[00:00:33] Host: Chapman University's Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences and Past Forward present Engaging the World: Leading the Conversation on Gender and Sexuality. In this series, we explore how culture, power, institutions, and social structures shape our understandings of gender and sexuality as the sexual mores of society evolve. We engage with doctors, artists, activists, and scholars to examine the increasingly visible spectrum of gender and sexuality and give voice to celebration and against inequality and exclusion. In this episode, we connect with Professor Takeo Rivera to discuss his project and book, Model Minority Masochism, Performing the Cultural Politics of Asian American Masculinity.

So I want to start, I know this is going to be a big question, but I want to have you give an explanation of the project and your book, Model Minority Masochism, Performing the Cultural Politics of Asian American Masculinity. I know to summarize an entire book is a lot, but I'm, you know, give us just a brief understanding so that we get a little context of where we're going to go with this conversation.

[00:01:53] Rivera: Totally, yeah. And, you know, I should frame this in terms of this book being, it's an academic monograph. So it's written in that way. And I want this conversation to be kind of a decoder ring in a lot of ways to make it more, to have it make a little more sense. Like if someone discovers this podcast after reading the book, being like, why did I just go through this? Hopefully this podcast will help the experience a little bit. And so, but I think, so the book, Model Minority Masochism is essentially arguing that Asian Americans have had a masochistic relationship to the model minority. It's a pretty, it's like right there in the title with a particular emphasis on masculine Asian Americans. I think the main thing I'm trying to say about that is that Asian Americans find themselves confronted with this model minority positionality.

First thing I want to say is that the model minority is oftentimes framed as a myth. But I, along with a lot of others, contemporary scholars in Asian American studies don't necessarily agree that it is a myth in the sense of it being false, because the model minority still has a profound ideological power that can make itself true through people's attachments and socio-political positioning. So there's a way in which the model minority, even if it can be sort of seen as a stereotype, that's actually kind of a misleading way of describing how the model minority functions within the broader context of American racial capitalism. And the model minority is, again, better described as an ideology. It can be described as a positionality. It can be described as a scenario. It has a lot of different elements. But to call it a myth is slightly misleading in many respects.

So essentially what I'm saying is that Asian Americans have a masochistic relationship to the model minority oftentimes when they're racialized into the position of being Asian American. And this takes place in one of two ways. There can either be a kind of masochistic embrace of stereotype or of positionality, the embrace of the model minority position. Or one can recognize that one has been seen as a model minority and then self-flagellate and punish oneself for having been put into that position. So that's kind of what I distinguish between what I'm effectively calling a primary and secondary form of model minority masochism. There's one form that happily assumes the model minority position, and there's one that flagellates oneself from having been a model minority. They're both forms of masochism in different ways.

[00:04:48] Host: Tell us about your experience of this. Is this coming from your lived experience? I know at the end of the book you include some poems that you wrote at a young age, which was fascinating to read because I wrote the same thing but from a different context. Obviously we are two different people with two different experiences, but there must have been something that was happening in that time for males in general. But what was your experience in that kind of lived perspective of the model minority? Were you the one self-flagellating?

[00:05:28] Rivera: Yeah, that's a great question. So, to make things sort of concrete, I went to undergrad at Stanford University, and it was a lovely experience in many respects. But I definitely felt a little odd about the fact that Asian Americans who were interested in things like racial justice, politics, and social justice more broadly, who were interested in those types of movements, were a very small minority of Asian Americans on campus. And the majority of Asian Americans that I encountered at a place like Stanford really kept their distance from that type of work, who are much more invested in sort of like beelining through STEM fields, becoming successful engineers or doctors or finance bros. I felt that there was this weird dissonance between the fact that I'm taking these Asian American studies courses at Stanford and learning about the myth of the model minority as this thing that's like totally wrong. And then being surrounded by classmates who had no problem with effectively being the model minorities we're supposed to be disproving. And oftentimes coming from upper middle-class backgrounds and then like shoring up their sort of bourgeois status even further.

