Allure and Dissonance: Interracial Lust and “Problematic” Pleasure

“Colormutedness”

People in the United States have been awoken from, as film and media scholar Susan Courtney notes, “the fantasy of living in colorblind society.”¹ Considering the notorious political situation in the U.S. and the in-progress construction of the Trump wall at the Mexico-United States border, open racism has officially become a severe issue. While the absurd promise of ‘making America great again’ by means of expelling immigrants can be viewed as typical hate speech, claiming that we should ‘stand united against hate’ might risk oversimplifying the complex racism in our public lives. In private, many of us have sexual preferences. The intimate bond shared by sex and race muddies the already troubled waters.

Linda Williams, the pioneer scholar of porn studies, reminds us that stereotypes and taboos serve to elicit and arouse our sexual desires (Williams, “Skin Flicks” 271-308). In her “Skin Flicks on the Racial Border: Pornography, Exploitation and Interracial Lust”, Williams draws from Courtney to address the notion of “colormutedness” in the U.S.:

On one level, then, interracial pornography’s refusal to be color-blind points to the obvious fact that as a culture we are not so much color blind as, as Susan Courtney puts it, “color-mute”: we take note of racial differences, much as we take note sexual differences, but unlike sexual differences, racial differences are not supposed to be noticed. (276)

A decade after the publication of Williams’s essay, this notion of “colormutedness” is still relevant to U.S. society, but barely found on porn sites online. According to the yearly reviews of Pornhub, one of the most popular porn sites in North-America, there were over 42 billion visits in 2019, that is, approximately 80 thousand visits per minute. There are more than one hundred categories of sex videos on Pornhub, mostly related to and sorted by sexual and racial tags. For example, the top searched terms and top viewed categories in 2019 were both led by “Japanese,” while “Hentai” remained the second most popular term. Within the top 25 terms, searches for “Korean,” “Asian,” “Ebony,” “Latina,” “Indian,” and “BBC (Big Black Cock)” all moved further up, while “Chinese” moved slightly down. The U.S. remains the country with the highest daily traffic to Pornhub. This review also suggests that the increase in searches for the term “Japanese” was caused by a big increase in traffic from Japan, which moved up two positions in 2019.²

As a Taiwanese immigrant woman and a graduate film student who studies in the U.S., it would be self-deceiving to ignore the gap between the hypersexualized representations of people of color, especially Asian women, on screens, and the colormutedness of my daily experience, including within an academic environment. How do we talk about our pleasure without sounding like a sexist or a racist? Furthermore, how do I talk about my pleasure without sounding like a victim of the West? How do I live with my “problematic” pleasure of interracial lust? How do I open up conversations of racialized representations without receiving the 101 answer: “Relax, it’s just porn”?

For one thing, at least in the U.S., the contrast of colormutedness in public and the vibrant interracial desires of online pornography reveals a simple fact: it is easier to claim something as racist than pleasurable. On the other hand, calling for censorship of interracial porns will risk oversimplifying the complexity of the racialized representations. This essay aims to explore how we deal with interracial attraction and the “problematic” pleasure of this attraction. It is my hope to challenge the notion of colormutedness and to offer a different conceptual approach. By doing so, I hope to destabilize the white-dominated cinematic and academic environment. To this end, I will start from the question asked by Professor Aaron Kerner, and ardently discussed by my cohort in our Affect theories seminar: how does allure function?

Allure 

In this section, I am largely indebted to Kerner’s unpublished draft, “Arousal.”^3⁠ His insights on the affinities between the Kantian conception of the beautiful and arousal allow me to investigate beyond the patriarchal structures and toward a nuanced approach to pleasure. Kerner writes: “Objects in themselves are not innately beautiful, or ugly for that matter. In a similar fashion, then, to announce that ‘this is sexually arousing,’ discloses more about the subject making the utterance, than it does about the referent” (Kerner 2). Furthermore, in Kant’s notion of universal subjectivity, we all are capable of accessing and engaging our aesthetic experiences, while what we sense as beautiful is individual. “While allure effectively operates as a universal human experience,” Kerner notes, “what one finds alluring, the triggering referent, is highly subjective—governed by any set of demographic, social-cultural, and historical contingencies” (5). In other words, things are not inherently alluring. Thus, claiming something is beautiful, alluring, or pleasurable, could be risky, because it may put the speaker in the vulnerable position of revealing something about her or himself. To arrive at how allure functions, it will be necessary to first explore how allure is generated.

