More on racialized gender stereotypes
The article I linked yesterday from Asian-Nation about racialized gender stereotypes is itself a response to another article by a different Asian-American man on the same topic. To some extent, the one article is a criticism of the other, since the two men have different solutions to the problem they discuss. The Asian Dating Dilemma moves to a conclusion that
I’m the only one to blame for feeding my own anxieties. I know now that for the most part, it is just in my mind. Stereotypes, no matter who they’re aimed at, aren’t real. I wish more people would wake up to this, like I have.
Sex, Race, and Denial finds this response naively individualistic, and insufficiently willing to confront the culture at large:
To accept Mok’s convictions, is to shrink away from the responsibility of standing up to racist culture.
I’m going to ignore the debate between the two articles, though, in favor of looking at the part where they both agree that Asian-American men don’t get portrayed as sexy. Here’s Bok talking about Asian men in the media:
Asian men have never gotten a fair shake in the media. The dominant stereotype projected on society is that they are weak and asexual. Movies and TV are full of examples. Take the movie Fargo, nominated for an Academy Award as best picture in 1996. The small role of Mike Yanagita (played by Steve Park) was employed for comic relief, adding nothing to the storyline. Yanagita, a geeky, bespectacled high school pal of protagonist Marge Gunderson, makes an awkward and desperate pass at his very pregnant friend. Later, he is shown to be a truly deranged individual.
This caught my eye because, when I watched Fargo, which I really liked, the small, comic role of Yanagita totally didn’t hit me as any sort of stereotype. I just saw it as an interesting bit part, which allowed an interaction that helped develop the Marge Gunderson character, and where the guy just happened to be Asian-American. Reading Bok, though, I can see his point, in one role where the Asian-American guy happens to be geeky, spectacled, and socially inept (and is later revealed to be something much more disturbing, but I’m not sure that’s so much of a stereotype, since movies show disturbed men of all races) is one thing, but when most of the Asian male roles in the movies are asexual at best, it’s another story. Asian women get highly sexualized roles like the one in Memoirs of a Geisha, and Asian men have, well, are there any movies with sexy portrayals of Asian men? Seriously, if you know of any, suggest them in comments, and I’ll stick them in my Netflix queue. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any.
This interests me as an aspiring writer. When I started my novel in progress (currently a first draft novella which I’m leaving to sit for a while before I look at it and do a rewrite), it was meant to be chick lit, which would have put it sort of within the broader romance genre. So, since I was writing a kind of romance, I decided to make an Asian-American guy the leading man, not, mind you, out of any particular urge to set the world right for Asian men, but because picking a guy of a race (and profession – he’s a computer technician) that isn’t usually chosen to play the romantic hero, and then going on to make him really sexy in the eyes of the protagonist/narrator was a way I felt I could have fun with romance conventions.
As it turned out, writing a romance set in Silicon Valley quickly turned into writing a mystery/suspense story about computer security where the heroine happened to have a relationship with a new boy friend, because, well, I find it much easier to let the computer stuff run my plot than to try to figure out how to actually make the standard romance type plots work. But the question of how I should write characters of different races still comes up, especially since the plot got entangled with racial matters for other reasons (and this is set in California, so it wouldn’t be true to life at all if the characters were overwhelmingly white).
First problem: If I give a character a background, it ought to matter. Whether Savannah Duarte is a stereotypical Latina woman, or whether she isn’t, she’s been walking around for her whole life with other people seeing her as both female and Latina, and that has to affect the way she views the world somehow, in some way that makes her experience different from that of her boy friend, Roger Wang, who’s spent his whole life encountering an entirely different set of expectations from people. So I should be sure that the characters (and the minor ones as well as the major ones) aren’t all just alternate versions of me, who wind up sounding alike. Even though, in fact, several of the characters do reflect different aspects of myself. (The way in which fiction winds up being autobiographical, for me, isn’t so much that the protagonist is me, as that everyone is a little bit me, and a little bit not me, in different ways.)
So, your background should make a difference. But the difference shouldn’t be, if I’m writing well, that everyone winds up playing out stereotypes like “magic Negro,” geeky Asian-American guy, etc. On the other hand, if no one ever aligns with stereotype at all, if I were, say, to just make people the opposites of what they’re stereotypically supposed to be, then that story wouldn’t feel real, either. I’m writing a story set in the Silicon Valley computer industry, so, though my protagonist has no serious need to ever encounter a “magic Negro,” she’d be living an unlikely life if none of her techie colleagues were of Asian background, and if none of them were geeky. So there’s a sort of balance to trying to round your characters out, and the question is, how do you know when you’ve found that balance?
November 16th, 2006 at 2:20 pm
I already recommended Heat and Dust. There’s also The Last Emperor. I had a crush on Kato in the Green Hornet when I was about 5 or 6 because I thought he was like a black cat, so Bruce Lee certainly has to go on my list. I suppose he whole kung fu thing is just another stereotype. That’s all I’ve got off the top of my head.
