Why Asian Female Stereotypes Matter to All:: Beyond Black and White, East and West

Author(s): Kyoo Lee

Source: Critical Philosophy of Race , Vol. 1, No. 1, SPECIAL ISSUE: CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY
OF RACE BEYOND THE BLACK/WHITE BINARY (2013), pp. 86-103
Published by: Penn State University Press
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 why asian female
stereotypes matter
to all
Beyond Black and
White, East and West

kyoo lee
John Jay College, CUNY critical philosophy of race,
vol. 1, no. 1, 2013
Copyright © 2013 The Pennsylvania
State University, University Park, PA

Abstract
Gender, race, ethnicity, class, religion, culture, etc., etc., etc. . . .
How are we to rearticulate and retool those kaleidoscopic “prob-
lems” of social categories and identities each time differently, with
different productivity, even as different “products”?—this capital,
frontal problema, this “sufficient” bodily evidence in and of reality,
“in front of you” and me <https://webmail.psu.edu/webmail/blank.
html#_edn1>. Such is the broad philosophical force, background
and foreground, of the questions I dwell on here if only briefly.
What interests me in particular, just as an example if not exemplar,
concerns the “Asian female” question, with which I happen to have
some auto-ethnographical familiarity: the material specificity as
well as translatability of some of the stereotypical identity markers
of it categorically isolatable as such—I also show why a categori-
cally responsive reflection matters, as my ultimate aim here is to
advance a case for the social ontological centrality of this issue of
Asian gender stereotypes to feminist and critical race theories.

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 87 ■ kyoo lee

Your Problem: Quotables?

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question:

unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the
difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They
approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or com-
passionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to
be a problem? They say, I know an excellent colored man in my town;
or, I fought at Mechanicsvile; or, Do not these Southern outrages
make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce
the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real ques-
tion, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.1

“How does it feel to be a problem?” The voice of W. E. B. Du Bois, writing

at the turn of the twentieth century, remains vibrant today. That line, often
quoted, still evokes those “unasked” questions—of the law of identity or
more precisely identification. It is, shall we say, a soulful question, a ques-
tion, indeed, of our “spiritual strivings, “as he puts it: not just “what” is a
problem, or “where”? But how a problem is embodied, becomes sticky, at
times too obvious to name.
So again: how does it “feel,” for instance, “to be a colored me,” when
“thrown against a sharp white background”?—a la Hurston, “Beside the
waters of the Hudson” “feeling my (her) race.”2 Or more recently, “how
does it feel to be stopped?”—a la Ahmed at an airport, clutching her British
passport, “who feel(s) like adding, ‘Can’t you read. I was born in Salford,’
but I (she) stop (stops) myself.”3 Again, “how does it feel to be a problem?”
today—a la Bayoumi, the reteller of stories of Muslim youths in the United
States today in Brooklyn, New York, those who have become daily and ran-
dom targets of Islamophobic attacks in post-9/11 New York.4 So what is
your problem, again?
What does it mean, “feeling being a problem”? Not feeling or being a
problem but “feeling being” one. I find myself doubly captivated by such
an intercategorical fusion, rather than distanced by its reflexive complica-
tion. Those philosophers, writers, theorists converging around that ques-
tion, time and again, are not detaching themselves or feeling from such
issues thus brought home. On the contrary, they are intensifying and mul-
tiplying them through an engaged self-theorization thus provoked. A feel-
ing of be(com)ing a problem, of auto-implication, arises when one feels

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 88 ■ critical philosophy of race

arrested—objectified, framed, and staged—by forces and conditions that

one also objectively recognizes as problematic. Here, I also recall Simone
de Beauvoir’s “irritation” over and “hesitation” around the question not
just of woman but of being a woman (philosopher), noted at the very begin-
ning of The Second Sex: “I hesitated a long time before writing a book on
woman. The subject is irritating, especially for women; and it is not new.”5
In such a book about problems associated with being a woman written by
a woman for whom such troubles are—or become—her own concerns,
not unlike Heidegger’s reflexive experience of being in time, what keeps
the theoretical forces doubly alive is the very presence of such embodied
voices, of double visions, remaining open to translation including transi-
tion; I think because I am pushed to think, not simply wish to. Something
causes Du Bois to “smile,” to smile a smile of double consciousness, at
that moment “reduced to a simmer,” further distilled into this zero-degree
question of how it feels to be a problem; something, of that minoritar-
ian order of being, has been thought through de Beauvoir, and when the
thinker responds to that feeling by theoretically documenting it, we see
a feminist classic emerging. The auto-ethnographical textuality of philo-
sophic thinking, when discerned this way, becomes a source of intersub-
jective imperatives as well as inspirations. The “I” of I feel becomes the
“we” of we must think, however contingent, constrained or contentious
such a “we” remains in its solidarity or solitude. Activating such a call for
co-feeling, performing this multilingual fugue for quotidian justice, these
thinkers are departing from their own respective situations, onto the onto-
pology (ontology and topology) of such “personal” problems that outlive
and outlast the person, “your problem” that ain’t just your problem, the
sort that is to be ascribed, addressed, analyzed collaboratively, to be made
a part of the question that needs asking, some part touchingly “unasked,”
needing to be unmasked.
So we have all sorts of “touchy” issues, to be sure, but the challenge,
again, is to feel them, to begin with. I see your pain, you say; but that
may not be enough, as pain is not exactly or entirely visible, as we all
know. But I mean I feel your pain, you protest: sure, better than noth-
ing, but that is not what I am asking you to do either: “Music. The great
blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard
what I felt. . . . He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so col-
ored.”6 It is as if, as Toni Morrison7 noted, the colored body existed so
that whiteness (too) could be felt, played out in the dark. If whiteness,