In her Fetishism and Curiosity, Laura Mulvey examines a convergence of two fetishisms: Max’s commodity fetishism and Freud’s fetishism. Marx’s commodity fetishism eliminates the value of working labor so as to achieve the spectacle of commodity, while Freud’s fetishism serves to disavow sexual differences in symbolic systems. Oscillating between the threatening uncanny and superficial images, Freudian disavowal, as Mulvey explains, is a dangerous but also potentially exciting process (Mulvey 14). Human minds are capable of holding two contradictory concepts at the same time. This contradictory process of disavowal defines fetishism. Moreover, similar psychic processes can be found in consumers. The “I know, but all the same…” mindset of disavowal facilitates commodity fetishism. Marx’s commodity fetishism and Freud’s fetishism are not structurally linked, as Mulvey notes, “[but] reinforce each other through topographies and displacements linking the erotic spectacle of the feminine to the eroticized spectacle of the commodity” (14). Popular cinema, as a commodity that fetishized the female body, can in turn “leads on to the bridging function of woman as consumer, rather than producer, of commodities” (8). Indeed, as Mulvey continues, cinema “built self-consciousness into its fascination, even while it apparently denied it” (14). In this sense, cinema as a commodity can be viewed as a convergence of Marx’s commodity fetishism and Freud’s fetishism.

Mulvey’s idea of the convergence of fetishisms is best considered on mainstream cinema screens through her lens of critical feminism. Nonetheless, my “problematic” pleasure can be triggered not only by popular cinema but other visual forms. In light of Mulvey, I will examine not only mainstream cinema but also include other alluring images generated by the economy of fetishism.

Exploring the possibility of (visual) pleasure, Kerner reframes fetishism as “one of the (primary?) ways that sexual arousal is elicited” (Kerner 6). We all have our sexual preferences, he notes, which are “deeply imbricated in a complex matrix of highly subjective predispositions entangled with the machinery of our respective cultural and historical context” (6). When reading a text that we find sexually arousing, allure is at work in drawing our internalized narratives to “latch onto” the externalized narratives, the cinematic texts. Kerner argues that “[a] fetish is in effect an internalized narrative. A fetish is the overvaluation of a referent, and this subjective investment is rooted in a complex and fluid network of personal predilections, and reinforced by a socially shared repertoire of erotically charged signifiers” (8). For example, in a scene of The Wayward Cloud (Tsai Ming-liang, 2005), the Taiwanese actress Chen Shiang-chyi gently licks a watermelon in a refrigerator. This scene is sexually arousing to me. From an angle, I see the actress calmly kneel down, gently leaning into the refrigerator. In the middle of the frame, Shiag-chyi’s tongue tentatively encounters the watermelon. I hear the licking sound sprinkled with Shiang-chyi’s moan. Furthermore, when Shiang-chyi’s warm tongue caresses the ice-cold watermelon, her jawline is emphasized by the camera composition.⁴ A sharp jawline is a fetish that can be found on screen. Similar compositions that emphasize sharp jawlines, for instance, can be found in Björk’s music video, “All is Full of Love” (dir. Chris Cunningham, 1999), in which two cyborgs, both performed by Björk, are leaning to kiss each other. Björk’s faces are slightly tilted to emphasize their sharp jawlines. [Figure 1 and 2] 

Figure 1: Chen Shiang-chyi in Tsai Ming-liang’s The Wayward Cloud, 2005.

Figure 2: Björk’s “All is Full of Love” (dir. Chris Cunningham, 1999)

Meanwhile, my internalized narratives are at work: as a Taiwanese woman and a filmmaker, watching the actress being filmed might be somehow erotic. I feel something intriguing that defies explanation, something ineffable that I can never explicitly fathom.⁵ They are my feelings that no one else owns. Here, allure functions to bridge the internal and external narratives, and thus, as Kerner notes, results in sexual arousal (8).

