Eng, David. Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America. Durham and London:  Duke UP, 2001.

Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America is a thought-provoking and innovative collection of literary interpretations, motivated by Eng's timely and necessary imperative to connect the foundations of racism with the foundations of sexual difference and its ideological demands of heterosexuality. The analytical device Eng uses to assemble these connections is psychoanalysis. His task is difficult but urgent, given that psychoanalysis' historical assumption that sexual difference is the fundamental human experience of difference limits its relevance to racial subject formation.

Eng's introduction, “Racial Castration,” foregrounds the need to support yet deviate from psychoanalytic tenets in theorizing Asian American masculinity:

I am interested in the ways in which [psychoanalysis] might be creatively deployed to leverage a more thorough understanding of the psychic burdens and material costs imposed on the Asian American male subject who aspires to assimilate into mainstream society. What is psychically required of the Asian American male subject who desires to be part of the dominant mainstream society? How is the Asian American male subject encouraged or coerced to see himself in a social order governed by race and racism? How does he unconsciously or unwittingly contribute to the perpetuation of his already contested existence? (23)

Eng responds to these questions with readings of several Asian American fictional pieces, films, and scholarly debates. He treats these cultural objects as testimonials to the already present linkages between politics, history, and individuality. Such a focused approach allows him to present the significance of a raced psychoanalysis in vivid and concrete situations. As such, the richest and most thought-provoking displays of Eng's creative intervention are to be found in these localized interpretations.

The first chapter, “I've Been (Re) Working on the Railroad: Photography and National History in China Men and Donald Duk,