Theological Reflections on “Gangnam Style”: A Racial, Sexual, and Cultural Critique

A Racial, Sexual, and Cultural Critique

Joseph Cheah, Grace Ji-Sun Kim

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781349476589
  9781137373472
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137370334
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

As we listen to Psy's music are we laughing at him or with him? This book responds to this question from historical and theological perspectives and tackles the pressing issues concerning racial stereotypes, imposed masculinity, and imitating another in order to ridicule him/her.

1

Laughing at Psy

Abstract: Asian American historiography reveals that discrimination, stereotyping, and racism occurred from the beginning of the arrival of the Chinese, the first group of Asians in the mid-nineteenth century. These Asian migrants faced tremendous difficulties and hardships and tried their best to overcome political, social, and cultural discrimination. Over the years, Asian men were stereotyped in the American media and society as clown (jester, nonthreatening), or nerd (socially inept, sexually undesirable), or martial artists (mysterious “other”). Asian women were typecast as Dragon Lady (hypersexual, immoral, aggressive) or Lotus Blossom (submissive, docile, passive). When we examine the worldwide phenomenon of Psy’s “Gangnam Style,” we realize that in certain ways Psy fits into the Asian male stereotype of a jester, offering goofy laughs for all. As Psy rose in popularity and record-breaking music statistics, many are left asking the question, “Are we laughing at Psy?”

Cheah, Joseph and Grace Ji-Sun Kim. Theological Reflections on “Gangnam Style”: A Racial, Sexual, and Cultural Critique. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137370334.0004.

Introduction

The success of Psy on the American entertainment scene raises the suspicion that the popularity of “Gangnam Style” in the American milieu may have as much to do with our racialized society as it does with the man whose music video went viral. Crystal Anderson, Refresh Daemon, and other commentators have pointed out that perhaps Psy made it big in the mainstream American media because he fits into one or more of the roles deemed acceptable for Asian men: nerd, clown, gangster, or martial artist. As Anderson puts it in Deanna Pan’s article about Psy, “He’s this chubby, happy guy. We can embrace that in a way we can’t embrace . . . other Asian male bodies that challenge the construction of Asian masculinities.”¹ Those who do challenge the construction of hegemonic masculinity of the American culture, such as Jung Ji-Hoon or “Rain,” one of the biggest names in the world of K-pop, Jay Chou, the actor, filmmaker, and song-writing pop star from Taiwan, and other talented Asian artists, have, despite years of trying to break into the American entertainment market, failed to do so. Daemon suggests that perhaps Psy was able to sing a catchy tune and dance his invisible horse into the hearts of millions of Americans in part because he plays a stereotypic role of a jester who lacks sex appeal and, therefore, does not pose a threat to heterosexual women.² Whatever our take on this, we cannot completely dismiss the factor of race in the discussion of Psy’s popularity in America. In this chapter, we argue that racial stereotypes of Asian immigrants and Asian Americans have deep historical and structural roots, and continue to be ubiquitous in our racialized society today. Specifically, we examine the racial formation of Asian immigrants as they enter the cultural, legal, political, and religious spaces of the United States and the ways in which Asian male bodies in particular are not only racialized in these spaces but are gendered over and against Western hegemonic masculinity. Throughout this book, we will take an Asian American historiographical approach that is antithetical to the interpretation of history as a temporal working out of the master narratives of the American culture.

Asian American historiography emphasizes a dynamic, nonteleological approach to history. It works against the teleological tendency implicit in such master narratives as the racial categorization of Asian Americans as “perpetual foreigners,” “nonassimilable,” “model minority,” and Asian/Asian American males as emasculated actors and other ideological characterizations prevalent in the American society. In other words, Asian American historiography does not see history as evolutionary. It counters the predictions of evolutionary theorists of social change that modernization and industrialization would bring about a reduction in the importance of race and ethnicity and ease assimilation. The Civil Rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, and the New Right movement of the 1970s brought to our attention the continuing importance of racial and ethnic divisions in defining lines of social order. To illustrate a nonteleological approach to Asian American historiography, we rely on many examples to show that (1) the racial stereotypes of Asian immigrants and Asian Americans date back to the mid-nineteenth century and the arrival in America of “celestials” from China; (2) Asian male bodies have been desexualized, feminized, and emasculated in American media and society at large; and (3) Asian female bodies have been hypersexualized and exoticized in American mainstream culture. All of these examples point to the manner in which Asian Americans in particular have been “laughed at” by the dominant group throughout American history.

Arrival of “celestials” from China

“Pushed” by the lack of employment and overcrowded living conditions in China due to the bankruptcy of Chinese peasant economy as a result of the intense conflicts brought about by the British Opium wars, as well as to the devastations caused by floods, famines, and droughts, and “pulled” by the lure of gold and the demand for cheap labor, beginning in 1849 waves of Chinese emigrants left their native Guangdong (Kwangtung in Cantonese) Province of China for the sugarcane plantations of Hawaii and the “Gold Mountains” (Gam Saan) of California. They were not part of the “coolie” trade from China to Latin America, developed between 1847 and 1874, but were indentured with payment for their passage. In California, Chinese laborers were initially involved in mining and railroad construction and, later, in manufacturing industries, agriculture, and land reclamation projects.³