It seemed to me at an early age that there was something of a sort of a denial or a disavowal occurring within the field of Asian American studies. That the model minority as a myth to be debunked as sort of a central tenet of the field in many respects, at least pedagogically, I was oftentimes trained, was just being disproven by what I was seeing right in front of me. And I felt that it was important for it. But at the same time, I still shared the kind of political and academic objectives of the Asian American movement and Asian American studies. But it was important for us to be honest about what the community looked like and what its investments were. So, in many respects, yeah, I mean, if we're talking about my own masochism, I certainly found myself identifying with the, how do you say, identifying with the more self-flagellating end of things. Because I myself was repeatedly ashamed of seeing Asian Americans not be involved and in fact, be fully on board with perpetuating the forms of like capitalist hierarchy that I come to critique, right?

[00:08:12] Host: Yeah. So it's interesting, because there's a shame of seeing success, which is what that's leading to. That becomes the thing that... I don't have this experience. I'm not an immigrant, but I've heard through many interviews and many discussions that any family, most families that come from somewhere else, that the goal is for their child to have a better life and that next generation to have the better life, pushing towards success at all costs. Model minority has come up. I have another series where we look at the Japanese American incarceration after Executive Order 9066. And so that term comes up a lot between the Issei and the Nisei.

[00:09:13] Rivera: Absolutely, yeah.

[00:09:15] Host: And you brought that up in your book as well. But it is a push to success or what we deem as success here in America.

[00:09:17] Rivera: Right, exactly. So that's kind of the thing, right, is that there are two different moral orders at stake here. And the masochisms correspond to the different moral orders, right? So there's the moral order of the classic immigrant bildungsroman, right? There's that moral order of, I have to be economically successful in order to do honor to my parents and my ancestors and so forth, right? And then there's also the moral order of activism. And that moral order is definitely in the minority, but it's a significant one because it is from there that the Asian American term, before ‘68, there wasn't a such thing as “Asian American,” right? That term emerged from pan-ethnic solidarity organizing. So there's a way in which the Asian American legacy is sort of a forever attached to that activist legacy too, right? So it's both. So it's both. And they have different overlapping histories, and they correspond also to class, and they correspond also to whatever sort of social movements are in various geographies. But in many respects, the people who are invested in thinking about what it means to be Asian American find themselves sort of butting up against these different moral orders and the corresponding masochisms and shames that are attached to it.

[00:10:37] Host: This term is going to come up throughout our entire conversation, but help us understand masochism in context to what you're talking about.

[00:10:51] Rivera: Yeah, great question. So what's funny about this project is in graduate school when I was first developing the dissertation version of this book, I didn't really land on the idea for this project until I was taking classes with two professors simultaneously. And one class was with Abigail Dukosnick, this is at UC Berkeley. Professor Dukosnick basically was teaching this class on new media, and I learned about techno-Orientalism as essentially this kind of racializing apparatus that sees Asians as mechanical, robotic, and so forth. And I was taking that class at the same time as taking Juana Maria Rodriguez's sexual subjects graduate seminar on queer theory, where I was exposed to things like masochism theory for the first time. So I was reading folks like the late Elizabeth Freeman, Derek Scott, Nguyen Thanh Phuong, and thinking about these unintuitive ways in which racialized subjects found themselves sexually aroused by these moments of subjugation, these intense scenarios of being racialized, and kind of getting off on that. But these works chose not to pathologize that, but rather think about, well, what's fascinating and productive about that tension, about finding pleasure in the violence and the trauma, right? As I'm taking these two classes, I sort of anecdotally come to notice that a lot of my Asian friends actually love things that we associate with techno-Orientalism. They actually love things like cyberpunk, and so, for example, thinking about these super stereotypical images of Asians in these various situations, and this sort of techno-Orientalism that I eventually came to associate with a sort of model minority ideology more broadly. And that's kind of where I started noticing these different patterns, right? That we find ourselves masochistically attached to these different images and these different positionalities. So I realize I'm not actually answering your question, but in terms of masochism itself, we can think about masochism as a sexual practice, right? We can think about masochism as leather and furs, as taking pleasure from pain. But in many respects, masochism can also be thought of as gaining various forms of sensation from moments of violence that can, in fact, also result in not just pleasure, but subject formation. And here I'm drawing a lot from the Black feminist scholar Amber Jamila Moser, a Black queer theorist who really does a brilliant job of explaining how masochism is not solely sexual, but is actually something akin to a universal aspect of what it means to become a subject, what it means to become an individual in society.

