Geisha of a Different Kind

Race and Sexuality in Gaysian America

C. Winter Han

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781479840694
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Costumbres y tradiciones

In gay bars and nightclubs across America, and in gay-oriented magazines and media, the buff, macho, white gay man is exalted as the ideal—the most attractive, the most wanted, and the most emulated type of man. For gay Asian American men, often viewed by their peers as submissive or too ‘pretty,’ being sidelined in the gay community is only the latest in a long line of racially-motivated offenses they face in the United States.Repeatedly marginalized by both the white-centric queer community that values a hyper-masculine sexuality and a homophobic Asian American community that often privileges masculine heterosexuality, gay Asian American men largely have been silenced and alienated in present-day culture and society. In Geisha of a Different Kind, C. Winter Han travels from West Coast Asian drag shows to the internationally sought-after Thai kathoey, or “ladyboy,” to construct a theory of queerness that is inclusive of the race and gender particularities of the gay Asian male experience in the United States. Through ethnographic observation of queer Asian American communities and Asian American drag shows, interviews with gay Asian American men, and a reading of current media and popular culture depictions of Asian Americans, Han argues that gay Asian American men, used to gender privilege within their own communities, must grapple with the idea that, as Asians, they have historically been feminized as a result of Western domination and colonization, and as a result, they are minorities within the gay community, which is itself marginalized within the overall American society. Han also shows that many Asian American gay men can turn their unusual position in the gay and Asian American communities into a positive identity. In their own conception of self, their Asian heritage and sexuality makes these men unique, special, and, in the case of Asian American drag queens, much more able to convey a convincing erotic femininity. Challenging stereotypes about beauty, nativity, and desirability, Geisha of a Different Kind makes a major intervention in the study of race and sexuality in America.

1

Being an Oriental, I Could Never Be Completely a Man

Gendering Asian Men

Before the evening begins, eight contestants, each with her own entourage, are cramped into the upstairs balcony of Neighbours, a popular nightclub in Seattle’s gayborhood. Being used tonight as a makeshift dressing and staging area for the evening’s competition, almost all of the floor space is filled with various dresses, shoes, bags of cosmetics, and boxes of costume jewelry. Cocktail tables set up as impromptu makeup vanities are cluttered with foundation, eyeliner, lipstick, and every conceivable tricks-of-the-trade concealer available to help the contestants “put on their face” and transform from “boys into girls.” While stereotypes of catty drag queens conniving to sabotage one another have been popularized by such shows as RuPaul’s Drag Race, the contestants upstairs are a collegial bunch. They move about the space in relative silence, interested more in focusing on their own preparation than on throwing shade. None of the contestants seem interested in insulting or degrading one another, and the conversation that passes between them is marked by cordiality rather than malice. They smile freely at one another, eagerly offer assistance, and seem genuinely interested in everyone having a good evening. Given what’s involved, the collegiality is that much more surprising.

Often seen as one of the “entry points” to the drag scene, the title of Miss Neighbours is coveted by new drag queens just starting to build a reputation in the gay community. “It’s a stepping stone,” a well-established drag queen told me a few days earlier, “a lot of queens start there.” By “starting there,” she means that many aspiring drag queens who win the title of Miss Neighbours go on to win more prestigious titles, such as Miss Gay Seattle, La Femme Magnifiqué, or the most coveted title of all, Empress of Seattle. “Of course, a drag career is not so straightforward,” she added, noting that many successful queens didn’t necessarily get their start by winning Miss Neighbours or winning Queen of Hearts, another “entry” drag title, and some established drag queens have entered, and won, Miss Neighbours. “But not Queen of Hearts,” she said, “that’s usually always a new girl.” So the fact that more established drag queens also enter Miss Neighbours, unlike Queen of Hearts, makes winning this title akin to a drag coup of sorts for newer queens. “You’re not always just competing against new girls,” she told me, “so it’s that much more pressure.” Understandably, the contestant are on edge, as each one glues on eyebrows, paints on lipstick, and lays out a number of different outfits for the various stages of the competition. Despite all the preparation, it’s already obvious to most in the club, even before the lights go up on the last contestant, who will walk away with the crown. In a flurry of fans and silk, one contestant manages to capture the largely white audience’s imagination. As the performance reaches its climax, the audience members are up on their feet, cheering in unison.

