Sticky Rice

“ How does an idiom of gay Asian male coupling move beyond its vernacular and banal meaning to other more capacious intellectual, sensorial, and political realms? Sticky Rice is a brilliant attempt to demonstrate just that. Subjecting canonical Asian American literary texts from No No Boy to The Book of Salt to a productive genealogical analysis, Cynthia Wu offers a deceptively simple yet dynamic notion of the ‘sticky dyad’ that showcases how race, sexual desire, and gender adhere to and become entangled with one another in a way that opens up creative possibilities for progressive coalitional politics, affective understandings, and provocative reading practices.”
—Martin F. Manalansan IV, Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities and author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora

“ Mining queer erotics at the heart of canonical Asian American literary texts, Sticky Rice interrogates both normative homophobic responses to and gay-positive celebration of intraracial same-sex intimacies. Wu attends to the ways that ‘sticky rice’ desires create tender coalitional bonds while simultaneously reanimating bitter antagonisms. Written in lucid, elegant prose, this bold and delectable contribution to the fields of Asian American studies, queer theory, and critical race studies is a welcome guide for readers interested in navigating the bumpy terrains of race, sexuality, and gender in the new millennium.”
—Nguyen Tan Hoang, Associate Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of California–San Diego and author of A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation

"Wu employs the trope of 'sticky rice'—which in gay Asian American culture means Asian American men who desire other Asian American men—to explore this intraracial desire, and she also uses the underlying critical vision to underscore a new coalitional politics for the ethnic group. Wu emphasizes such a desire as intervention in assimilationist tendencies and healing differences among diverse Asian groups.... Summing Up: Highly recommended."
—Choice

"Wu interrogates the politics of intraracial same-sex desire through queer readings of five key works of Asian American literature and drama.... It is a testament to the richness of Wu’s analysis that readers may benefit equally if they approach Sticky Rice as optimists or as realists. This imaginative and provocative volume will interest scholars of Asian American studies, queer studies, and American literature, issuing a welcome invitation to look anew at these and other literary works."
—Journal of Asian American Studies

"Wu reads against the grain of these texts, tracing unremarkable, elusive expressions of queer desire that reside in metaphor and innuendo, in what goes beyond plot or prose. These sticky encounters between Asian-raced men offer another means of confronting the irresolvable heterogeneity of an intraracial Asian American coalitional politics shaped by ethnic and class differences."
—GLQ

" Cynthia Wu’s Sticky Rice provides a daring and innovative genealogy of Asian American canonical literature through a queer analytic.... This book would be useful for academics engaged in Asian American studies, queer of color studies and also for LGBTQ activists who are thinking about coalitional politics as it pertains to intraracial and relational racial dynamics.... Sticky Rice pulls together an interdisciplinary archive that methodologically embodies the type of coalitional politics that she aims to advance with her reading of these Asian American canonical texts."
—QED