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In Spoiled, Summer Kim Lee examines how contemporary Asian American artists challenge expectations that their work should repair the wounds of racial trauma. Kim Lee turns to the “spoiled”—the racialized, gendered body and all that it consumes, wrecks, and inflicts in its desire and excess—in visual culture, performance, music, and literature. Reading works by Cato Ouyang, Patty Chang, Wu Tsang, TJ Shin, Jes Fan, and others, Kim Lee highlights moments of hostility and deformation that spoil idealizations of Asian Americanness and incite modes of feeling and relating that relinquish fantasies of wholeness, power, and control. She observes the latent aggressive behaviors and negative affects in Asian American aesthetic practice: the embarrassment of asociality, the imposition of speaking as someone else, and the indulgence of ravenous appetites. In so doing, Kim Lee questions the political desires for repair expressed in “feeling Asian” and stays with the damage that spoilage creates as integral to the kinds of repair that Asian Americans seek.
Price: $35.00
Pages: 248
Publisher: Duke University Press
Imprint: Duke University Press
Publication Date:
21 October 2025
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9781478032052
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
“To be spoiled is to be ruined, but to be spoiled also indicates excess, indulgence, and an unfair advantage of power and proportion. Summer Kim Lee offers a brilliant, counterintuitive treatise on the refusal of healing and self-control. Instead, we are presented with a provocative theoretical call for the degraded Asian American subject to reject assimilation and containment and to dwell in unwellness and bad behavior.”—David L. Eng, coauthor of, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans
“Examining what feeling rather than being Asian might be, Summer Kim Lee produces a set of thoughtful close readings that center unruly attachment and a politics of staying with bad feelings. Spoiled is a beautifully written and wonderful contribution to many fields, including Asian American studies, critical race studies, feminist and queer studies, affect studies, and aesthetic inquiry more generally.”—Amber Jamilla Musser, author of, Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined
"Kim Lee moves beyond triangulation, where Asian American subjects are caught between the Black and white binary, by activating this subjectivity as a trope remade into an analogy. Asian American as, rather than is, helps avoid the pitfalls of essentialization, and by extension, instrumentalization."—Liz Kim, The Brooklyn Rail
“Examining what feeling rather than being Asian might be, Summer Kim Lee produces a set of thoughtful close readings that center unruly attachment and a politics of staying with bad feelings. Spoiled is a beautifully written and wonderful contribution to many fields, including Asian American studies, critical race studies, feminist and queer studies, affect studies, and aesthetic inquiry more generally.”—Amber Jamilla Musser, author of, Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined
"Kim Lee moves beyond triangulation, where Asian American subjects are caught between the Black and white binary, by activating this subjectivity as a trope remade into an analogy. Asian American as, rather than is, helps avoid the pitfalls of essentialization, and by extension, instrumentalization."—Liz Kim, The Brooklyn Rail
Summer Kim Lee is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. Ripe for Spoiling 1
1. Staying In: The Autoeroticism of Asian American Asociality, in Earnest 35
2. Using Quotations: The Risk of Speaking as Someone Else 67
3. Cold Leftovers: Out of Touch with Asiatic Femininity’s Material Remains 99
4. Injured Enough: Depending on the Wounds of Analogy 135
Coda. Sweet, Selfish Ends 169
Notes 177
Bibliography 203
Index 225
Introduction. Ripe for Spoiling 1
1. Staying In: The Autoeroticism of Asian American Asociality, in Earnest 35
2. Using Quotations: The Risk of Speaking as Someone Else 67
3. Cold Leftovers: Out of Touch with Asiatic Femininity’s Material Remains 99
4. Injured Enough: Depending on the Wounds of Analogy 135
Coda. Sweet, Selfish Ends 169
Notes 177
Bibliography 203
Index 225