How to solve the problem of Asian American masculinity in US popular culture? Hollywood rarely accords Asian men much visibility on-screen; when it does the industry tends to portray them as asexual, sexually perverse, or simply effeminate. Partly a product of the legal exclusions that prevented Asian men from marrying, starting a family, or fully participating in “compulsory heterosexuality,” a common response to this representational history has been a reparative “why can't the Asian man get the girl for once?” In Straitjacket Sexualities, however, Celine Parreñas Shimizu suggests that such a demand for remasculinization is shortsighted. As she notes in her Introduction, this cultural turn simply reinscribes many of the problems inherent in heroic heterosexuality, being predicated on the sexual possession of Asian American women and the conscious erasure of nonnormative sexual practices from Asian American male identity. Rather than dismiss these screen performances as shameful, stereotypical, and somehow lacking, we should instead recognize their political potential. Drawing on Levinas and a method of close reading she terms “intimate literacies” (13) – careful consideration of how characters speak to, look at, and touch one another during private moments on-screen – Parreñas Shimizu argues that both mainstream and independent films provide numerous examples of Asian American men fashioning manhood through care for self and other rather than through relations of domination and violence. The cinematic archive is therefore a privileged site for the location of alternative, ethical models of male identity formation that have potentially wider application beyond the Asian American community.

In the chapters that follow, Parreñas Shimizu applies this methodology to a series of case studies. Chapter 1 considers Bruce Lee, usually championed as the archetype of Asian American manhood. Through close readings of Lee's films, and of films about Lee and his legacy – specifically the biopic Dragon (1993) and the work of Justin Lin and “JJ Chinois” – Parreñas Shimizu shifts the focus away from Lee's skill as a fighter and his status as a postcolonial political icon to his internal battle with the ethics of violence and his relationship with women. In chapter 2, “shameful” (83) characters in Wayne Wang's Eat a Bowl of Tea (1989), Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet (1993), and John Waters's Sixteen Candles (1984) are reassessed with the help of queer theory. In the first two films, the characters of Ben Loy and Wai Tung are deemed instrumental to the refashioning of marriage and masculinity in ways that subvert patriarchy and heteronormativity; in the last, the author contends that the unmanageable excess of Long Duk Dong ultimately carves out a space for the Asian male beyond stereotype. This trajectory is continued in chapter 3, which focusses on independent film. Here, Justin Lin's Better Luck Tomorrow (2003) is celebrated for the ways it cheerfully explodes the model minority stereotype, while Charlotte Sometimes (dir. Eric Byler, 2002) and The Debut (dir. Gene Cajayon, 2000) are criticized for privileging heteronormative gender roles between Asian American men and women. Probably the most complete chapter of the book, chapter 4 focusses on pornography. Parreñas Shimizu incorporates both textual and contextual analysis to argue that in films by Darrell Hamamoto and James Hou male emancipation is predicated on the continued subservience of Asian American women. In contrast, the British Asian porn star Keni Styles, and American directors Hoang Tan Nguyen, Jeffrey Lei, and Greg Pak, all explore the genre in ways that problematize, reclaim, or present alternatives to pornographic misogyny. The final chapter turns to the actors James Shigeta and Jason Scott Lee, citing them as examples of Asian American stars who have successfully negotiated the pitfalls of “straitjacketed sexualities” and thus present a model for the future. The book concludes with a very brief consideration of Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino (2008), balancing Bee Vang's own criticisms of his character with consideration of the possibilities it offers for an Asian American manhood that is emotional and vulnerable rather than macho.

Parreñas Shimizu's methodology in Straitjacket Sexualities reflects her interest in ethics, politics, and identity. While her close readings open up interesting new perspectives on old material, an unintended consequence of this approach is the occlusion of production contexts, questions of form, and issues of internal difference. Although Bruce Lee's star image is acknowledged as the product of a “transnational formation” (45), the impact of Chinese ideas of masculinity on this image is not considered. Here, the work of scholars such as Kam Louie might have been useful, particularly since the debates around wu/wen (martial versus literati) masculinity in Chinese cinema feed directly into this book's broader argument. Better Luck Tomorrow wraps its message in an overall package explicitly derived from established Hollywood film genres. Why does it do this, and what are its implications? Finally, though the author indirectly acknowledges the variety of historical experience encompassed in the term “Asian American,” this is not something she directly addresses in her argument. If James Shigeta can play a Japanese American romantic hero in the 1950s, why is Jason Scott Lee, a Chinese American, always ethnically cross-cast in the 1980s? Does Keni Styles's Britishness make him more acceptable to the American porn industry than a homegrown Asian star? Straitjacket Sexualities leaves such questions hanging, but in doing also suggests plenty of avenues for further scholarship on this topic.