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 89 ■ kyoo lee

for instance, as observed by Morrison, signals certain (an)aestheticized

privileges that are enjoyed but unacknowledged by those who outsource
feelings by ­racialized mimetic deflection, the problem is the numbness
itself that prefigures the socially sanctioned ignorance and the superior-
ity complex ignored as such. One might ask further, how does it feel to
inhabit the problem of social identities without having to acknowledge it?
How does it feel not to feel? Who knows: such problems of social blockage
and affective zoning, of the lines drawn by “color,” “gender,” “class,” “cul-
ture,” etc., so-contrasted, so-ignored, so-used, tend to be “felt” frontmost
and foremost, registered feelingly first, especially by those readily sliced
and shuffled by those persistent, problematic categories.
Gender, sexuality, class, race, ethnicity, age, culture, religion … how
are we to rearticulate and retool those kaleidoscopic “problems” of social
categories and identities each time differently, with different kind of pro-
ductivity, even as different ‘products,’ while keeping the intersubjective
momentum of situated questioning?—this capital, frontal problema, this
“sufficient” bodily evidence in and of reality, “in front of you”8 and me.
Problem is bodily, irreducibly, interstitially; even zeno’s paradox of infi-
nite distance, namely the infinity of spacing, however ethereal and men-
tal, could be a shortcut to the point I am making here. To borrow Jacques
Derrida’s formulation in part: a problem, in front of me, of “‘being me,”
of being embodied as me, is what evokes the responsorial “passions” in
me, driving forward and multiplying such questions of embodied identi-
ties; such passions become an intellectual duty, a scholar’s passion, rather
than a scholastic or egotistical exercise in self-understanding. This points
to a sort of situationalist or socially inflected moment of the cogito, when
the implicit question everyone asks of himself or herself—“who am I?”—
returns to the subject in the form of the more theoretical question “what
are you?” addressed to itself, at which point the subject then, instantly
becoming an inter-subject in self-dialogue, bears the burden of reiterating
answers as well as questions. Hence, the issue and rather ghostly phenom-
enon of “feeling being a problem” dually addressed as such: it is a sense of
suddenly being at once implicated into and distanced from an objectified
embodiment of all these problematic inter-categories. At this moment of
affective cogitation, the ego is reduced to a feeling of being not right, being
not that but at that.
Such is the broad philosophical and more specifically rhetorico-­
phenomenological force, background and foreground, of the questions

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 90 ■ critical philosophy of race

I would like to dwell on here if only briefly, as I still think it bears repeating
also for the reasons I will continue to unpack. An example that interests
me, not an exemplar, concerns the “Asian female (or woman)” question,
with which I, too, happen to experience some of that auto-ethnographical
“irritation” or disorientation, uncanny doubling. I set out to describe the
Asian woman-ness as “a problem,” as distinct although not entirely dif-
ferent from, say, the “white European” woman-ness of the second sex,
which seems to remain a secondary concern for de Beauvoir, or African
American womanhood under multiple appropriative oppressions, as
powerfully focalized by Morrison on the layered legacies of slavery in U.S.
history as traceable in literary moments, figures, and voids. What I am
presenting is not, however, a systematic study, as this piece, started and
installed here as part of a much longer and complex (her)story, simply
represents a snapshot of how I would—or one could—set out to explore
the social ontology of the “Asian woman,” a figure in the background.
Advanced below is, in brief, a note toward a case for the social onto-
logical centrality of this issue of Asian gender stereotypes to feminist and
critical race theories, especially in the transnational U.S. social imaginary:
the double intersections of the black/white binary on the one hand, and the
gendered rhetoric of East-meets-West, on the other hand, the very point
that tends to get crossed out in the form of invisibility or hypervisbility.
By situating this auto-ethnogendered question in a broader, theoretical
reflection on the material specificity as well as translatability of some of
the stereotypical identity markers, I hope to show, conclusively, why and
how a trans-categorically responsive reflection on sociopolitical ontopol-
ogy, ontotypology in particular, matters to all, across the board, regardless
our respective positions and persuasions: why should one, whoever that
is, care about the moral and political harm of Asian Female stereotypes,
among others? Again, how are we all implicated, black or white, Eastern or
Western, yellow or not?

