In Spoiled, Summer Kim Lee examines how contemporary Asian American artists challenge expectations that their work should repair the wounds of racial trauma. Kim Lee turns to the “spoiled”—the racialized, gendered body and all that it consumes, wrecks, and inflicts in its desire and excess—in visual culture, performance, music, and literature. Reading works by Cato Ouyang, Patty Chang, Wu Tsang, TJ Shin, Jes Fan, and others, Kim Lee highlights moments of hostility and deformation that spoil idealizations of Asian Americanness and incite modes of feeling and relating that relinquish fantasies of wholeness, power, and control. She observes the latent aggressive behaviors and negative affects in Asian American aesthetic practice: the embarrassment of asociality, the imposition of speaking as someone else, and the indulgence of ravenous appetites. In so doing, Kim Lee questions the political desires for repair expressed in “feeling Asian” and stays with the damage that spoilage creates as integral to the kinds of repair that Asian Americans seek.

Summer Kim Lee is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. Ripe for Spoiling  1
1. Staying In: The Autoeroticism of Asian American Asociality, in Earnest  35
2. Using Quotations: The Risk of Speaking as Someone Else  67
3. Cold Leftovers: Out of Touch with Asiatic Femininity’s Material Remains  99
4. Injured Enough: Depending on the Wounds of Analogy  135
Coda. Sweet, Selfish Ends  169
Notes  177
Bibliography  203
Index  225