Nipposexual 3: Damned if you do...

[imomus]

artysmokes raised a very interesting point in our discussion of nipposexuality yesterday. "Personally, I've never fancied a black woman, but I'd be horrified if someone levelled accusations of... racism at me [for that]," he said, pointing up a simple but puzzling Catch-22: it's both racist if you do fancy someone of another race, and racist if you don't. The only way out of the accusation of racism is to say that race plays no part in your attraction to, or lack of attraction to, the otherly-raced person. And so we get the somewhat absurd spectacle of someone trying to pass off a big tangled knot of historical, cultural and racial features as nothing more than personal attributes. "It's not her Japaneseness that I like, it's the fact that she has lovely dark hair and eyes, and makes great sake teriyaki, and wears lovely kimonos at obon... In the end, though, she's just a unique individual, and all the other stuff is just a bonus."

I often think it's terribly sad that the identity politics movements of the 60s and 70s, which were all about discussing matters of race and gender and using them as criteria for analysing the world, became, in the 80s and 90s, the complete opposite: a way of saying "Shut up!" If Artysmokes risks being called a "racist" for either fancying or not fancying a black woman on account of her race, all his accuser is really saying is "I don't want racial considerations to be an issue in this conversation at all. My use of the term "racist" is the final statement in which race is the structuring concept that I want to hear in this discussion. Shut up about race!" And so identity politics, which in the 60s and 70s was very much an invitation to have a discussion about race and gender, became, in the 80s and 90s, a way to close those same discussions down. What started as an initiative to foreground and spotlight the concepts of race and gender became a call to sweep them under an extremely large and dark carpet. Far from advising you to join the Black Panthers and structure your entire life around racial struggle, today's conservative liberationist wishes to liberate you from the concept of race itself; he will often tell you that race, as a scientific concept, doesn't exist at all.

But wishing don't make it so. Race and gender are sociological facts, whatever they may be to science. After being foregrounded by identity politics in the 70s, they were deconstructed in the 80s. Then, by means of benign-sounding ideological tropes like equality of opportunity, the uniqueness of individuals, the commonality of all humanity, and blindness to race, colour or creed, race and gender were shown out of the hotel lobby, frogmarched down the service corridor, and set to work in the kitchen, out of sight. It's not that these things instantly stopped determining the lives and histories of people. It's just that we didn't talk about them, because we felt strongly that they shouldn't determine the lives and histories of people.

So successful were concepts like "racism" and "sexism" at taking race and gender off the conversational agenda that attempts were made to create other taboos in their image: "rockism" was meant to make rock music go away, and "homophobia" to make either prejudice against gays, or, more sinisterly, gays themselves in all their difference and particularity, disappear into the woodwork. But think of all the neologisms that weren't coined! All the missed opportunities to stigmatize! Nobody has invented the reproach "marketist" for anyone who attempts to say that marketers have specific attributes rather than being "individuals, same as everyone else". No, marketing is "unproblematical" and doesn't need to be deconstructed. Carry on marketing! Nobody calls "businessmanist" those who single out businessmen and say they have unique attributes, either good or bad. You're still allowed to say "I want to marry a businessman" rather than twist yourself up in knots with constructions like "He needs to wear a suit and be savvy with money and go out daily to wheel and deal and bring home the bacon, but I wouldn't say that necessarily means I'm saying he needs to be a businessman. I mean, there are lots of people who meet those criteria who aren't businessmen at all. I'm not being businessmanist about this. You know, scientifically speaking there's no evidence to say that a businessman is different from any other human being. And people who say businessmen are hot are being just as offensive, reductive and patronising as those who say they're not."

In aggregate, then: deconstruct everything or deconstruct nothing. Make everything taboo, or nothing.

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

That's a very sensible summary, thanks!

But the attribute "submissive" is not present in everyone's understanding of the set "asian."

I think this is one of the key problems here. It enrages me when "submissive" is presented as an attribute of Asian women. Someone did note that Japanese women are much more likely to slap their partners, and I can totally confirm that, from my own relationships and those of friends. Also, there's a huge underestimation of the extent to which submission is enacted in Japanese culture as a pure sign, a theatrical gesture, a cosplay. What's more, even this symbolic capitulation is mutual: when someone bows to you or apologises to you, you bow back and apologise back.

[thapunkprincess.livejournal.com]

Perhaps it is more to do with the fact that you are presenting your sexual (and cultural) preferences as the products of free-will, because you happen to prefer the attributes you as an individual associate with Japanese people. Underpinning many of the comments is the old structure/agency debate, with your arguments tending towards the latter and the criticisms circulating around the former. Rather than free-will, a relationship with the Other is something that is already coded into your Anglo-Saxon subjectivity, which takes its position in a Western culture that has a whole history of dubious representations of the Orient behind it (which is where all these 'Japanese women=subservient' comments come from). As such you might be expressing an unconscious racism which has twisted itself into what you see as a 'positive prejudice'.

