Jonno Marlton Blog 8: Community Reflection and Project Proposal

Maya Lyn has an impressive story, and it’s one worth paying attention to as an American because it speaks to the diversity of our experience.  Thinking back to my first blog post, I borrowed definitions of ‘nation’ from government textbooks and integrated them with Anderson’s theory on the imagined nature of communities.  He makes a point about sovereignty being imagined, which would extend to mean that national accountability is a collective effort.  In other words, members of a nation or community decide together who the other members are.  Where do I fit?

Well, based on what I’ve said, that’s up to you to decide.  I have worked hard to participate and offer myself as a contributing member of our community.  I have done the same thing for my American and Aussie brothers and sisters—arguably more so for the US side of myself.  They hold me accountable in the same way that the rest of us hold you accountable.  Our criteria for measurement are given to us by the media, our folks, our experiences, and countless other sources.  Thinking back to Dr. Lyn, many of my countrymen had the sense to step up to a small faction of resisting veterans that attempted to discredit her war memorial design because she was a woman, and an Asian one at that.  We, the members of our class, have the sense to celebrate the achievements of this American hero and spurn the negativity that comes from others who have the same national identity.

For my project, I want to continue to think about the portrayal of race and gender.  The reaction against Maya Lyn’s design based on the artist’s heritage and sex got me thinking about how we as people, as Americans, receive information.  I started taking another look at a play called M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang.  It’s a substantial piece that attempts to deconstruct the manner in which the ‘powerful West’ approached the ‘feeble East.’  It drags in questions of gender identity, sexuality, and colonialism.  Being a play, M Butterfly is able to approach gender in a manner particular to the stage: as a performative expression.  Because the play involves a male actor playing a male actor/ spy who enters the role of a female to seduce a French diplomat and access his state secrets, we can see that gender has become something to be displayed and even altered.  The performative reading of gender begs the question of what gender really is, and it allows us to use M. Butterfly as an example to examine how it is portrayed. 

I was introduced to this play in high school, and we began thinking about how Asians are represented in American society.  We also discussed, like in this class, how well (or poorly) America has done in integrating its citizens and residents with Asian backgrounds.  We have looked in Sexy Racy at Asian Americans, but I want to extend the conversation even more by bringing in a work that associates gender and ethnicity together in a critique of common perception towards Asian identity.  The idea is that a western (French) diplomat attempts to personally conquer a timid Chinese woman in the fashion of Puccini’s opera, Madame Butterfly. The male actor, who is actually a spy, uses the Frenchman’s misconceptions against him, unraveling the lie of Western dominance.