Social Science - Sociology assignment discussion week 13

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QUEENS OF ANAL, DOUBLE, TRIPLE, AND THE GANGBANG 175

PORN MEGASTAR ANNABEL CHONG: MONSTROUS?

Through her initiating the massive gangbang in the porn industry, the

Asian/American porn star Annabel Chong shot to the attention of popu-

lar culture critics and scholars. She appeared on The Jerry Springer Show

and occupied the focus of a documentary premiering at Sundance. Today,

hundreds of essays on her work are available on line from academic jour-

nals to film reviews to newspapers to blogs. Chong achieved fame par-

ticularly for her a≈nity for doing perverse acts while proclaiming herself a

feminist. Like Asia Carrera, she receives regard as a ‘‘thinking’’ porn star in

a kind of eroticization of the model minority stereotype—especially since

she worked in porn while an undergraduate at the University of Southern

California. Unlike Carrera, who enjoys recognition as having a ‘‘good head

on her shoulders,’’ Chong encounters a more questionable reception, for

both anti-pornography and sex-positive feminists may claim her. In her

most famous film, The World’s Biggest Gang Bang (1999), the expressive

contortions of her face and body demonstrate the unreliability of repre-

sentation in terms of making distinct the appearance of pain or plea-

sure. In various publications, she resists commodification by forwarding a

deeply contradictory identity that negotiates not only the binds of pain

and pleasure but good and bad. She also does so in nicely spoken ways that

seem to counter well her a≈nity for nasty sexual practices. As such, she

receives more of a contested response for pushing the buttons of accept-

able sexuality even within pornography.

In ‘‘The Child Defiled: The Annabel Chong Story,’’ an article by Gary

Morris in the Bright Lights Film Journal, the tag line to the article reads,

‘‘Liberated Porn Queen or Psychological Wreck?’’∑≤ Annabel Chong’s rec-

ord of putting on extreme acts can be assessed in her well-known films

such as I Can’t Believe I Did the Whole Team! (1994). Having acted in over

fifty porn films, Chong established her fame in The World’s Biggest Gang-

bang, in which she set the first world record for the most sexual partners for

a single woman in one sitting (251 men). When the ‘‘intense, disturbing’’∑≥

documentary about her experiences entitled Sex: The Annabel Chong

Story,∑∂ premiered at Sundance, it sealed her stardom outside of pornog-

raphy. The caliber of Annabel Chong’s stardom, parallel to that of Linda

Wong and Asia Carrera, secured itself on di√erent grounds. Unlike Wong

and Carrera, who fulfill white standards of beauty in porn, the smaller,

shorter, and darker (more visibly Asian and less racially ambiguous)

Shimizu, Celine Parrenas. The Hypersexuality of Race : Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene, Duke University Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csueastbay/detail.action?docID=1170528. Created from csueastbay on 2022-11-12 05:15:54.

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176 chapter five

In The World’s Biggest

Gangbang, Annabel

Chong’s face contorts

in pleasure or pain

during sex.

Chong fulfills the extremely perverse expectations for racialized sexuality

in order to o√er a radical critique of commodification and stardom.

The World’s Biggest Gangbang touts itself as an unique project and no

less than a historic event establishing a world record number of sex part-

ners (soon broken by others if not immediately). It begins as the director

and crew prepare for the shoot scheduled for the next day. The director

explains that the gangbang is Annabel Chong’s idea. Chong explains the

project’s aim quite succinctly: to prove women can work as ‘‘studs’’ not

‘‘sluts.’’ Accordingly, the set celebrates the extreme athleticism in her claim

to power and evokes Greece and the Olympics with its white pillars and

statues. We meet Annabel Chong, who seems an alert, aware, and self-

possessed young woman as she surveys the scene of her dressing room and

her set. Dressed in a suit and speaking loudly in a British accent of sorts,

she walks confidently through the sound stage. Later we see her emerge

into the gangbang lifting her arms up, smiling in her luminous gold lamé

dress, and we hear her speak of her goals for the project and her life as a

student. Her navigation of contradictory words and worlds—wholesome,

intelligent student speaking in a certain educated manner coexisting with

porn stardom and the specificity of her fame as based on extreme per-

versity—combine to contribute to her recognizability.

