[In the following essay, Morris argues that M. Butterfly ultimately reaffirms and reinstates the hierarchical power structures of gender and culture that it sets out to deconstruct.]

SETTINGS

When the curtains go up on the stage of M. Butterfly, the audience is greeted with a serenely minimalist stage. A curling ramp encircles a dark space, spot-lit to reveal a solitary character in his prison cell. Although not yet visible, the floor is crossed by several translucent sliding doors. With a few additional props, these will move and metamorphose under the lights to provide the stage settings for scenes alternately proceeding in a Parisian prison cell, a diplomat's house in Beijing, the apartment of an opera singer, and—most important of all—the mind of Rene Gallimard. The setting is the design of Eiko Ishioka and the text is the creation of David Henry Hwang. The performance itself belongs to the actors. But the story is the property of Monsieur Rene Gallimard, and it is he who greets the audience and narrates the events of the drama as they unfold during the play's three brief acts.

When the lights come up, Gallimard is fantasizing about his Chinese lover, Song Liling. Appearing first as a projection on the ramp above Gallimard's cramped quarters, Song is dancing to a “traditional” piece from the Peking Opera when the music is interrupted by the “Love Duet” of Puccini's Madame Butterfly. Here, the French diplomat turns to us and begins his narrative by describing his circumstances, and filling out the simple contours provided by Ishioka's stark stage design. After an intervening scene, Gallimard again takes hold of the narrative and imagines for himself a more sympathetic hearing. Indeed, he fantasizes the “ideal audience—who come to understand and even, perhaps just a little, to envy” him.¹ And so, from the beginning, the audience is caught in a labyrinthine tale of disrobings and dissimulation.

This labyrinth is comprised of four main narrative strands, woven together in layers of ironic repetition.² The first of these is the story of Madame Butterfly, Puccini's opera about an American serviceman and his Japanese lover. The operatic tragedy is recounted by Rene Gallimard and enlivened by music from the actual score, whose sweeping libretto provides the intersection point between this and the other three narrative threads. The second level is an actual enactment of Madame Butterfly projected in and by Gallimard's imagination. Here, Rene plays the part of Vice-Consul Pinkerton and Song plays that of Cio-Cio-San. This second play-within-a-play is conducted in the casual but affected slang of 1960s America, with the result being a ludicrous melodrama (a soap opera, if you will) in which characters seem completely alienated from both their words and their acts. It stands in painful and ironic contrast to the sordid drama which is Gallimard's effort to perform alchemy by transmuting the play into his own lived reality. This latter, the third narrative, is Rene's imagining of his own affair with Song Liling—a male transvestite opera star—conducted in the image of the Puccini opera. From these emerges a fourth strand, which is the historical context in which Song and Rene confront the fictive melodrama of Madame Butterfly, and then negotiate their “reallife drama” against a backdrop of imperial aspiration and Orientalist fantasy. In the final, all-encompassing narrative the audience is a primary character. Often addressed directly by the characters on stage, it becomes a participant in this negotiation by which the narratives of desire are structured around the distinct but related images of the ideal woman and the ideal Orient.

The stance that one ultimately adopts toward M. Butterfly depends, in large part, on whether one accepts the audience positioning offered by the play. For, like most dramas constructed within the paradigm provided by dominant Western theatre, this one assumes an eminently gendered system of looking. On its surface, the play appears to take this system as its subject matter. It seems deeply concerned with gender as a social and historical construction. Yet, despite the play's overt dialogue about phallocentric politics, and despite its deconstruction of the “fashion system” by which gender is marked and remarked, M. Butterfly addresses the issue of gender only insofar as it is a locus for the construction of geopolitical difference. Indeed, for Hwang, gender is the means by which geopolitical power is naturalized and legitimated, and the play itself is an attempt to argue against that conflation. My purpose here is to examine Hwang's assault on Orientalist fantasy and to critically assess the play's success as a political statement about Western constructions of otherness. Considering the play in these terms, I hope to do justice both to Hwang's own intentions and to the project of cultural criticism as I understand it. Yet, ultimately, I shall argue that M. Butterfly is not subversive of “Western” notions of gender and the Orient. Rather, I want to suggest that the play both assumes and reaffirms the hierarchical, binary oppositions by which the bourgeois masculine “West” has conventionally imagined its others. Accordingly, the project of this paper is to show how, through the valorization of inversion as a critical tactic, Hwang has reinstated the very power system that he hopes to undo. In the language of Philip Auslander³, Hwang enacts a politics of transgression rather than resistance. In the context of this play, we might say that M. Butterfly is concerned with addressing and undressing, rather than redressing and that, as such, it never fully overturns dominant, which is to say, patriarchal theatrical practise.

