The Graduate Group in Performance Studies presents: Looking for Jackie: Gaysian Archival Fantasies

In the U.S. popular imagination, gaysians (gay Asian men) occupy the position of absence, lack, and invisibility. What does it mean, then, to advance the concept of a gaysian sex archive? This presentation considers my imagining of the gaysian sex archive through three case studies: 1) PIRATED! (2000) a found-footage video about my perilous boat escape from Vietnam in 1978; 2) the “Asian Male Nude Collection” the University of South Florida; and 3) a new video essay The Lesbian Hand that culls footage of hands from lesbian-themed movies. These case studies push against conventional understandings of the archive as an official repository of documents buttressing dominant narratives of race, gender, sexuality, and nation. Instead, they advance an expanded notion of the archive to consider a gaysian sex archive as a material and affective entity, filled with imaginary, speculative, fantastical, fleshy, and gestural potentialities. 

About the Speaker:

Nguyễn Tân Hoàng is an experimental videomaker and film and media scholar. His videos include Forever Bottom!, K.I.P., look_im_azn, and I Remember Dancing. They have been screened at MoMA, the Pompidou Center, and the Getty. His writings have appeared in Camera Obscura: Journal of Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, Porn Studies, Visual Anthropology, and The Asian American Literary Review. He is the author of A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation (Duke UP, 2014). He teaches film and media at UC San Diego.