“I’m never entering another pageant with Asian girls again,” one white drag queen tells me later that evening, “they’re just too hard to beat. They’re just way too real, it’s not even fair.” In the opinion of this white drag queen, the realness of gay Asian drag queens comes from their “more delicate features, smaller statures, and their ability to be more feminine.” It is this ability to pass as a real woman, even when the lights go on, that allegedly gives Asian drag queens a natural advantage in pageants. This sentiment, expressed to me by a white drag queen in the heat of the moment, is shared among Asian drag queens as well. As one Asian drag queen told me:

Asian men are just better at looking like real girls. With white guys, there’s all this hair to hide. If you don’t conceal it well, the hair will show after a few hours. Asian guys are naturally hairless, their skins are smoother, their bodies are leaner and a little smaller, so there’s less work to do to hide all the manliness. I think it’s easier for Asian guys to look more natural.

Jokes about having less to tuck told repeatedly with a sly smile aside, it’s obvious that the belief that Asian men make better drag queens, due to their physical features, is certainly not held only by white men. In fact, the belief that Asian men made better drag queens was repeated to me by many of the men I met, both Asian and non-Asian.

While delicate features and smaller size may contribute to the overall illusion of realness, perhaps it is the audience perception of Asian men that ultimately leads to Asian drag queens being perceived as more authentic. It may not be the physical characteristics of gay Asian drag queens, per se, that contributes to the illusion; rather, the inability of white audience members, judges, or other drag queens, to see them as anything other than female may be the real illusion. Thus, the illusion that Asian men are somehow naturally more feminine than white men may be more of a testament to the white imagination than the result of actual physical traits of Asian men.

This illusion of Asian men’s femininity is perhaps best exemplified by what has now become the most famous line from David Henry Hwang’s acclaimed play, M. Butterfly. The play, Hwang’s loose interpretation of the real-life relationship between the French diplomat Bernard Boursicot and Shi Pei Pu, a male Peking opera singer, and inspired by Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly, premiered on Broadway at the Eugene O’Neil Theatre in 1988. The play traces a two-decade-long relationship between Song Liling, a Chinese opera singer, and Rene Gallimard, a French civil servant. When the relationship, marked by deception and espionage, is finally discovered by French authorities, both Song and Gallimard are arrested and charged with treason. When a French judge asks the protagonist to explain how he was able to fool Gallimard into believing that he was a woman for nearly two decades, Song attributes the success of his masquerade on Gallimard’s inability to see him as anything other than a woman rather than on his own abilities of deception.1

“The West thinks of itself as masculine—big guns, big industry, big money—so the East is feminine—weak, delicate, poor but good at art, and full of inscrutable wisdom—the feminine mystique,” Song tells the judge, “I am an Oriental. And being an Oriental, I could never be completely a man.”2 In Song’s opinion, it was Gallimard’s inability to see him as anything other than a woman, because he was an “Oriental,” a result of historical gendering of Asian men necessitated by global domination and conquest, which perpetuated the ruse. Precisely because Asian men are feminized in western minds, the western mind is unable to see anything other than a female when gazing at a male “Oriental” body. Given the perceived realness of Asian drag queens, perhaps this illusion has more far-reaching consequences than a relationship between a French diplomat and an Asian concubine.

