Asian Immigration & Eroticized Geography

I think Mandy brings up some very interesting points about the sexualization of Asian men in her post. In considering the questions that she raised, I’ve become increasingly interested in how both Asian/(American) bodies are objectified, and how space was simultaneously eroticized and raced. Geographical issues and metaphors are central to both Shah’s and Ngai’s work. In Contagious Divides, Shah outlines how public health sought to define and contain the sexual threat that was associated with both Chinese bodies and Chinese spaces in San Francisco. There are striking parallels between the diseased “dens, density, and . . . labyrinth” (Shah 18) of Chinatown and the bodies of the syphilitic “mercenary prostitute,” high opium addict, and (obviously) ill and “abject leper” (Shah 79). In Impossible Subjects, Ngai makes similar argument about the conflation/confluence of race, place, and sexuality when she discusses the taxi dance halls frequented by Filipino men. In both historians’ work, race is a critical component in the literal and metaphorical construction of the boundaries (i.e., space) of the modern-nation state.

Both Shah and Ngai clearly outline the relationship between Asian sexuality and Asian spaces, however, what both works fail to fully articulate is how white sexuality/white spaces are constructed in hierarchical opposition to other raced spaces. Because the West is the primary setting for both histories, I can’t help but think of how the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny sexualized the “virgin” territories of the West. I’m thinking of images like John Gast’s painting American Progress (circa 1874), which I’ve posted on the right. By examining how “American” space/boundaries were conceived of as both white and fertile in discourse, prior to the policies of both public health and the Johnson-Reed Act, I think that we can come to a fuller understanding of what was thought to be at stake, and how easily race, place, and sexuality were united in the racist rhetoric of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

I would be grateful if anyone else considered and posted on how the construction of whiteness and its relationship to other perceived racial and national identities operates, particularly as it relates to domesticity.

Dangerous Subjects, Sexual Objects

I’d like to briefly continue a topic that was brought up in class on Monday. I think the connections between Tori from The Cheat and the population of Filipino nationals Ngai discusses in Impossible Subjects are particularly interesting. Tori and the male Filipino population are both viewed as dangerous subjects because of their ability to successfully assimilate into American culture. The resulting threat to Americans is, of course, most frequently associated with the interactions between Asian men and white women. However, in terms of these interactions, Tori and the Filipino men are actually constructed as two rather different types of dangerous subjects.

Tori is an active threat to a white woman, Edith, whom he physically brands and attempts to sexually manipulate. Based off of the evidence in Ngai’s book, however, Filipino men were perceived by white men as sexually threatening to their white women (many of whom actually found the Filipino men to be sexually desirable) rather than as truly dangerous figures (Ngai 113). Of course, this comparison is problematic because Tori is a character constructed by a white director, screenwriter, etc. and the Filipino nationals are a real group of people presented in a scholarly text. Despite these gaps and generalizations, I think this comparison is a useful basis for some questions and random thoughts that I have regarding the sexual desirability of different Asian races and how assimilation (or apparent assimilation) affects that desirability.

First of all, though Tori and Edith have what appears to be an intimate relationship (he catches her when she trips, she pats his hand, etc.), none of Edith’s actions reveal a sexual interest in Tori, though he clearly desires her. As for Filipino men, sexual interest in white women is evident, as is white women’s interest in them. Ngai quotes a social worker in California who says, “Filipinos are easy prey for women who can pick up any Filipino on the street” (Ngai 113). Though the character of my two sources problematize these questions, I wonder if this difference in the sexual desirability of Asian men is perhaps a question of assimilation?

After all, though Tori presents an Americanized veneer in public, each scene in his home – his private space – reveals that he has not fully assimilated. He still wears a kimono and his decorations are strongly evocative of Japan and his pagan heritage. On the other hand, Filipinos “could not be considered heathen or steeped in ancient traditionalism: they were Christians; they went to American schools and spoke English; they wore Western-style clothes; they were familiar with American popular culture” (Ngai 109). Additionally, Filipinos were nationals, a status that, though not as elevated as that of a US citizen, would certainly be superior to Tori’s status within the United States.

