“The (In)Visible Man”

Renegotiating Asian American Masculinities in the 21st Century

1_Context The experiences of Asian American [1] masculinities throughout US history should attract attention from artists and scholars. From 1875 to 1965, a series of exclusion policies and legislation enacted by the US government, which limited the immigration of Asian women into the US and prohibited miscegenation between Asian American men and White [2] women, led to the celibacy of Asian American men en masse. [3] The image of these men doing ‘feminized’ jobs in laundromats, restaurants, or service sectors created the stereotypes of Asian American men as effeminate, submissive, asexual, or even hypersexual. [4] In American cultural products of the 19th and 20th centuries, Asian American men were either portrayed as supervillains like Dr. Fu Manchu, who lacked heterosexuality but posed great danger to White women, or effeminate subjects in movies such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) or Sixteen Candles (1984), the sitcom series The Simpsons (premiered 1989), the play M. Butterfly (premiered 1988), or the novel The Joy Luck Club (1993). [5] All these features developed into emasculated stereotypes of Asian American masculinities and gave birth to remasculinization movements in Asian American literature. Pioneering this were the masculinist cultural projects in the late 1960s and 1970s helmed by Asian American male authors, such as Frank Chin, Jeffrey P. Chan, Gus Lee, and others, who called for a radical reconstruction of Asian American masculinities in art and literature (even though the projects are now viewed as androcentric and nationalistic). [6] The 21st century has witnessed notable changes in representations of Asian American masculinities in cultural products. With increasing economic and cultural exchanges between (East) Asia [7] and the US, contemporary literary approaches to Asian American masculinities now choose to embrace intersectionality and substantially deviate from masculine norms. Features once marked as masculine shortcomings such as ‘bottomhood’, or being ‘effeminate’ or ‘submissive,’ and are now turned into a new power, challenging boundaries and dimensions of masculine ideals. Critically acclaimed and commercially successful films such as Searching (2018), Crazy Rich Asians (2018), Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), and Past Lives (2023), and literary works by authors like Julia Otsuka, David Chang, Ocean Vuong, Ken Liu, John Yau, etc. have helped to bring Asian American narratives into the mainstream, and shift perceptions towards Asian American masculinities. Recent empirical research also reveals that Asian American men are increasingly perceived as more “desirable romantic partners” in the US, as “soft” masculinities are now…