How Does It Feel to Be (Visibly) Replaceable and Relayable?

Somehow, I feel I had already started piecing together material for this
piece a few years ago.
An inspiration comes from this rather usual, yet vividly remem-
bered, (non)encounter I had during a job interview as a lucky finalist

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 91 ■ kyoo lee

for a ­tenure-track professorial position at a highly respected university:

an elderly Caucasian man, a potential senior colleague, spotted me at a
­hallway outside his office and so came out to greet me. How welcoming.
As I was about to introduce myself, he asked me where in China I was
from; no “hello,” no “how do you do” or “what do you do,” not even a
“wonderful weather.” Nothing, and nothing but China. Come to think of
it, that might be the first time for anyone to skip the usual first stage of
inquiry: the “you Chinese/China (or Japanese/Japan or Korean/Korea or
something)?” I semi-answered it anyway, as I certainly can look Chinese.
His response: “Oh great, you can be a good replacement for the other
Asian woman who’s just left.” Appreciating that he might have gotten at
least my gender right, I registered the fact that he did not know or call
my name; he did not bother to ask mine or remember hers. Obviously,
he was just glad to see an Asian womanly face floating by, also to imag-
ine he might perhaps see one again, if not necessarily that—so I mean,
this—one. He then scudded off, wishing me good luck—for what and
which me exactly?
What exactly is it that was seen there, albeit in passing? What, or who,
started that serial thinking? What precedes this scene of quasi-familial
(mis/over/under/non/quasi-)identification? In what name or figure did
this body (“problema in front of you”) exist at that moment in that balding
man’s imaginary?—regardless of who I was or how I looked. I also recall
recalling then, left there standing smaller than I already am, Derrida on
performing “oblique passions” in the name of the other, a scholar’s duty
to think across, around and onward. At the heart of such institutionalized
mechanism of indistinct individuation or affirmation, as embodied by this
routinized micro-misdemeanor, is a kind of psycho-political cookie-cutting,
serialized indifference to the singularity of beings, including human beings
thus thing-ified, metonymically itemized.
“China Doll,” “Dragon Lady,” “Geisha Girl,” “Lotus Flower,” “Madame
Butterfly,” etc., etc., etc. . . . let me then start with some of those Orientalized
Asian female stereotypes materializing in readymade nicknames or met-
onyms, “altered names.” Given here are some stereotypes, “solid-mark-of-
a-blow, printing from a metal plate,” interconnected sets of traits assigned
to particular groups of beings; in this case, Asian females demographically
marked as such. When Asian femaleness or femininity is metaphorically
matched with such composite images and codified by such compound words,
revealed there is a set of preconceptions or embedded perceptions guiding

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 92 ■ critical philosophy of race

such an impression, the “stereo” part, the linguistic re-inscription of which

practically precludes other forms or possibilities of representational associa-
tions or significatory chains. As with cliché (“print”), ­stereotype is therefore
past oriented, inferentially regressive or restorative rather than progressively
creative and forward-looking: X is as it was and it will be as it is. Stereotyping
as an inscriptive act of temporal deprivation or imaginary desiccation is not
only metaphysically delimiting but psychically damaging. Take such hack-
neyed images as “the blonde (+) bimbo,” “the angry (+) black woman,” “the
hot-tempered (+) Latina,” “the desperate (+) housewife,” “the queen bee (+)
dominatrix,” etc., where certain attributes are not simply added but character-
istically highlighted as practically inseparable from the subject/object in ques-
tion. Although “the angry black woman” is a descriptive phrase, and “China
doll” a compound and therefore one level higher in terms of compositional
fixity and rigidity, what is shared between them structurally is a certain lin-
guistic fate: the attributes associated with them, “anger” and “doll-like-ness,”
become identity markers, as in “Chinatown,” not Chinese town, which is
even more tightly “closed” and compounded also in its unbreakable linguistic
brokenness. Once an X, an x forever, so says stereotype; President Obama’s
demeanor is professorial, and jazzy, as he was a professor and is black.
So, in stereotypical thinking, those itemized marks, “anger, temper, des-
peration, domination,” are fixedly assigned and tightly joined to those particu-
lar groups of anthropomorphized beings thus individuated and incorporated.
Stereotypes, as intergroup perceptions focally formed around sedimented
biases toward/for/against “the (group-able) other,” narrow down various
descriptive possibilities to definitive or definitional qualities. So this (black)
woman becomes almost, by definition, angry in the way that, by definition,
“‘this (liquid) is water’; ‘this (animal) is a tiger’; ‘this (fruit) is a lemon.’”9
According to this logic of kind-of-naturalization or naturalization of the natu-
ral “kind,” as in when ”“‘this kind of boy’ doesn’t fit in ‘this kind of private
prep school,’”10 a black woman who is not angry may not be a black woman;
or a non-angry black woman would be considered meta-angry, meta-angrily
busy countering such a “stereotype threat,” i.e., “being at risk of confirm-
ing, as self-characteristic, a negative stereotype about one’s group.”11 That
“fear that (one) might confirm the stereotype that others hold,”12 as it is a
fear, remains a trap, an effect of psychical incarceration; a black woman who
seems un-angry will then have to fit into the other kind/side of ­stereotypes,
the “mammy” figure, for instance, which is not exactly or necessarily positive.
In the land of stereotypes, no one escapes “her/himself.”

