Chapter 17 - Transnational Sexualities

Summary

This chapter sheds light on different forms of cultural production that perpetuate stereotypes of racialized sexualization growing out of specific histories of US transnationalism in Southeast Asia. Tracing the Butterfly figure from Giacomo Puccini’s 1904 opera to David Henry Hwang’s repurposing of it to interrogate its imperial complicities and racist underpinnings, the chapter demonstrates how American culture has constructed its others to justify its colonial and neocolonial adventures. In so doing, the essay highlights some of the ways in which Asian and Asian American cultural producers, including Hwang and Jessica Hagedorn, have resisted those constructs both by inverting them and by establishing alternative ways to represent marginalized experiences under cultural hegemony. The aesthetic work performed by these writers and dramatists decenters the white psyche in the relationship between Asia and the United States. while also seeking to undermine the white supremacy that centering enabled.