As this study shows, Asian American "player" masculinity is the poached mimicry of normalized white hegemonic masculinity. Critic Martin Summers argues that white "hegemonic masculinity--or the dominant cultural ideals of what it means to be a man--becomes the terrain on which all marginalized, or subordinated, masculinities are constructed and performed." That is to say, masculinity often--but not always--implies domination, and since 1945, a specific kind of masculinity has dominated: that of the player imperialist. In the ideology of player imperialist masculinity, in order to play others, a player must believe himself, at least at some point, to be the best. US imperialism began to operate as a form of playerism after 1945, when the US emerged from World War II victorious and as the geographically unaffected world leader; this timeframe was also when neoliberalism, described by such political figures as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek starting in 1938, coincidentally emerged with what has become Keynesian economics in its defense of free-market capitalism. Distinguishing neoliberalism from classical liberalism, in which the government "is hands-off and/or aims to offset market effects such as unemployment, resource depletion, or pollution," political scientist Wendy Brown has famously argued that "neoliberal rationality disseminates the model of the market to all domain and activities--even when money is not at issue--and configures human beings exhaustively as market actors, always, only and everywhere as homo oeconomicus." Historian Suzanne Kahn adds that neoliberalism was synonymous with the market-driven, "breadwinner liberalism"--which favored "a breadwinner father and homemaker mother" in the "idealized nuclear family"--that dominated the mid-twentieth century. Historically championed by white, hegemonic (that is, straight and cisgender) men, the neoliberal player, which both challenged and reaffirmed the patriarchal nuclear family, has characterized US war-making since 1945; this discursive figure has followed the model of the free market in terms of playing others, that is women and gendered (Asian and Middle Eastern) nations of color--for his own profit and to win, or defeat others.

Brown goes on to argue that "liberal democracy has also carried--or monopolized, depending on your view--the language and promise of inclusive and shared political equality, freedom, and popular sovereignty." In this way, the US, as a neoliberal player, has seduced certain Asian and Middle Eastern nations since 1945 precisely through the promise of democratic inclusion. In US fiction, the feminized Asian American player performs this gendered citizenship and ultimately reveals the promise of inclusion to be a bluff, an offer that continues to be held beyond his reach. Player imperialism, although racialized and politicized by whiteness and hegemony, is a simulacrum mimicked by Asian American players. The Asian American male player in the context of post-1945 US war-making in and against Asia and the Middle East, regions toward which he might defensively feel akin, demonstrates how player imperialism has pervaded the global ethos during this historical period, particularly since it is predicated on perpetuating the cycle of the victim and victimizer. This idea of the player is simultaneously sexual and scheming, interpersonal and geopolitical; the Asian American mimicry of what I am calling player imperialism poses a threat to its authority by mimicking or performing it. As the epigraph of this book suggests, the player has been a historically high (dramatic performer, actor) and low (gambler) cultural figure whose meaning was conflated with that of a "womanizer" after World War II. The Oxford English Dictionary records the first usage of player in this sense in 1968 and traces it to the turn of the twenty-first century.

Even though the OED designates player as an especially prevalent slang term among African Americans, this study indicates that the idea of the player has informed the ideology of white American imperialism since 1945, which, in turn, has influenced all US citizens. The term player is now a common concept and term that the larger American, including Asian American, popular low and high cultures have absorbed. In this way, the player, which lies at the confluence of popular low and high cultures--a trademark of postmodernism--represents postmodernism and its multiple significations. The OED generally defines the "player" in slang as a man who embarks on serial sexual conquests for empowerment.