.1 A sense of membership within the larger national collective has traditionally followed the political, economic, and cultural incorporation of a Western European ethnic group under the banner of immigration and assimilation as well as through the spatial metaphorics of the United States as a point of arrival and melting pot. However, recent debates in Asian American studies about diaspora—its focus on point of departure and displacement from origin—insist that we (re)think the problematics of home in this field.2 Suspended between departure and arrival, Asian Americans remain permanently disenfranchised from home, relegated to a nostalgic sense of its loss or to an optative sense of its unattainability. p. 240s In order to trace the increasingly important relationship between queer- ness and diaspora in Asian American studies in the late 1990s, it is useful first to consider a brief history of the Asian American studies movement as it originally formed around the domestic imperative of claiming the U.S. nation-state.13 In the shadow of 1950s and 1960s civil rights struggles, the emerging Asian American studies movement focused much of its political energy and theoretical attention on domestically based race relations within the geographical boundaries of the U.S. nation-state. Modeled on the cultural nationalism of the Black Power movement, the Yellow Power movement during this period largely endorsed a political platform of identity-based politics, racial separatism, and a Marxist-inspired class critique of American capitalism. The Asian American cultural nationalist project, perhaps best exemplified in the academy by Frank Chin’s Aiiieeeee! group, centered its attentions on local Asian American communities as sites of resistance for the mobilizing of political action, the building of alternative economic institutions, and the creation of an oppositional nativist culture.14 In the 1975 prefatory manifesto to their now-classic collection of Asian American writings, Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, the editors contend that ‘‘legislative racism and euphemized white racist love’’ have consigned Asian Americans to a state of ‘‘self- contempt, self-rejection, and disintegration.’’15 A remedy, the Aiiieeeee! group insists, demands the assertion of an Asian American identity with its own unique political as well as recognizable cultural parameters. Rejecting the dominant either/or conception of Asian American identity as forever divided—split between the Asian and the American and between Asia and America—the editors insist on claiming the domestic sphere as their own. Hence, they link entitlement to the public sphere of the nation-state with the private prerogatives of home.16 Seizing upon their self-definition of Asian American, they emphatically state that the myth of being either/or and the equally goofy concept of the dual personality haunted our lobes while our rejection by both Asia and white America proved we were neither one nor the other. Nor were we half and half or more one than the other. Neither Asian cul- ture nor American culture was equipped to define us except in the most superficial terms. However, American culture, equipped to deny us the legitimacy of our uniqueness as American minorities, did so, and in the process contributed to the effect of stunting self- contempt on the development and expression of our sensibility that in turn has contributed to a mass rejection of Chinese and Japanese America by Chinese- and Japanese-Americans.17 In delineating an integrally and a psychically ‘‘whole’’ Asian American subject against this model of either/or split subjectivity, cultural nationalism’s political project was centered squarely on Asian American claims to the space of the U.S. nation-state as enfranchised citizen-subjects. The Aiiieeeee! model worked to configure Asian Americans as a racialized minority group with inviolable political needs, economic concerns, and cultural contours.18 Rejecting the mainstream stereotype of Asian Americans as anomalous ethnic novelties ill fitted to the general socio-political landscape of the U.S. nation-state, cultural nationalism’s energies focused on not merely defining but prescribing who a recogniz- able and recognizably legitimate Asian American racial subject should ideally be: male, heterosexual, working class, American born, and English speaking.