Organizer: Karen Lee Kelsky, University of Hawai'i
Chair: Meryl Siegal, Holy Names College
Discussant: Dorinne K. Kondo, Pomona College
The aim of the panel is to problematize whiteness as a locus of racial anxiety, assumption, prejudice, and desire in China and Japan and in Western institutions (such as the university and the multinational corporation) which observe and market to Asia. As has been the case elsewhere, whiteness has not been named and its constructions have not been interrogated within these contexts, and yet the concept of the white "foreigner" (gaijin, guizi, gwailo), for example, has long been manipulated in both China and Japan in ongoing efforts to defeat, contain, and/or attract the Western gaze. The papers address the ways that contemporary deployment of whiteness imagery and rhetoric in local contexts resonates into transnational political arenas and the shifting demands of capital. They show that both local and global representations of whiteness are inevitably gendered, and are as critical to nationalistic constructions or the racial self as they are to multinational commodity ethics and aesthetics. Throughout, the goal is to denaturalize the "naturalness" of whiteness as a category, trace resistances to and manipulations of such racial constructs, and expose the transnational agendas of gender, race, desire, and capital which are increasingly served through their deployment in Japan, China, and elsewhere.
The Politics of Cosmetic Surgery in China
Susan E. Brownell, University of Missouri, St. Louis
This paper analyzes changes in attitudes toward beauty and health in Beijing, China, due to the expansion of consumer culture. Based on interviews with fashion models, the head cosmetic surgeon at a Beijing hospital, and patients undergoing facelifts, eye flap operations, nose jobs, and breast implants, it explores the growing desire for a youthful and/or Caucasian appearance. The goal of the paper is to describe the complex forces shaping such practices, including the learning of Western surgical techniques, their adaptation to "Chinese" bodies and faces, and their marketing to domestic and international clients; older women's marital insecurity because of the increase in the taking of mistresses by financially successful men; and the premium placed on a kind of standardized beauty for younger women desiring lucrative hostess and public relations jobs. In other words, this is not simply a result of media marketing of the white woman as the ideal of beauty: under the economic reforms, changing marriage and family structures create economic and social pressures on both younger and older women, which intertwine with the forceful images of white beauty promoted by multinational advertising. The paper demonstrates how recent changes in sexuality and the symbolism of gender difference are the product of a complex combination of forces, both national and transnational.
White Anomalies: Race, Gender and Notions of Modernity in China
Louisa Schein, Rutgers University
Among the many changes wrought by the post-Mao reform policies implemented after 1978 was a more concrete encounter with whiteness than most mainland Chinese had ever experienced. This paper asks not only how "whiteness" was constructed during the reform period, but also how it was adjusted, elaborated, and circumscribed through contact with media and actual persons. A particular disjunction developed between homogeneous images of white westerners as emblems of a unitary modernity and the heterogeneity that characterized those who actually arrived in China. As a central example, this paper will explore the consternation that was generated by the author's field research in a rural community of the Miao minority in Guizhou province. The choice on the part of myself and other fieldworkers to endure hardship and "eat bitterness" appeared incommensurate with the visions of the "modern" with which westerners were thought to be most identified. This apparent anomaly was, as a consequence, also met with considerable fascination and resulted in an array of representations of the strange white foreigner-gone-native, or in my case, the white Miao woman. These representations can be read as keys to understanding contemporary Chinese understandings of the social and racial orders and of what constitutes the modern and the savage. They can also, I argue, be cross-read with gendered hierarchies to suggest the ways in which these apparent disjunctions were symbolically mediated.
"It's Pure": Racial Iconography, Color Symbolism, and the
"White" Self in Contemporary Japan
John G. Russell, Gifu University
The Western Other occupies a decorative space in the Japanese Imaginary, Japanese consumers drawing from the reservoir of Western-dominated popular and commericial culture as they reconstruct their own modern iconographies of Self and Other. Particularly noteworthy is the role of skin color symbology and the privileging of "white" skin in such constructions. This paper argues that Japanese constructions of "whiteness" have less to do with alleged Japanese traditional preferences for "white" skin than the transnational political economy of Western-derived race imagery and engendered racial stereotypes that have been adopted and refined in Japan where, despite the prevalence of such imagery, "whiteness" is constructed as a deracialized universal marker of beauty, sexual attractiveness, sophistication, status, and power.
