Race, Sexuality, and Representation in David Mura's The Colors of Desire

Abstract

Race, Sexuality, and Representation in David Mura’s The Colors of Desire 1 Xiaojing Zhou (bio) In Asian American literary discourse, identities of race, gender, and culture have been highly contested sites, whereas sexuality is still an emerging terrain of literary and critical exploration. 2 Sexuality, especially homosexuality, intersected by race, gender, and class, as a central theme has developed rapidly, but only recently as shown by Timothy Liu’s collections of poetry, Vox Angelica (1992), Burnt Offerings (1995), and Say Goodnight (1998), and by anthologies such as A Lotus of Another Color (1993), The Very Inside (1994), On A Bed of Rice (1995), and Asian American Sexualities (1996). 3 David Mura’s second book of poetry, The Colors of Desire (1995), is part of this significant development among Asian Americans and their growing consciousness of the complex relations between race and sexuality. Mura’s volume also marks a new departure in Asian American writers’ treatment of sexuality as a racialized and gendered positionality. 4 Mura’s poems explore the connections between racial ideologies and representational deployments of sexualities, and their effects on sexuality. They also illustrate that prohibition and taboo imposed by law or dominant ideology on sexual transgressions are enabling conditions for both the articulation and subversion of racialized heterosexual norms. Judith Butler in Bodies that Matter considers ideologically determined sexual prohibitions as “constitutive constraints,” which make the “performativity” of gender and sexuality possible. Butler further argues [End Page 245] that the “performative” dimension of the construction of sexuality is “precisely the forced reiteration of norms.” In other words, Butler contends, constraint should be “rethought as the very condition of performativity”; “the law is not only that which represses sexuality, but a prohibition that generates sexuality or, at least, compels its directionality.” 5 Butler’s theory of performativity in terms of the regulative and generative functions of power in constructing sexuality, can shed light on Mura’s representation of the connections between racial identities and sexualities. Butler’s argument that “the law is . . . a prohibition that generates sexuality or, at least, compels its directionality” can also illuminate Asian American men’s feminized stereotypes, and their counter-representations by Asian American writers of their racialized, gendered, and sexualized identities. These representations and their historical roots provide an important context for our understanding of Mura’s Colors of Desire. According to the editors of one of the earliest Asian American literary anthologies, Aiiieeeee! (1974), the history of Asian Americans is one of disempowerment and marginalization, or “emasculation” to use King-Kok Cheung’s word. 6 While fully aware that “terms such as ‘emasculated’ and ‘effeminate’ presume and underwrite the superiority of the masculine over the feminine,” Cheung examines the “emasculation” of Asian Americans as an imposition upon Asian immigrants and Asian Americans by the dominant power in the historical, cultural, and political contexts of the United States. 7 Cheung’s location of Asian American gendered identities helps shift the terms of the debate on gender issues in Asian American literary discourse from patriarchal sexism and cultural nationalism versus feminism to a more complex consideration of gender in terms of power relations, racial ideologies, and historical specificities. 8 Jinqui Ling’s recent essay on Asian American masculinity further contributes to dismantling binarisms in the debate on issues of gender. Ling argues that in investigating the meaning of Asian American men’s experience troped on their “emasculation” or “feminization,” it is necessary to contextualize these terms in a social and historical framework. 9 Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men is perhaps the most informative and galvanizing work which provides a historical context for an [End Page 246] understanding of Asian American men’s social, political, and sexual “emasculation,” as well as an Asian American writer’s counter-representations of Asian American manhood. Although Asian American sexualities have always been constructed as part of their racial and ethnic identities, Asian American writers’ rearticulations of their identities have been more concerned with the racialization and ethnicization of gender, and the engendering of race and ethnicity than with sexuality. 10 Sau-ling Cynthia Wong notes a curious absence of sexuality in works by American-born Chinese American writers since the 1960s in contrast to those...