Perhaps Filipino men were more desirable because they were constructed as more honestly assimilated than Tori? Perhaps white women found them to be more sexually desirable and viable because of their status as nationals? These are questions I cannot answer, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic.

Test, test

*This was meant as a reply to Molly's post, but Blogger will not let me reply directly on her post.*

Thank you, Molly, for showing us the connection between Dickens' and Shah's work.

I find it interesting how there are hierarchies and terms that people within a race use for each other. Having grown up in the South, I heard white people use the terms "white trash" and "redneck" for other white people. Sometimes the person using those terms would be in a similar class or just slightly higher.

As far as Chinese people are concerned, there is a divide between native-born Chinese and American-born Chinese. American-born Chinese are referred to as ABC and are sometimes looked down upon by native-born Chinese. In my own experience, ABCs have been referred to as outsiders and also metaphorically as crooked bamboo. Some ABCs refer to native-born Chinese as FOBs (Fresh Off the Boat). That term is used in disdain or a flippant manner and has been equated with the N-word for African-Americans.

Contagious Divides: A Victorian Perspective

Reading Shah’s analysis of the discourse that surrounded Chinatown as a site of disease---“The creation of ‘knowledge’ of Chinatown relied upon three key spatial elements: dens, density, and the labyrinth” (18)---my mind immediately went to Charles Dicken’s Bleak House, the nineteenth-century novel I’m currently reading in my seminar, “On life and the living.” Descriptions of Chinatown employ a vocabulary and imagery similar to Dicken’s in describing the slums of the London poor; in particular, Dicken’s description of the slum “Tom-all-Alone’s” employs similar tropes of infection and dehumanization:

“It is a black, dilapidated street avoided by decent people…these tumbling tenements contain by night, a swarm of human misery. As, on the ruined human wretch, vermin parasites appear, so, these ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence, that crawls in and out of gaps in wall and boards…and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever” (256).

With this passage in mind, I was fascinated that one observor explicitly made a connection to Dickens in his evaluation of Chinatown:

“The immodesty, lethargy, and unabashed narcotic addiction recalled for Logan the figure of the ‘opium-smoking hag’ in Charles Dicken’s novel Edwin Drood…Logan used realist narrative devices and Dickens’s ‘morally-ordered’ universe to effectively communicate the hidden dangers of Chinese habitation” (31).

What I find fascinating about this connection is the tension between environment and “specimen” that it highlights, as well as a tension between considerations of race and class. While nineteenth-century “ethnographers” of Chinatown seem to have employed its “dens and density” to suggest the mysterious and malicious character of the Chinese race, Dicken’s passage emphasizes that it is the environment itself---the social conditions of London---that have “bred” such “human wretches” as the London poor. Bleak House is a novel anxious that the contagious poor will infect the entire social body; the street urchin Jo introduces smallpox into the middle-class household of the heroine. But in this passage, Dickens attributes the development of this infection to rapacious landlords and “all the fine gentlemen in office” who have oppressed the poor (257).

With Logan’s observation, we see a discourse about class transformed into one about race, and the “blame” shifted from “external” social policy to some “intrinsic” racial character. And with later Asian American activists, we can observe a return to Dicken’s use of this rhetoric. Later activists accepted evaluations of Chinatown as a site of decay, but they argued that this decay was created by negligent city officials and racist policies. Like Dickens, they used this strategy to lobby for social reform and government action.

At the same time, Shah’s work challenges me to consider the ways in which Dicken’s discourse on class might also be a racial discourse (particularly in establishing a kind of paradigm of environment / specimen that was common in racist theories of social Darwinism). The passage demonstrates a great deal of ambivalence by blaming “fine gentlemen” yet so vividly describing the poor as dehumanized “vermin parasites.” Particularly in the imperial context of the novel---English ventures in Africa, America, and India feature prominently---I wonder how else I might read Dicken’s invocation of a “crowd of foul existence.”