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 93 ■ kyoo lee

Once caught in the psychic grid and grip of the forecasting ­typecaster,
there is practically no way out. There seems no exit from this globe of
­double whammy sealed by the inner contradictions of the privileged
­stereotyper, although it does not mean there is no excuse for the socially
sanctioned absence of self-questioning: such is precisely the social
­privilege, not having to be challenged or altered. While minority-majority
stereotyping can be structurally reciprocal, it does not necessarily mean
that the power dynamic is symmetrically balanced or fluidly ­harmonized.
On the contrary, especially if you are in the position of being perceived
as such, whatever suchness you are supposed to embody, you are,
as a holder of minority double consciousness, often, typically, the one
expected to activate or validate the majority assumptions about a group
of which you are a projected member. For example, here, just the usual
script: a(n Italian) woman is a virgin Maria/whore, an Asian (American)
woman a China doll/Dragon lady (with often “No Joy, No Luck”)13, an
Asian man, sexless/perverse,14 and so on. Now, many a subject perceived
to belong to such demographics negotiates his or her own way through
such ­impossible and impossibly diverse territories. Those majorly minor
characters tend to live inside the centrifugal heads of the monolingual
storytellers and their reproducers, not outside. Those are, however, not
just “you ­people” I can size up at my narrative disposal, but real ­people,
people with quirks, desires, ­passions and sentiments, all intriguing
­living and thinking beings with singular histories and herstories. We,
(the) people, every member, we must remember, remain uncontainable
by stock (exchangeable) images such as screaming/submissive Korean
­grocers, screaming/scheming Japanese sex addict, smart/sinister Jews,
the European Orientals, etc:

“Like being mugged by a metaphor” is a way to describe what it

means to be at the mercy of racist, sexist, hetereosexist, and global
capitalist constructions of meaning of skin color on a daily basis. Like
a mugging, this attack involves an exchange of assets: some aspect of
the social order is enriched domestically and internationally by virtue
of material inequities stabilized and narrativized by race oppression
and I lose symbolically and monetarily. Further, I am physically trau-
matized and psychologically assaulted by an operation that is mysti-
fied. It goes on in the dark, so to speak—in the dark of a power that
never admits its own existence.15

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 94 ■ critical philosophy of race

The sociopolitical vicissitudes of stereotyping are sustained by this

­linguistic economy described above, quite aptly, as “mugging by meta-
phor,” which seems to capture the typical mechanism by which dynamic
­attributes of a reality, extracted and extrapolated into a set of properties,
end up replacing that reality summarily, in the name of cognitive econ-
omy. If a cliché is a dead metaphor, stereotype is a dead metonym; both
are dead in the sense that the meanings produced and exchanged there
are trapped in the economy of inert, self-same, self-serving repetitions,
to the point where, perversely enough, what “survives” in the end would
be such clichés and metaphors—even if “the Asian American is on the
doorstep of extinction,” as Frank Chin puts it; “either you’re foreign in
this country, or you’re an honorary white.”16 The simplicity of this either-
or grammar is, in social political terms, equivalent to that of categorical
violence, mindlessly exclusionary practices, whether psychical or practi-
cal. Similarly, as Trinh T. Minh-ha astutely points out, reissuing Roland
Barthes’s warning against the literary destructiveness of stereotypical
thinking:

Nothing, indeed, stands more acutely in opposition to the poetic than

the stereotype, which is not necessarily a false, but rather an arrested
representation of a shifting reality. The constant challenge faced in
dealing with stereotypes is precisely that of assuming representation
without being limited to it.17

