Sticky Rice Politics: Impossible Possibilities of Queerness in and Across Yellow Fever and Front Cover

Abstract

This article engages in a close reading of the concept of “sticky rice”—an Asian man falling in love with another Asian man—in and across the films Yellow Fever (1998) and Front Cover (2015). Of particular interest here are the ways in which the old–new immigrant dynamics of sticky rice display impossible possibilities of queerness—that is, a temporal moment of counterhegemonic transgression. The three following themes organize this analysis: the mobility of the “old” immigrant subject; the denaturalizing of racialized gender; and queer kinship and relational structures. This article reevaluates the overall implications of the constructions of sticky rice that Yellow Fever and Front Cover offer.

Keywords:

• Racialized gender
• intersectionality
• queerness
• Asian and Asian American
• desire

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this article was presented at the National Communication Association (NCA) conference and awarded the Ralph Cooley Top Paper, International and Intercultural Communication Division, Dallas, Texas, in November 2017. The author would sincerely like to thank the editor, Dr. Claire Sisco King, and the intelligent, amazing, and kind anonymous peer reviewers for having provided their careful and in-depth evaluations of this study over the course of multiple revisions.