Celine Parreñas Shimizu
Associate Professor
Area of Emphasis:
Ph.D., Stanford University, Modern Thought and Literature
M.F.A., UCLA, Film Production and Directing
film and performance theory and production, theories of sexuality, Asian American cultural studies and transnationalism, feminist postcolonial studies and social theory
Filmmaker and film scholar Celine Parreñas Shimizu is an Associate Professor of Film and Performance Studies in the Asian American, Comparative Literature, Feminist and Film and Media Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She was a Visiting Faculty Fellow and Scholar at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University from 2009-2011, where she wrote her second book Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies, which is forthcoming in April 2012 from Stanford University Press. This new book studies scenes of cinematic intimacy in the forging of ethical manhoods on and off screen. Her first book, The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene, won the Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. She is currently at work on a third book which focuses on the production of heterosexuality in Asian and Asian American films. She is also editing the book Feminist Porn along with Constance Penley, Mireille Miller-Young, and Tristan Taormino, forthcoming in 2013 from The Feminist Press.
Celine Parreñas Shimizu’s publications include interviews and articles in Countervisions (Temple, 2000); SIGNS (2004); Wide Angle (2004); Pinay Power: the Filipina American Feminist Theory Anthology (Routledge, 2005); Theatre Journal (May 2005); The Yale Journal of Law and Feminism (June 2006), Journal of Asian American Studies (2010), and Sexualities (2010). She also served as a columnist for the new media journal FLOWTV.org in 2009.
Recently, her first feature film, Birthright: Mothering Across Difference (2009), won the Best Feature Documentary at the Big Mini DV Festival. It is available at www.progressivefilms.org. Her previous filmworks include Mahal Means Love and Expensive (1993), Her Uprooting Plants Her (1995), Super Flip (1997) and The Fact of Asian Women (2002/4). She is currently developing her first feature narrative film based on a true story about a Filipina/o American community in Martinez, California, in 1931.
She teaches popular culture, social theories of power and inequality, race and sexuality, feminist and film and performance theory as well as television and film production. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in Modern Thought and Literature (2001), her M.F.A. in Film Production and Directing from the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television (1996) and her B.A. in Ethnic Studies from the U.C. Berkeley (1992).
For her scholarship and film work, Dr. Parreñas Shimizu has received many additional awards, fellowships, grants and honors including the Social Science Research Council Sexuality Research Fellowship, the Stanford Asian American Studies Graduate Academic Award, the Edie and Lew Wasserman Directing Fellowship, the James Pendleton Foundation Directing Prize and the Eisner Prize for Poetry—UC Berkeley’s highest award in the creative arts. While at the University of California at Berkeley, she founded smell this, the magazine by and about women of color distributed by Third Woman Press and edited Tea Leaves, the Asian American arts and literary magazine as well as the undergraduate journal portfolio. At UCLA School of Theatre, Film and Television, she was founding president of the student body organization.
As a faculty member, Celine Parreñas Shimizu’s service and professional activity includes the leadership of the UCSB Senior Women’s Council in 2007-09, and serving on the board of the UCSB Women’s Center, the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the UCSB Center for Interdisciplinary Study of Music as well as serving as a jury member for the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival and the Social Justice Award for Documentary at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. She looks forward to serving on the board of The Fund for Santa Barbara for which she was recently elected. She convened the inaugural formation of the New Sexualities research focus group at UCSB. For Temple University, University of Michigan, New York University and top journals such as Signs, she has reviewed articles and books.
Professor Shimizu advises undergraduate and graduate students in a wide variety of disciplines as well as interdisciplinary areas of inquiry at UCSB and beyond.
Sole-Authored Books
Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies.Stanford University Press, forthcoming April 2012.
The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/ American Women on Screen and Scene. Duke University Press, July 2007. *Winner, 2007 Cultural Studies Book Award, Association for Asian American Studies
Edited Books
Feminist Porn: Sex Workers in Industry and Academe. Co-edited with Constance Penley, Mireille Miller-Young, and Tristan Taormino. Forthcoming, The Feminist Press, Spring 2013.
Refereed Journal Articles
“With Intimate Knowledge of Ethical Manhood: The Legacy of Bruce Lee” Under consideration.
“Intimate Literacies: The Ethics of Teaching Sexually Explicit Films” in Feminist Films in the Classroom, a special publication ofSigns: Women, Culture and Society. October 2010.