Even before the first Chinese migrant stepped foot on America’s shores, many in the West regarded China as a country in severe decay and its citizens as “nothing more than starving masses, beasts of burden, depraved heathens, and opium addicts.”⁴ When the first sizable wave of Chinese migrants arrived during California’s gold rush in the 1850s, various public officials, including the mayor and the governor of California, initially praised these “celestials” from China for their work ethic and pleasant demeanor. In his address to the California legislature in January 1852, Governor John McDougal described the Chinese laborers as, “one of the most worthy classes of our newly adopted citizens—to whom the climate and the character of these lands are peculiarly suited.”⁵ Governor McDougal, however, had either ignored or failed to notice the deeply ingrained ethnocentrism of his constituents. Later that year, the ugly head of racism began to emerge as nativists demanded that white miners be protected from foreign miners in general and Chinese miners in particular. The nativist outcry was devious since the Chinese, the vast majority of whom in California were working in the mines as independent prospectors, could only work on claims already abandoned by white miners. In response to the nativists’ demand, the new governor John Bigler followed the recommendation of a committee of the California Assembly by enacting the foreign miners’ license tax, which required every foreign miner who did not want to become a citizen to pay a monthly tax of three dollars. The tax was aimed particularly at Chinese laborers who, by virtue of their race, were in fact ineligible to become American citizens because the Naturalization Act of 1790 reserved naturalized citizenship to “free white persons” who had lived in the United States for at least two years. By the time the foreign tax was voided by the federal Civil Rights Act of 1870, what the state of California had collected from the Chinese amounted to between 25 and 50 percent of all the state’s revenue. What is important to note in relation to the theme of this chapter is that the nativists and Governor Bigler used race to maintain power and privilege for the whites.⁶ This is also the first instance in which the Chinese are legally marked as non-Americans or foreigners, a characterization that, as we shall see, has been expanded to subsequent immigrants from Asia and that continues to be etched into the consciousness of mainstream America today.

Accompanying the settlement of Western territories and the discovery of gold in California in 1849 was the expansion of labor-intensive industries, such as mining operations and constructing the railroad, which increased the need for cheap labor. The greatest demand for Chinese laborers was in heavy construction work on the Central Pacific Railroad. The Chinese played a significant role in the building of the first transcontinental railroad over the High Sierras and across the Nevada plains and desert. Unable to find sufficient white laborers to lay railroad tracks eastward of Sacramento, Charles W. Crooker, one of the “Big Four” who headed the Central Pacific Railroad Corporation, turned to the Chinese by hiring those who were already in California and by recruiting additional workers from Guangdong, China.⁷ Crooker’s idea of employing the Chinese sounded ludicrous and was initially opposed by J. H. Strobridge, the superintendent of Central Pacific Railroad Corporation, who doubted that the slightly built Chinese, whose average height was four feet ten inches and weight was 120 pounds, could do the backbreaking toil of pounding rocks and laying tracks across the remote Sierra Nevada and beyond. But the Chinese laborers proved him wrong. Often using simple hand tools, these Chinese indentured workers demonstrated herculean efforts in laying the toughest section of railroad tracks by carving through the granite spires of the Sierra. The lifestyle and work ethic of the Chinese laborers were so impressive that even Strobridge, who had initially opposed hiring Chinese, admitted: “They learn quickly, do not fight, have no strikes that amount to anything, and are very cleanly in their habits. They will gamble, and do quarrel among themselves most noisily . . . but harmlessly.”⁸

The Chinese contract laborers built the most difficult stretches of the railroad by boring tunnels through the granite rocks of the Sierra Nevada and by laying tracks across the deserts of Nevada and Utah. At the peak of its construction in 1868, the Central Pacific Railroad employed more than 12,000 Chinese contract laborers. Because the Chinese were efficient and diligent workers and were willing to work for lower wages than others, employers sought them out. Yet due to the xenophobic fear among white Americans that the Chinese might populate California, the labor contracts with Chinese indentured workers discouraged or prohibited their wives or family members from accompanying them.

In order to keep wages low and undermine efforts at organizing labor union, white capitalists and railroad tycoons pitted the Chinese laborers against white workers, including a large number of Irish and Italian immigrant workers. The Irish and Italians were classified as “nonwhite” on the East Coast but were seen as “white” when juxtaposed with the Chinese on the West Coast. Railroad magnates praised the abilities of the Chinese to work more efficiently at longer hours for less pay than their white counterparts. Consequently, white laborers found themselves competing for jobs that the Chinese would do for lower wages, became angry at them for doing so and for capitulating to other labor demands such as strikebreaking, and ultimately accused the Chinese of taking their jobs from them.⁹ These quarrels contributed to the rise of nativist sentiments, which lent strength to the Know-Nothing Party in Congress and led to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882—the first piece of national legislation that explicitly excluded a specific racial/ethnic group from the United States.

In reality, Chinese laborers were at no point in competition with white laborers. The only jobs that were open to the Chinese were the jobs that whites did not want. White employers turned to Chinese laborers only as the last resort. In fact, white workers benefitted from Chinese willing to take low-paying jobs because this contributed to higher wages and living standards for whites in California.

Beginning in the 1880s, the fear of “Chinese invasion” stemming from the outgrowth of anti-Chinese sentimentality that had been simmering for the past few decades swept the United States. It became a political cornerstone of many politicians who were afraid that the Chinese were going to overrun America. In every form of media, from newspaper articles to letters, from pamphlets to sermons, the so-called “Chinese issue” was discussed, debated, and challenged. Common charges leveled at the Chinese immigrant was that “he is not a genuine immigrant”; “he does not settle down to make a home”; “his sole object is to save himself enough money to get back to China”; “every spare dollar that a Chinaman saves goes to China”; “he is clannish, and insists on living in communities of other Chinamen”; and “he despises our customs and manners and maintains his own.”¹⁰

While Chinese railroad workers, for example, retained the customs and demeanor of their cultural heritage, they also exhibited hegemonic masculinity that was consonant with that promoted by the dominant white culture: undaunted courage when faced with insurmountable challenges, retaliation when provoked, and protest when confronted with an unjust situation. Yet that equanimity ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Laughing at Psy
• 2  Laughing with Psy
• 3  Theology of Marginalization
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index