Historically, Western-derived racio-cultural hierarchies have positioned Japanese liminally between the white and the black, both white Western and Japanese commentators ascribing to the Japanese attributes that separate them from both. Although both Western and Japanese commentators have problematized Japan's obsession with Western culture and some have problematized Japanese appropriations of commercial African American popular culture, few have critically examined the consumption and reproduction of "white" cultural forms and practices. The phenomenon raises important questions about both the Western construction of non-White Others as well as the forces defining the boundaries and legitimacy of hyrid racial/cultural identities in an ostensibly transnational world.
The White Man and Woman in Japanese Television Advertising: Fantasies of Mastery
and the Eroticized Gaze
Karen Lee Kelsky, University of Hawai'i
This paper examines representations of caucasians on Japanese television commercials. Using commercials recorded from Japanese television in 1995, I will argue that while the employment of white women in Japanese advertising has been the more widely problematized by both Japanese and foreign observers, it is white males who are utilized with the greatest frequency and least ambiguity in advertising to both male and female markets, and by both foreign and Japanese corporations. The white man is named and voiced: he is made the arbiter of success in the "international" world, the possessor of that which the Japanese consumer (allegedly) desires: usually for men economic equivalence with the West, for women romantic entre to the West as eroticized objects of the white sexual gaze. White women, by contrast, are depicted with greater ambiguity: nearly mute figures of fascination, loathing, and fun who have been made inaccessible to Japanese men by domestic and Western hierarchies of sexual access, and who can confer prestige, but not power. Advertising to the Japanese male consumer posits the Japanese woman as object of (multinational) desire, and the Japanese man is incited not so much to acquire the white woman as to identify with the white man's conquest of the Japanese. Yet such constructions are also the result of a complex transnational dynamic, in which local marketing goals dovetail with Euro-American corporations' (and ad executives') desires to maintain themselves as objects of Japanese longing, and as masters of sexual acquisition. The "naturalness" of white male authority and white female decorativeness for both Japanese and foreign producers and viewers has caused such representations to go unquestioned: yet I argue that they are critical to an understanding of the complex forces of gender, race and sexual desire which increasingly color the transnational imaginary.
The Case of White Western Women in Japan: The Construction of the Other through
Discursive Practices
Meryl Siegal, Holy Names College
Drawing from a larger study (Siegal 1994), this paper discusses the case of a white woman (Arina), a sojourner in Japan with the purpose to study Japanese. I analyze the specific "discourse practices" that Arina participates in and argue that the identity of this woman is not fixed, but responsive to contextual constraints and discursive practices (part of Japanese ideology). Language is at the crux of social identity and through specific encounters, which I term "foreigner only" speech events the learner, Arina, participates in becoming an "other" in Japan. The learner's identity is a "site of struggle" eliciting multiple subjectivies (Weedon 1987). Discourse breeds in institutions, such that encounters are places where institutional power can be discerned. From a Foucaldian perspective, "the view of 'power' [is] not as a possession of agents who exercise it to define the options of others, but as a set of pressures lodged in institutional mechanisms which produce and maintain such privileged norms as the subject of the primacy of epistemology" (Connoll 1984:156). In viewing these speech events (imbued within the ideology of kokusaika 'internationalization') how Arina as subject and agent responds to the constraints of these events will be discussed. Specifically, the discursive complexities that are evoked in these events suggest that the role of "other" is reflexive. Although one analysis suggests that the ideology present in these encounters embodies the Japanese myth of essentialism such that the "Japanese identity [is] in relation to other peoples" (Ohnuki-Tierney 1993:100), creation of the "other" as a means of self examination is, indeed, a universal trope (cf. Kristeva 1991).