Thus, Kerner concludes, “Although this runs counter to the established affective regime that I have advanced thus far, it seems that narrative plays a role in arousal” (8). With Kerner’s notion of allure in mind, I will move on to examine the following question: how does interracial lust function with regard to our internalized and externalized narratives?

Allure and Dissonance: Interracial Pornography and “Problematic” Pleasure

What renders the representations of interracial sex able to elicit our pleasure? How does allure work in terms of our internalized and externalized narratives? In this section, I will draw from two influential essays, Linda Williams’s “Skin Flicks on the Racial Border: Pornography, Exploitation and Interracial Lust” and Daniel Bernardi’s “Interracial Joysticks: Pornography’s Web of Racist Attractions,” to reflect on the “problematic” pleasure incited by interracial pornography.

Drawing from Georges Bataille and the Hegelian dialectic between masters and slaves, Williams investigates the transgression of taboos which largely depends on the dark history of white master and black slave in America, and thus claims that “a mix of fear and desire is at the heart of the erotic tension of interracial pornography” (Williams, “Skin Flickers” 286). Williams does not judge if the text itself is racist but claims that “there is a kind of knowing flirtation with the archaic beliefs of racial stereotypes” (302). On the pleasure elicited by interracial pornography, Williams draws from Tessa Perkins to note a difference between knowing and believing in the racialized scenario. Williams writes:

[t]here is a big difference, as Tessa Perkins has observed, between ‘knowing’ racist stereotypes and ‘believing’ in them. … Although nothing necessarily rules out their also believing them—that is, they can certainly be interpreted in a racist manner—the pleasure taken in pornographic depictions of interracial lust does not depend upon believing them. (286)

Indeed, in terms of pornography, what we desire to watch on the screen does not always match what we want to perform.

On the other hand, Bernardi claims that racialized representations in pornography are not likely to induce physical violence, but still “might lead to the perpetuation—or ignorance—of violent ideologies such as racism” (Bernardi 223). Contrasted to Williams, Bernardi argues that it is “important, even crucial, to charge these pornographic works with racism” (Bernardi 229). Not claiming that the spectators and producers are racists, Bernardi argues that it is the texts themselves that are racists (229).

It is important to point out that, as Bernardi critiques Williams, the term “interracial sex” should not be synonymous with black men and white women (Bernardi 228). Moreover, Williams’s conception of “the absent third term,” which is used to explain the erotic transgression in terms of the relationship between black male slave and white female mistress, implies that the white master might be absent yet essential in eliciting interracial lust. What about the absence of people of color other than black? How are they rendered in the context of interracial lust? How does this absence signify in the academic circle? Williams indirectly and ironically mutes the sound of people of color other than black.

Opposing Williams, Bernardi comprehensively analyzes the articulation and marketing of race on a pornography site named Greenguy Link O’Rama. He examines the categorizations including the people of color (“Black Porn,” “Asian Porn,” “Latina Porn,” and “India Sex”), “Interracial Sex” (usually white female and black male, though sometimes Asian female and black/white male), and even a category where nouns of color are absent (“Cheerleader Porn”). Bernardi notes:

When it comes to color on Cheerleader Porn, denotation is not required. Color is excluded. … Cheerleaders, as symbols of beauty and youth, as paragons of beauty in the American imagination, are always already white. (Bernardi 232)l.

Aiming to expose the presumed whiteness in pornography, Bernardi claims that the racialized representations, especially in interracial pornography, serve the superiority and the pleasure of the dominant white male. Thus, the fact that ideological racism remains powerful, as opposed to the material racism, could be reflected in whitewashed pornography. According to Bernardi, the construction of the white-centered pleasure largely depends on the dehumanization of people of color. He writes:

People of color on Greenway Link O’Rama are reduced to their exotic sexual organs, a form of fragmentation and fetishization that emphasizes historical constructed differences in race that ultimately dehumanize people of color … At the same time, this discourse positions people of color as worthy of a voracious consumption. Their body parts might not be “normal,” but they are definitely exotic, edible, and perishable. In fact, it is their constructed difference, the apparent abnormality, that facilitates desire, a Hegelian desire that ultimately defines whiteness as normal, ugly, and perverse. (Bernardi 234)

