The Oriental obscene: Violence and the Asian male body in American moving images in the Vietnam era, 1968--1985

A Viet Cong spy executed on national television. Chinese martial artists fighting with their bare hands. Why does the "oriental" male body become a site of violence in American popular culture during the Vietnam War? The overall rise of violence in popular culture has been variously attributed to politics or economics. However, these analyses ignore the significance of racialized bodies in representations of violence. This dissertation focuses on the Asian male body in the genres of Vietnam War and martial arts films, and examines how violence in these genres travels between differently racialized bodies. I argue that violence on the physical body stands in for a complex set of psychic and political interactions within the social body, and that the entrance of the Asian American into the American body politic is premised upon the incorporation of a form of violence I term the "oriental obscene" into American bodies.; The "oriental obscene" describes a style of visualizing violence which is graphic, excessive, and features the body and its boundaries violated, rendered out of control, and put on display. Although this violence appears first on Asian bodies, it spreads in the form of a mimetic contagion, traveling from text to text and body to body. Hence, I am not concerned with the stereotype of the violent oriental, but rather with the style of an orientalized violence that circulates between different bodies in American culture. When the oriental obscene appears in non-oriental bodies, it symbolizes both an imagined relationship with racial difference and the appropriation of that difference in the constitution of normative masculinity.; My dissertation is organized into three parts: (1) A Genealogy of the Oriental Obscene, (2) The Vietnam War and the Body Incontinent, and (3) Martial Arts and the Body Mastered. I use the two tropes of the body incontinent and the body mastered to speak to the processes of assimilation, incorporation and expulsion that help to constitute American national identity. Thus, the analysis of images of bodies ties into a larger context of American orientalism that is defined by both immigration from and foreign contact with the orient.