[00:13:49] Host: Yeah, you wrote, “Masochism represents the surrendering of control to achieve sensation, to feel and become through unbecoming,” which I thought was a great representation of how you use it throughout your work.

[00:14:05] Rivera: Thank you.

[00:14:06] Host: You know, this term “model minority” is problematic in some ways, because it does pit one against all others. It almost has this feeling like the favorite student in class, which still has a sense of oppression because then you're the student to who, you're the favorite to who that there is, you're the minority to another element. And I think that that keeps connecting to the masochism, it keeps like this sense of submission, and almost castration as well.

[00:14:55] Rivera: Yeah, no, that's right. And of course, you know, this is where we kind of get to the masculinity stuff a little bit, right? And within Asian American studies, there's a brilliant tradition of, you know, of feminist and queer critique against this sort of masculinist anxiety around being castrated, right? We think about like, you know, folks like David Ang thinking about from a psychoanalytic standpoint, we can think about, you know, a long range of Asian American feminist literary tradition from, you know, Rachel Lee to Lisa Lowe, you know, criticizing the masculinism within Asian Americanist critique. And I think that in many respects, because the model minority is sort of seen as being submissive, a lot of the masculinist cultural nationalist anxiety around the model minority was wrapped up in kind of masculinist terms as well, right? So, there's kind of this fear of being the bottom or fear of being put into, not that they're the same, they're not equating, but examples of being feminized by a literary establishment and so forth, right? So, you know, obviously, that's like, so I think that sort of anxieties around the model minority can also be like deeply misogynistic, right? So, which is not to say that the critique shouldn't happen, because I still actually agree with the critique to a certain extent, but we have to think about on what basis.

So, it's not necessarily... you know, if we're sort of like operating from the standpoint of a kind of a homophobic or misogynistic fear of the feminine, or the fear of being penetrated by the force of whiteness, you know, we're gonna have to take a minute to unpack that a little bit more, right? However, there's nevertheless, the very real kind of way in which Asian America can be positioned against, in particular, Blackness. I mean, I think what's interesting, if you look at this decade in particular, how quickly Stop Asian Hate as a movement went from kind of like a universal sort of liberal to left formation about recognizing anti-Asian racism, and quickly became carceral, and once it was sort of absorbed by the state, became a motivation for policing Black communities more. Even though the data doesn't actually bear out that Black people are committing more crimes against Asians and hate crimes and so forth, right? So, that's actually not true. But it ended up becoming co-opted very easily by the right, which in many respects sort of like demonstrates the ways in which like an Asian American narrative easily becomes model minoritized, and oftentimes absorbed into an anti-Black logic in particular, and a logic that actually reifies the status quo of racial relations in the United States.

[00:17:48] Host: Yeah, one of the things I was thinking about when looking at that submissive element of model minority is that in comparison to when looking at masculinity, the submissive masculine compared to the hyper-masculinity or the machismo of Black and Latin culture, that there is this stark... and then it's that hyper-masculinity that makes those minorities more of a threat to whiteness. And I think in turn, that's why we see this carceral situation.

[00:18:31] Rivera: Yeah, for sure. I think that what's interesting, right, is thinking about, again, the cultural nationalist strands in Asian American thoughts tracing all the way to the 1970s. Specifically, I'm thinking about the IE anthology, I'm thinking about Frank Chin's writings, wherein you have... and you actually see threads of that sort of restarting again in contemporary Asian American incel cultures, unfortunately. But this sort of way where Asian American men will recognize that disparity as this like, well, Asian men aren't seen as being hyper-masculine threats, unlike our Black and Brown brothers. So there's something to be said about, but sometimes a little bit of an Asian American envy that you'll see manifesting in different ways of the kind of hyper-masculine threat of Black and Brown men, in many respects, right? So yeah, so then we get to these various iterations of toxic masculinity of Asians, oftentimes assuming their own kind of hyper-masculinity with a deep chip on his shoulder because it's not being recognized as such. But it can get very, very toxic and oftentimes results in terrible treatment of Asian women, for example, right?

