Screening Shirtless AZN Men: The Full Frontal Power of Intimate Internet Industries

For the first heterosexual male porn star of Asian descent in the West, Keni Styles’s tumblr project shows the full frontal power of the face so as to increase the representations of diverse Asian and Asian American male sexualities online. In his new video Look, I’m AZN!, filmmaker and scholar Nguyen Tan Hoang gathers the ways in which Asian men use such online gay cruising sites such as grinder to play with the visibility of their racial identity in relation to the sexual practices and partners they desire. This presentation explores how Asian/ American men use the internet to register one’s racial visibility and the particularity of one’s desires to explode their usual ascription as asexual, passive, and undesirable. This work is part of my next book project The Proximity of Other Skins: Screening Transnational Sexualities.

Celine Parreñas Shimizu is a Visiting Professor in Cinema and Sociology (Sexuality) Studies at SFSU and Distinguished Scholar of Feminist Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. A former Full Professor at UCSB, she is an award-winning film scholar and filmmaker. Her books are The Feminist Porn Book (2013), Straitjacket Sexualities (2012) and The Hypersexuality of Race (2007). Distributed by Progressive Films and Third World Newsreel, her films include the feature documentary Birthright: Mothering Across Difference (2009) and the experimental short documentary The Fact of Asian Women (2004). She publishes widely in top journals such as Concentric, Frontiers: Journal of Women’s Studies, Journal of Asian American Studies, positions, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Signs, Sexualities, Theater Journal, Wide Angle and Yale Journal of Law and Feminism. Currently, she edits for Oxford Bibliographies Online and Brill. Her panel review work includes service for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation. Currently, she is U.S. Area Editor for the journal Asian Diasporas and Visual Cultures of the Americas. She received her Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University (2001), her M.F.A. in Production and Directing from UCLA School of Theatre, Film and Television (1996), and her B.A. in Ethnic Studies from U.C. Berkeley (1992). For more information, go to www.celineshimizu.com.