Being typecast means to be deprived of a freedom to be otherwise;

being typecast means becoming part of the instant architecture of assump-
tions, whether it is enabling or debilitating. Such is the associative logic
and self-reinforcing force of stereotyping generalization, which leaves
practically no room for other free associations or alternative perceptions
but some “essentially strategic” values for the minoritarian or subal-
ternized subject, to use a Spivakian notion. Where the imagination fails,
an army of clichés, stolen corps of perceptions and cheap quotes, kicks
in. What I have been highlighting in addition is how such “mugging by a
metaphor” becomes error-free by the unbreakable monologue of the mug-
ger, how its internal contradictions become insulated and empowered by a
sense of narrative agency knitted into the dominant discourse. Privileged
are those who can make up stories, freely, at no cost of their own. That
is, stereotypically ethno-gendered thinking uses its own schizo-paranoid

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 95 ■ kyoo lee

tendencies for a ­tautological cushion, if and when contradictions arise,

necessitating dyadic code-switching on the part of the generalizing picker.
Such an immediate move of generalization, quite familiar to most of us as
a daily perpetrator or victim, is not just hasty but automatic, and automati-
cally wounding. It is never simply abstracting insofar as it emerges from
specific contexts, ­carries material forces and produces political effects,
micro- of macro-, individual or collective, often beyond individual control.
Stereotypical thinking as an equalizing, self-stabilizing impulse of the
mind is “activated” or “suppressed”18 in water-tight reciprocity and highly
coordinated seasonal randomness, not unlike those fluctuating graphs
mobilizing the New York Stock Exchange.
Now, for a change of scenery, imagine this (minority) woman going out
of (her) business, venturing into an international philosophy conference:

When writers from oppressed races and nationalities have insisted

that all writing is political the claim has been dismissed as foolish
or grounded in ressentiment or it is simply ignored; when prestigious
European philosophers say that all writing is political it is taken up as
a new and original “truth.”19

The stereotyping mind is a stereotyped mine, where truth arrives too early
or too late. Space can tell—again, almost infinitely.
Imagine farther. You are a Twenty-first Century American Continental
philosopher summering abroad, away from all such talks, all such clamor-
ing Anglo-European theoretical scenes as above, and so—still out of profes-
sional habit or courtesy—you begin to cogitate, instead, on a Vietnamese
prostitute you have just (de)toured into. Or imagine, you are a celebrated
nineteenth-century southern American writer in Hawaii “voyeuristically
focusing on the … underdressed and over-perfumed”20 women there. In
either case, there would be indeed no end to this “paranoia you construct
for yourself,” if you allowed yourself to get caught up in that unfathomable
monologue:

Does she want to trap me by getting pregnant? … Is she aiming for

some kind of triumph in seducing a white man, one of the colonial
race? Is it because the GIs were here during the Vietnam war that the
local morality broke down and women started going to bed with for-
eign strangers? Then: what do her parents think of her and me, and

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 96 ■ critical philosophy of race

what does her society think? … Another circle. And what about me?
Is this a serious affair, which I will have to explain to my wife when
I get back? Or is it a secret affair, which means something only to me?
Another circle. . . . What will it mean when I go back to post as a uni-
versity professor—will I miss this detour into exoticism? What will it
mean when I teach ethics to young people, I who am harboring this
secret life? Another circle. There is no end. This is how you construct
a paranoia for yourself.21

And my point, again, is this: it is one thing to be self-deprecating, surgically

self-exploratory even, and yet another to be duplicitously or blindly self-
affirming of that vicious circle of social injustice and political imbalance,
precisely of yet “another circle” globalized as such, literally or metaphori-
cally. If, as incisively observed, “this is how you construct a paranoia for
yourself,” that is also how paranoia gets scripted through you, that par-
ticular way rather than some other ways. Watch that material specificity
and narrative linearity, accentuated by the cloistered perspective here. In
that kind of travelogue of a brooding globe-trotter, whatever colorful or dull
stereotypes the reader would project into the voice of that journal, there
is a thin but clear line between exquisite self-mockery and expansive self-
indulgence, and what makes the latter stand out is the material historicity
of the story, among others. Put simply, suffice to note that some of us still
are or live like that “colonial race in the Third World” happily cocooned in
that bubble:

Ever since I got a job in academia I have spent all the time off in
another country. . . . I do not make myself at home there, most of
the time not knowing the language. But I pretty much do there what
I do back in my home state: get up with the sun, write all morning,
have lunch and go for a walk or a ride, read in the evening. [. . .] (F)
or a good thirty years I have gone to Third World countries, it is even
cheaper than staying in the U.S.22

“Even cheaper”: here is a certain temptation, I confess, to see the portrait

of an established thinker.
As Hilary Putnam observes, stereotype becomes not only a ­perceptual
component but also a criteriological enabler, a narrative condition, for
“description.”23 As colorfully and repeatedly illustrated above, it can blur