The paper is divided in three main sections. In the first of these, I provide a detailed synopsis of the play in performance. From there I move to a more abstracted consideration of the play's two main thematic foci, namely gender and race. And finally, I consider how the structure of the play as a play partakes of those gendered metanarratives by which the viewer and the viewed are constituted as mutually other. The conclusion is an effort to reintegrate what has been rent apart in the analytic process, and to restore a sense of dramatic integrity, while showing how the play's various narrative lines actually sustain each other. In the end, this paper shares much of the “revelatory” project inherent in Hwang's play, and aims to show how M. Butterfly re-constitutes the gender system upon which rests not merely Orientalism but dominant narrative theatre as well.

“THE PLAY'S THE THING”: M. BUTTERFLY IN BRIEF

M. Butterfly opens with Rene Gallimard's description of his Paris jail cell, then quickly moves to a party scene where he is the object of mocking discussion and lurid curiosity. There is much joking about how incompetent a lover the diplomat must have been to not have recognized the body of his lover as that of a man. The party scene ends with a guest making an ambiguous salutation, “Vive la différence”⁴ and the play then opens onto a baroque tale of mistaken differences. We return to the cell, where Gallimard responds to these overheard discussions by framing the play itself as his own nightly imaginings. His didacticism is surprisingly unveiled and indeed, the audience is never permitted to forget the artifice of the theater in which they experience the play.

Gallimard has, as he puts it, “known, and been loved by … the Perfect Woman.”⁵ The paradigm for that beauty is, of course, Madame Butterfly, and Gallimard introduces the opera as his favourite. Why? Why an Italian Opera, a realist melodrama⁶ about a caddish American attaché in Japan and a Japanese woman's unrequited love for him? After all, Gallimard is in China, not Japan. But the diplomat answers, “And why not? Its heroine, Cio-Cio-San, also known as Butterfly is a feminine ideal, beautiful and brave.”⁷ Its hero is a rather unattractive character, both socially and physically—much like Gallimard himself. And thus, we are transported into the dark heart of the fantasy, both that of the play and that of the Orientalist imagination.

In Scene 4, we are returned to Gallimard's youth in Aix-en-Provence (1947) where the young French man is being introduced to the ways of sex by Marc, a youth of self-avowed promiscuity and tiresome bravado. Later in the play, Marc recalls for Gallimard the latter's first (laughably unerotic) sexual encounter with a woman, whom the former explains to have been a gift (Marc having sacrificed his rights to, and desire for her in order that his friend finally get laid). In the mean-time, we are returned to the cell where Gallimard is contemplating pornographic magazines in yet another dimension of his dream world. The diplomat wryly muses that “In real life, women who put their total worth at less than sixty-six cents are quite hard to find.”⁸ He remembers having discovered his uncle's magazines, and shaking as he “read” them “Not with lust—no, with power.”⁹ Whence begins the fantasy with the paper beauty. The woman pictured (both in the magazine and in Gallimard's lust) narrates her acts for the diplomat. In archetypically pornographic fashion, Gallimard imagines the woman persuading him that the pleasure is hers, while he whispers in rhapsodic surprise, “She … she wants me to see.”¹⁰

As Gallimard continues to narrate his story, we move abruptly to Act Two of Madame Butterfly, the scene in which Butterfly discovers that Pinkerton has been transferred state-side and will leave her permanently. In parallel, we learn of Gallimard's own life as an aspiring diplomat with a satisfactory but uninspired marriage to an older woman, named Helga. As part of his bureaucratic duty, Gallimard goes to China and it is there that he meets his true love, Song Liling (Mr. Shin). Needless to say, this is a departure from the original opera, where Pinkerton carries out his romance in traitorous cynicism. Unable to completely mimic his swaggering American predecessor, Gallimard is constantly thwarted in his attempt to retain emotional autonomy and personal power in the relationship with Song. Completely entranced by the Orientalist vision and believing his fantasy to be real, Rene is undone by the depth of his desire for Song. Of course, Pinkerton never loved Cio-Cio-San. Indeed it was this fact that led to her beautifully tragic suicide. In contrast, Gallimard not only mistakes Song for Butterfly, but he loves Song in anticipation of the latter's devoted passion. And herein lies his nemesis.

