A View from the Bottom: Asian American
Masculinity and Sexual Representation
by Nguyen Tan Hoang
Duke University Press. 304 pages, $24.95
IN AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE, depictions of Asian men as sexually desirable have been few and far between. In films and television shows, they’ve rarely been granted “leading man” roles and instead ended up as asexual sidekicks or as feminized caricatures. Recent exceptions hint that this might be changing. The ABC network’s now-canceled sitcom Selfie, a contemporary social-media-inspired take on Pygmalion, had John Cho as the male love interest. In the popular AMC series The Walking Dead, Steven Yeun’s character Glen is not only one of the sci-fi drama’s most effective zombie killers, he’s also in a biracial relationship with the (Caucasian) character Maggie.
Cho and Yeun aren’t mentioned in Nguyen Tan Hoang’s A View from the Bottom, but an analysis of their characters would have added an interesting angle to Nguyen’s discussion, since his focus is on the racial, sexual, and gender assumptions that underpin depictions of Asian men in visual media. Nguyen does not include TV in his analysis but instead concentrates on four aspects of visual culture: pornography, cinema, experimental film, and video of the 1990s, as well as on-line gay cruising sites and apps.
A View from the Bottom is part of Duke University’s “Perverse Modernities” series, and the book’s cover, depicting a pair of legs held aloft by two hands, makes it clear what the “bottom” in the title refers to. Nguyen’s focus is on examining, and challenging, the idea of gay Asian “bottomhood.” He asserts that the identity of “gay Asian bottom” is much more complicated, and also much more positive, than is suggested by the conventional, polarized view of the top role as the privileged, more powerful position.
A View from the Bottom has most of the hallmarks of academic writing. It draws upon extensive research in queer theory, film studies, and related disciplines, and it’s heavily footnoted with an extensive bibliography. Nguyen’s prose is also thick with graduate seminar words such as “valorize,” “heteronormative,” “phallocentric,” and the like. But Nguyen is not a typical academic. As he notes in the book’s prefatory material, he came to academia relatively late in life after devoting his twenties to work as an experimental video artist. Indeed, most of the book’s chapters actually began as video projects. Nguyen’s artistic sensibility serves him well in his close readings of the films he examines, including those classified as pornography.
Nguyen isn’t the first scholar to take a serious look at porn, but it is a subject that’s still mostly held at arm’s length by the academy. Nguyen is only too aware of this. In an almost rebellious way, he explores the subject with gusto, sometimes using playful, decidedly nonacademic language in doing so. He devotes his first chapter to the career of Brandon Lee (stage name of Jon Enriquez), a boyishly handsome and very well-endowed young man who was arguably the industry’s first Asian male porn star.
At first, in the early and mid 1990s, Lee’s talents were featured only in Asian-themed porn (with titles like Asian Persuasion and Fortune Nookie) that targeted niche markets. Eventually, however, Lee crossed over to mainstream gay porn, appearing in films like the military-themed Big Guns 2. This migration, Nguyen argues, was made possible not only by Lee’s good looks and sizeable package, but also by his fluent English and his image as a fully assimilated Asian-American.
Nguyen makes much of the fact that Lee began as a top, only to lift his legs eventually and embrace bottom roles. He presents a detailed analysis of these categories, arguing that, in Lee’s case at least, the transition from sexually dominant roles to sexually submissive ones was never clear-cut. The chapter is illustrated with images from Lee’s films, including one dramatic page featuring two photos, both shot from below: one of Lee being fellated by another Asian actor, the other of him topping the same actor. The chapter also includes, as a side discussion, a fascinating analysis of the homoeroticism in the fight scenes of martial arts star Bruce Lee.
Nguyen follows his discussion of gay porn with an analysis of two films from mainstream cinema, Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), directed by John Huston and based on a 1941 Carson McCullers novel of the same name, and The Lover (1992), Jean-Jacques Annaud’s adaptation of Marguerite Duras’ 1984 novel, L’Amant. With both films, Nguyen focuses on the Asian male characters to develop his analysis of gay Asian bottomhood. Although the critics largely dismissed Reflections and The Lover at the time of their release, Nguyen presents a convincing case for their reassessment.
Despite its subject matter, A View from the Bottom is not a book for the general reader. Even those who have more than a passing interest in queer theory and film studies are likely to find Nguyen’s prose challenging. That said, the author offers many fresh and novel insights in his analysis, and his arguments are thoughtful, nuanced, and complex. A View from the Bottom is a valuable piece of cultural criticism about a topic that has received very little attention.
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Jim Nawrocki is a writer based in San Francisco.
