Invention, Inversion and Intervention: The Oriental Woman in The World of Suzie Wong, M. Butterfly, and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert

Invention, Inversion and Intervention: The Oriental Woman in The World of Suzie Wong, M. Butterfly, and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert Peter Kwant The construction of the Oriental Woman-a fictional character of the Western imagination-canbe dissected,accordingto Professor Kwan, by means of a cosynthetic analysis. The cosynthetic analysis is a means of understandinghow certainstereotypes emerge out of a confluence of racial, sexual, gender, class and other identities. These identities interact in a catalytic manner, creating a stereotype that cannot be reduced to its parts. Kwan identifies this particularstereotype as often times the result ofpeculiar Western tropes such as the White Knight trope and the racial phallus, as demonstrated in the first two films referenced. Yet the very same Oriental Woman can be used to validate white deviancy, as shown in the final film discussed This novel use of the Oriental Woman construct is accomplished by some alternative juxtapositions which nevertheless depend on the same cosynthesis of attributes, demonstrating the durabilityof the stereotype. Introduction .............................................................................................. 100 I. Constructing the Oriental Woman .................................................... 102 A. The World ofSuzie Wong .......................................................... 102 B . M . Butterfly.... ........................................................................... 104 C. The Adventures of Priscilla,Queen of the Desert..................... 106 II. Domination and Domestication: Cosynthesis and the Fantasy of the Oriental W om an ................................................................................ 108 A. Cosynthesis and the Seduction of the Oriental Woman ............ 110 B. Cosynthesis and the Racial Phallus ........................................... 116 C. Cosynthesis and Violence Against the Oriental Woman .......... 126 III. Intersectionality and Post-Intersectionality Theories ....................... 133 © 1998 Asian Law Journal, Inc. t Assistant Professor of Lav, Santa Clara University School of Law. This Article has benefited from the valuable help and constructive comments of my friends Professors Robert Chang, Margaret Chon and Adrienne Davis. I dedicate this Article to my father. ASIAN LA WJOURNAL [Vol. 5:99 INTRODUCTION The figure of the Oriental Woman, and her relationship with the white man who becomes her lover is a theme repeatedly mined by Hollywood studios.' In many of these films, the category of the Oriental Woman is constructed through the white male gaze where, as Gina Marchetti describes, "Asian females are often depicted as sexually available to the white hero." 2 In contrast to the actual bodies of women from Asia, the Oriental Woman is a fictive creation, an invention of the western imagination deployed to justify sexual exploitation, dominance and not infrequently, violence to Asian women. 3 The Oriental Woman is meek, shy, passive, childlike, innocent and naYve. She relies and is dependent on the white hero to satisfy her most basic needs and to perform the most basic tasks, including, of course, lessons on the proper uses and pronunciation of English. As Edward Said has written on Orientalists of the nineteenth century: "(Orientalism) viewed itself and its subject matter with sexist blinders. This is especially evident in the writing of travelers and novelists: women are usually the creatures of a male power-fantasy.4 They express unlimited sensuality, they are more or less stupid, and above all they are willing." 5 Despite, or perhaps because of this, the white hero finds the Oriental Woman extremely sexually desirable. This racial-sexual fetish is often cast and recast in colonialist terms that reinforce the subjugation of the Oriental Woman and posit her as an object for western consumption 1. See, for example, GINA MARCHETTI, ROMANCE AND THE "YELLOW PERIL" (1993), in which the author theorizes on the issues of miscegenation, race, sex and gender through Hollywood films such as The Cheat, Broken Blossoms, The Bitter Tea of General Yen, ShanghaiExpress, Lady of the Tropics,Madame Butterfly, China Gate, Love is a Many-Splendored Thing, The World of Suzie Wong, Sayonara, The Crimson Kimono, Japanese War Bride, Bridge to the Sun, My Geisha and Year of the Dragon. 2. MARCHETTI, supra note 1,at 2. 3. See Sumi K. Cho, Converging Stereotypes in Racialized Sexual Harassment: Where the Model Minority Meets Suzie Wong, 1 J. OF GENDER, RACE AND JUSTICE 177, 193 (1997) (Cho quotes Tony Rivers who wrote in his article, OrientalGirls, in the British edition of Gentleman's Quarterly, that the "stereotype of the oriental girl is the greatest sexual shared fantasy among we;tem men, and like all the best fantasies, it is based on virtual ignorance and uncorrupted by actuality."). 4. Using Flaubert's writing about the Middle East as an example, Edward Said's description of the relation between race and sex is worth quoting in full: Woven through all of Flaubert's Oriental experiences, exciting or disappointing, is an almost uniform association between the Orient and sex. In making this association Flaubert was neither the first nor the most exaggerated instance of a remarkably persistent motif in Westem attitudes to the Orient. And indeed, the motif itself is singularly unvaried, although Flaubert's genius may have done more than anyone else's could have to give it artistic dig- nity. EDWARD SAID, ORIENTALISM 188 (1979). See also LISA LOWE, CRITICAL TERRAINS: FRENCH AND BRITISH ORIENTALISM, (1991) (especially "Chapter 3, Orient as Woman, Orientalism as Sentimentalism: Flaubert"). 5. See SAID, supra note 4, at 207. 1998] INVENTION, INVERSION AND INTERVENTION and the satisfaction of western desires. The Oriental Woman is therefore available to satisfy desires that would normally otherwise be socially and morally unacceptable if acted upon the bodies of white women. The Oriental Woman, for example, normatively permits acting out such desires such as pedophilia and sexual aggression and sexual violence upon the bodies of Asian women. Like law, filmic representations not only create but reflect social norms and meaning.6 Films are important contemporary cultural texts whose analyses provide a rich source for the understanding of various social phenomena. In this Article, I describe three filmic and literary instantiations of the Oriental Woman: The World of Suzie Wong,7 M Butterfly S and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.9 I employ these films as sites of visual culture on which to explore the (re)inventions and deployment of the Oriental Woman category. I show that the Oriental Woman is a category of fantasy used to support modes of subordination on Asian women. Moreover, this fantasy is fabricated out of multiple supporting matrixes that include racial, sexual, gendered and colonial subject formations (...truncated)