Although I agree the most with Bernardi’s framework (and less so with Williams), his framework assumes omniscient whiteness, and thus is limited. The dehumanization of people of color is true, but not the only truth. Bernardi emphasizes that people of color are represented as to-be-looked-at objects on the screen, and thus implicitly privileges whites as the presumed spectators. The Western gaze fails to take into account the vision of people of color. Consequently, as an Asian woman spectator, my pleasure in interracial pornography is thus rendered as even more “problematic,” since I am aware of the dehumanized representations and yet still find it arousing. The dissonance between allure and interracial lust thus enhances my identity as a “slutty Asian girl” in the white-centric framework.

“Productive Perversity”

How do I rethink this “problematic” pleasure from interracial pornography? Moral panicking about our pleasure might not be a productive response to the racialized sexuality in our daily lives. On the contrary, we might risk giving the dehumanized representations of people of color an easy pass. As Celine Parreñas Shimizu points out, “To panic about sexual, visual, or gendered images reifying Asian/American women is to ignore the importance of questioning how racialized sexuality constitutes subjects and identities” (Shimizu 18). Shimizu calls for attention to the agencies of Asian/American women by reflecting on not only on the representations of Asian/American women but also their pleasure, pain, trauma, and social experiences. She notes that

to reinsert sexual pleasure in discourses of racial pain would not only recast hypersexual images of race as unstable figures rather than knowable entities but would also acknowledge how moralism stealthily creeps in to discipline Asian/American women. (Shimizu 19)

Indeed, as Shimizu reminds us, while we analyze the racialized sexual hierarchy, we might too simply judge the stereotyped representations of people of color as “problematic,” thus “deprive[ing] ourselves of the profoundly interesting ways race, sex, performance, and visual culture work together to convey creativity, pleasure, power, and trauma simultaneously” (19). In other words, the embracement and reinterpretation of the hypersexualized image by Asian/American women can, and should, be viewed as a self-redefining performance and a political resistance to white-male-dominated narratives.

Toward redefining the hypersexuality of the representation of Asian/American women via situating them as subjects with agency, Shimizu advances a theory of “productive perversity” which empowers Asian/American women to embrace their sexualized representations: “Aiming to open up new discourses regarding the controversial representations of sex, I argue for embracing perversity as political” (23). Furthermore, Shimizu extends authorship from the act of representing oneself as a performer, producer, or filmmaker, to the act of viewing as a spectator. She argues for a triangulation of desire for spectatorship, authorship, and criticism. By doing so, Shimizu incorporates the living experiences of spectators while not privileging the white male’s gaze in the academic circle. She writes:

The scene of consuming Asian/American women’s hypersexual self-representations mirrors the bondage of pleasure and pain found in engaging sexuality as authors. For Asian/American women as objects of white male fantasy in representation, to reconcile the intense emphasis on sexuality as a being-for-others with sexuality that comprises our intimate self-recognition and our public everyday life remains a challenge. If engaging sexuality on scene and screen “perverts” Asian women, it may be a productive perversion worthy of exploration for what subjectivities emerge from this location of cultural formation and transformation. (Shimizu 24)

If we follow Shimizu’s triangulation to study our pleasure, what subjectivities might emerge during the process of a productive perversity? As a spectator, Shimizu’s theory of productive perversity leads to a possibility of self-reformation, of understanding my pleasure without rendering it “problematic.” My internalized narratives can be playful, in light of Kerner, while the externalized narratives of Asian women remain hypersexualized and alluring. Something unfathomable is there. I feel something. Criticizing racialized pornography as a scholar who studies whiteness, Bernardi remains skeptical of censorship. He writes: “One can critique the misogynist, racist, and homophobic aspects of pornography, call for media literacy, without advocating censorship or aligning with moral zealots” (Bernardi 223). In other words, with an awareness of my pleasure, I can still be critical without advocating the censorship of pornography due to moral panic.

