ABSTRACT
The work of Chinese American writer Frank Chin has been especially hard for the author to come to terms with; even as it is the most forthrightly homophobic and sexist of the Asian American male writers he has studied, it critiques US White supremacy in an appealingly spirited manner. In the peculiarly American tangle of race and gender hierarchies, the objectification of Asian Americans as permanent outsiders has been tightly plaited with our objectification as sexual deviants: Asian men have been coded as having no sexuality, while Asian women have nothing else. Antagonisms arise between Asian American men and women, and between male heterosexuals and homosexuals of all races. John Okada's novel demonstrates the literal ways in which institutionalized racism endangers the lives of people of color. The dominant informing discourse of Nisei masculinity coalesces around a set of tropes which signify both physiological and behavioral characteristics.