‘‘The industry’s attraction to Grace Quek (Annabel Chong’s real name)

is clear—she’s very pretty, naïve-looking, agreeable, a kind of Asian child

bride—and the lure of defiling this image is clearly the driving force.’’∑∑

Chong’s voice and appearance stand out not only in person but also

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QUEENS OF ANAL, DOUBLE, TRIPLE, AND THE GANGBANG 177

Annabel Chong enters the arena of The World’s Biggest Gangbang.

within the industry. The writer Kimberly Chun explains: ‘‘Whatever her

motivation, an ad for nude models in the L.A. Weekly led to meetings with

directors such as Ed Powers, director of Dirty Debutantes and John Bowen,

the director of World’s Biggest, who talks about taking ‘this girl with an

Asian look and an English accent’ and making her into the nastiest porn

star ever, who stages particularly extreme acts.’’∑∏ Her director, in the

passage above, measures the performance of perversity by Chong within

fetishistic and patriarchal logic. That is, he finds worth in her ability to

complete men’s sexual aims based on her looks and abilities for particular

acts. An Internet porn star biographer lists Annabel Chong as ‘‘the one

porno starlet who it can be said specializes in gang bangs, having appeared

in lots of kinky group gropes for Bone [director John Bowen]. . . . She is a

kinky, crazy sexual dynamo who is one of the most popular Asian porno

stars ever.’’∑π This perception both confirms and di√ers from her platform

as a feminist who works in pornography, according to her interviews, so as

to say something about moralism, sex, power, and gender. In one of many

interviews, she o√ers the following critique: ‘‘I really believe that when you

talk about banning porn because it’s exploitative of women or because it’s

obscene, then it’s terribly fascist.’’∑∫ While delivering such critique, she also

delivers what may seem a contradictory statement. A cnn.com article

states, ‘‘Quek . . . says she likes being treated ‘like a piece of meat.’ ’’∑Ω

Chong aims to confront the myth of the ‘‘passive female’’∏≠ in a critique

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178 chapter five

of gendered and racialized expectations for women’s sexuality. In doing so,

she also o√ers a more egalitarian, ‘‘multicultural equal opportunity’’ ap-

proach to the porn process. In The World’s Biggest Gangbang, she proves

the sexual abilities of women like herself with a multitude of partners.

Claiming to have mastered ‘‘triple penetration,’’ an act involving vaginal,

anal, and oral sex, Chong occupies a new face of feminism, worlds apart

from the anti-pornography feminists Dworkin and MacKinnon and the

black feminists Walker, Garner, and Teish.

A wide range of interpretations from enslavement to empowerment

surround the presence of feminism in the commodification of Annabel

Chong. In The World’s Biggest Gangbang, the director lauds her entry: the

beautiful Annabel Chong! In other scenes, she seems ridiculed by other

individuals.

Scenes [of] her sidling up to [porn star Ron] Jeremy [emcee of the gangbang]

and others in the porn industry as if they cared about her are undercut by

interviews [in Sex: The Annabel Chong Story] in which it’s clear that she’s

been totally commodified in their minds—Bowen doesn’t even pay her for

the gangbang video that he himself calls the best-selling video in porn his-

tory. Once her record of 251 guys is eclipsed, she’s dismissed as ‘‘all washed

up,’’ and ends up gaggling with second-rate pornmeisters over a few hundred

bucks.∏∞

The World’s Biggest Gangbang’s most noticeable and enduring image must

indeed be her contorted face, expressing what most certainly looks like

pain, with enough ambiguity, however, so that it may also turn out to be

pleasure. Her facial expression of pain cannot serve as factual evidence of

her oppression when the facial expression of pleasure looks similar. The

picture of her face presents much more complexity. She demands for the

men to fuck her or summons them to her. Her commanding power in

inciting the men to give it to her competes against the extreme close-up

shots of her face in pain (or pleasure). Since we cannot read pleasure or

pain, we must keep in mind the possibilities her critique o√ers, no mat-

ter how contradictory. Rather than follow the pornographers who dis-

miss her feminism in service of her commodification, I acknowledge the

powerful way Chong brings to light the hypersexuality of Asian women

within her career experience. In this film, Chong seems to successfully

appropriate technologies of the camera and the contest for perversity in

porn in order to diagnose conventional understanding of female sexuality

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QUEENS OF ANAL, DOUBLE, TRIPLE, AND THE GANGBANG 179

as bound and limited. She presents herself as an unreliable subject. So if

anti-pornography feminists claim her as a victim, she counters their ap-

propriation by o√ering a more contradictory subjectivity: a porn star who

enjoys seeing herself sexually represented as a feminist claim to power.

