Kaplan's Anarchy of Empire tracks the influences and impacts of the "domestic" and "foreign" in the time of empire building in the US on constructions of race and gender. Specifically, I would like to focus on the idea of the duality of domesticity, as both the literal home and the domestication of the "savage" other. In the late 1800s, where much of Kaplan's analysis is rooted, focuses more so on the domestication of the general "foreign savage" population, I would like to direct this lens and analysis to the perpetuation of this desire to domesticate in modern day, particularly women, as exemplified with the advertisement above for an Asian dating website.
The fetishization of Asian women is not a particularly new phenomenon, with many examples in popular culture and many dating back a hundred years, such as Madame Butterfly which was a short story published in 1898, obviously many years before the very popular musical. However, the existence of this phenomenon does not necessarily mean it is tied to empire building in the past or present. However, taking into account the gendered expectations of domesticity and the stereotypes around Asian women, the emphasis on demure, quiet, and complacent femininity emerges. Thus, arguably as the cult of domesticity was maturing and taking root in America, it was being applied to non-white women as well, and in modern day the domestication of the foreign non-white other that occurred through literal invasion is now being accomplished through stereotype and fetish. The ad plays on tropes of Asian culture as seen by Americans, turning a diverse and multifaceted continent into a monolith of bamboo and pagodas. These exotic, foreign, non-white women exemplify the aspects of femininity that have been maintained and perpetuated for decades in America, welcoming, silent, and pliant. These women have been proverbially domesticated, but do to their race (and in this case the intentional exotic background of the video) the "otherness" of these women is maintained, and the conquering of white masculinity can still continue. Fetish towards Asian women functions similarly to the awkward and contradictory story told by Kaplan of the Supreme Court's decision that Puerto Rico was not part of the United States, but still under the United States watchful and paternal eye. A fetish is not love, it is not genuine and equal. It others just as the nations of American empire were othered as to protect whiteness. Asian women become a vanguard for the "ideal" women, but simultaneously present otherness that can then be conquered.
Brava, Sarah. It's a solid connection between the text and a contemporary example, while simultaneously speaking to my own narrative within this historical discourse, if only indirectly, in that I am a descendant of Asians and Asian-Americans. Sadly, there have been instances in grade school in which, when it was disclosed that I was both gay and one-quarter Japanese, fellow students would suddenly become deeply fascinated by my existence, even individuals who didn't even know my name, and they would hence forth refer to me as "their Gasian," meaning "their gay Asian." It's disheartening to see how trivial we, as a collective society, take human lives to be simply on the basis of a superficial and often constructed difference.
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