Asian women

Modern Day Asian Sex Slavery: The Musical (2/18/11)

brittany — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Long Beach, California

Each year CSULB has Sex Positive Week, presented by various feminist and queer student groups. Mariko Passion, activist, artist, and out and proud sex worker, kicked off the week of festivities with her one-woman show, Modern Day Asian Sex Slavery: The Musical.

Passion is a champion of what she refers to as the Whore Revolution, a phrase coined by fellow activist Emi Koyama. According to Koyama, the Whore Revolution begins with the acknowledgment that not all sex work is voluntary or safe and it aspires to create a world in which they are. After getting to know Passion a bit and attending an event thrown by the Sex Workers Outreach Program in Los Angeles (SWOP-LA), it has been brought to my attention that there is an entire generation of young women who do not feel victimized by their work. There are literally thousands of women who are not ashamed of how they make their money. These are women who are passionate, empowered, intelligent, and fighting for the most basic of human rights. As Jessie Nicole, director or SWOP-LA told me at an event earlier this month, sex workers see their work as just that—work. The average person doesn’t have to worry about being beaten, raped, or robbed while at the office and sex workers don’t want to have to worry about these things either.

Passion began her one woman show explaining to the audience that she starts each session with a massage. Straddling a pink Hello Kitty body pillow, Passion described how she uses her small hands to rub and coax her client into a safe, submissive state. This quiet before the storm also assists her in preparing to be intimate. According to Passion, eighty-five percent of the time she is not sexually attracted to the men she services and her sensual, slow massage enables her to “establish a genuine connection” while getting in the mood.

Her show was off to a strong start but was interrupted by various technical glitches and a few awkward on-stage costume changes that resulted in the audience getting a glimpse of Passion’s goods. It was obvious that Passion, who is Chinese and Japanese, hoped to tell the story of the plight of the Asian sex worker and the many ridiculous sound bits and pop culture tidbits she’s been reduced to. As a matter of fact, one of the most compelling moments of Passion’s show was when it appeared as if she broke away from the script, cursing, saying how much the infamous scene from Full Metal Jacket fucked with her childhood, how often she heard, “Me so horny, me love you long time.” As a virginal child completely unaware of sex work, it proved a rude introduction to the stereotypes Asian women must deal with.

Using old news clips and radio broadcasts, music, slides, and songs, it was an admiral attempt to cover decade’s worth of racism and sexual politics stemming from the Vietnam War, but it simply seemed like Passion didn’t have enough time to tell the story that was in her heart. Though entertaining and containing flashes of genius (traipsing around stage using a pink dildo as a mic and singing a dirty version of “I Enjoy Being a Girl"), we’ll have to call this a precocious work in progress with a lot of potential.

Photo courtesy of Stefan Agregado, photographer and photo editor at The Daily 49er.

Written by: Tina Vasquez, February 28th 2011

Tea & Justice

brittany — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Directed by Ermena Vinluan

Women Make Movies

If your political leanings are more in line with musical acts like NWA or MDC, then Ermena Vinluan’s fifty-five-minute exploration of race and gender issues in the context of the New York Police Department may seem... tame?

Tea & Justice is a documentary about Asian women police officers in the NYPD that skirts the uneasy boundaries between a full-blown narrative of empowerment of Asian women breaking cultural and gender stereotypes to become police officers, their negotiation of the politics of being racial and gender minorities in what has historically been perceived as a racist and sexist institution, and the inherently violent nature of policing. Sometimes provocative, but generally unremarkable both politically and artistically, the film is perhaps worth watching (once) for its almost accidental exposition of the gender and cultural politics at play.

The centerpiece of the film is the personal stories of three women, who share their experiences of discrimination and defiance as part of the two percent of NYPD officers who are Asian women. Their stories are interwoven with the public’s perceptions of Asian culture, women, and police officers. Officer Ormsby, for example, tells of how being compelled to serve tea to her male colleagues at a Japanese firm prompted her to find a new career. This is against the backdrop of interviews with New Yorkers, some of whom (predictably) feel that men make better officers, while others subscribe to the great equalizing power of the gun.

In an interesting history of the NYPD, Vinluan highlights how various social movements opened up space for women in policing; for example, the NYPD got rid of regulation high-heels, lip-stick, and smaller guns for female officers in the 1970s. Somewhat disingenuously, the director also traces images of women warriors in Asian mythology to support her claim that ‘being an Asian woman cop is not so odd after all’. While Asian culture is full of examples of remarkable women, I found it difficult to believe that most people would identify policewomen with being leaders or warriors, a contradiction amplified by the inclusion of interviews discussing racially charged incidents of police brutality in the United States, such as the beating of Rodney King.

