Louisa Schein is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She has researched the Hmong/Miao people in China and the United States for almost four decades. She is the author of Minority Rules: The Miao and the Feminine in China’s Cultural Politics (2000), co-editor of Translocal China: Linkages, Identities and the Reimagining of Space (2006, with Tim Oakes), and Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia (2012, with Purnima Mankekar), and co-director of documentary films on Hmong Americans, including Better Places  and Shamans, Herbs and MDs. She is currently writing a book, Rewind to Home: Hmong Media and Gendered Diaspora, and publishing popular and scholarly work on violence, Asian masculinities, and comparative racialization both in the American justice system and in the Hollywood film Gran Torino.

Abstract:
The Devil in the Profile: Revisiting Asian Masculinities

This paper will examine the social life of Asian masculinities as refracted through geopolitical, popular and criminal justice lenses. Much has been said about the emasculation of Asian American men in a racial order that imposes a model minority status that is in turn premised on the devilish bargain of upholding political quiescence and bootstraps achievement-orientation. This trope of feminized Asian men on US soil is arguably counterpointed, however, by the twin spectres of the violent gangster in American cities and the rapacious capitalist in Asia. Based on collaborative works, focused on Hmong, with Bee Vang and Pao Lee Vue, this paper makes two interdependent moves. First, I interrogate how images of Asian American men may have been inflected by the recent economic rise of Asia, particularly China, and the attendant Western panics that have ensued. Second, I make the case for going beyond the critique of stereotypes in discourse to ask what are the consequences of such dominant tropes in policy and practice. I zoom in on an instance of racialized unequal justice and on the question of the criminalizing of Hmong men in order to analytically synergize the geopolitical scale with that of local practices of profiling, convicting and punishing men of color. Here refinement of a comparative racialization frame becomes key to building a nuanced argument that takes account of the violences of our specific historical moment.