Spoiled: Asian American Hostility and the Damage of Repair

by Summer Kim Lee

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 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.

Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award

248 pages, Hardcover

Published October 21, 2025

Reviews

[Vinay Khosla · Rating 4 out of 5]

First review yay! Resisting the wholeness of the (Asian American) subject and reveling or at least tarrying in the hostility, ambivalence, and durationality of pain, hurt, damage— and their intersubjective dimensions. To be is to hurt and to be hurt. The Asian American takes notes… the im/personal dimensions of the spoiled and Kim Lee’s pedagogical prose were highlights