Table Of ContentThe Exquisite Corpse of Asian America
SEXUAL CULTURES
General Editors: José Esteban Muñoz and Ann Pellegrini
Titles in the series include the following:
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of
Samuel R. Delany Queer Futurity
José Esteban Muñoz
Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the
Afterlife of Colonialism Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism
Edited by Arnaldo Cruz Malavé and Scott Herring
Martin F. Manalansan IV
Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power,
Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, and Sexuality in the African American
Discursive Spaces Literary Imagination
Juana María Rodríguez Darieck Scott
Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries
Limits of Religious Tolerance Karen Tongson
Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini
Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino
Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Literature and Queer Reading
Latinization of American Culture Martin Joseph Ponce
Frances Négron-Muntaner
Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled
Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in Michael Cobb
the Jim Crow Era
Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding
Marlon Ross
Performance in the Asias
In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Eng-Beng Lim
Bodies, Subcultural Lives
Transforming Citizenships: Transgender
Judith Halberstam
Articulations of the Law
Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays on Isaac West
Race and Sexuality in the U.S.
The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption
Dwight A. McBride
and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture
God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Vincent Woodard, Edited by Justin A. Joyce
Religious Violence and Dwight A. McBride
Michael Cobb
Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other
Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Latina Longings
Black American Intellectual Juana María Rodríguez
Robert Reid-Pharr
Sensational Flesh: Race, Power,
The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American and Masochism
Literary and Cultural Memory Amber Jamilla Musser
Lázaro Lima
The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America:
Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Biopolitics, Biosociality, and
Nineteenth-Century America Posthuman Ecologies
Dana Luciano Rachel C. Lee
The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America
Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies
Rachel C. Lee
a
NEW Y ORK UNIVERS ITY P RESS
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Contents
Corpse
Blood Introduction: Parts/Parturition 1
Kidney
1. How a Critical Biopolitical Studies Lens
Lymphocytes
Alters the Questions We Ask vis-à-vis Race 39
Teeth 2. The Asiatic, Acrobatic, and Aleatory Biologies
Feet of Cheng-Chieh Yu’s Dance Theater 66
Gamete
Vagina 3. Pussy Ballistics and Peristaltic Feminism 97
GI Tract
Parasite 4. Everybody’s Novel Protist: Chimeracological
Chromosome Entanglements in Amitav Ghosh’s Fiction 126
Head 5. A Sideways Approach to Mental Disabilities:
Incarceration, Kinesthetics, Affect, and Ethics 161
Breasts 6. Allotropic Conclusions: Propositions on
Skin Race and the Exquisite Corpse 210
Tissue culture Tail Piece 245
Notes 259
Bibliography 295
Index 313
About the Author 325
An insert of color images follows page 138.
>> v
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Introduction
Parts/Parturition
Part to Whole
Cut your arm. Cut.
See. You feel no pain
’cause you already so-wa inside
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
spread the cut you just made
before the blood get hard . . . .
Then we write her name . . . .
— L ois Ann Yamanaka, Saturday Night at the
Pahala Theater, 1993
With respect to the human parts, organs, fetuses and em-
bryos you are viewing, Premier . . . cannot independently
verify that they do not belong to persons executed while
incarcerated in Chinese prisons.
— language to be posted by “Body Worlds” exhibitor,
Premier Entertainments, by order of the New York State
Attorney General’s Office, 2008
Lois Ann Yamanaka’s poem series, “Parts,” included in Saturday Night
at the Pahala Theater, launches a bitter complaint against women’s
work of cleaning, cooking, and raising children. Written in the blazon
tradition — b ut one that declines to sanctify a female subject through
praising a single body part1 — interior poems of the series titled “The
Brain,” “The Face,” “The Nostril,” and “The Foot” highlight its speaker’s
>> 1
2 << Introduction
own corporeal burdens — her “splitting headache” — and the bodily
harm she will visit upon others if they delay their domestic chores:
“Want me / to punch / your face in? / . . . Now get / your ass / in your
room / and fold / all the laundry. / Then iron / your father’s shirts”
(“The Face,” 66). Section 3, “Girl in Parts,” relays the speaker’s hostile
response to her daughter’s divulgence of being raped: “Why you had
to tell me this? / . . . Don’t you ever talk / about this again” (73). In the
crudely titled “The Crack,” the speaker commands the girl — h er daugh-
ter, presumably — to shut her mouth and seal her other lips, the labia:
“you going think / you popular / but all they thinking / is you spread
fast” (71). The focalized body parts shift from those of the mother to
those of the daughter, with both of these female subjects lacking owner-
ship of their bodies.
While these stanzas directly conjure parental disapproval as key
to carving up the “girl in[to] parts,” the divisive social structuring of
Hawai’i’s plantation economy implicitly contributes to this state of
affairs. After overthrowing Hawai’i’s Queen Lili’uokalani in 1893, Amer-
ican missionaries and businessmen turned these Pacific Islands into
an archipelago of fruit and sugar plantations. Pursuing a strategy of
divide and conquer, plantation owners recruited workers from different
nations, counting on linguistic and ethnic differences to prevent col-
lective labor organizing. At the same time, plantation overseers needed
a language to command their multilingual workforce. Local pidgin
English — assembled from Japanese, Native Hawaiian, Portuguese,
Tagalog, and Chinese elements — grew out of these conditions. Written
in this local dialect, Yamanaka’s poetic apostrophe (i.e., direct address
to a person or thing, often absent) brings into being the female body
through this historically specific “language of command.” Providing its
own theorization of writing in relation to embodiment and the biologi-
cal body, the poem’s discourse — its series of imperatives — p erforma-
tively instantiate this daughter or “you” as a divisible corporeality.
While the conjured person or thing (“girl in parts”) addressed in
this poem stays consistent, the speaker in the final poem of this series,
which includes the excerpt quoted in the epigraph, switches from a
mother to a teenage peer — a “14-year-old friend” who details an act
of self-cutting. This action also places the apostrophed subject in the
domain of clinical health. Even though this final poem, titled “What the
Introduction >> 3
Hands Do about All of these Parts / Advice from a 14-Year-Old Friend,”
shifts its speaker from adult parent to adolescent pal, there is no lessen-
ing of the logic of fragmentation. The hospital, rather than the house-
hold, now provides the lexicon for processing this divisibility:
Take the needle. Take it. . . .
Push um deep, the needle,
till you see the white part
of your meat. Spread um —
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Kind of gray, yeah the feeling?
Going away, the pain inside,
‘cause you getting numb.
Your whole body not throbbing yet?
I remember the first time
I did this. Felt so good . . .
[when] the blood started dripping
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . Tasted like rust.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
My father took me emergency that day.
That was the first time
I seen him cry.
No. No need towel.
Lie down. Let the blood
drip on the sidewalk.
Then we write her name
with the blood
and when dry,
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . she going know
How much you love her.
In relation to continuing debates in Asian Americanist criticism on
whether representational fullness constitutes the ideological goal of the
field,2 Yamanaka’s poem teases with the promise of self-enacted expres-
sion (what the hands can decisively do), but in the end neither reveals
