Asians Loving Asians

“Written in Eguchi’s distinctive and compelling voice, Asians Loving Asians will make you rethink your assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, and nation. Bringing together the fields of communication, Asian American studies, and Queer studies, the book displays an astonishing intellectual breadth. At the same time, it provides a template for pushing the boundaries of qualitative methods and demonstrates the transformative possibilities of critical, cultural, and auto-ethnographic methods.” —LeiLani Nishime, Professor of Communication, University of Washington and Author of Undercover Asian: Multiracial Asian Americans in Visual Culture and Co-Editor of Racial Ecologies
“In Asians Loving Asians, Shinsuke Eguchi offers a much needed intervention into the exploration of gay sexual cultures and the meaning attributed to whiteness and white desires within gay communities both nationally and globally and the impact such desires have on multiple different arenas. Through adapt use of various methods and theoretical perspectives, this work demonstrates the ways that ‘sticky rice,’ the coupling of two Asian men in sexual relationships, can both be powerful and problematic. This book is a major accomplishment that will shape how we perceive inter and intra racial desire and the wide reaching impact of such desires beyond personal intimacies.” —Chong-suk Winter Han, Professor of Sociology, Middlebury College and Author of Geisha of a Different Kind: Race and Sexuality in Gaysian America and Racial Erotics: Gay Men of Color, Sexual Racism, and the Politics of Desire
“It’s 2022, and we’re all in favor of post-colonial, non-Western, intersectional investigations of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. But, alas, easier said than done. Luckily, Shinsuke Eguchi is showing us how this can be done, in the best possible way, by doing it. Asians Loving Asians is a pathbreaking work that will enlighten us all, and that will inspire new directions in queer scholarship.” —Larry Gross, Professor of Communication, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California and Founder and Editor of the International Journal of Communication and the Annenberg Press Book Series
“Asians Loving Asians: Sticky Rice Homoeroticism and Queer Politics takes the vernacular discourse of ‘sticky rice,’ which refers to same sex desire between Asian men, from aphorism to theoretical frame and political activist affect. It is part confessional and part critically embodied theory building that deconstructs internalized racism perpetuated in the hegemony of colonialism of same sex desire. In Asians Loving Asians, Shinsuke Eguchi deftly engages queer color critique with an unwavering voracity that does not drift in abstract theoreticality, but is made manifest in the embodied practices of queer Asian men and their performative resistance against exoticism and the return to self-love. In the process there are close readings of media representations of queer Asian desire; ethnographic interviews with queer Asian male subjects; and the criticality of self-affirmations to create a counter hegemonic queer Asian-futurism that calls us all to attend. Eguchi establishes a fierce postcolonial queer of color critique that expands the focus of inquiry, discovery and positionality with the queer Asian subject. The work emerges from the body of the author, and thus both centers and it decenters staid presentations and proclamations of queer theory. Asians Loving Asians: Sticky Rice Homoeroticism and Queer Politics reads as critical autoethnographic discovery and offers a new template of sociality from a transnational Asian queer perspective. Asians Loving Asians is a must read for anyone seeking to explore the most bracing aspects of queer of color critique, by exploring a more expansive focus on racialized queer diversity. The book as a whole is liberating for the author and will be so for all who engage it. And like Marlon Riggs, who wrote about the audacity of Black men loving Black men, maybe Shinsuke Eguishi could also argue that ‘Asian men loving Asian men is a revolutionary act.’” —Bryant Keith Alexander, Dean, College of Communication and Fine Arts, and Interim Dean, School of Television and Film, Loyola Marymount University, Co-Author of Collaborative Spirit-Writing Performance in Everyday Black Lives and Still Hanging: Using Performance Texts to Deconstruct Racism, and Co-Editor of The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Communication