I came to a similar conclusion when thinking about contemporary examples of this kind of discourse of “dens” and “human vermin.” I believe this discourse remains with us in contemporary American society, but that it is more often expressed in terms of class rather than race. However, a term like “white trash”---while typically used as a class marker---still implies a particular set of racial beliefs and hierarchies; race and class remain intertwined in these discourses of social decay and ruin.

THINKING ABOUT STEREOTYPES: CAN WE ESCAPE THEM?

To think of the relationships between the West and the East, between the Orient and the Occident, is an exercise in deconstruction – understanding, analyzing and interpreting the manner in which they are constructed, through specific sets of knowledge that are aimed at promoting and advancing a particular point-of-view or world view. At the same it forces us to think through the manner in which we, in our daily lives, reaffirm these differences in order to comprehend our “others”, those that are racially, ethnically and culturally different from us. Analyzing stereotypes requires one to be critical of their role in society, and to be conscious of how we appropriate them as an exercise in cross-cultural communication and understanding.

The film The Cheat and the books Madame Butterfly and A Japanese Nightingale demonstrate these points well. Both use stereotypes of the West and of the East strategically, on one hand reaffirming Western civilization and culture as a dominating force in the world, while at the same allowing us to deconstruct ethnic identity (Asian American) and its positioning in the American imaginary.

In The Cheat, the Burmese trader (Hishuru) and the space he occupies is constructed as the “other”. He is both feminized in his representation and his “queer” sexuality is constructed as a treat. His relationship with Edith is problematic (the fear of miscegenation), as this has implications for the imagination of the American nation as “white”. The text employs the classic stereotypes of the Orient that has a familiar history in the West. The domestic space of Hishuru’s house and room, his clothing, the sound track, his gentle (yet threatening) demeanor is in stark contrast to the stereotype of white masculinity. However, he is positioned on the same level as Edith, the over performing, hysterical white women, also constructed as the “other” in the text. The film interesting conflates the “Orient as feminine” (through space and the Burmese trader) with white femininity, emphasizing the “white” nation as patriarchal and heteronormative. While the film positions white women as core to the survival of the nation, through her “biopower” (biopolitics) (Foucault), she is also constructed as a threat because of her very essence – her sexuality. The film speaks to the anxieties in American society during that historic moment –that of miscegenation and its treat to a white nation. In contrast to Edith and Hishuru, Richard is portrayed as the logical, capitalist, white male who is in control and whose superiority is reasserted at the end of the film, by re-appropriating his wife into the control of patriarchy. By the end, the film also controls and manages the threat of the Oriental male, reinscribing a social order that asserts heteronormative whiteness at its core.

Madame Butterfly and A Japanese Nightingale, are complex texts that introduces the figure of the hybrid subject. In Madame Butterfly, Cho-Cho-San marries Pinkerton (an American) and in his absence has his bi-racial child. In A Japanese Nightingale, Yuki and her brother Taro are bi-racial subjects that complicate the narrative and the relationships between the East and the West.

The texts abound in Oriental stereotypes that construct a clear dichotomous relationship between the East and the West. Cho-Cho-San and Yuki are infantilized throughout the texts. They are positioned as younger women who succumb to the Oriental fantasies of the Western man. Cho-Cho-San performs her role as the wife of an American man, which in her imagination elevates her status in her world. Yuki’s performance in the beginning is of a humble, exotic Japanese girl who is subservient and meek. These are stereotypes of Oriental women and female sexuality that are at the core of the Western imagination of them. Yuki’s performance unravels in the book – she constantly shifts from being satisfied and cheerful to being sad and burdened by her destiny in life. These women are also described as objects (compared to the picture perfect Japanese fans, or Japanese ornaments). They have been reduced to commodities who have a “value” (in the very Marxist sense) determined through their sexuality and performance of femininity (Cho-Cho-San more than Yuki, although, the American man she tries to escape to the West with, sees her as a commodity, a spectacle, he can sell in the West).

