The Wily Filipino

Ethnic Studies Porn.

My department chair is all over the news that Lucy Liu is heading a project to make a Charlie Chan film -- with Liu as Chan's granddaughter (also named Charlie) in the lead role. Some "pro-bono" advice from the AAS department, as he wrote: "lots of sex and violence; but to acknowledge the Asians, with lots of hoisin sauce and sesame oil (Lee Kam Kee can be the corporate sponsor) for body rubs."

I have a better idea: incorporate the sesame oil rubs into a sequel to (or better version of) Darrell Hamamoto's Skin on Skin. That way it can really be porn with a wink. (I was joking yesterday with some fellow professors that writing a script could be a collaborative faculty project over spring break.)

I mentioned Hamamoto's film to one of my grad student classes today -- I had briefly mentioned Richard Fung's article on Asian men in gay porn -- and got a frighteningly enthusiastic response. Here, our previous scholarly discussion devolved very quickly from the life of the mind to the gutter.

One of my students, W., hated the little snippets of Hamamoto's film he saw: "If you're going to make porn, then you have to make real porn." (Let's just say that my student clearly liked his porn a little, uh, raincoaty, since he mentioned bukkake -- a word I never thought I'd use in this blog -- and not, as I put it, "couples" stuff.) "Real porn, not ethnic studies porn."

That got the class laughing. We disagreed: "Ethnic studies porn, that sounds great," said one. "Conscious porn!" said another.

Broken down into a series of vignettes, "ethnic studies porn" might work; adding something genuinely theoretical to the mix (and not just a CNN-like crawl running underneath the action) would be at once pleasurable and, well, pleasurable. I thought a flashback to the Third World Strike ("Make love not war, baby!"), complete with bushy-haired activists would be one possible vignette. W. had some scary ideas of his own, too: one scenario involved a Fu Manchu character and his coterie of enslaved white women ("This one's called 'Heathen Porn'," he said). (I mentioned this to Madeline and she said, "That just sounds vindictive," which I think was the point.)

The first vignette that comes to mind would be the one with the Chinese food delivery guy and the bored housewife:

He: "...and with the pork buns, that comes to $32.69."

She: "Oops! I seem to have dropped my change. Let me pick it up."

[or]

He: "...and with the pork buns, that comes to $32.69."

She: "I like that." [slowly] "Pork. Buns. 69."

But that isn't ethnic studies.

Guy: "...I mean, it's still an extremely Eurocentric curriculum once you come down to it."

Other guy: "I totally agree -- the students get to read nothing but the narratives of the dominant people in power."

Guy: "Of course, the students don't have to be all submissive about it."

[pause]

Other Guy: "Have you ever been handcuffed?"

Or:

Woman: "...and the additional problem with 'straight' and 'white' being the unmarked categories is that it forces you to retreat into these smaller, divided facets of your identity! Why can't I be Filipino American and lesbian and Asian American and second-generation immigrant all at the same time? I'm really, really sick and tired of having to perform all this 'identity management!'"

[pause]

Other woman: "Looks like you need a massage."

Or:

She: "...and so he argues that Blacks and Asians have been exchanging ideas and lifestyles for centuries."

He: "Which is why talking about hybridity is problematic --"

She: "-- because it presupposes two existing cultural purities."

He: "I guess that's related to why sociologists have been fascinated with interracial sex for decades."

She: "Well... there are other more obvious reasons for that fascination, no?"

[pause]

He: "Looks like you need a massage."

Anyhow, spring break starts tomorrow, and the whole family (except Shelby the dog) is taking off for Philly, Manhattan and Boston. I'll be mostly on babysitting detail, with maybe a couple of conference panels on the side. But ethnic studies porn... hmm...

Posted by the wily filipino at March 19, 2004 08:49 AM