Critics call the documentary about Grace Quek, aka Annabel Chong,

entitled Sex: The Annabel Chong Story ‘‘di≈cult to watch and utterly com-

pelling’’ within the same breath that questions the subject’s reliability:

‘‘feminism’s heroine or patriarchy’s victim?’’∏≤ The film documents her

experience of filming the gangbang and follows her for the next two years.

Directed by her then-boyfriend, the documentary shows Annabel Chong

being jeered by the audiences of The Jerry Springer Show. When she is

asked why she has sex with so many men, she answers ‘‘why not’’ matter-

of-factly. The film recollects the shooting of The World’s Biggest Gangbang

and her declarations of reclaiming promiscuity for women and relin-

quishing the classification of ‘‘slut’’ in order to claim ‘‘stud.’’∏≥ A set of

interviews on campus and in her home, a motel room apartment of sorts,

allows us to hear Chong speak further on her feminist platform. We also

hear from her classmates and a professor. In contrast, we see porn pro-

ducers with incredible valley views from their homes as they comment on

Chong. The disenfranchisement between actress and producer becomes

particularly revealing when we discover that she never received payment

for her work in the gangbang. We then follow Chong as she returns to

England, where she was raised and also, significantly, gang raped, and then

to Singapore to ‘‘come out’’ to her parents as a porn star. Chong herself

understands the film as a somewhat ‘‘fair’’ but skewed image. Indeed, the

discourses around the film center on her victimization and feminism.

Critics note that Annabel Chong’s contradictory ‘‘double life’’ as a porn

star and an academic needs to be appreciated in the study of the film. In

her Asian Week article, Kimberly Chun asks: ‘‘How does this woman rec-

oncile her third-wave feminist studies with the objectification of porn; her

Christian upbringing as a Chinese girl in Singapore with her toils as sex

worker in the raw, Gen-X gonzo porn genre; and her speeches about

sexual freedom as female empowerment by the adult industry’s over-

whelmingly male producers and directors?’’∏∂ She reconciles those contra-

dictions with what Chun describes as hints of substance abuse. Critics

admire the quality of her openly sexual personality as well as her assertion

of female ‘‘love for sex and control of her life’’ as a critique of ‘‘puritanical’’

ideas about sexuality.∏∑ Regarded as suspect, others describe her a√ect as

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180 chapter five

‘‘both unsure of herself and in total control at the same time.’’∏∏ Critics ask

if the producers of The World’s Biggest Gangbang duped and used her: two

years after the gangbang, she still had not received payment for her work.

Chun illustrates Chong as far away from her spunky self at the end of the

film: she seems ‘‘ready to be directed’’ rather than commandeer her life.∏π

Moreover, the film culminates in a dramatic revisiting of the site of the

gang rape. By concluding the film with Chong’s return to her past, the

filmmaker connects the gang rape with the gangbang and constructs the

gangbang as Chong’s reenactment of a character-defining act of serial

violence. Perhaps this construction of Chong’s character in the film pro-

duces a victimized subject that denies her power.

In Annabel Chong’s work, an important critique of pornography and

documentary presenting the regime of truth of Asian/American women

as a ‘‘special genre’’ emerges. Chong o√ers a feminist platform that pri-

oritizes sexuality as a critical analysis against the victimizing discourses

that tend to dismiss her critique. The prioritization of sexuality and her

voice within the film both argue for a new subject of feminism: the Asian

female sexual pervert. Her figure presents perversity as a feminist position.

She ‘‘defies the lure’’—to borrow Morris’s description, of Asian/American

women as passive victims by becoming the active participant in sex.∏∫ In

this, the di≈culty in assessing the pleasure or pain of her expression be-

comes politically productive practice in terms of our interpretation. Pre-

cisely because of the di≈culty in assessing her facial expression, we should

not forget that the encounter between others across di√erence cannot be

assumed. Especially as Chong’s iconicity remains rife in debate as mon-

strous or feminist, we must keep her meanings loaded with possibility.