I will move on to exploring the productive perversity generated by an amateur porn performer, and a Vietnamese-American actress, Minnie Scarlet.⁶ According to Pornhub’s yearly review, “Amateur” was the search term that “defined 2019.”⁷ In “How to Make Ethical Porn in an Industry Built on Racism and Fetishization,”^8⁠ Minnie explores the  racism that exists behind the scenes of the U.S. pornography industry. Based on her observations throughout her career, performers with lighter colors have the privilege to request extra payment for their “first IR” (interracial) scene, while darker performers might be turned down in their job offers because the lighter performers choose not to work with darker performers. Minnie remarks:

Performers should have control of who they fuck, which is absolutely fine with me, and I will never suggest that anybody is forced to fuck anybody but if you are in a position where you are given that choice—that’s a privilege in itself. And if you’re getting paid extra to fuck somebody just because they are a specific race, yikes, it’s hard to say that’s not racist. (Minnie)

Are there ethical ways to perform porn if these arousing representations are too often assumed to be inherently racist? Striving for agency, Minnie starts shooting for herself only. She creates two personal websites, xoMinnie.com and xoMinnieUncut.com, as archives of her amateur photosets, blogs, liveshows, and softcore and hardcore porns. Based on a membership system, viewers can gain full access by subscribing for a monthly fee. The “Tip Me” section allows spectators to support Minnie directly, with rewards offered by the performer such as signed prints and cam dates. Minnie also self-produces “Somethin’ Bout Minnie,” a freely available online Podcast where she “offers her commentary on society, pop culture, love, and everything in between as she snacks on sour patch candies (but only the watermelon ones) and rolls a blunt on top of her notebook full of highdeas.”^9⁠ Inspired by all of Minnie’s creative and playful resistances against the stereotypes in racialized pornography, I argue, the fact that “Amateur” as a popularly searched category that defined 2019 means much more than a trendy craving for an identical realism or verisimilitude.¹⁰ Porn studies scholars should consider the agencies of performers as well as spectators when discussing the self-produced amateur pornography.

Interracial Lust in Asia

In his “The ‘Law of Attraction’ in Interracial Homoerotic Desires”, Huai Bao points out the difficulty of opening up a diverse study of interraciality and multiraciality in a white-dominated context (Bao 46-57). Bao notes:

Post-colonial studies challenge Western ways of thinking of and reading the world. The imbalanced conversation between the colonist and colonized or ‘us’ and ‘them’ has been giving place to a trend towards multi-visions, developing into a negotiation between selectively appropriating otherness and maintaining the attributes of oneself. Although the de-colonized world allows for hybridity, the continuation of colonialism still constructs discursive hierarchies, with the Anglophone world on the top that accounts for most of the knowledge distribution. (54)

Bao incorporates his study of the clichéd stereotypes of interracial gay dating scenes in North-America with socioeconomic factors. The “law of attraction,” including the notion that opposites attract, should be examined with regard to the ever-changing economic status of a globalizing world, especially the booming economy of China in the last two decades. Examining the myth behind the success of a Thai film, Love of Siam (Chookiat Sakveerakul, 2007), Bao reminds us that interraciality and multiraciality are marketable. The construction of the “law of attraction” and the standard of beauty has been dominated by Hollywood, where the West maintains the cultural hierarchy via building the norms of beauty which serves the construction of whiteness.

However, if we adopt Bao’s “law of attraction,” which is largely related to the economic-social formation, smaller countries that lack economical agency might always be interpreted as cultural minorities. We might also risk viewing one of the largest economies in the world, China, as a cultural representative of Asia. Within the Sinophone world, there are multiple layers of identity, wherein language is only one factor. Although Bao creates a new vision alongside the regime of the Anglo-dominated academic world, we need to follow his path toward a complex study of racialized sexuality in countries other than the U.S..

If we take a look at Crazy Rich Asians (Jon M. Chu, 2018), an American romantic-comedy featuring an “all-Asian” cast, we can hardly ignore the fact that Hollywood is still polishing its cultural hegemony with the clichéstereotypes of the East. This film, with its $30 million budget, was a global box-office smash hit which generated more than $230 million worldwide. Not surprisingly, Crazy Rich Asians ironically exposes the whitewashing process of Hollywood via its constructions of Asianness for the West. This blockbuster has been widely discussed and critiqued for its misrepresentation of Singapore as an all-Chinese based society, while at the same time marginalizing and thus effacing the minorities on a globalized screen. It is absurd to believe that these English-speaking characters, who were treated as representatives of an “exotic” Asia, could possibly depict the diversity of Asia and Asia diaspora. What is Asianness? As José B. Capino notes: “‘Asian’ is not really a race—in fact, you’ll count at least three discrete ‘races’ among people of Asia—but a category of race favored by the West despite its arbitrary combination of physiological and geographic criteria” (Capino 207).

