Excess and Masculinity in Asian Cultural Productions

By Kwai-Cheung Lo

Subjects: Cultural Studies, Asian Studies, Popular Culture, Gender Studies
Series: SUNY series in Global Modernity
Paperback : 9781438432083, 251 pages, July 2011
Hardcover : 9781438432090, 251 pages, August 2010

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Table of contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction - Asian Modernity and Its Unassimilable Male Excess

1. Ethnic Ghosts in the Asian Shell: Racial Crossover and Transnational Cinema

2. The Racial Other and Violent Manhood in Murakami Haruki’s Writings about China

3. Becoming-Woman in the Male Writings of Hong Kong Chinese Society

4. Fighting Female Masculinity: Modernity and Antagonism in Woman Warrior Films

5. Ethnic Excess in Films about Minorities

6. Clean Modernization, the Web-Marriage Game and Chinese Men in Virtual Reality

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Innovative analysis of the relationship of gender to East Asian economic development.

Description

In Excess and Masculinity in Asian Cultural Productions, Kwai-Cheung Lo explores the excesses associated with the phenomenal economic growth in East Asia, including surplus capital, environmental waste, and the unbalanced ratio of men to women in the region, connecting the production of capitalist "excess" to the production of new forms of transnational Asian masculinity. Lo draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxist ideas as well as gender theory in his examination of East Asian cultural products such as religious and parenting books, transgender literary fantasies, travel writing, gangster movies, female action heroes, and online games. Through this analysis, Lo argues that the excess of Asia's "masculine" modernization throws into relief the internal inconsistencies of capitalism itself, posing new challenges to the order of global capitalism and suggesting new possible configurations of global modernity.

Kwai-Cheung Lo is Professor of English and Humanities at Hong Kong Baptist University. He is the author of Chinese Face/Off: The Transnational Popular Culture of Hong Kong.