Where this engagement leads needs further examination. In Sex, Chong

confirms that she felt presented in a limited way. Later, we find out from

other sources such as Morris and Chun that Chong was sleeping with the

film director Gough Lewis during some of the making of the film. Chong

says this film should more appropriately use the title Sex: The Gough Lewis

Story as told through her body and life.∏Ω If a racialized porn star can

remain spoken over in documentary, what happens in porn that she nei-

ther directs nor owns? Annabel Chong understands the importance of

performance. She presents Grace Quek, documentary subject, and Anna-

bel Chong, porn star. This occupation of an unstable subjectivity that

shuttles from one position to another needs serious study for its political

possibility. Rather than remaining stalled within the shocking nature of

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QUEENS OF ANAL, DOUBLE, TRIPLE, AND THE GANGBANG 181

the sex acts, we can see the dynamic process of producing and creating

them. Her voice remains strangely perplexing, however. As an unreliable

subject, seemingly a√ected by drugs and alcohol, she makes the question

of her agency di≈cult to answer. Why do we need to find her agency, or

political possibility, as a sex worker or a porn star?

Through the force of unreliability, Chong rewrites racialized sexuality

beyond victimization in favor of achieving an elusive and out-of-grasp

subjectivity. It turns out to be too tempting to relegate Annabel Chong to

victimhood: to frame her gangbang with the gang rape highlighted in Sex:

The Annabel Chong Story and to say she did not succeed in turning the slut

into a stud, especially since she did not get paid, and the violence con-

tinues to overdetermine her identity. In her own words, she dispels the

appropriation of her position as raped and victimized in The World’s

Biggest Gangbang. Because she is someone in front of the porn and docu-

mentary cameras, her economic exploitation silences her powerful intel-

lectual and anti-commercial critique. Like the actresses on Broadway, the

Hollywood Asian American femme fatales, and the porn stars preceding

her, Annabel Chong is bound by the processes of race, sex, and representa-

tion as well as money. From this position, she directly provides an intellec-

tual, social, and philosophical critique of these technologies and categori-

zations. Hypersexuality accompanies her powerful critique, developing it

as an unstable and contradictory position that attests to the complexity

and ambiguity of sex, race, and representation.

Chong’s interviews o√er a nuanced critique of the filmmaker of Sex: The

Annabel Chong Story as well as the porn industry and restrictive Asian

cultural values. Not only does she want to critique gender limits for her

own sexuality and for sexual roles for women, she presents a major race-

sex-and-gender critique: ‘‘ ‘Don’t you think,’ she says, ‘that by putting

women on this terrible pedestal, where they’re all pure and perfect, is kind

of terribly constraining on women? It really puts this terrible limit on what

they can do in life. It’s just another way of controlling—limiting the ave-

nues of exploration that women are allowed to do.’ ’’π≠ In this statement,

Annabel Chong, porn star and social critic, provides an explanation for

why she tests the bounds of hypersexuality. In claiming hypersexuality as

political and personal critique, she is rendered unacceptable. It makes

sense that since then Annabel Chong no longer makes herself available

and instead presents another persona entirely. The writing on her website

o√ers an even more e√ective refusal of the question of her resistance.

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182 chapter five

Annabel Chong’s own words and own voice reject further inquiry re-

garding her character Annabel Chong. Like that of Asia Carrera, Annabel

Chong’s website has represented her voice in cyberspace since her retire-

ment in 2003. I quote most of the very brief site here in order to give

an indication of Annabel Chong’s complex understanding of her self-

formation, especially as an avatar, announcing ‘‘game over’’ to those pur-

suing her further. She chooses a new anonymity in cyberspace.

Whatever happened to Annabel Chong?

Annabel is dead, and is now replaced full time by her Evil Doppelganger, who

is incredibly bored with the entire concept of Annabel, and would prefer to

do something di√erent for a change. From her shallow grave, Annabel would

like to thank her fans for all their love and support all these years, and to let

them know that she will never forget them.

In that case, what is this Evil Doppelganger up to nowadays?

