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“The Daughter of Fu Manchu”: the Pedagogy of Deconstructing The “The Daughter of Fu Manchu”: The Pedagogy of Deconstructing the Representation of Asian Women in Film and Fiction Author(s): Shoba Sharad Rajgopal Source: Meridians, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1 April 2010), pp. 141-162 Published by: Indiana University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/meridians.2010.10.2.141 . Accessed: 26/04/2015 20:38 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Meridians. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sun, 26 Apr 2015 20:38:02 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Shoba Sharad Rajgopal “The Daughter of Fu Manchu”: The Pedagogy of Deconstructing the Representation of Asian Women in Film and Fiction Abstract Courses regarding race, gender, and representation are not easy to teach under any circum- stances, but even more so in predominantly white classrooms in the post 9/11 U.S. where the masses have been fed a diet of xenophobic, anti-Asian propaganda inculcating an “us” versus “them” mentality. I analyze the discourse of empire, a metaphor that has been used time after time to construct a mythical and menacing Other. In contrast, the portrait of Asian women in cinema and television news as traditional, veiled, and inhabiting a separate sphere adds to this representation of Asian cultures as premodern and irrevocably opposed to the West, much as portrayed in Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” theory (Huntington 1996). I illustrate this transnational feminist critique with a documentary used in Women’s Studies classes: Deborah Gee’s landmark film Slaying the Dragon (1988). I have a vision. Of the Orient. That, deep within its almond eyes, there are still women. Women willing to sacrifice themselves for the love of a man . Rene Gallimard, in M. Butterfly. (Hwang 1986, 92) [Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 2010, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 141–162] © 2010 by Smith College. All rights reserved. 141 This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sun, 26 Apr 2015 20:38:02 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions I teach ethnic and gender studies courses concerning Asian women predom- inantly to white students on the east coast, and have found that most of them find it very difficult to comprehend how both race and gender oppression continue to influence them on a daily basis. Many of them acknowledge that things “were really bad” for women and people of color in the past, but feel that now, in light of the current occupant of the White House, things have all changed for the better. Interestingly, this is the case not just with my white students but with many of my Asian students too, predominantly those from the east coast, where they are not as much a presence as they are in the west, and who do not have the tools to recognize that certain patterns of behavior are not the norm but are in fact ways in which non-white populations are perceived within the dominant discourse. My pedagogy is thus guided by theorists such as Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, Chandra Mohanty, and Ella Shohat, who articulate the principles of white hetero-patriarchal privilege that grants not only explicit but unspoken levels of access to social and institutional power. I also provide texts by other South Asian scholars whose location, like mine, privileges issues pertaining to transnational- ism, such as the crossing of boundaries and confronting difference. These include Uma Narayan, Kum-Kum Bhavnani, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Inderpal Grewal. I find that one of the most effective means of raising the consciousness of my students is to utilize film documentaries that demonstrate how images from Hollywood have been used in the past century to further the “Othering” of a specific, immigrant population. I will discuss both Asian and Arab women in this study, since they have much in common, both from a shared history of persecution in the U.S., and from the fact that many people in the West are often unable to distinguish between Arabs and South and Central Asians, leading to several attacks on Sikhs from South Asia in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. The primary documentary I use in my class is Deborah Gee’s Slaying the Dragon (1988). Produced by Asian Women United, the film was originally made in the late 1980s, but, if used with supplementary films and readings in Asian American Studies and feminist film theory, and with documen- tary and feature films as well as YouTube videos, the film remains very effective as an icebreaker, to get students talking to enable them to 142 meridians 10:2 This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sun, 26 Apr 2015 20:38:02 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions confront racial and gender stereotypes and move into the complexities of international geopolitics behind such representations. Much of feminist film theory has been concerned with film as a signify- ing practice, as a locus of pleasure and entertainment, and as an instru- ment of dominant ideology, or conversely as a tool for political resistance and subversion. It brings to the forefront things that are often ignored in dominant or mainstream popular cinema. These things are centered not just on presences but also in absences, where presences include explicit ways in which women are portrayed in cinema, while absences imply the ways in which women do not appear in film at all (Chatterjee 1998, 4). But if the representation of white women in cinema was perceived by feminist theorists as the signifier not of woman, but of the absent phallus (Johnston 1975), what about the non-white woman, how was she represented? Interestingly, this was even more repressed or ignored by much of Western feminist theory until the 1980s and 90s, with the publication of critiques by women scholars of color (Anzaldua 1987; Collins 1990; hooks 1996). Indeed, the problem of this representation is compounded by the white woman’s complicity in the construction of the discourse of empire and the civilizing mission of colonialism. It fell to theorists of color to critique this representation with the publication of the landmark anthology of cultural studies by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in Seventies Britain (Gilroy 1982). However, it was only much later that theorists began to deconstruct the representa- tion of these marginalized groups and link it to the discourse of empire (Spivak 1988; Marchetti 1993; Hamamoto 1994; Shohat and Stam 1994; Hamamoto and Liu 2000; and Hirabayashi and Xing 2003). Gee’s film can be regarded as a celluloid version of this critique of Hollywood as the discourse of empire through its representation of Asian women as ahistorical and frozen in time, a composite of the many wars of empire that the West as engaged in, with the Asian woman playing the role of the spoils of war. Gee uses the Dragon to symbolize the representation in cinema and fiction, a usage that is interesting in that the Dragon is associated with the cultures of the East, and indeed, many Eastern cultures have been repre- sented in the mainstream cinema of the West as dangerous (to the West, that is), devious and evil, all characteristics in the West of the mythical being, the Dragon. It first appeared to Western audiences as Fu Manchu in Shoba Sharad Rajgopal • The Daughter of Fu Manchu 143 This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sun, 26 Apr 2015 20:38:02 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions the early decades of the twentieth century. The character Fu Manchu has been described in these words: Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan . one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man. (Rohmer 1913) Gee demonstrates how the representation of the evil genius’s female incarna- tion in Daughter of Fu Manchu (1931) is no less Machiavellian. If anything, she is perceived as even more of a danger because she is so beautiful. Examining the cover of the first version of the book Fu Manchu’s Daughter by Collier publishers, it is curious to note the blatant obscuring of the multitude of different cultures in the developing world, where women from cultures as distinct and different as India and China and the entire “Middle East” are all collapsed into one, all-encompassing representation of “the Oriental woman.” Chandra Talpade Mohanty describes this as the reductive and homogeneous notion of “Third World difference,” that stable, “ahistorical something that oppresses most, if not all women in these countries” (Mohanty 2003, 19). I shall examine subsequently whether this mass media representation of women from the Global South has changed in recent times and the implication of such representations in Western mass media. The representation of Asian men has changed a great deal from the emasculated Indian sepoy Gunga Din in the Hollywood film of the 1930s and the Chinese cook Hop Sing in the Cartwright household of Bonanza (NBC, 1959–1973).
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