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the very distinction between definition and description. This is when

description gets “circularly”24 built into definition and vice versa, and so
description becomes no longer or more than accidental or peripheral.
Quite clearly, Putnam’s intention is to retain the categorical distinction
and hierarchy between the two, as he seeks to contain stereotype as a
kind of description but not definition, as “a standardized description of
features of the kind that are typical, or ‘normal’”25 within his semantically
holistic world. Again however, my own interest is in what Putnam later
notes, although in ­passing, as “the extreme cases,” the hyper-normaliza-
tion or naturalization of stereotype, where “the stereotype may be just the
marker: the stereotype of molybdenum might be just that molybdenum is
a metal” (emphases in the original).26 The cases we have been discussing
are ones where a description does morph into something like a definition.
Again, such hyperbolic overdeterminations and shortcuts in typecast cog-
nitions in pedestrian thinking, illustrate how stereotype comes to func-
tions as a pragmatic if not analytic27 condition for linguistically codified
and coordinated thinking, where, for example, “this (butt) is Brazilian” is
not just a random composition. That pronouncement is not just an effect
of one of hundred-something computational possibilities, e.g., British,
Burmese, Nigerian, etc. Rather, it originates from and feeds back into
the near-exclusive, para-figurative link between “butt” and “Brazil” as in
“this (is a big, boosted) Brazilian butt,” which is a familiar scene not only
in the pornographic market but also throughout plastic surgery clinics
and fitness centers across the Globe: this→Brazil→butt→Brazil→this is
circuitous, indexically, reciprocally. It is almost as if Brazil itself were
inter alia a derrière in such a psycho-culturally remapped, rewired zone
of significations, around which various other smaller clichés would stick
and swirl; similarly, as Richard Fung points out through his queer theo-
rizing of racialized Asian masculinities, “Asian and anus are conflated,”28
gone global, already three-dimensional.

How Is the Brazilian Butt Linked to Suzy Wong?

With this proleptic Brazilian detour, this (Asian lady) amateur philos-
opher is heading back to our starting point, a look at the naturalized—
“extremely” normalized—epistemology of stereotyping, whereby stereo-
typed perceptions are cartographically crystallized and metonymically
diffused into a networked series of altered names, improper names,

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 98 ■ critical philosophy of race

quasi-names; “this (Asian woman) is a China Doll, Dragon Lady, Geisha

Girl, Lotus Flower, Madame Butterfly,” etc., exchangeable and replaceable
randomly at will. Stereotype can be (1) that specific, saliently strange, and
­context-bound; (2) that global, extensive, mutually damaging and impover-
ishing; and that, I am trying to say, (3) matters across the board, no matter
what, and wherever and whoever you are.
Specificity remains local, while relevance is structurally expansive and
intricate. If as Linda Alcoff says, “One cannot simply look at the location of
the speaker or her credentials to speak; nor can one look merely at the propo-
sitional content of the speech; one must also look at where the speech goes
and what it does there.”29 I am suggesting, in a similar vein, that we also look
around what we are looking at. This goes back to the bifocalized task of “feel-
ing being (part of) a problem,” feeling with the intimate distance of a theorist
on the go. This would mean to observe speech acts seriously philosophically.
This would mean analyzing the behavioral patterns, including rhetorical
tricks, of the language mobilized in nick-naming and quick-naming, as they
often provide a micro-window into brute realities of social political frictions,
distortions and injustices. Rather than just zooming in on some localized
or isolatable episodes in “Third World” or “transnational” feminism, the
historico-cultural dictates and deeply-rooted specifics of Asian female ste-
reotypes along with effects of their rhetorical traffic are or should become a
key issue in especially socio-cultural ontology and the feminist philosophy of
language, let alone in critical race theory. When “feeling being a problem,”
when becoming part of those deadly alive words & images hurled around
and through us, what we need to dig into, more broadly pointedly as it were,
is the discursive space between them, namely, networks of significations:

We should not define stereotypes in terms of their target group, their

accuracy or inaccuracy, or whether they have or have not been pro-
duced by the larger culture. Such things may be true of some or most
stereotypes, but to define stereotypes in terms of these features soft-
ens our focus on the more central features.30

So how do we articulate that nerve-center of stereotyping as a codified

perceptual act? By shifting the focus of analysis from the “content of stereo-
types to the processes of”31 stereotypical thinking, to something like “a cogni-
tive structure containing the perceiver’s knowledge, beliefs and expectations
about some human social group.”32 We should look ­dynamically at the very