In Madame Butterfly and A Japanese Nightingale, the hybrid children represent the very literal meeting or mixing of East and West. Cho-Cho-San sees her child as instrumental in maintaining her marriage to an American man. She assumes that the hybrid (mixed race) child will bind her and Pinkerton forever. However, for Pinkerton Cho Cho San was a “plaything”, a temporary arrangement while in Japan. The child is not the culmination of a love relationship that will keep them together forever.

The positioning of the mixed race children in A Japanese Butterfly is more complex. Yuki and her brother Taro are children of a Japanese mother and an American father. Yuki is positioned as the subservient, loyal and self-sacrificing Japanese girl. Although she is Japanese in every way, her difference is clearly marked through her hair and her eye color, rendering her even more attractive and mystical in the world of the geishas. Her brother Taro has made the transatlantic journey to the West to be educated. Upon his return, he has become “Westernized” and this complicates his position in Japanese society. His return to Japan is symbolic – his mixed race nature makes him a treat to American society, yet his Westernization in the West compromises his position in Japanese society. The narrative deals with this by killing him off.

In these books, the United States (and Western thought in The Cheat) is constructed as modern, superior and civilized while the East is constructed as pre-modern, uncivilized and inferior in every way. The biracial children are problematic as they represent the fusion of modernity with the pre-modern, the civilized with the un-civilized, further complicating their identities and creating them as liminal, perverse beings. Yuki’s liminality is manageable in the narrative as she has assimilated into Japanese culture and tradition and is not a threat to the imagination of the United States as a “white” nation. Taro’s movement between the East and West constructs him as a danger to Western civilization and imperialism. He is never allowed to fully enjoy “modernity”. A Japanese Nightingale suggests that the hybrid body cannot negotiate modernity (as represented by the West) and therefore has to either die or remain contained in the East. The books interesting reaffirm the manner in which race, sexuality, gender and geography are imbricated and the manner in which the subject is produced through the interaction and relationship between these factors.

The stereotypes in the books and the film allows us to understand the manner in which the West perceived the East, and at the same time the manner in which the West constructed the East through these stereotypes as its “other” (Edward Said, Orientalism). We all approach the world we live in with stereotypes that allow us to negotiate and understand our worlds. Do stereotypes allow us to understand different cultures, societies and individuals? And what their limitations? Are all stereotypes negative or carry negative connotations? Can we move beyond stereotypes in our understanding of the world?

Written by Jordache A. Ellapen

Commodification and Female Self-Constitution in John Luther Long's Madame Butterfly

In her analysis of travel narratives, Dominika Ferens notes that Western tourists often feminized and eroticized Japan in their writings, portraying the landscape, culture, and women through the rhetoric of desire and aesthetics (“Two Faces of the Orientalist” 33). Such writing was produced against the backdrop of increased commodification of Japanese culture in the nineteenth century. Ferens observes that the authors of travel narratives “tended to describe the scenes around them as if they were representations of the more real figures painted on lacquer and porcelain” (37) and argues that it was through the aesthetic objects already familiar to Western readers that these authors negotiated their often voyeuristic relationship to Japan. William Elliot Griffis, for example, writes that living in Japan is like “living on a large painted and lacquered tea tray…[T]he landscape [sic] suddenly jumped up from the dead plane into the living perpendicular, and started into busy being’” (37). Ferens views such references as a product of the “booming trade in orientalia” and, implicitly, as a way for authors to better connect to their readership (37). She does not, however, analyze how Western desires to aestheticize Japan relate to issues of subjectivity and self-constitution, especially for the Japanese women who played key roles in male-authored narratives of the period.

