Spoiled

Asian American Hostility and the Damage of Repair

By: Summer Kim Lee

Write A Review

Hardcover | 19 January 2026

Sorry, we are not able to source the book you are looking for right now.

We did a search for other books with a similar title, however there were no matches. You can try selecting from a similar category, click on the author's name, or use the search box above to find your book.

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.

Industry Reviews

"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

Shipping

	Standard Shipping	Express Shipping
Metro postcodes:	$9.99	$14.95
Regional postcodes:	$9.99	$14.95
Rural postcodes:	$9.99	$14.95

Orders over $89.00 qualify for free shipping.

How to return your order

At Booktopia, we offer hassle-free returns in accordance with our returns policy. If you wish to return an item, please get in touch with Booktopia Customer Care.

Additional postage charges may be applicable.