The ed is a diabolical yuppie who is working as a web developer and consul-

tant. She specializes in asp and .net with C#, Database Development and

also does web design. While the divine Ms Chong was busy doing her Anna-

bel thang, the ed was surreptitiously going to computer boot camp to pick up

some skills, so that she can permanently kill o√ Annabel Chong and begin

her new life of peace and relative obscurity. Now she is making a pretty decent

living being a horrible geek and all that, proving that there are second chap-

ters in American life, to hell with F Scott Fitzgerald.π∞

In the above short passages, Annabel presents multiple subjectivities within

the same racialized and sexualized Asian/American female body. She seems

to confirm her unreliability as well as the political power of her position as a

bound subject. In direct contrast to Asia Carrera, Annabel Chong’s refusal

to tra≈c further in self-commodification speaks to her particular signifi-

cance in pornography.

Katrien Jacobs uses the term ‘‘monstrous revolt’’ to describe the work of

the sadomasochistic lesbian performance artist Maria Beatty.π≤ The mon-

strous ‘‘assume[s] that women are urged through false consciousness to act

out and improve their fantasies in relation to the ‘original’ heterosexual

act.’’ Instead Jacobs ‘‘show[s] how Maria Beatty commands complex pro-

cesses of desire, bodily exchange, how she fictionalizes and aestheticizes

her sex life in order to reinvent definitions of female sexuality which can be

stimulating and negotiable for women.’’ Monstrous revolt may not be

appropriate to use for the life and work of Annabel Chong. Chong does,

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QUEENS OF ANAL, DOUBLE, TRIPLE, AND THE GANGBANG 183

however, more than any other figure I study, teeter on the edge of the real

and the imagined. As unreliable, she rewrites sexuality outside of race

as simply victimizing. As monstrous and outside legibility, however, her

meaning registers as primarily bad, undesirable, and powerless.

Where deviancy and hypersexuality stand as the norm in porn, race

provides the di√erence. Through their racialization, we see that Asian

American female porn stars craft their own personas, direct their own

videos, and insert Asian American female priorities in pornography and

their websites as feminist and anti-racist critique. Through mainstream

pornography, we can ultimately see that the vocabulary of pleasure does

not exceed politics. Asia Carrera and Annabel Chong show us how the

embrace of bad womanhood does not occur uniformly in its political

critique. By studying their work, however, the dynamics of fantasy, fetish-

ism, money, power, and history in pornography can point to how we may

expand Asian women’s roles in the national imaginaries to include their

work of redefining race and sex in pornography. As feminist practices,

they expand our understanding of how sexuality helps to define race and

how pornography opens up space for the study of Asian/American wom-

en’s power.

To reiterate the terms I prioritize in my study, what if we study Asian/

American women’s representations by centering sexuality as their own,

even if that sexuality looks di√erent from what typically constitutes the

normal and the acceptable? Within racialized communities, acknowledg-

ing perverse pleasures and enjoyment in sex as well as in viewing, perform-

ing, and criticizing o√ers a more viable politics of recognition. At the same

time, the experience of pain and the fear of reinscribing images through

the power of cinema must remain part of our analyses. When we see the

production of fantasy for Asian women in early stag films, the production

of yellowface in Golden Age pornography, and the performance of perver-

sity by Asian/American porn megastars, we recognize an intensely racial-

ized formation of sexuality in representation. Asia Carrera and Annabel

Chong emerge from this hypersexual legacy in order to provide two dif-

ferent political engagements with pornography. Annabel Chong especially

challenges acceptable forms of politics and power: she insists on the un-

reliability of representation and the unknowability of the race, class, gen-

der, and sexual experience. She shows this complexity by exposing her

vulnerability as di≈cult to pin down. Then, she runs away. I surmise that

her flight is an attempt to flee the oppressive power of classification and to

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184 chapter five

keep the debates about her power or powerlessness open. Along the way,

she opens space for the formulation of race-positive sexuality that attests

to the need for us to maintain the complexity of representation.

To center the sexuality of Asian/American women in pornography as a

feminist critique of racial and sexual representation rightly and more

accurately complicates the process of viewing as simply an act of violence

upon the viewer. We can acknowledge images of Asian women as per-

versely and pathologically sexual in the Western cinema industry and from

there argue that the condemnation of non-normative sexuality and the

simplification of the process of viewing a film do not su≈ciently illus-

trate the political possibilities raised in watching race and sex on screen.

The space between bondage and freedom in defining racialized sexuality

proves vast, ambiguous, and complex, in ways we need to sustain as ever

mysterious and surprising in terms of its political possibilities.

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