“Assembling Asian American Men in Pornography: Shattering the Self Towards Ethical Manhoods.” Article in Journal of Asian American Studies. June 2010.
“Screening Sexual Slavery?: Southeast Asian Gonzo Porn and U.S. Anti-Trafficking Law.” Lead Journal Article in Sexualities. Summer 2010.
“Producing Asian/American Feminism in Pornography” in Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, 2006.
“Hypersexuality in the Films of Helen Lee” in Chon Noriega and Eve Oishi, Race and Independent Media Anthology. UCLA: Chicano Studies Research Center, 2006.
”The Bind of Representation: Consuming and Performing Hypersexuality in MissSaigon” in Theatre Journal.Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
”Sex Acts: Two Meditations on Race and Sexuality” Co-authored with Helen Lee. Signs: Journal of Women, Culture and Society. Special Issue on Film Feminisms. Vivian Sobchack and Kathleen McHugh, eds. Chicago: Chicago UP. Volume 30, Number 1, Autumn 2004, pp.1385-1402, 2004.
Master-Slave Sex Acts: Mandingo and the Race/Sex Paradox” in Wide Angle: Journal of Film History, Theory, Criticism, and Practice. Special Issue on Visual Culture and Black Masculinity. Keith M. Harris, ed. Volume 21, No. 4, October, pp. 42-61, 2004.
"The Necessary Terror of Stephen Winter’s Chocolate Babies” in Stanford Black Arts Quarterly, Spring/Summer 1998. Stanford,1998.
Popular Journal Articles:
“Straitjacket Sex Screens” A column commissioned by FlowTV.org, University of Texas. September 2009.
“The Hypersexual Power of the Hip Hop Hottie: The Black Eyed Peas’ ‘Bebot’” A column commissioned by FlowTV.org, University of Texas. July 2009
“The Making of My Mothering Movie: On Race, Neoliberalism and Mothering” A column commissioned by FlowTV.org, University of Texas, June 2009.
Book Chapters
“Pain and Pleasure in the Flesh of Machiko Saito's Experimental Movies” in Daniel Bernardi, editor. Filming Difference. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009.
“The Master-Slave Sex Act: Mandingo and the Race/Sex Paradox” in The Persistence of Whiteness. Daniel Bernardi, editor. New York and London: Routledge University Press, 2008.
“Theory In/ Of Practice: Filipina American Feminist Filmmaking and Explicit Sex” in Pinay Power: Filipina American Feminist Theory Anthology. Melinda De Jesus, Editor. London and New York: Routledge University Press, 2005.
"Unashamed To Be So Beautiful: An Interview with Filmmaker Celine Salazar Parreñas” in Hamamoto and Liu, Countervisions: Asian American Film Criticism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000.
Book Reviews
Book Review of “Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures” by Gayatri Gopinath. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Journal of Asian American Studies. Johns Hopkins University Press. Baltimore, MD: 2007.
Films
Producer, Director, Writer and Co-Editor, Birthright: Mothering Across Difference. (2009) Digital Film. 75 minutes.World Premiere: ReelHeart Film Festival. Toronto, Canada. June 2009. Best Feature Documentary, Big Mini DV Film Festival, New York 2009. Distribution: Progressive Films (May 2009).
Co-Producer, Director, Writer and Editor, The Fact of Asian Women (2002). Digital Film. 26 minutes. Experimental Documentary. The film evaluates the legacy of three generations of Asian American femme fatales in Hollywood. World Premiere: Silver Lake Film Festival, Los Angeles, CA. October 2002. Distribution: Third World Newsreel (Fall 2003)
Producer, Director, Writer and Editor, Super Flip (1997) 16mm. 30 minutes. An experimental narrative based on interviews with Filipino American low-wage workers in San Francisco regarding work and love. Considered an “underground” classic of Filipino American cinema. World Premiere: Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley Distribution: Progressive Films, Berkeley.
Producer, Director, Writer and Editor, Her Uprooting Plants Her (1995)An experimental narrative based on interviews with Filipino immigrant families regarding home, memory and exile. World Premiere: Women in the Director’s Chair, Chicago. Distribution: New York: Third World Newsreel.
Producer, Director, Writer and Editor, Mahal Means Love and Expensive (1993). An experimental narrative based on interviews with young Filipina women regarding race, colonialism, sex and love. World Premiere: Women in the Director’s Chair, Chicago.
Works In Progress
Race, Philosophy and Film. Co-authored with Jerry Miller (Haverford). Book manuscript.