[00:19:50] Host: Yeah. I want to read this part section from your book because it ties in. So you quote Frank Chin, you say, "Lacking an ethnically distinct ideal of virility of ‘their own' with which they can identify, Asian American men are left imitating ‘styles' of masculinity that belong properly speaking to men of other races. But the ‘solution’ that Chin prescribes for this problematic interracial mimetic desire that threatens to homosexualize Asian American men is not the eradication of this desire, but rather it's melancholic intensification via the aesthetic.” And I think that ties perfectly with what you were just saying. Yeah.

[00:20:42] Rivera: Thank you. Yeah. I was like, “Oh yeah, I did write that.” Yeah, exactly. So this is sort of way that like, and Daniel Kim does a really brilliant analysis of that too in an earlier book called Manhood in Black and Yellow. And this is sort of way that Chin in particular sort of dwells in that self-flagellating moments in order to find a kind of authenticity and truth. And the irony is, if you actually achieve the completion of, if you actually fully form the Asian masculine subject, it doesn't feel quite satisfying on some level, right? It's like its incompleteness is actually sort of like the most viscerally satisfying reflection of lived experience in many respects. So yeah, this produces all sorts of problems. And what ends up also occurring, as I talked about in the third chapter, is this kind of idealization of Blackness and of Black masculinity in particular, where we have sometimes, again, like what's interesting about Asian American cultural politics is you'll see sort of these like very polarized relationships of Blackness. You'll have like deep, intense anti-Blackness probably more broadly than anything else. But you also have another sort of subset of like the idealization of Blackness and kind of sort of backslides between those two things as Asian Americans try to like figure out where they land in all this. And when you have that idealization of Blackness, you see what we develop, what I call in the book as sort of an Afro-Asian superego. And this was very much informed by what we saw, for example, the Black Lives Matter movement, Asian for Black Lives chapters and so forth, and thinking about like Blackness as the fulcrum of racialization.

So we have to essentially listen to Black folks and essentially allow them to lead and follow their lead along the way. Which is like, again, like I'm not condemning that, but I guess what I'm saying is that there's, because it's much better than the alternative, but I think that there's something objectifying about that too, right? There's something that also sort of like denies the heterogeneity of Black thought and so forth. And what it also does is it creates a paradigm in which like Asian American worth often is being triangulated against Blackness rather than whiteness. So it's curious.

[00:23:22] Host: When we talk about Asian American masculinity or African American masculinity, I think one of the key words is “American.” First, because these identities are inherently coming from a place of oppression, as is the nature and history of this country. But also I would assume because what defines masculinity here in America differs from Asia, parts of Asia, parts of Europe, and Africa as well.

[00:23:59] Rivera: Yeah. No, that's absolutely right. And I think what's interesting about what I set out to do here is that there are ways in which the text is and is not specific to its context. So what's interesting about the last several years as I've spoken to different people is that there's a lot about the last several years as I've spoken to different people about the book is, and I'm actually very excited about this, is when I hear about folks who the book is not targeted towards as an object of critique, finding themselves being like, oh, but that does actually seem familiar in my particular social context. So, for example, I definitely see a lot of ways that Asian American women, for example, be like, oh, this is still applicable. This particular part is still applicable across gender. And part of the reason why I didn't make the claim, why I sort of stuck to masculinity is because masochism has a lot of different valences across gender. So I sort of stuck to the masculine because I didn't want to do disrespect to the specificity of feminine masochism, which has different stakes, different politics, and would require its own book to do right, frankly. If I were to cover both, I think, in the book and masochisms that are non-binary and so forth, I feel like it would have been beyond the scale of the project.

