Cookie Consent by FreePrivacyPolicy.com
Skip to main navigation menu Skip to main content Skip to site footer

Special Issue Articles

Vol. 4 No. 1 (2022): American Studies as Vulnerability Studies

On Being Topped: Vulnerability and Pleasure in Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

  • Leopold Lippert
Submitted
November 15, 2021
Published
2022-12-30

Abstract

This article explores the sexual and racial politics of anal vulnerability in Ocean Vuong's 2019 novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. The article shows how the book negotiates the relationship between vulnerability as an embodied relation—configured as forms of bodily receptiveness, permeability, and dependency that necessarily constitute the formal basis of any intersubjective encounter—and vulnerability as a social relation, configured as frameworks of legitimation that differentiate populations in terms of how they encounter, and are affected by, risk, attachment, desire, violence, and physical and mental health. By reading a series of teenage sexual encounters between the Asian American narrator-protagonist Little Dog and Trevor, his white first lover, the article shows that the novel uses anal sensation and metaphoricity to negotiate the vulnerabilities that come with sexual shame and stigma, racial trauma, internalized homophobia, as well as with racialized sexual stereotypes, all the while suggesting ways in which these vulnerabilities may be turned into sources of pleasure, care, reparation, and healing.

References

  1. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
  2. Bersani, Leo. "Is the Rectum a Grave." October, no. 43 (1987): 197-222. https://doi.org/10.2307/3397574.
  3. Bersani, Leo. Receptive Bodies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.
  4. Bow, Leslie. Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022.
  5. Brim, Matt. Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.
  6. Butler, Judith. The Force of Non-Violence: An Ethico-Political Bind. London: Verso Books, 2020.
  7. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso Books, 2004.
  8. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.
  9. Eng, David. Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.
  10. Espiritu, Yen Le. Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refugees. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.
  11. Hoang, Nguyen Tan. A View From the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
  12. Hocquenghem, Guy. Homosexual Desire. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
  13. Kemp, Jonathan. The Penetrated Male. New York: Punctum Books, 2013.
  14. Lee, Summer Kim. "Staying In: Mitski, Ocean Vuong, and Asian American Asociality." Social Text 37, no. 1 (2019): 27-50. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-7286252.
  15. Lim, Eng-Beng. Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias. New York: New York University Press, 2014.
  16. Maurel, Christian [Hocquenghem, Guy]. The Screwball Asses. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2010.
  17. Neumann, Birgit. "'Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all—but an orphan': The Mother Tongue and Translation in Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous." Anglia 138, no. 2 (2020): 277-98. https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2020-0023.
  18. Nguyen, Kelly. "Queering Telemachus: Ocean Vuong, Postmemories, and the Vietnam War." International Journal of the Classical Tradition, no. 29 (2022):430-48. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-021-00605-3.
  19. Nguyen, Viet Thanh. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016.
  20. Puar, Jasbir K. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
  21. Ramírez, Catherine S., Sylvanna M. Falcón, Juan Poblete, Steven C. McKey, and Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, ed. Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2021.
  22. Sarimento, Thomas Xavier. "PhilippinExcess: Cunanan, Criss, Queerness, Multiraciality, Midwesternness, and the Cultural Politics of Legibility." In Q&A: Voices from Queer Asian North America, edited by Martin F. Manalansan IV, Alica Y. Hom, and Kale Bantigue Fajardo, 318-30. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2021.
  23. Slopek, Christina. "Queer Masculinities: Gender Roles, the Abject, and Bottomhood in Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous." Anglia 139, no. 4 (2021): 739-57. https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2021-0057.
  24. Sohn, Stephen Hong. Inscrutable Belongings: Queer Asian North American Fiction. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018.
  25. Standing, Guy. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury, 2011.
  26. Vuong, Ocean. Night Sky with Exit Wounds. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2016.
  27. Vuong, Ocean. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. London: Jonathan Cape, 2019.

Similar Articles

51-60 of 62

You may also start an advanced similarity search for this article.