In her haste to bridge the gap between images of subservient Japanese tea-servers and Vietnamese warrior princesses, Vinluan seems to have confused empowerment and oppression. This speaks to the broader issue of the film’s selective critique of the police along gender and racial dimensions, and failure to adequately question its inherently violent role in maintaining law and order.

Interesting interviews include one with Margaret Moore (Executive Director of the National Center for Women and Policing) who claims promoting diversity in gender and race is the only way to ensure fair treatment inside departments and in policing. Moore and others also argue that since most excessive force claims are made against male officers, recruiting more women—who are ‘naturally less aggressive’—is the solution. But by essentializing qualities to women like their ‘mothering’ instincts and tendencies towards less aggression, interviewees like Lieutenant Eric Adams (100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care) regurgitate classic stereotypes of women that Vinluan’s film is supposedly aiming to debunk. By failing to attribute their ‘natural’ credentials for making better officers to the historical subordination of women in care-giving and domestic roles—aren’t we back at square one?

Vinluan’s schoolteacher voice-overs and flat animation accompanied by platitudes like ‘she’s just a regular working mom!’ work against the film’s rare moments of subtlety, leading me to conclude that those parts that can be deemed thought-provoking are, in fact, inadvertent. Am I asking too much from Tea & Justice? Maybe. But given the eight film festival laurels adorning the DVD cover, I expected more.

Written by: Kaavya Asoka, October 25th 2010

Beauty

admin — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Raphael Selbourne

Tindal Street Press

Beauty is the outstanding first novel of British author Raphael Selbourne, winner of the prestigious 2009 Costa First Novel Award (formerly known as the Whitbread Literary Awards). The novel’s plot is seemingly predictable–an illiterate girl runs away from an abusive home where she had been forced to marry a much older mullah (religious man) at the age of fourteen. However, Selbourne’s pen transforms the story into an insightful glimpse into British-style multiculturalism and immigration, from the point of view of a young woman. Beauty Begum’s tragic tale is one of a young immigrant woman doubly alienated by her family and her environment.

Beauty's timely publication in 2009 is worthy of note, given the paranoia and terror surrounding the tragic London bombings in 2005 and the overt racial profiling that has been ongoing in the Western world. Writer and filmmaker Hanif Kureishi (himself a Whitbread prizewinner) had previously focused in on the immigrant experience and depicted the struggles of Muslim immigrant families in Britain in his screenplays for My Beautiful Laundrette and My Son the Fanatic, for example. Selbourne’s novel can be seen as a valuable continuation of these themes.

Although Beauty never directly addresses the reasons and context for the racism it exposes, it presents us with diverse xenophobic scenarios that are all equally deserving of consideration. It also brings to light the very complex circumstances of women immigrants, domestic abuse, and the everyday struggle of women who are caught between lived tradition and modernity. The author, previously a student of Islamic Studies, is clearly knowledgeable about the topic, a fact that counteracts any reservations we might have about the author’s being just another patriarchal gaze on the “subordinate.”

Selbourne’s secondary characters are rich in detail and complexity. From Mark, the gruff bloke who takes Beauty into his dog-infested home, to Peter, the newly single, perverted neighbor who fantasizes about seducing her, all the characters are cleverly constructed. However, Selbourne’s tour de force lies in his depiction of the feminine psyche. Beauty is very much a convincing female character, of the depth and quality that I had previously only encountered in Roddy Doyle’s Paula Spencer from The Woman Who Walked into Doors. The writer’s sensitivity is key to developing a plausible protagonist.

Raphael Selbourne establishes himself in the proud tradition of English-language writers who manage to paint realistic and tender portraits of specific social groups. Having lived in West Midlands teaching English, he captures the much-ridiculed West Midlands accent in his writing in the same way Roddy Doyle captured the Irish brogue in his novels. Selbourne’s Bangladesh-born Beauty speaks a drawl that is perfectly representative of the West Midlands (UK) setting of the novel. Furthermore, the author scatters Bengali terms in the novel, such as Beauty’s interjections, or explanations for her reactions, thoughts, or actions. Admittedly, Beauty is occasionally an exercise in reading; one must decipher, literally, the spoken language that the author has committed to the page. However, do not let this dissuade you from reading this engaging and thoughtful novel.

