Course description for "Asian-American Texts: Racial Castration," an English and Comparative Literature graduate course offering from Columbia University:

If, as Norma Alarcon suggests, people of color are multiply interpellated, then the traditional ways in which feminism and queer studies have taught us to read psychoanalysis is as a naturalizing discourse of sexual and, in particular, heterosexual difference must necessarily be expanded to include a viable account of race as well. This seminar investigates the intersection of sexual and racial difference in psychoanalytic theory, with a particular focus on masculinity in Asian American and African American literatures. Reading from Freud and Lacan, as well as from feminist, postcolonial, critical race, and queer studies, the course provides a theoretical grounding in several key psychoanalytic concepts (narcissism, the mirror stage, aggressivity, paranoia, hysteria, the Oedipus complex, fetishism, and the primal scene), while exploring how these identificatory paradigms socially institute a system of compulsory heterosexuality and whiteness. In addition to psychoanalytic readings, we will discuss how Asian American and African American male subjectivity work both with and against the theoretical models we develop. We will end by addressing the ethics of psychoanalysis and the question of naming.

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