We Got Moves You Ain’t Even Heard Of (Part One) by Clover Paek, comments humorously
on sexual identity, butch/femme roles, and Hollywood’s Orientalism by re-casting the
filmmaker as the lead in The Karate Kid and its sequels of the 1980s, and, alternately,
by re-imagining teen idol Ralph Macchio as a lesbian icon. The 1999 short video substitutes
Paek’s sexually ambiguous body for that of the Karate Kid (Ralph Macchio) to underscore
both the flexibility and mutability of his image as a sexual icon for straight and
queer viewers and to expose the ways in which the appeal of the Karate Kid movies
rests upon the converging spectacles of homoerotic violence and masked orientalism.
Oishi, Eve. “Bad Asians, the Sequel: Continuing Trends in Queer API Film and Video.”
MFJ. Accessed May 25, 2023.http://mfj-online.org/journalPages/MFJ41/oishipage.html..