Griffis’ passage suggests that the landscape becomes real only under the Western gaze. He does not simply provide Western readers—themselves stuck in the land of aesthetic substitutes for “real” Japanese culture—with unlimited access to Japan. His comments may be read as confirmation of his own power to bring those objects to a Western reality through observation (and perhaps voyeurism?). That the scene “suddenly” starts when he observes it brings to mind a director calling “action” on a stage of silent and unmoving actors (37). If Japanese beauty comes to life through the Western gaze, there is also an implication that such beauty was in fact made for the Westerner. For the Western tourist to filter his descriptions of the country through his relationship to Japanese commodities is to still keep Japan in the unreal, in a place of cold artifice.

John Luther Long’s Madame Butterfly may be read as an exploration of the Western male’s relationship to Japanese aesthetics. Pinkerton defines Cho-Cho-San only in aesthetic terms, making it difficult for her to see herself as anything but an artificial object of desiring male gazes. Like travel narratives, which often present a “real” Japan through comparison with the commodities that represent it, so too does Pinkerton elide his wife’s humanity by equating her with an artificial Western ideal of Japanese beauty. At the beginning of the novella, Pinkerton describes his wife as “quite an impossible thing, outside of lacquer and paint” (Long 33). The vice-consul mirrors this rhetoric when he observes that “It was, too, exactly in Pinkerton’s line to take this dainty…formless material, and mold it to his most wantonly whimsical wish” (64). In both descriptions, Cho-Cho-San’s womanhood is masked by male representations of her as an unsubstantial “thing”. Pinkerton’s poem, in which he refers to Cho as “jus’ a picture off of a fan,” suggests that he negotiates his real-life relationship to his wife through his knowledge of orientalia. He views the fan as the privileged object of origin or authenticity; Cho is merely a representation or copy. Interestingly, Pinkerton contains the female object of paint and lacquer, his “picture off of a fan,” in a space reminiscent of a museum or mausoleum, a timeless space “leased for nine hundred and ninety-nine years” and furnished with American hardware to protect its inhabitants from the gazes of outsiders (31).

The novella, through Cho-Cho-San, also dramatizes the Japanese female’s ambivalent relationship to Western views about feminine beauty and artifice. That Cho recites the poem about the fan to her son, inflecting Pinkerton’s words with her accent, perhaps means that she has internalized her husband’s refusal to acknowledge her humanity. As she prepares for her husband’s return, she tells her maid to “make a picture” of her son (71). In reference to her own beauty, she expresses a desire to look “ ‘Jus’ lig those old picture of Bunchosai!’” (71). As Honey and Cole explain in their footnotes of Long’s text, Cho imagines herself a living representation of fifteenth-century paintings by Bunsei Gaishi (71). Unlike the maid, who aspires to the beauty represented by nineteenth and twentieth-century porcelains, however, Cho searches for an aesthetic ideal reminiscent of a pre-Modern Japan untouched by Western influences and the Meiji Restoration. Here, her attempt to mirror herself after a lifeless aesthetic object may be read as an anti-Western gesture, if not an attempt at self-assertion. Interestingly, Cho never relinquishes her desire to become beautiful for her husband or to view him as the arbiter of aesthetic taste. She hopes that, in killing herself, she will be reborn “again beautiful—again as a bride’” (77). Her suicide takes place in front of a mirror, and the narrator provides an eroticized account of Cho watching and sensing her own body become covered in blood: “She could feel the blood finding its way down her neck…In a moment she could see it making its way daintily between her breasts” (78). Thus, even the act of her suicide, which the narrator presents as both a destruction and glorification of the female form, is committed in the name of becoming beautiful for others, or more specifically, for the idealized American male.

This leads me to question whether the Westerner’s fascination with Japanese beauty and aesthetic objects (both animate and inanimate) is not more ambivalent and pernicious than Ferens’ analysis suggests. Is there a sense of fear attached to the notion of Asian femininity and sexuality that causes the male author or voyeur to replace the feminine subject with containable objects of consumption? Is Pinkerton’s substitution of female subjectivity for artifice and objectivity a misogynistic, racialist, or Orientalist gesture, or is it all three? How does the commodification of Japan hinder, rather than facilitate, Western understanding of and tolerance towards that country?