Since its release in 2018, reviews and discussions of the triumph of Crazy Rich Asians have dominated the online news. The director Jon M. Chu, a California-born American, describes Crazy Rich Asians as not a movie but as a movement that celebrates the diversity of Asian American communities. As a middle-class Taiwanese woman who has just immigrated to North-America, my living experience is not remotely similar to the fantasized East where leading characters indulge in materialism as much as possible. My intention in bringing up Crazy Rich Asians is to emphasize the fact that, especially in the Sinophone world, Asianness has always been a constantly changing Western product that we have been fed and consumed. The protagonists certainly are never us. In fact, non-Chinese native speakers, on screen or in real life, are usually categorized as “foreigners.” Furthermore, people who have multi-racial ancestry, especially related to Caucasian or European lineages, are also perceived as “foreigners,” as they share the “exotic” facial appearances. In Japan, “Half” (ハーフ Hāfu), a loanword from English which literally means “half-blood,” has been used to categorize the multiracial people, while “Mixed Blood Child” (hunxue’er 混血兒) is commonly used in the contemporary Sinophone world to describe multiracial people. With perpetual connotations of “foreignness,” the term “ABC” (American-Born Chinese) refers to natural born American citizens with Chinese descent. In short, the experience of watching Crazy Rich Asian for Sinophone viewers, and Asian viewers in general, might be hardly different from watching another Hollywood blockbuster starring all “foreigners,” with the minor exception that this film casted more Asian-Americans than the norm.

The concept of “foreigner” in Asia is essentially exclusive yet privileges whiteness, as a legacy of colonization. It is loosely based on race rather than nationality. In contemporary Japanese, the term “Gaijin” (外人 がいじん) literally means “outsiders,” and is usually used as a connotation for people who do not have Japanese ancestry, especially Caucasian and European people. People from Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, and the Philippines are not called “foreigners” but “foreign labor” (wailao 外勞) in highly developed countries such as Taiwan. The term “Cross Cultural Romance,” a slang known as CCR (or ㄈㄈㄔ in the Taiwanese Zhuyin phonetic system), exclusively refers to the relationship between Taiwanese girls and either white or black men, rarely Latino, and never Southeast Asian people. These Taiwanese girls who are illustrated as interested in foreigners are labeled as traitors to their Taiwanese culture.

Furthermore, in Asia, we see racialized constructions that are consistent with the representations of men and women of colors across pornography in North-America. In the pornography scenes, “foreigners” as a whole are also constructed as sexually aggressive and essentially insatiable. The size of foreigners’ penises is portrayed as a gigantic and mysterious object for the slutty Asian girls who couldn’t help but love the big (black) penis. Black men are animalized and equated to a threatening “big black cock (BBC).” Not surprisingly, Asian males and white females are barely seen in the same pornographic frame. The dehumanization is clear. We can rarely find images of people from Southeast Asia as subjects with agency appearing on the cinematic screen. Drawing on Richard Fung and Alice Walker, Bernardi writes:

“In pornography,” writes Alice Walker, “the black man is portrayed as being capable of fucking anything … even a piece of shit. He is defined solely by the size, readiness and unselectiveness of his cock.” … This is not to say that diverse forms of sexual expression are always racist. What makes these images racist is the way in which they are coded: to emphasize and enhance freak-show stereotypes that have a very long history in white cultures. The hate in these images is not located in the fantasy or sex itself, but, as Fung noted about Asian men in gay pornography, in the uniformity with which they reappear. (Bernardi 238, emphasis added)

On the one hand, as Bernardi points out, the unceasing re-presence in pornography of dehumanized Southeast Asians serves to construct the sexual hierarchy of whiteness. On the other, the constant absence on the cinematic screen, as in Crazy Rich Asians which I discussed above, renders Southeast Asians less able to access their agency and further embrace Shimizu’s notion of productive perversity.

