Lana Ohtani - Oct 14, 2017
Nota: Lana Ohtani é minha amiga, cunhada e uma das pessoas mais inteligentes e articuladas que conheço. É uma honra enorme ter seu texto publicado neste site. O texto está em inglês porque foi originalmente publicado no jornal alemão on der Freitag newspaper , em outubro de 2017, durante o período que morou e trabalhou em Berlim.
O assunto tratado aqui, é muito valioso e atual. Como andaremos com o feminismo de maneira adequada? É preciso que mulheres brancas (me incluo nessa categoria) comecem a enxergar os desdobramentos de todos os tipos de feminismo, tomando cuidado com as suas particularidades e questões para que a luta se torne verdadeiramente coletiva.
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Empowerment — Is an Asian Feminism needed? Lots of nonconformist women say: yes. We fight against racist cliches.
Delicate, shy and exotic, Asian women are always ready to be fetishized. While feminism has recently begun to have its moment in the pop culture spotlight, Asian women have consistently been left out of that conversation. “I’m yellow. Does your Feminism see me?”, wrote Fabiane Ahn, a Brazilian activist with South Korean ancestry, on a popular post on Facebook.
The way mainstream media represents Asian women reinforces a harmful stereotyping and, consequently, fetishization process. Through tropes perpetuated in Miss Saigon, Memoirs of a Geisha, The Last Samurai and even Kill Bills, both the film and literary industries played a significant role in the construction of East Asian women as subservient, submissive, and exotic, but often also dangerous and underhanded, and frequently in need of rescue by a white man.
The Lotus Blossom stereotype (better known as Chinadoll or Geisha) objectifies, fetishizes and exoticizes Asian women by representing them as sweet, naive and hyper-sexualized. This is one of the most noxious tropes in Asian female representation due to the fact that, in addition to the idea that Asian women are like dolls, which are meant to be played with and tossed aside, the image of a Geisha carries intrinsic meanings of subservience and submission that are still very much present today. “Your Japanese girl will HAPPILY cook, clean, wash and fold your clothes, do your dishes, and give you a back rub all at the same time! They’re amazing multi-taskers”, says a post called 7 Reasons I Love Japanese Girls and You Should Too from the Asian Dating Experts blog.
Along with the Lotus Blossom trope usually comes a white western man with all the power, knowledge and means to save her from her own oppressed, primitive and barbaric Eastern people and bring sense to her meaningless life. The “white saviour complex” may sound harmless, at first, given that it’s seen all the time in action movies. However, besides the fact that most of them were made right after the end of World War II and the defeat of Japan, it diminishes Asian women to a mere object, made to be dominated and to give pleasure. Moreover, it contributes to the contradictory trope of them as “childlike” and in need of protection, which in turn serves the fetish for young and collegial Asian women.
In opposition to the Geisha stereotype is the Dragon Lady, one of the earliest portrayals of Asian women. This archetype was made famous by Anna May Wong, the first Asian american to become an international movie star. It represents women as cunning, underhanded, exotic and sometimes hyper-sexualized figures. It is usually used to personify an eastern villain or a mysterious figure, and the Dragon Lady always wears traditional eastern garb. Besides, she is often a master of martial arts. Although it may sound like an empowering trope by representing Asian women as strong figures, the Dragon Lady is usually present only so she can be defeated by the western protagonist.
These stereotypes — mostly the ones that perpetuate the idea that Asian women should always be “obedient”, “passive” and “quiet” — can be severely harmful. In the USA, up to 61% of Asian women experience physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner during their lifetime, according to the Asian/Pacific Islander Domestic Violence Resource Project.
Pornhub’s 2016 Year in Review ranked the word “Asian” alongside “lesbian” and “step-mom” in the top 20 search terms of the website. This fetishization of Asian women even has a name: “yellow fever”. And it is mostly based on that image of subservient and submissive women constructed throughout the years, opening space for violence, abuse and racism. “Yellow fever” objectifies an entire group of people and reduces them to stereotypes, creating this idea that Asians are all the same, instead of recognizing their personhood. So in a society that prioritizes individualism above all, this erasure of personality is a form of dehumanization.
The lack of individuality that follows the Asian community makes room for the “model minority myth”. The idea that Asians are more diligent, hardworking students and more successful may seem harmless, like any other stereotype, and maybe even positive. But the connotation that Asian people always stand out and therefore overcome the struggles of other people of color hides the prejudices and erasure they face in their everyday life. It reinforces that Asians are perpetual foreigners, making them often deny their identities and whitewash themselves to fit society’s standards. And beyond that, the model minority myth is commonly used to discredit other minorities, such as black and muslim people.
In order to deconstruct those stereotypes, a couple of initiatives and collectives are starting to pop up. All the way down in Brazil, the country with the biggest Japanese community — outside Japan — in the world, there is the Lótus PWR Platform. Composed by women of Japanese, Chinese and Korean ancestry, it even extended its scope to include women of Indian, Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian origin, proving that the term “Asian” should cover the whole continent, and not only the East part. The collective brings together Asian activists and artists and promotes a study group on Facebook about Asian Feminism. The creation of yet another feminist group does, however, induce some criticism. In response, Laís Miwa Higa, one of the founders of the group, said in an interview to Carta Capital, a Brazilian magazine: “A lot of people say that (…) it divides, breaks up, but actually, maybe society had already separated those groups. Didn’t these people already feel separate from an idea of Brazilianness and citizenship?”
Up in the USA, coming right after Brazil in the quantity of Japanese people living in the country, there is the Sad Asian Girls Club. Founded by Esther Fan and Olivia Park, both students of the Rhode Island School of Design in the USA, it is a self-funded and self-managed collective by and for Asian-American women who aim to break that passiveness and silence. They have already done quite a few projects, such as a three-part serie all about the model minority myth, pointing out the social standard Asian people are put into and how to dispel these stereotypes. Their first project, a video called “Have you eaten”, is all about the box that Asian women are forced to put themselves in, often even by their own families. Another project, this time a physical one, consisted of a serie of posters loudly proclaiming that “Asian women are not all quiet”, or that “Asian women are not your fetish”, or that “Asian women are not submissive”. It started as an online form, in which women could complete the sentence “Asian women are not_____”. Later, the answers were turned into posters and displayed around their University.
Besides these, there are still other initiatives, such as Perigo Amarelo Facebook page, The Coalition Zine, The Middle Eastern Feminist Facebook page and Reappropriate website.
Race and gender have always been intrinsically connected and should be discussed in unison. People of different racial backgrounds have different social experiences. And we, yellow women, are not all quiet. We want to speak up.
(This text was originally published in german on der Freitag newspaper — https://www.freitag.de/autoren/lana-ohtani/wir-sind-laut)
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