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 99 ■ kyoo lee

narrative interaction between what is being perceptually processed and how

the process unfolds: the sociocultural inflection of perceptions. Given such
a discursive complexity, as well as eventual fixity, of stereotype-formation,
David Schneider’s procedure-oriented, contextual account of stereotypes as
“qualities perceived to be associated with particular groups or categories of
people”33 (emphasis added) is especially instructive. Again, what interests
me philosophically is that apodictic, passive or passing “being,” being per-
ceived, to be associated, as a China doll as well as a Dragon lady—often at
once. In brief, stereotyping, an act of flash-freezing one’s own perceptions
into one and only one at a time, indexicalizes its own ontological irreso-
lution in the face of seemingly incompatible specificities, particularities,
pluralities.
Who are these flat folks, supposed to live such associated and disso-
ciative live simultaneously?—where and how are they clustered and circu-
lated? And again, why do they matter? Because they materialize—through
various figures of the woman of “color” who, framed and staged as such,
would perform34 their colored-ness, including Oriental yellow, just to pick
one color out of “color,” not colors. That is, the lack or absence of organic
manifoldness in the world of stereotypical thinking does not necessarily
entail that stereotype has no temporal agency of its own, although, it does
remain monotonous and mono-colored as in, again, a woman of “color.”
The ghostly narrative and historiographical complexity of stereotype forma-
tion can be showcased through a woman of (Asian) color materializing, or
machinizing herself, in the following way.
Entering Suzie Wong today, the red-lanterned Saki Lounge in New
York City (547 27th Street), where you can sample cocktails such as The
Geisha, Madame Butterfly, Ying-Yang, and so on, you are bound to meet
a cast of Suzie Wongs reproduced from the seminal character in Richard
Mason’s 1957 novel, The World of Suzie Wong. There, Robert Lomax, a
young British painter living in Hong Kong in search of inspiration, meets
Suzie Wong, a Chinese prostitute specializing in colonial mistressing a la
Madam Butterfly, whose golden heart Mason found irresistible; at least the
Brit took her in eventually as a legitimate girlfriend, whereas Pinkerton,
the Yankee, didn’t, so goes the story. Three years later, 1960, this same old
story, of Boy-Meets-Girl-and-East-Meets-West, with a new twist was then
cinematized by another Robert (Quine) in the United State, where “Suzie
Wong” went viral. This trans-Continental arrival, adoption and assimilation
of Suzy Wong was a commercial success, but the other side of the matter

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 100 ■ critical philosophy of race

remains dark and messy; this postwar daughter of Madama Butterfly with
a universal Oriental accent has been reproduced, circulated and consumed
in the theatre near you as well as the under-world of porn industry, mail
bride industry, global sex trafficking, etc., to the point where Suzie Wong
still functions as a virtual name attached to any yellow(-looking/sounding/
tasting/smelling) women allegedly touched, if not completely altered, by
the modern West.
At once caught up in and generating this loose but robust system of
associative referrals or strategic deferrals, “Suzie Wong” drawn from the
fictional character, itself a historically layered construct, has become an
enabling device for identifying, indexicalizing, naturalizing, Suzie Wong;
recall Putnam on “extreme” cases of stereotyping, which, seen this way,
seems not that extreme. The capital basis for this fantasy business might be
phantasmagoric, and its business, normal or normalized “at any rate,” but
its harm remains literal, and its reach, global, as King-Kok Cheung points
out, citing Elaine Kim:

The stereotype of Asian women as submissive and dainty sex objects

has given rise to an “enormous demand for X-rated films featuring
Asian women and the emphasis on bondage in pornographic materi-
als about Asian women,” and that “the popular image of alluring and
exotic ‘dream girls of the mysterious East’ has created a demand for
‘Oriental’ bath house workers in American cities as well as a booming
business in mail order marriages.”35

Again: stereotyping, this “mugging by metaphor,” can be as literal as mar-

rying a butterfly; also to the extent that the butterfly has to allow you to
marry her in order to survive.
To fast-forward: how does Suzie Wong un-become, un-do, Suzie
Wong?—or does she? Besides, with a name like that, Wong, could she ever
become a Betty Friedan or a bell hooks?—maybe in an American-Obamaian
dream? From where does she draw a sense of social agency as well as politi-
cal urgency and futurity? In the year 2012, can we imagine Suzie Wong
the post-Orientalist feminist critic or else action hero, for instance? When
one is not born but becomes an Asiatic woman, she comes to belong to
something other/less/more than the second sex, the female, the woman,
the feminine subject, of and through which Simone de Beauvoir speaks in
The Second Sex. Rather again, the Asiatic woman, still and often existing in

