<http://purl.org/dc/terms/description>
"At its most general level, this thesis will engage with theoretical dialogues surrounding the\r\ncomplex intersectionality of race, sex and representation, especially in Asian American cultural\r\nproduction. On another level, I set up an interpretive tension between a Foucauldian genealogical\r\napproach and a kind of liberatory post-colonial approach engendered by a number of theorists,\r\nincluding Frantz Fanon. The specific field of representation that I will explore will be\r\npornography\u2014a medium/genre that raises, in a problematic but I think important fashion, the\r\nquestion of sexual discourses and the bodies, desires and pleasures which are their targets. It is a\r\nfield that also crudely exposes the 'gendering of ethnicity' or the 'eroticization of race,' a\r\nsignifying practice that has, as many critics have argued, historically formed the racialized subject.\r\nThe specific texts upon which these issues will be negotiated come from disparate quadrants of\r\n' Asian America.' These will include papers that in various ways formulate a pro-porn position as\r\na hedonistic counter to the 'emasculation' of the Asian body that is produced by the 'white gaze.'\r\nThe core of this study will be a reading of Japanese American writer David Mura ' s memoirs. In\r\nthese works, Mura at once 'confesses' to a number of sexual 'transgressions' and 'disorders,'\r\nincluding an addiction to pornography, and further manufactures a concept of race and sexuality\r\nout of those experiences. I will argue that M u r a naturalizes or 'essentializes' the raced body along\r\nmasculinist lines in order to evoke an ethos of psycho-somatic healing and community\r\nreconciliation. The thesis will conclude with an attempt to salvage this ethos from what might be\r\ncalled its 'implication in power strategies' by rearticulating it through the work of post-colonial\r\ntheorist, psychiatrist and revolutionary, Frantz Fanon. His preoccupation with the erotic,\r\ncolonizing gaze provides an illuminating counterpart to Mura's fixation with the pornographic,\r\nracializing gaze and points enigmatically to the possibility of a critical-emancipatory praxis of the\r\nbody and its representation."@en
<https://open.library.ubc.ca/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/831/items/1.0099551>