Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias

253 Pages·2014·3.607 MB·English

by  Eng-Beng Lim

BROWN BOYS AND RICE QUEENS
SEXUAL CULTURES
General Editors: José Esteban Muñoz and Ann Pellegrini
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue Manning the Race: Reforming Black
Samuel R. Delany Men in the Jim Crow Era
Marlon Ross
Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in
the Culture of Social Relations In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender
Phillip Brian Harper Bodies, Subcultural Lives
Judith Halberstam
In Your Face: 9 Sexual Studies
Mandy Merck Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch:
Essays on Race and Sexuality
Tropics of Desire: Interventions
Dwight A. McBride
from Queer Latino America
José Quiroga God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics
of Religious Violence
Murdering Masculinities: Fantasies of Gender
Michael Cobb
and Violence in the American Crime Novel
Greg Forter Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and
the Black American Intellectual
Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton
Robert Reid-Pharr
Affair and the National Interest
Edited by Lauren Berlant and Lisa Duggan The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in
American Literary and Cultural Memory
Black Gay Man: Essays
Lázaro Lima
Robert Reid-Pharr
Foreword by Samuel R. Delany Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the
Body in Nineteenth-Century America
Passing: Identity and Interpretation
Dana Luciano
in Sexuality, Race, and Religion
Edited by María Carla Sánchez Cruising Utopia: The Then and
and Linda Schlossberg There of Queer Futurity
José Esteban Muñoz
The Explanation for Everything:
Essays on Sexual Subjectivity Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism
Paul Morrison Scott Herring
The Queerest Art: Essays on Extravagant Abjection: Blackness,
Lesbian and Gay Theater Power, and Sexuality in the African
Edited by Alisa Solomon and Framji Minwalla American Literary Imagination
Darieck Scott
Queer Globalizations: Citizenship
and the Afterlife of Colonialism Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries
Edited by Arnaldo Cruz Malavé Karen Tongson
and Martin F. Manalansan IV
Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino
Queer Latinidad: Identity Literature and Queer Reading
Practices, Discursive Spaces Martin Joseph Ponce
Juana María Rodríguez
Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled
Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and Michael Cobb
the Limits of Religious Tolerance
Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding
Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini
Performance in the Asias
Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Eng-Beng Lim
Latinization of American Culture
Frances Négron-Muntaner
Eng-Beng Lim
BROWN BOYS AND RICE QUEENS
Spellbinding Performance in the Asias
a
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
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© 2014 by New York University
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may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lim, Eng-Beng, 1973-
Brown boys and rice queens : spellbinding performance in the Asias / Eng-Beng Lim.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8147-6089-5 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-8147-5940-0 (pb)
1. Queer theory—Asia—Case studies. 2. Sex role—Asia—Case studies. 3. Asia—Race
relations—Case studies. 4. Orientalism—Case studies. 5. Postcolonialism—Asia—Case
studies. I. Title.
HQ76.3.A78L56 2013
305.3095—dc23
2013017728
New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,
and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.
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Also available as an ebook.
Dedicated to the ones
Who in the struggle for a more equal and just world
Face the unmitigated mutations of colonial and neoliberal discourses
Like infections that wear you out
The best among us
With the guise of care that protects the Self-same.
You watch in disgust, sickened 
But know better
That nothing could wipe out your queer spirit
Or the labor of your kind
In the solidarity of our minds.
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contents
Preface: The Queer Genesis of a Project ix
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction: Tropic Spells, Performance, and the Native Boy 1
1. A Colonial Dyad in Balinese Performance 41
2. The Global Asian Queer Boys of Singapore 91
3. G.A.P. Drama, or The Gay Asian Princess Goes to the United States 137
Conclusion: Toward a Minor-Native Epistemology in 167
Transcolonial Borderzones
Notes 191
Index 221
About the Author 233
vii
9780814760895_lim 3p.indd 7 9/10/13 12:01 PM
PREFACE
The Queer Genesis of a Project
It is now twelve years since a queer sort of Asian encounter started it all.
Shortly after I arrived in California from Singapore, my former adviser,
in a moment of casual butch-camp ribaldry, asked for my thoughts on
rice queens and a Balinese ritual purportedly choreographed by a Ger-
man guy involving many Balinese men as monkeys. I was baffled and
fascinated by her que(e)ry and affect as she tried to bring out the queer
resonances of a colonial seduction scenario between the white man and
the native boy survived by the trope of the Asian houseboy. It was a con-
nection that could not be more far-fetched. The trope, though prevalent
in the contemporary West, was not on my East Asian cultural radar.
Even farther removed was the figure of the rice queen, a gay Asiaphile
from Euro-America whose primary attraction is the nubile, innocent
brown boy. The boy may be any (underage or adult) Asian male who fits
ix
Preface
the bill by virtue of his looks, affect, or infantilization. As for the gnarly
tale of queer miscegenation in a traditional Southeast Asian ritual, I was
simply flabbergasted for not knowing more. How could I have missed
it? That burning sentiment, butch-camp ribaldry, and a set of queer
question marks around the brown boy ignited this research project.
Growing up in Charlton Park, Singapore, I was raised on a steady
diet of Chinese, Japanese, Cantonese, Taiwanese, and Korean popular
culture that featured all-Asian pop stars, heroes, or protagonists. Hol-
lywood films and an odd mix of mainstream British, Brazilian, and U.S.
soap operas and sitcoms like Mind Your Own Language, Isaura the Slave
Girl, and The Cosby Show supplemented my formative transcultural
repertoire with glimpses of stereotypical racial performance and end-
less heterosexual storylines. My references did not include butch-camp,
rice queen, and houseboy. I was more familiar with the transvestites on
Bugis Street, an infamous red-light district area that was “cleaned up”
by the Singapore government in the 1980s; its queer legacy was carried
forth by a lone Indian drag queen, Kumar, at the now-defunct Boom
Boom Room, where I spent many weekends as an adoring fan among
beautiful boys. Lost in the cultural translation of our conversation was
the fact that at twenty-five years of age, I was woefully ignorant of any
gay racial fetish, let alone the campy seduction possibilities of white/
native, man/boy, daddy/son, master/houseboy that crossed Euro-Asian
racial lines.
But I had, or so I thought, queer theory and postmodern sexuality
under (alas, evidently above) my belt. My proudest academic achieve-
ment to date, an undergraduate thesis on Tony Kushner’s Angels in
America written at the National University of Singapore in 1998, had
dutiful if also overachieving citations of queer, feminist, and perfor-
mance theorists, from Michel Foucault to Judith Butler to Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick. Little did I know that the heady days of queer theory were
about to wane, or so it was claimed, as I rode its last wave to graduate
school. Despite how well it served me around the erotics and politics of
angelic supersexuality, queer theory did not prepare me for this campy
encounter or the irony of a butch bottom donning a Xena Warrior Prin-
cess T-shirt. “Now why would I be interested in queens working at the
rice fields?” I asked with precious indignation as she flashed a wicked
smile and with that insouciance cast the spell of the colonial dyad. It
x