That's not to say all Western Anglo-Saxons are automatically guilty of racism merely for expressing an interest in Japanese culture, but it is to say that cultural/sexual desires are not always controllable by their owner on the level of the unconscious, and that they are implicated in a wider social context the person has no control over; a social context with a whole history behind it that inscribes itself in every subject.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Your argument doesn't really fit the case very well, although it might explain some of the anxieties felt by people on the other side of the argument. Japan has never been a British colony; Britain and Japan have both had colonial episodes in their past. They are both now rich and sophisticated industrial cultures, perhaps both tipping into the "post-industrial". Citizens of these countries meet very much as equals. However, I can see that something like "referred guilt" might apply: some might be projecting their guilt about African slavery or the Vietnam war onto Japanese people.

[thapunkprincess.livejournal.com]

Japan occupies a slightly different position in the 'postcolonial' world because it has managed to sustain a unique identity and history of its own, but it is said that this brings with it its own unique form of 'Orientalism'. Historical representations of Japanese feminity from geishas to childlike submissives, of Japan's 'inhuman' male militaristic character, of Japan's collectivist and politely conformist traditions, of its exotic, quixotic cultural practices, through to fetishisation of Japanese business methods still permeate Western culture, as projections that contrast against our own liberal, rational, individualist societies.

We all 'know' these things because we're frequently provided with representations of them; they inform every Westerner's vision of the mystic East to some extent. To come to fetishise the Japanese is to bring all this baggage along regardless of how you justify it as a 'meeting of equals', because it all lurks in the collective Western unconcious - and where are fetishes formed, if not in the unconscious? Such is the problematic of anyone who finds themselves only attracted to the Other.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Okay, Freud recommended word association as a way to reveal the subconscious contents of the mind. Let's try it with your list of stereotypes of Japan:

You say: geishas
I say: expensive, theatrical
You say: childlike
I say: picture of kids swinging like monkeys from the handrails of a subway train
You say: submissives
I say: S&M, dom-sub, consensual role play
You say: 'inhuman'
I say (with Terence): "I am human, and nothing human is alien to me".
You say: Male
I say: "boy means bad"
You say: Militaristic
I say: hmm, I heard there was a country whose constitution forebade it to have an army...
You say: collectivist
I say: it's what communists and Asians have in common!
You say: politely
I bow, and enjoy it
You say: conformist
I say: ultraconformist... visconti... italian fascism... germans waiting at the red man even when there's no traffic... british people in a tube train all reading the evening standard... americans all going "whoooo!" at a rock show
You say: exotic
I say: the horizon keeps moving every time I advance towards it
You say: quixotic
I say: Don Quixote, a nice man, a dreamer
You say: fetishisation
I quote Rosemarie Trockel saying "A fetishist is someone who wants the woman's shoe but has to make do with the whole woman"
You say: business methods
I say: "continuous improvement" always seemed like a nice idea to me

[thapunkprincess.livejournal.com]

Nice list, and of course most those stereotypes could be given a certain slant and applied to almost any society. Just as the problem of desire for otherness could be applied to something as common as male-female relations (as it has been, lots). I like the interplay between your personal preference for Japanese people/culture and your linking it with a more general argument for valourising difference, against the role that very difference has in constructing your personal preference. Interesting stuff.

Anyway, despite your statements describing how 'exotic' and 'magical' it is, the specific question remains: 'Why Japan?'

PS next time I see a Japanese person I'm sure the word that (unconsciously) springs to mind will be: Momus.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

There is actually no clear answer to "why Japan?" except perhaps "You know it when you see it, and you miss it when you don't."

You know it when you see it: Well, hear it. Right now I'm listening to Yukiko and Hisae talking. There's something so gentle about their constant, supportive, almost "sung", phatic noises. "Ehhhh. Mmm. Mmm. Ah!" Like flute music, very calm and wholesome, full of solidarity and agreement.

You miss it when you don't: Last night I watched a documentary about Shanghai. It looked very, very unattractive, despite the fact that in many ways you might map it to Tokyo in the 80s: hectic development, sprouting new buildings, vast wealth. But it was clearly missing "the it factor" that Japan has, and that I'd either have to describe in 100,000 words or just four: "a way of being".

[artysmokes.livejournal.com]

One might make the accusation that Momus is in denial about his "cultural baggage". I suspect he could claim in response that he jettisoned any baggage he had when he fell in love with Japan. He is "ahead" of the liberals sitting back here in England, where the majority still think of the Japanese as "little yellow people".

[mckibillo.livejournal.com]

some might be projecting their guilt about African slavery or the Vietnam war onto Japanese people

wow, America is the devil again...

God, you're so predictable. Why don't you just substitute "the Jews" for every mention of America from here on out. Then your myopic world view will be in good stead with the long line of European intellectuals who always look for a scapegoat beyond there own sordid history.

I mean, seriously, check your own bias when pronouncing on the underlying motives of others.