A twist and a twirl: Examining two scenes of dancing
In the above video montage, I have intercut footage from both Columbus and Burning, atop the song “Eat the Night” by the Etettes, which features in Columbus. In both of these films, around the middle of the runtime, the lead female characters dance for the lead male characters. In Columbus, Casey dances in an empty parking lot after Jin buys her some alcohol. She feels hurt due to learning that her mother has not been heading to her night job, instead possibly searching for drugs, and dances and drinks to blow off some steam. In Burning, Hae-mi smokes a joint with Jong-su and Ben at Jong-su’s house in the north, by the DMZ. Hae-mi gets up and dances topless, assumedly for her own enjoyment, yet the film clearly places her as an object of desire for Jong-su and a way to show Ben’s apathy, seemingly not affected by Hae-mi’s nudity at all.
I argue that these two scenes are not just coincidental similarities. Neither scene features men on display nor in joy. Jin Lee either appears unamused or actually asleep, with Jong-su and Ben more casually amused or even disgusted. These two scenes both show that, despite any efforts by the films to represent Casey or Hae-mi as complex characters, they both ultimately serve as objects for the male characters and as plot points to further illustrate tensions surrounding masculinity. Additionally, these scenes are little more than visual fluff given that the scenes directly after the dances carry more weight. After Casey dances, the film cuts to Jin and Casey in Jin’s home, leaving it ambiguous as to whether or not they slept together. After Hae-mi dances, she passes out. Ben and Jong-su discuss travel and Jong-su’s childhood. Later, after Hae-mi awakes and right before she departs, Jong-su calls Haemi a whore to her face and then tells Ben he will keep an eye out for greenhouses to burn. Importantly, both scenes depict and deepen the men’s relationship with the women but do so in ways that attempt to reinforce or assert their own masculinity.
As examined within the discussion around Columbus, the Minority Masculinity Stress Theory finds that nonwhite men may attempt to regain their masculinity through roles of oppressor in other areas of their lives. Jin Lee attempts to control or act as an authority to the women in his life. Ben in Burning is a classic manipulator, both of men and women, but very clearly sets his sights on controlling the appearance, livelihoods, and social statuses of women. Chua and Fujino (1999) make clear an emergence of a particular type of Asian American masculinity that at once opposes white hegemony, but in this opposition, constructs hegemonic hierarchies that place Asian American men at the top. Asian American men cannot fully sustain white hegemonic masculine practice but they can create and reinforce a system that privileges male heterosexuality.
So, it is made clear within the films and my montage that Asian American men and white men have access to different forms of power that particularly emphasize bodily autonomy, gender hierarchies, and power over women, to varying degrees. The question then becomes how can films at once engage with the historical denomination of Asian American men as feminized and physically weak without having to simply mirror the structures of power that are created by and for white men? The answer partially lies in choosing to queer Asian American men and Asian American cinema itself.
Queering Asian American Masculinity
Crystal Parikh and David L. Eng write on queering Asian American masculinities, creating a parallel between gender identity and diaspora. With an emphasis on both queer identities and diasporic identities being defined in mutability, Parikh and Eng defer from a stabilized identity as an endpoint for either transnationality or masculinity. Eng focuses on using queerness as a method of unfurling Asian American identities from their hegemonic origins. He writes:
“queerness as critical methodology… comes to describe, affect, and encompass a much larger Asian American constituency- whatever their sexual identities or practices- whose historically disavowed status as U.S. citizen-subjects under punitive immigration and exclusion laws renders them "queer" as such… I am focusing on a politics of queerness that can function for Asian American studies as a method of wide critique, considering at once a nexus of social differences and concerns as they dynamically underpin the formation of Asian American subjectivities” (40-41).
Eng establishes queer frameworks as not only addressing the demands and challenges of gender and sexuality, but also in defining citizenship and nationality as fluid, flexible conceptions that are not destined to arrive at any stable endpoint. Seeing gender roles and diasporic identity as tied together, impossible to make fully distinct one way or the other, is key to understanding how John Cho and Steven Yeun must create their star personas to fall in multiple categories of constant contestation and flux. These vectors include assertive, yet not dominant, masculinity and having to juggle what it means being Korean in America, American in Korea, and just Korean American in general. These negotiations of identity are never fully categorized, rather - as this project hopefully shows - nationality and gender diffuse into one another.
As Stuart Hall summarizes in his conception of différance, the diasporic individual “is always either over- or under-determined, either an excess or a supplement. There is always something 'left over'” (230). Perhaps the future of Asian American masculinity represented in film texts does not have to play within the rules of white or nonwhite masculinity at all. With such an effort to either claim a position at the top or present oneself as something distinct from whiteness, the ones who ultimately are given the most torture are the ones who stand behind men: everyone else. Columbus, in its own effort to find an alternative form of masculinity, procures Jin Lee as a father figure, friend, and lover of Casey’s. Columbus stretches Jin’s character too thin, at once over-determining his status as a masculine presence and under-determining his ability to have his own interiority play out without having to be defined by his relationship with Casey (in more emotional capacities) or Eleanor (in sexual assertions of manhood). Burning, on the other hand, is much more explicit in its conflation of nationality and masculinity, where Ben’s more cosmopolitan masculinity is implied to be due to his traveling and eschewing of Korean masculine conventions. Where he is not taken by Hae-mi’s nude body, nor her clear romantic affections for him, he remains un-possessed by the feminine strategy, his power originating from a masculine stoicism that cannot be disturbed by a feminine agent. His masculinity is over-determined as his source of power, instead of his class.