November 16th, 2006 at 4:48 pm
I thought sexy Asian men were the stereotype.
November 16th, 2006 at 5:09 pm
Ah, how could I forget The Last Emperor? I’ll put Heat and Dust on my Netflix queue tonight. How about Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? I haven’t seen that one yet, so I only know what I’ve read in reviews about it.
November 17th, 2006 at 8:25 pm
I suppose Asian men are sexy in movies made in Asia by Asians. There’s that Japanese noodle shop “western” one. I was trying to think of movies made in the West, and I think the problem is more the rarity of Asian men at all than how they appear when they do.
How about Quincy’s assistant on the old tv series?
November 17th, 2006 at 8:44 pm
That would be Robert Ito (Google is my friend). I see he also played Professor Hikita in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, and has had roles in a couple of the versions of Star Trek.
Here’s a good looking Asian-American movie actor, but it turns out that I haven’t seen any of his movies. Maybe the problem really is a rarity of roles at all for Asian men (beyond a few like Bruce Lee), and a lack of exposure for their movies.
November 17th, 2006 at 9:02 pm
Also, it occurs to me that generally only one man per American movie gets his sexiness emphasized (sometimes more than one woman, depending on whether the movie has a leading man/leading woman focus or a man surrounded by lots of babes focus).
I kind of found the Sikh sapper in The English Patient sexier than the Almasy character, but I think the Almasy character, as the leading man, was the role you were supposed to find more sexy.
November 18th, 2006 at 5:57 am
Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa – Asian American. I have never seen him in a starring role on TV or in the movies, but I find him extremely sexy. His eyes seem to glimmer. Quite often the roles I have him in are a policeman or ganster. Looked him up on Imdb, I believe he has had starring roles in Asian movies.
November 20th, 2006 at 1:02 pm
I thought of Heat and Dust myself, but I think the problem he’s talking about really only applies to east Asians. The sexy Middle Eastern/Indian guy has shown up in movies at least since Omar Sharif (farther if you count people like Rudolph Valentino masquerading as Arabs).
November 22nd, 2006 at 9:40 am
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November 22nd, 2006 at 10:19 am
Anything with Chow-Yun Fat and his upper lip.
The lower one’s not that bad, either.
November 22nd, 2006 at 7:20 pm
Crouching Tiger DEFINITELY has sexy Asian men
November 23rd, 2006 at 9:07 am
Thanks to everyone for the sexy Asian men suggestions! I see I’ll have to look up some new movies. And Happy Thanksgiving to all.
November 26th, 2006 at 11:38 am
I third Crouching Tiger. Chow-Yun Fat is h.o.t. Is it cheating to include Anna and the King, also primarily for Chow-Yun Fat?
I’d also add 2046 (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0212712/).
November 30th, 2006 at 7:27 pm
Interesting post. A couple of comments.
If I give a character a background, it ought to matter.
By background, am I right in reading “ethnicity”, as in, if you don’t give a character a background, we can assume that any ole normal everyday character is a white person? This is less and less true statistically, but is another way that non-white identity is minimized in public discourse like novels and movies. And it seems like any person’s background includes, but is more than, their experience around having a certain color or culture – family structure, personality, geography, what they look like, who they’ve know. I hope your characters are rounder than this suggests.
Also, Jean:
I suppose Asian men are sexy in movies made in Asia by Asians. There’s that Japanese noodle shop “western†one.
Good point about who sees Asian men as sexy — themselves. In Asia and der, the Asian film industry, Asian men are normal instead of an Other with a list of traits. Asian women characters in film often have more of a personality than over here, though white women tend to get sexualized. Flippety flop!
And is the movie you’re thinking of “Tampopo”?
November 30th, 2006 at 9:24 pm
Yes, in this case I was thinking of the “ethnicity” part of the background, but the characters do have other aspects to their background, such as jobs, family structure, age, where they grew up, religious and political beliefs, hobbies, and how they got to know each other (some of which then gets written into the story, and other aspects of which I keep in notes so that I remember what I’ve made up about my characters and how it affects them). White isn’t *supposed* to be a default generic background in this case (if it is, then I’m slipping); particular characters have been given particular white backgrounds, just as other particular characters have been given particular non-white backgrounds. And, since it didn’t seem to me that my first person narrator would actually be announcing the ethnicity of each character she interacts with, when characters show up that haven’t had their ethnicity stated explicitly, sometimes I’ve cast them in my mind as white, and sometimes something else. Of course, some of the characters at this point are more round than others. And whether I actually succeed in avoiding the “normal everyday characters are white” trap, especially with minor characters, I don’t know. It’s hard to be sure I’m not slipping that kind of bias in somewhere.
December 1st, 2006 at 5:17 am
I had to look at IMDB – yes, Tampopo is the one.