Towards a Conclusion

When I was reporting my outline of this paper in our Affect theories seminar, one of my classmates, an Asian woman, told a joke in class: “I have heard that if we remove all the Asian Women porns, the whole internet will collapse.” Most of us laughed. And in a way she is right: if we recall the 2019 yearly review of Pornhub, which was mentioned at the outset of this essay.¹¹ At the time, I even said “You’re welcome!” to my classmates, with an awareness that the racialized representation of Asian women could be politically performed as playful. Through that act of performing, I ama subject with agency. As an Asian female student who is studying film in the U.S., it seems that I am “privileged” to make jokes about my own ethnicity on the screen without sounding like a racist. But, can it be read as a politically productive act? More examples can be found in contemporary stand-up comedy acts and also our own daily life. However, what if this joke was made by people who are not Asian women? Is it still laughable, and pleasurable? What about all those ethnic jokes that make us laugh with a sense of guilt? Can we perform, interpret, and criticize them as a process of redefining the perversity, as productive practices?

In light of Kerner’s insights on arousal, I am able to explore the ways by which allure can function on the levels of internalized and externalized narratives, and thus think beyond the stereotyped narratives of pleasure. Studying the complexities of sexualized representations, Shimizu’s theory of “productive perversity” reminds Asian female students like myself that we do not always have to situate our pleasures as problematic. At the same time, I wonder how the dominant white male performers, spectators, and critics embrace this perversity, as Shimizu suggests, in a politically productive way. Is it another form of privilege that only belongs to people of certain races? How do people other than those of the Anglophone world embrace the productive perversity within their own cultures? Could it be productively conducted in the discipline of ethnic studies? How do internalized and externalized narratives intermingle with our embracement of productive perversity? These are the questions we must grapple with if we are to move toward a politically productive conceptual framework of pleasure.

Works Cited 

Bao, Huai. “The“Law of Attraction” in Interracial Homoerotic Desires.” SQS Journal of Queer Studies 1-2, 2012, pp. 46-57.

Bernardi, Daniel. “Interracial Joysticks: Pornorgraphy’s Web of Racist Attractions.” Pornography: Film and Culture, ed. Peter Lehman. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2006, pp. 220-243.

Capino, José B. “Asian College Girls and Oriental Men with Bamboo Poles: Reading Asian Pornography.” Pornography: Film and Culture, ed. Peter Lehman, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2006, pp. 207.

Courtney, Susan. “From Colormutedness to Interracial Dialogue (A Love letter to my MF Students).” FLOW, April 2017. https://www.flowjournal.org/2017/04/from-a-love-letter-to-my-mf-students/. Accessed 16 Dec. 2019.

Crazy Rich Asians. Dir. Jon M. Chu. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2018. Film.

Kerner, Aaron. “Arousal.” Affective Cinema. Draft Chapter, Department of Cinema, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, 2019.

Love of Siam. Dir. Chookiat Sakveerakul. Sahamongkol Film International, 2007. Film.

Mulvey, Laura. Fetishism and Curiosity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

Scarlet, Minnie. “How to Make Ethical Porn in an Industry Built on Racism and Fetishization.” VICE, 21 Dec. 2016. https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/aev8ga/how-to-make-ethical-porn-in-an-industry-built-on-racism-and-fetishization.. Accessed 16 Dec. 2019.

—. “Somethin’ Bout Minnie.” Podcast. https://www.buzzsprout.com/141281. Accessed 15 Dec. 2019.

Shimuzu, Celine Parreñas. “The Hypersexuality of Asian/American Women: Toward a Politically Productive Perversity on Screen and Scene.” The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007.

“The 2019 Year in Review.” Pornhub INSIGHTS, 11 Dec. 2019. https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2019-year-in-review. Accessed 15 Dec. 2019.     

Williams, Linda. “Motion and E-motion: Lust and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible.’” Journal of Visual Culture 18, no. 1, April 2019, pp. 97-129.  

—. “Skin Flicks on the Racial Border: Pornography, Exploitation, and Interracial Lust.” Porn Studies, ed. Linda Williams, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004, pp. 271-308.

Notes