Sticky Rice Politics: Impossible Possibilities of Queerness in and Across Yellow Fever and Front Cover

Abstract

This article engages in a close reading of the concept of “sticky rice”—an Asian man falling in love with another Asian man—in and across the films Yellow Fever (1998) and Front Cover (2015). Of particular interest here are the ways in which the old–new immigrant dynamics of sticky rice display impossible possibilities of queerness—that is, a temporal moment of counterhegemonic transgression. The three following themes organize this analysis: the mobility of the “old” immigrant subject; the denaturalizing of racialized gender; and queer kinship and relational structures. This article reevaluates the overall implications of the constructions of sticky rice that Yellow Fever and Front Cover offer.