Asian/ American Heterosexualities in Film, Theatre and New Media. Book manuscript.
Knothole.Book-length Poetry Collection. Under review.
Martinez, 1931. Narrative feature film in research and development.
Awards, Prizes and Distribution
For The Hypersexuality of Race:
Winner, 2007 Cultural Studies Book Award, Association for Asian American Studies
For Birthright:
Winner, Best Feature Documentary, Big Mini DV Festival, New York, November 2009. Distribution: Progressive Films.
For The Fact of Asian Women:
Winner, Best Documentary Short, Big Mini DV Film Festival, New York, 2002; Winner, Best Picture, Women’s Issues, ZoieFest 2003. Winner in Long Format-Education, DV Awards, 2003. Winner, Best of Festival—Documentary, Berkeley Film and Video Festival 2003; Distribution: Third World Newsreel. (Fall 2004)
For Super Flip:
Motion Picture Association of America Directing Award; Edie and Lew Wasserman Directing Fellowship, 1995-96. World Premiere: Pacific Film Archive, 1996.
For Her Uprooting Plants Her. Distribution: Third World Newsreel.
For Mahal Means Love and Expensive:
Certificate of Merit, Berkeley Experimental Festival, 1995; Certificate of Merit, Long Island Film Festival, 1995 and Motion Picture Association of America Prize.
Screenings: Los Angeles Asian American Film Festival, Chicago Asian American Film Festival, Women in the Directors’ Chair International Film Festival in Chicago, Directors’ Guild of America, Arkipelago-NYU Film Festival, New York International Film and Video Festival, Memories of Overdevelopment – U.S., Canada and Latin America, Japanese American Cultural Center in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Los Angeles Filipino Film Festivals, Society for Cinema Studies, Kansas, SF Cinematheque, San Francisco Asian American International Festival, and Plug-In Gallery, Canada, Smithsonian Institution, Los Angeles Asian American Film Festival, Japanese American Cultural Center in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles Filipino Film Festivals; Japanese American Cultural Center in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Los Angeles Filipino Film Festivals, Society for Cinema Studies, Kansas, Long Island Festival in New York, San Francisco International Film Festival, Philipine Consulate – New York.
Film Collections include: Georgetown University, University of Michigan, University of Massachusetts at Boston; University of Vermont; Temple University, San Francisco State University; Asian CineVision; Visual Communications; Film Arts Foundation; NAATA; University of Hawaii; University of Wisconsin at Madison; Stanford University; Santa Clara University; Northwestern University; Wilfred Laurier University, Canada; and University of California Berkeley, Davis, Riverside, Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara.
Other Publications, Radio and TV Documentaries
Interview with Desiree Gamotin, “Hypersexuality of Asian women, minorities: Despite stereotypes, race-positive sexuality is attainable” February 11, 2009 University of Western Ontario Gazette.
Interview with Adrienne Clarke . “Professor Discusses Book on Sexuality in Asian Film” in the Daily Targum, Rutgers University. November 12, 2008.
Interview with Sara Wright, “The Hypersexuality of Asian Women in Film and Other Media: Ridding the Exotification of Asian Women” Mustang Daily, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. May 8, 2008.
Interview with Jori Lewis, “Black Eyed Peas’ Bebot on Public Radio International’s The World. January 5, 2007.
Interview with Poonam Sharma, “Hot or Not” in Audrey Magazine. July 2004.
Poetry in Nick Carbo and Eileen Tabios, Babaylan: Filipina and Filipina American Literary Anthology. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Press, 2000.
"Asian American Media Representations” Featured panelist on Forum/ National Public Radio, July 1998.
Featured Cover Artist in Sau Ling Wong, Critical Mass. Online Journal. UCBerkeley, 1998.
Featured Filmmaker in Yong Soon Min, Memories of Overdevelopment. Exhibition Catalogue. Irvine, 1997.
Poetry in Elaine Kim, et al. Making More Waves, Beacon Press, Boston, 1997.
Poetry in Walter K. Lew, ed. Premonitions, KAYA Press, New York. 1996.
Editor-in-chief, smell this: women of color cultural production, Berkeley: Third Woman Press. 1990, 1992.
Asian / American Sexualities.
Asian/ American Film, Television and New Media: Documentary, Narrative and Experimental Forms.
Race, Sex and Cinema.
Film and Television Production.
Performance and Ethnography.
Introduction to Popular Culture.
Theory and Methods.