Asian Masculinity and Homosexuality

After reading Anne Cheng’s chapter on M. Butterfly, I found new meaning in Song’s statement that “being an Oriental, I could never be completely a man” (Hwang 83).  As Cheng puts it, “Asian and Asian American manhood is always exoticized, feminized, and hence made invisible” (Cheng 107).  Cheng briefly discusses the real-life story of the affair between Bernard Bouriscot and Shi Pei Shu, which inspired M. Butterfly.  Bouriscot claims that his gender misidentification was attributed to the “lack of sexual differentiation in China” (Cheng 114).  We can see part of that lack of sexual differentiation in the character of Comrade Chin, who is one of the few biological women in the play, who acts masculine by asserting dominance over Song in their scenes together.

Cheng highlights one way that the West has feminized Asian/American men:  hair.

            In nineteenth-century America, from the early 1870s to the 1900s, …popular pictorial

            representations of Asians in America played up this indistinction between the sexes

            through desexualization and animalization: men with “pigtails” and “Celestial Ladies”

            with ape faces. (Cheng 115)

Asian men also traditionally have less body hair compared to Western men.  One could argue that another way that the play feminizes Song’s character is by the description of his skin.  Comrade Chin says that Song’s hands are too smooth even after working the Hunan fields for four years (Hwang 71).  Gallimard comments on the “softness of her cheeks” after Song has stripped down for him (Hwang 89). 

This interchangeability of gender in the Asian male is part of Song’s identity crisis.  The play constantly reinforces that his value lies in his ability to pass as an Asian woman.  Only as an Asian woman is he able to obtain classified information from Gallimard in order to serve his country.  Only as an Asian woman is he loved by Gallimard.  Because one cannot distinguish between an Asian man or woman, Cheng suggests that “Asian homosexuality is an accident, an understandable mistake” (Cheng 115).  In the context of the play, this statement would only work from a Western perspective, since Comrade Chin constantly denounces homosexuality in China.

I admit that I have not read or seen enough to fully comment on the representations of Asian males in literature and film, but I’m wondering if there are balanced representations that do not buy into the typical emasculation and do not paint the Asian male as a sinister, sexual predator, such as in The Cheat (which by the way was a great connection made by Mary).

Works Cited

Cheng, Anne Anlin.  The Melancholy of Race.  New York, Oxford University Press, 2001.

Hwang, David Henry. M. Butterfly. New York: Plume/Penguin Group, 1989.