Race and Masculinity

By now, it is clear that race has always played an integral part in defining masculinity, with racial markers used to define appropriate masculine attributes and behaviors and contrast those with attributes and behaviors that have come to be perceived as inappropriate. As sociologist Michael Kimmel noted: “The masculinity that defines white, middle class, early middle-aged, heterosexual men is the masculinity that sets the standards for other men, against which other men are measured and, more often than not, found wanting.”3

In this comparison, white masculinity, practiced in its hegemonic form, is largely based on homophobic, racist, and sexist notions regarding those who do not fit the model and maintains itself specifically by defining others as being outside of that norm, whether it be because others are too feminine, overly masculine, or simply fail to achieve the masculine norm in some important way.4 Potential ways to fail at achieving the masculine norm are legion. When appropriate masculinity is constructed not only along physical attributes but also along socioeconomic attainment, educational achievement, and cultural tastes which are all measured along what is considered normative behavior for upper middle-class white men, men of color can fail to measure up along multiple dimensions, even when they manage to measure up to one, or even a few, of the other dimensions. This leads to a number of ways to marginalize men of color for not being masculine enough or being too masculine. For example, black, Latino, and Asian men have been differently gendered and sexualized, with black and Latino men being constructed as hypermasculine and hypersexual, while Asian men have been constructed as having failed at achieving an appropriate level of masculinity in terms of both gender performance and sexual behavior. Yet the processes that differently construct men of color as being hypermasculine or not masculine enough work in similar ways to place them outside of what has come to be seen as normal and appropriate gendered and sexual behaviors. Because there are so many ways to fail, there are many ways to force men of color to fail.

Being defined outside of the masculine norm has negative consequences for men of color. In examining masculine identity among black men, psychologist Shanette Harris noted that black men are not able to achieve the “European American standards of manhood as provider, protector, and disciplinarian” and instead redefine masculinity in a way that emphasizes “sexual promiscuity, toughness, thrill seeking, and the use of violence in interpersonal relations.”5 Denied other cultural markers for being a successful man, black men become hypermasculine in the areas of masculinity that are available to them. This hypermasculinization of black men is further propagated by the media’s unrelenting portrayal of black men as being angry, violent, and criminal. Efforts to counter the stigmatized status of being black may lead black men to also hold anti-homosexual attitudes, and may cause black men who engage in same-sex behaviors either to remain closeted or attempt to define same-sex attraction outside of the way that “gay” has come to be understood.6 For example, many black men who engage in same-sex behaviors refuse to see themselves as being “gay” and prefer the label of “being on the down low,” even when their same-sex sexual behaviors are known by others. While in the larger imagination, the “down low” has come to be equated with closeted black men, more recent research with black men who have sex with men suggests that the “down low” label may have as much to do with black men’s refusal to self-identify as “gay” rather than simply a way for them to hide their sexual behaviors from others.

Latino men have also been constructed along hypermasculine lines similar to black men, if slightly less dangerous. Long stereotyped in the popular press, Latino men’s machismo has come to be equated with sexual aggression, domination, and violence.7 This misrepresentation of machismo as strictly a hypermasculine characteristic devoid of any cultural context is easily done when contrasted with that of white masculinity and may lead Latino men to be perceived, similar to black men, as violent and dangerous.8 Like black men, the focus on machismo has consequences for both sexuality and sexual behaviors. For example, gendered stereotypes often dictate sexual behavior among gay Latino men with more masculine men taking on the dominant role while the more feminine men take on the submissive role during sexual interactions and with the more feminine men becoming objects of social shame.9 When conceived in this way, it becomes obvious that it isn’t same-sex sexual behavior that is shameful but the failure to behave “like a man” that is the source of shame. While black men and Latino men have been portrayed as hypermasculine, Asian masculinity has always been and continues to be “produced, stabilized, and secured through mechanisms of gendering” that portray Asian men as asexual and/or feminine rather than sexual and/or masculine.10 This gendering of Asian men can be traced to various historic projects aimed at claiming a dominant west vis-à-vis a submissive east, big guns and big industry vis-à-vis good art and inscrutable wisdom.

Historic Constructions of Asian Men

At the root of the process that has constructed Asian men as gendered bodies lie various historical processes that have shaped what it means to be an Asian man in the white imagination. In his seminal work, Orientalism, cultural critic Edward Said noted, “The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.”11 Rather than being a method of describing the “Orient” along purely romantic lines, orientalist discourse acted as a “political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’)” that acted to promote the belief of a dominant and superior “west” against a subjugated and inferior “east.”12 Rather than acknowledge and highlight the diversity European colonialists encountered, orientalist projects had the consequence of homogenizing vastly different cultural groups with different views, regarding not only appropriate gender roles but homosexual acts, and placing them all under the umbrella of “the oriental,” for the sake of colonial efficiency as well as the colonialists’ own repressed sexual desires.