But nevertheless, I'm finding there are still a lot of Asian American women who find the work still applicable in the women's context. And also interesting non-Asian people finding resonances, like folks when I was speaking to children of African immigrants, for example, find a lot of parallels in their communities when they look at this book. South Asian folks from the UK have engaged with this book in these really sort of interesting ways. Because at the end of the day, I guess what I want to make clear is that fundamentally, I'm less invested in the particularities of ethnicity. I'm less invested in the particularities of these particular, like Korean American cultural mores that find themselves translated across decades of whatever. I'm more invested in a type of relationality that I see, a type of subject formation that emerges from that kind of point of contact. And that kind of point of contact, I'm really thinking about really East Asian American men in a particular period of time, really from 1982 onward. But that doesn't foreclose the relation I'm describing from being observable outside of that geography and outside of the gender context and outside the racial context.

[00:26:52] Host: You know, it's interesting. As I was reading through, I mean, I have to read through it through my own lens and my own experience. But one of the things I started to think about was my perspective of archetypes of masculinity, which kind of echo the zeitgeists of the moment. And I was thinking about like for the longest time, the cowboy was kind of this symbol. And the cowboy in and of itself in that archetype is a very white representation of masculinity, which I have to step outside of myself to recognize that. And then we have the soldier during the great wars. And I feel like that soldier element of masculinity kind of led up into my existence. And then in the 80s and 90s, we had the athlete kind of became the symbol of masculinity. And then with the athlete, it really opened the door for those color lines to blur. And we had people like Michael Jordan and Bo Jackson that people of all races would have posters up on their wall, admiring and aspiring to have that level of masculinity. And then there was this kind of suave intellectual masculine, this groomed kind of metrosexual element that came as the masculine started softening. And again, this is just my perspective as I was reading through your book. And then we entered into this phase where, maybe like 10, 15 years ago, where this concept of a warrior monk became the almost idealized, this spiritual element of having strength and spirituality at the same time. And then we lost it all. And now we're back to the meat eating, cage fighting, anti-empathy caveman. It felt like, you know, the archetype was softening, but still with the strength. And now we're moving, you know, and I know a lot of it has to do with our current political situation.

[00:29:11] Rivera: Yeah, I'm thinking about that. I'm thinking about that kind of narrative that you traced there. Because like, you know, the martial arts master has been sort of like the route for Asian American masculinity for some time, right? So obviously, Bruce Lee, right? Which, you know, so the thing is like, if we think about that particular figure, he does overlap with the cowboy, and historically. But what's interesting is like, he's not, with the lone exception, I would say, of Bruce Lee specifically, I don't necessarily know if the warrior monk figure was seen as a masculine ideal per se, you know? Like, there was something to be, because it's not like he had, again, with the lone, with the sole exception of Bruce Lee, I'm not sure if like, the martial arts figure was seen as a sex object, that several of these other sort of archetypes were. I've been thinking about some of that question too. Like, you know, I think there's something like, I've been thinking about particularly like the 1980s, you have bulk, right? You have the Schwarzeneggers and the Stallones. Sort of dominating as just like, as the Cold War kind of like nears its end, this like, recompensatory post-Vietnam defeat, bodybuilding.

[00:30:52] Host: Right. WWF, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:30:54] Rivera: Right, right. So like, steroid masculinity seems to really peak in the 1980s, which I think is really fascinating. And then seem to die down, I think, actually around the War on Terror, because I think, this is my, I haven't thought about this deeply, but I've thought, I've considered how like the War on Terror encouraged new aesthetics of masculinity around sleekness. So, you know, so I think there's a contrast between like, Schwarzenegger and Predator and Stallone and Rambo versus Matt Damon and Bourne Identity, right? There's something to be said about sleekness and speed as sort of the counter-terrorist ethos, as opposed to the muscular brute force against communism that we see in the 1980s. Right. Something to be said about that. But also as in the, around the War on Terror, if you're thinking about the Warrior Monk, right? We think about the Matrix, we think about Keanu Reeves, we think about like, you know, so that's really curious.