Written by: Sophie M. Lavoie, June 27th 2010

Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist China

admin — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:56:00 +0000

By Tiantian Zheng

University Of Minnesota Press

On one occasion, gangsters walked into the bar, grabbed me by the arm, and started dragging me up the stairs toward a private room intended for hostesses’ sexual encounters with clients. The women were also sometimes raped there by gangsters. I quickly realized what was going on—that I was in real danger... Whereas safety was a major issue, hygiene was another. Living in a filthy karaoke bar room without bathing facilities, I had lice in my hair and over my whole body. However, by living and working closely with hostesses in the bar, I gained their recognition and friendship.

Ethnographers always get their man (or woman... or both) even if they have to use their bodies as instruments of data collection and analysis. Ethnographers usually become participant-observers during fieldwork to facilitate rapport and to capture what people actually do as opposed merely to what they say they do, but as these snippets suggest, such can lead to squeamish feelings and harrowing experiences. Zheng participated in activities that male ethnographers could only have observed. Her analysis of sexual networking is consequently first-rate because she moves easily and persuasively from person to state, capital to labor, ideology to practice.

Red Lights is a beautifully written account of the emergence of new femininities and masculinities in post-socialist People’s Republic of China. Zheng analyzes the growth, structure, registration and functions of the karaoke bars now dotting the landscape and in which are played out the social and economic contradictions of class, heterosexuality, ethnicity and gender. In often grim detail, she shows how Communist Party bureaucrats, gangsters, and small business owners (literally) patronize young, unmarried females. In so doing, the former make money, express obeisance to their own social superiors, and get back at Mao Zedong for allegedly having sapped their masculinity during the Cultural Revolution. Women escape poverty (sort of), find boyfriends (ditto), manipulate men as best they can, and experience female solidarity. Her male informants freely express their disturbing misogyny while also confessing their sexual anxieties and class resentment. Confucianism, capitalism and communism each but differently punish women for alleged sexual promiscuity while rewarding men for theirs.

Many tens of thousands of Chinese women have migrated from economically and socially stagnating rural areas to the strip clubs and karaoke bars, back rooms, and guest houses of urban centers such as Dalian, where they “choose” forms of employment that entail grotesque subservience, daily humiliation, squalid working conditions, and social leprosy. Dalian was long ago hailed as an oasis of economic development during the period of Occupation by the Japanese military in the 1930s and 1940s. Its morally unsavory status today as a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah—but whose economic function is central to post-socialist China—reveals the social and economic contradictions of Confucianism, patriarchy, communism, Western media forms and capitalism. “In Dalian,” Zheng writes, “taxes paid by the entertainment industry are the largest source of local revenue.”

Red Lights opens with Zheng’s painful personal stories of growing up a filial daughter in a sex-negative and patriarchal Chinese household. It continues with her painful humiliation in a U.S. college classroom regarding her views of gender relations. It proceeds to detail the humiliation of Chinese women. Her extremely sorrowful Afterword, entitled “From Entertainer to Prostitute,” shows the inexorable logic of patriarchy and capitalism and gives the lie to pro-sex work activist positions that can neglect or ignore specifically gendered humiliation in sex work. Her Acknowledgments section deeply moved me in recounting the joys and pains of scholarly work. It exemplifies the beauty and honor of academic collaborations that break through barriers of geography, language, culture, theory and gender but that are nevertheless mindful of them.

Red Lights would make a fine addition to graduate-level courses in social theory and fieldwork, but could be used in upper-division courses in gender studies and ethnography, too. It is a major contribution to ethnographic explorations of gender, sexuality, and prostitution, and to Asian Studies, too, which has enabled too few participant observation-style studies of sexual networking.

Written by: Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D., August 7th 2009

Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire

admin — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:08:00 +0000

Edited by Sonia Shah

South End Press

Incredible. Insightful. Inspiring. These are the words I use to describe Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire, the pivotal textbook on the growing politics of Asian American women. Essays embrace wide-ranging issues that include domestic violence, health, exploitation in the global trade, the role of spirituality, and punk-rock culture—all in the light of organizing and activism.

The anthology’s key concern is with the attitude of mainstream feminism whose individualistic and essentialist views are at odds with the affairs and experiences of Asian women. Sonia Shah, editor of Dragon Ladies, believes that a singular Asian American feminist movement is essential in representing Asian American women’s interests. The term ‘Asian’ is problematic in that it corresponds to a diaspora of ethnic identities, but Shah nevertheless manages to take into account the realities that females face from this walk of life.

As Juliana Pegues points out in “Strategies from the Field,” unlike white activists, Asian women have to deal with invisibility as well as “exotic” racial stereotypes and labels like “well-behaved,” “hard-working.” and “obedient.” The trouble is that Asian women’s perspectives are ignored when race is viewed in terms of black and white. When it comes to organizing resistance, “groups in many cases act as all-white groups internally, and white perspectives and standards are the norm.”