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 101 ■ kyoo lee

ominous caricatures, in their second names, appears to embody and enact

something like the third sex a la and contra Beauvoir: the second sex of the
Third World, the secondary second sex.36
Such sedimented layers and ghettoized directions of that ghostly
third at work are embodied and embedded in the on-going complex lives
of “Suzy Wong,” named and responded to as such, the metonymically
axiomatized figures of “the woman of color (=) the Third World woman,”
often constructed “under Western eyes,”37 as Chandra Monhanty put it,
already almost a generation ago. My suggestion, not so much new as
more networked as it were, is then we approach Suzie Wong, this third
woman, from at least a three dimensional intersection of feminism and
critical race theory—the idea being that this “third,” the post-Beauvoirean
second, also beyond the black/white binary as well as male/female, could
function as a kind of formal metonym for another dimension yet to be dis-
covered from within and alongside any gendered, raced, and ­class-bound
thoughts. Let there be the fourth dimension in a three dimensional
world, the fifth in a four, and so on … then perhaps we could all go, at
least, beyond the One-dimensional Man38 placated by the techno-mutation
of oppositional dialectic, and away from the One-dimensional Woman39
(Power 2009) consumed by self-deceptive positivism and utopian fantasy
today.

notes

1. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, African American Heritage (1903; repr.
Radford, VA: Wilder Publications, 2008), 5.
2. Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” in The Florida Reader: Visions
of Paradise, ed. J. Lane and M. O'Sullivan (1928; repr. Florida: Pineapple Press,
1994), 119-21.
3. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 207), 140.
4. Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in
America (New York: Penguin Press, 2008).
5. Simone de Beauvoir, trans. C. Borde, C. and S. Malovany-Chevallier, The Second Sex,
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 3.
6. Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” 121.
7. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
8. Jacques Derrida, “Passions: An Oblique Offering,” in On the Name, trans. David
Wood (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 10.

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 102 ■ critical philosophy of race

9. Hilary Putnam, “The Meaning Of ‘Meaning,’” in Mind, Language and Reality:

Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 229.
10. Ken Corbett, Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinities (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2009), 92.
11. Claude M. Steele and Joshua Aronson, “Stereotype Threat and the Intellectual Test-
Performance of African-Americans,” Journal of personality and Social Psychology 69,
no. 5 (1995): 797–811.
12. Steele and Aronson, “Stereotype Threat and the Intellectual Test-Performance of
African-Americans,” cited in Roy F. Baumeister and Brad J. Bushman, Social Psychology
and Human Nature (Belmont, CA: Thomson Higher Education, 2008), 434.
13. Jessica Hagedorn, “Asian Women in Film: No Joy, No Luck,” Ms. Magazine 4, no. 4
(1994): 74–78.
14. Jeffery Paul Chan, The Big Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese
American Literature (New York: Meridan, 1991), xiii.
15. Wahneema Lubiano, ““Like Being Mugged by a Metaphor: Multiculturalism and
State Narratives”,” in Mapping Multiculturalism, eds. Avery Gordon and Christopher
Newfield (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 64.
16. Cited in Trinh Minh-ha, Trinh T., Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism
and the Boundary Event (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2011), 36.
17. Ibid., 93.
18. David Schneider, The Psychology of Stereotyping (New York: Guilford Press, 2004), 426.
19. Linda Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” Cultural Critique 20 (1991):
5–32, 13.
20. Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2002), 67.
21. Alphonso Lingis, “Language and Persecution,” in Between Deleuze and Derrida, ed.
Paul Patton and John Protevi (London: Continuum, 2003), 175–76.
22. Alphonoso Lingis, “The Steppe,” Naked Punch 5 (2005): 59–70, 62–63.
23. Putnam, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning,’” 229–30.
24. Robert K. Shope, The Nature of Meaningfulness: Representing, Powers, and Meaning
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 168.
25. Putnam, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning,’” 230.
26. Ibid., 229–30.
27. Ibid., 230.
28. Richard Fung, “Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn,” in
How Do I Look? Queer Film & Video, ed. Bad Object-Choices (Organization) (Seattle:
Bay Press, 1991), 153.
29. Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” 26.
30. Schneider, The Psychology of Stereotyping, 24.
31. Ibid., 12.
32. C. Neil Macrae, Charles Stangor, and Miles Hewstone, Stereotypes and Stereotyping
(New York: Guilford Press, 1996), 42.

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 103 ■ kyoo lee

33. Schneider, The Psychology of Stereotyping, 24

34. Josephine Lee, Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary
Stage (Philadelphia: Temple University, 1997); especially chapter 4, “The Seduction
of the Stereotype,” 89–135.
35. King-Kok Cheung, “The Woman Warrior Versus the Chinaman Pacific: Must a
Chinese American Critic Choose between Feminism and Heroism?,” in Conflicts
in Feminism, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (New York: Routledge,
1990), 235.
36. I have explored this question more extensively in the forthcoming essay, “(Un)
naming the Third Sex after Beauvoir: Toward a Third Dimensional Feminism,”
edited by Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni, and Fanny Söderbäck, Undutiful
Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012)
37. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and
Colonial discourses,” Boundary 2 12, no. 3 (1984): 333–58.
38. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced
Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).
39. Nina Power, One-Dimensional Woman (London: O Books, 2009).

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