Geisha of a Different Kind: Race and Sexuality in Gaysian America. By C. Winter Han. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv+237. $89.00 (cloth); $26.00 (paper).

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewsGeisha of a Different Kind: Race and Sexuality in Gaysian America. By C. Winter Han. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv+237. $89.00 (cloth); $26.00 (paper).Stanley ThangarajStanley ThangarajCity College of New York Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMore“As one gay white man told me regarding his preference for newly immigrated men: ‘The [Asian] guys who were born here, or even grew up here, are too pushy and demanding. Too much like American guys. I think the guys who just got here are more polite and respectful, they have a better understanding of their culture’” (p. 49).This quote from C. Winter Han in Geisha of a Different Kind captures one key ethnographic moment in Seattle’s gay community that highlights in brilliant, complicated, and multiple ways the contradictions around race and gender that govern what Lisa Duggan (The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy [Beacon Press, 2004]) characterizes as homonormativity. The white man’s desire above articulates subservience to whiteness and a commodity-fetishism of Asian foreign difference as emblematic of Asian identity. Race is coded through sexual desires, pleasures, and white aesthetics in mainstream gay publics. Han, instead of embarking upon a treatment of the gay community as always socially progressive, successfully disrupts the homonormative narrative by centering the representations, experiences, histories, and pleasures of Asian American gay men. In the process, the book convincingly demonstrates how the queer Asian Other is instrumental in solidifying the boundaries of homonormativity as white, muscular, Christian, middle class, and male—or what Audre Lorde (Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches [Crossing Press, 1985]) refers to as the “mythical norm.”Whereas most major work on gay Asian American communities in the United States, such as Martin Manalansan’s Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2004), explores major cities like New York City, C. Winter Han provides a compelling and understudied urban landscape with Seattle. Seattle’s gay community is a particularly interesting case, with white flight, on a national scale, to the Northwest coupled with a small gay community where people from various racial, classed backgrounds meet. In this setting, gay Asian Americans negotiate racialized and sexualized lives both in their Asian American communities and in the larger gay (read white) community while challenging the dominance of the black-white racial binary. While binaries are used to locate these men as either Asian or gay, Han weaves together the lived experiences of gay Asian Americans who also exist in the contradictory racialized registers of both model minority and the embodiment of the patriarchal, sexist East. In the process, like Linda Vo (Mobilizing an Asian American Community [Temple University Press, 2004]), C. Winter Han invokes the experiences of many Asian American subjects in the panethnic category of Asian America to underscore shared experiences of racialization.With critical reading practices of media and related archival material coupled with ethnographic research, Han traces the longer history of orientalism, “racial castration,” and emasculation as evidenced in the works of David Eng (Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America [Duke University Press, 2001]) and Celine Schimizu (Straightjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in Movies [Stanford University Press, 2012]). He explains the feminization of Asian American gay men and the ways these men negotiate their place in the local gay community with their limited resources. While gay Asian American men narrate their marginalization in the larger gay community as a result of their racialization as feminized subjects (as always the bottom), some gay Asian Americans use that very racialization to garner status in the drag shows and queen contests where their success is naturalized. They invert the power of the stigma and use the stigmatization to their advantage to lay claim to spaces within gay America.This text would be ideal for courses in Sociology of Gender and Sexuality, Gender Studies, and Critical Race Studies. Coupling this book with a few others could also push forward some missing intellectual paradigms. Although orientalist racist tropes used by gay white men position their Asian American counterparts as always feminine and always bottom, Tan Hoang Nguyen (A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation [Duke University Press, 2014]) illustrates the kind of agency and pleasure negotiated in that position. Instead of celebrating the agentive possibilities in pleasure, the author structures normative masculinity as the model for integration. Furthermore, instead of centering the logic of race with a white-yellow model, the missing black and Latino masculinities could be salvaged with an extended conversation on the relationality and “comparative racializations” (Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson, eds., Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization [Duke University Press, 2011]) of Asian American gay masculinity to racialized masculinities.In order to further disrupt homonormativity, Han must accommodate “critically queer” (Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter [Routledge, 1993]) readings of gender and sexuality, like the work of Judith Halberstam (In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives [New York University Press, 2005]) and Kristen Schilt (Just One of the Guys? Transgender Men and the Persistence of Gender Inequality [University of Chicago Press, 2011]), where lives of trans, intersex, and gender-nonconforming subjects are part of the analysis.The book offers an important intervention in sexuality studies by inserting the ways in which race and subsequent racisms structure gay life. When gay Asian Americans highlight and respond to the racism in the gay community, white gay men utilize orientalist logics to displace the racism by invoking sexism and homophobia in Asian America. Racism becomes a “nonevent,” while white claims to homophobia and sexism in Asia and Asian America constitute the “event.” Situating homophobia in the Asian and Asian American community becomes one way to elide the racism within the gay communities. On the other hand, the stories of the Gaysian Americans say otherwise when we look at the example of the gay Asian American man who tells Han, “She [sister] was genuinely worried. I had to promise her that I would never step foot in Wyoming. She never worries when I’m in Chinatown” (p. 130). The sharp analysis in this book offers a way to see the deeply penetrating influence of race while offering expansive models for living in (LGBTQI) America. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 122, Number 1July 2016 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/686887 Views: 1340Total views on this site For permission to reuse a book review printed in the American Journal of Sociology, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.