In his examination of early European writings about the Orient, Joseph Boone notes the sexual politics of colonialization that marked “Oriental” men as feminine while at the same time constructing European men as masculine. As Boone puts it:

For many Western men the act of exploring, writing about, and theorizing an eroticized Near and Middle East is coterminous with unlocking a Pandora’s box of phantasmic homoerotic desire, desire whose propensity to spread without check threatens to contaminate, indeed to reorient, the heterosexual “essence” of occidental male subjectivity.13

This gendering of Oriental men was used to disguise western homoerotic desires within the confines of occidental heterosexuality. As the logic goes, if the desired male Oriental body was not really a male body, then the homoerotic desires of western travelers were not really homosexual. While Boone’s analysis is limited to narratives about the Near and Middle East, the same orientalizing narratives were often used to describe Asian men from both East and Southeast East Asia.

Given the history and consequences of the orientalist projects, what it means to be Asian, from a western perspective, is constructed largely on western expectations of what is normal and what is abnormal. Within this need to homogenize a vast continent of colonized subjects, images painted about what it means to be Asian often focus on stereotypical, one-dimensional portrayal of Asians who are nearly always presented as one in the same despite divergent histories, cultural backgrounds, and points of origin. These types of portrayals present Asian men as being a certain way, that is difficult to fully describe and comprehend in the western mind but distinctively different from the west, one-dimensional, and fundamentally foreign. But, more important, it portrays Asian men as being inferior in every way to white men.

The distinctive gendered tone of orientalist discourse is evident in other historic writings about Asian men. “Two beings walk up the street, placidly, with tiny steps,” Jean D’Estray wrote in Pastels d’Asie in 1900. “Strange girls?” he questioned. No, he answers. It was, “two infantrymen out strolling.”14 While d’Estray was specifically discussing Vietnamese men, the tendency to view Asian men through a feminine lens was a prevalent feature in western literature and popular culture. Even in today’s media, “Asian men are rarely portrayed as anything other than housekeepers, waiters, or ruthless foreign businessmen.”15

This distinction, particularly useful as a means of justifying the masculine thrust on the Asian continent by European colonial powers, became an easy way to maintain hierarchical relations even within western borders. Once Asian men traveled to western nations, the same orientalist discourse about the feminine, and therefore infantile, Asian man fit nicely with the social reality that was already created for them.

While popular images are powerful tools in constructing images of the “other,” legal policies can also act to construct racial meaning.16 Particularly, immigration and racial policies have contributed substantially to the construction of a gendered Asian male. The racialized legal process that constructed Asian people as racial subjects through immigration and naturalization laws also had the effect of making gendered subjects out of Asian men who were denied the more masculine role of citizen and the rights inferred by that designation.17 Asian exclusion laws, coupled with anti-miscegenation laws, led to the creation of a “bachelor society” among early Chinese male immigrants. Because Asian women were not allowed to immigrate to the United States, and Asian men were not allowed to marry non-Asian women, early Asian male immigrants found themselves trapped in bachelor societies. Facing a racist and exclusionary society, these men often congregated together, established family associations, and set up households without women. At the same time, labor laws excluded Asian workers from various occupations and relegated Asian men to feminine occupations such as laundry workers, domestics, and cooks in the largely male-dominated west coast of the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century, further marking them as being feminine in the western imagination.18 Thus, not being able to vote, work in masculine occupations, and marry women of any race contributed to the formation of a gendered Asian male in the white mind. When granted sexuality at all, Asian male sexuality was always depicted as a deviation from the normal white male heterosexuality from which white women needed to be protected.19

While being portrayed as meek asexual houseboys or as sexual deviants, Asian men have also been portrayed as ...