Now, in terms of my book, what's curious is that this book was written over the course of three different presidents, because it started when I, there's still some writing in there that was from my first year of graduate school, which was in 2011, 2012. So that was like Obama years. So in a lot of ways, the book was like actually responding initially to a sort of like, Obama era, like post-racialism, multiculturalism, and the ways in which Asian Americans were sort of interacting with that moment. The stakes shifted, of course, when Trump came to office, and the target was no longer sort of like neoliberalism, but kind of like a newly ascended fascism. And I had to sort of address like, well, how do I respond to that ideologically? But as the book was coming out, it was Biden, right? And which produced its own sort of like new contradictions. So there's a way in which the book's 10 year journey reflects this sort of like multiple sort of political moments where the stakes kept shifting a little bit. And that's part of the problem about, and as I sort of was doing those revisions every few years, I came to really realize like, this is what's really hard about contemporary cultural criticism. Because academic writing is slow, and it's immediately outdated by the time it comes out. And then I'm like, so that's why my friends who do 19th century work do 19th century work, because it already happened. So you don't have to worry quite as much about being outdated.

But yeah, suffice to say that the evolving politics, like absolutely affected the way of the book, kind of kept shifting its tone, kept thinking about like different problems. But when we think about the kind of historicity of masculine archetypes, that is really interesting. And thinking about like, race in particular, and how Asian Americans have and have not been able to relate to that. I will say that Asian American emasculation, there has been a turning point, I would say, for at least the last, for about 10 years now, where I think even like more than 10 years ago, I would say, like Asian men, sort of like regularly, were just like not seen as desirable objects. And maybe the stats will bear that out nowadays. I haven't seen the latest stats on dating apps or whatever. But I can say that Asian men, at least in the popular media, have really gained a new foothold, I think, as a consequence of one really strong pushing from Asian American filmmakers and actors and so forth, right, that we're starting to see like, you know, sexualization of Manny Jacinto, for example, right? And Crazy Rich Asians, etc. But then you also have like, but you also have the rise of transnational media, such as K-pop, right? K-pop was really, really key to this. And the way that K-pop has had a global influence and has presented Asian boy bands in this like very hot way, right? I think it has changed the landscape about like the sort of like global acceptability of having Asian men or whatever. That said, all this is within a heterosexist framework, right? Like all this is still within like these sort of like heterosexist archetypes. I think within queer context, you have different economies altogether. But it's, yeah, it's interesting.

[00:35:27] Host: How has this work, you said over 10 years, over three presidencies, how has it changed your perspective and your way of living in your own life?

[00:35:41] Rivera: That's a wonderful question. I think what's interesting is like, writing the book and reflecting on it sort of made me realize that there's certain things about the project, about my own investments, there's certain assumptions that I had made that were actually just not quite descriptive of the full picture. And after I wrote the book, I came to this realization that at the end of the day, what I was really fixated upon, and throughout the book was a sort of question of ethics. I was really fixated on the question of what it meant to be an ethical Asian American masculine subject, like in many respects. Like that actually kind of was at the core of this book. This is sort of soul searching. Curiously, I came to the conclusion after the end of the book, I didn't write this, but I sort of thought it to myself, that that question was actually not that important. I think that was my certain realization is that the question of like, how to be an ethical Asian American was missing the bigger picture. And that in many respects, like how to be an ethical Asian American was less important than the question of what an Asian American politics can and should look like. And I realized that these are not the same. And the question of like, not so much about how to produce an ethical Asian Americanist, but rather, is Asian Americanist a useful political rallying point in 2025? That, to me, is actually the more interesting question now, now that I've finished writing the book on the first question.

[00:37:15] Host: We'd like to thank Takao Rivera. If you would like to continue the conversation, visit chapman.edu to learn more. To access recommended books from our guest for further learning, or for more socially conscious content, visit us at passforward.org, or follow us at Apple, Spotify, or Whereview Podcast.