Intimate Literacies: The Ethics of Teaching Sexually Explicit FIlms
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By Celine Parreñas Shimizu

           The intimate literacy approach demonstrates how a critical language might be forged to address the acts that compose racialized subjects in the movies. Intimate literacy builds on elements of film language to go beyond the limits of identifying “good” or “bad” sexualities, or deeming sexual identities and acts as inherent or fixed. When we identify particular and concrete individual action, we can see the complexity and range of emotion composing relations. Because sexuality is dynamic and different depending on who participates, sexual acts are indeed, as Cherríe Moraga famously attests, microcosms of social relations. As such, we can read sexual acts as encounters of power and subject formation. Thus, sexual representations of racial subjects have the potential to illuminate how power circulates and works on and off screen. It is not enough to see Asian American men and women represented; we must also see and analyze how they are constructed and what they are concretely doing in these representations. While moral panic logic decides what sexually explicit scenes already mean, intimate literacy insists on assessing what composes the meanings in each representation and how the act of interpretation can generate surprising discoveries. For example, to tout Sessue Hayakawa’s character in The Cheat (1915) as a violent and rapacious representation, without close readings of the intensity of his performances, evaluating his motivations within the diegetic world of the film, accounting for the admiring responses to his work, or recognizing his own efforts as an actor to establish a studio that produced films that richly represent Asians in cinema, is to miss the complexity of representations of race and sexuality as an important site of cultural struggle.
       The intimate literacy classroom method builds from my own scholarship in The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene (2007) and Straitjacket Sex Screens: Mapping Asian American Manhoods in the Movies (forthcoming). Both books privilege ambivalence in racialized sexuality and its representations and employ the method of intimate literacy as a form of reading that dissects how subjects choose to act and live their particular character, gender, sexuality and race. Whether they undergo a conscious psychical process or unconsciously engage social scripts and roles, they possess power in choosing specific performances, gestures, and acts. Perhaps the most famous scene I can point to that needs to be considered beyond a moral panic frame features the porn star Annabel Chong’s face in The World’s Biggest Gang Bang (1995). As I discuss in my first book, the contortion of her face is indeed an indication of pain, but with enough ambiguity that it may also be pleasure. The responses to this film, under the umbrella framework of feminism, involve a wide range of interpretations from suggestions of Chong’s enslavement to her empowerment. This is precisely where the method of intimate literacy enters. While I do not show the original pornographic film, I screen the documentary Sex: The Annabel Chong Story (1999) in my classroom and use interdisciplinary sources to situate our study of the work, including the writings of the actor herself and various scholarly interpretations of the film. Most importantly, I encourage students to embrace the intensity of learning and the importance of critically thinking about what is actually happening before us, as worth careful dissection and close reading. If critical thinking and learning teaches us to challenge our beliefs and to consider what we accept as natural to be constructed and produced to benefit particular realities, good research—evidence versus opinion, argumentation versus polemics, and discovery versus the fortification of belief—is not optional but required.

Professor Celine Parreñas Shimizu is a filmmaker and film scholar based at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Her first book, The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/ American Women on Screen and Scene (Duke University Press, 2007), won the Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies, and her second book, Straitjacket Sex Screens: Mapping Asian American Manhoods in the Movies, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press. Her latest film, Birthright: Mothering across Difference (2009), won the Best Feature Documentary Award at the Big Mini DV Festival in New York and is available at progressivefilms.org. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University..