Purvi Shah’s article “Redefining the Home” is very engrossing, though the entire text is by no means an easy read. In fact, a lot of the material is tough, but if you’re passionate enough about this topic, you’ll fly through it. Shah discusses the belief that the personal is political when it comes to abuse within the home. Community elites seem to be the culprits in seeding the idea that culture and politics are separate issues—matters of the Home/Marriage for instance are cleverly disguised as tradition; these leaders are in essence threatened by organizations that challenge their norms. Rightly so, Shah proposes that “a home in which violence occurs is a public space” and a political problem that is affected by a range of factors like social, cultural and environmental.

Many prominent figures have come together to comprise this collection of interviews, personal essays, and eye-opening historical and current facts such as on the slave-like treatments of overseas Filipina workers. The joint mother-daughter article “Bringing Up Baby: Raising a ‘Third World’ Daughter in the ‘First World’” was a piece I found quite amusing and relevant to my own view of reality. Shamita Das Dasgupta and Sayantani DasGupta talk about balancing their different identities—Indian immigrant and American-born Indian—against Western culture. The idea of community is important to Indian culture and therefore for Indian women, it forms part of their identity; adopting the model of western feminism whose emphasis lies on the ‘individual’ would inevitably further alienate them; the issues concerning white feminists do not always apply to women of Asian origin.

Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire in itself deconstructs the Asian woman stereotype conveying instead an image of the “virangana”—the ‘warrior woman’ thirsting to battle for change and victory. The contributors are good role models to rouse the next generation to self-reflect and take part in some form of action to empower the disadvantaged. From a spiritual standpoint, Cheng Imm Tan makes an important assertion: “When activism is fuelled by anger and hatred, we end up objectifying the ‘enemy’ just as we have been objectived.” What Tan then subtly suggests is that injustice can be met with compassion, and an intent to transform our aggressors rather than destroy them.

Certainly, this is a book with great ideas from women who not only breathe fire but speak with absolute conviction.

Written by: Payal Patel, July 14th 2009

Women's Movements in Twentieth-Century Taiwan

admin — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 09:36:00 +0000

By Doris Chang

University of Illinois Press

Women's Movements in Twentieth-Century Taiwan by Doris Chang offers a compelling history of the recurrent feminist movement in Taiwan’s imperial and post-war eras. Though Chang’s primary concern is establishing a historical survey of Taiwanese feminism, the book contains an even more valuable—if largely incidental—subtext about the vulnerability of feminism against competing political and cultural movements.

We tend to think of sexism as the final barrier following a millennium of social progress; after centuries spent peeling away layers of barbarism and prejudice, it is a final lingering injustice. We also imagine that, following these other achievements, the realization of women’s rights should be natural and frictionless. Chang shows us that this is exactly wrong.

In fact, feminist thought ebbed and flowed in colonial Taiwan under the Japanese, then under the Chinese, and then again under the autonomous Taiwanese government, always emerging briefly before being shuttered away by competing political and cultural identities. In a time when women were married off as chattel or sold into brothels, advocates for women’s rights were again and again cast as selfish agitators sapping vitality from the political cause du jour.

This is not to say that the violent swaying of Taiwanese politics was in any way frivolous. Taiwan confronted the Sino-Japanese War, World War II, the Chinese civil war, and then decades of martial law under the Kuomintang. Each period sagged under the weight of ethnic and class inequalities, all of which retarded economic growth and democracy. Throughout this turmoil, feminist groups were repeatedly encouraged to ally with cultural movements, political parties, and class-based entities, and then were admonished to abandon their objectives to the greater goals of their partners.

This will sound familiar to progressives who feel themselves pushed to put women’s issues on a back burner. The implication was—and remains—that in times of distress, women should shelve their feminist ideals and divert their attentions to some larger cause. Of course, it is impossible to ask a woman to prioritize her gender identity over her national identity or her class sympathies. Yet Chang shows us that this very tension drowned the advancement of women’s rights at every moment of political reckoning.

The implications of these observations are unclear. Maybe the recent successes of Taiwan’s feminists could only have been realized in the absence of war, imperialism, and censorship. Perhaps it was the eventual triumph of democracy that paved the way for women’s freedom to marry, divorce, work, and study as they choose. But it begs the question: If the feminists of the 1920s had been able to find their voice, would it all have taken so long?

Written by: Rebecca Zerzan, July 10th 2009