The relationship begins awkwardly after a performance of the Puccini Opera in which Song is starring. Although it is Song who initiates this first contact, the encounter takes the form of argumentation rather than seduction. Song counters Gallimard's infatuation with Butterfly with open disgust for Puccini's imperialist drama of “The submissive Oriental woman and the cruel white man.”¹¹ But, against all odds, Song invites the diplomat to attend the Peking Opera, which she/he believes to be a far superior genre. Gallimard accepts and gradually, they begin what becomes a 20 year affair. Gallimard falls wildly in love, accepting, encouraging and delighting in Song's (to him) exquisitely Chinese behavior—which includes both intellectual self-possession and a “modesty” that prevents the French diplomat from seeing her/him and thus knowing her/his anatomical identity as a man.

From his prison cell, Gallimard recalls his affair as an education in manhood, as the time when he learned “the absolute power of a man.”¹² It is an ironic fulfillment of unrealized sexuality, and his remembrance of such education leads him to recall, with Marc, his first sexual intercourse—in which he (rather than his female partner) was disempowered, she having initiated the act and retained the superior position. It was, for him, a miserable failure.

Woven into this personal imperial romance is the story of Gallimard's role in China, and France's involvement in Indochina, particularly Vietnam. Gallimard becomes a trusted, if horribly inaccurate, predictor of local politics when it is learned that he is romancing a Chinese woman. Promoted to coordinator of the “revamped intelligence division,” he becomes a kind of cultural mole, providing supposed insights into Chinese character as part of France's endeavor to estimate the repercussions of their own and the United States' Indo-Chinese policy. The parallels between his own life and those of Pinkerton fuel Gallimard's desires, and it is after being elevated to the status of Vice-Consul that he goes to Butterfly to consummate their relationship. As the lights go down, darkness provides the veil that clothes no longer offer, and Gallimard allows himself to be seduced by bodily pleasure. Not only does he not recognize the sex of his lover (because it is his pleasure rather than hers that matters to him), but Gallimard mistakes his violently parasitic relationship for love. Ignoring Song's distaste for the imperial romance, he quotes Puccini to Song: “All ecstatic with love, the heavens are filled with laughter.”¹³ Here, the audience is invited into the play, to observe and to share in the ironic laughter as the Frenchman and his transvestite lover enact the most intimate of charades.

Of course, Song is not Butterfly and she/he also has a purpose in this affair, namely to extract information about America's intentions in Vietnam while, at the same time, feeding misinformation to Gallimard. In bits and pieces, the information is passed on to Comrade Chin, a heavy-handed and unbelievably stupid, not to mention bigoted woman, who represents the Party in China's “New Society.” Though a mere courier of information, Chin interrogates Song about the nature of his relationship with Gallimard, reminding him that “there is no homosexuality in China”¹⁴ and that Chairman Mao would not tolerate any such activity, even for the purposes of intelligence gathering. Song's physical and political cross-dressing ultimately leads him to a rehabilitation camp during the cultural revolution, but in the mean-time, he is able to carry out his performance in such a way as to make Chin believe that his transvestism is a mere requirement of his assignment. Next to Song's hyper-femininity, Chin appears cloddish and Song mocks her as the poor excuse which “passes for a woman in modern China.”¹⁵

The Western alternative to Mao's liberated woman is Renee, a young college student from Denmark, whom Gallimard meets at a party. Renee's disarming explicitness about sex and sexuality, and her frank but politically immature ridicule of both Gallimard's penis and phallocentric politics, provide the pure antithesis to Butterfly. The two (Renee and Gallimard) have a casual but extended relationship which lasts for several months. This affair is part of Gallimard's trial of Song's devotion and an exploration of his own sexual power. However, in the end, Renee proves an unexciting partner, and Gallimard returns to Song, his ideal woman.

The play continues with baroque deceptions and seemingly impossible scenarios. Song eventually has Chin provide him with a baby, which he delivers to Gallimard after an appropriate absence. The child both proves the diplomat's virility (he had been deemed infertile when his wife could not conceive), and confirms Song's own femininity, now construed as maternity. Towards the end of Act Two, Song (who has been pardoned for treason by the French president) explains to Chin that the deception of the ideal woman was possible precisely because “only a man knows how a woman is supposed to act.”¹⁶ Chin's stature as a woman is diminished even further here, while Song—the man-playing-woman—lectures her on her own inadequacy to the task of feminine desirability. Chin herself is reduced to pathetic self-defense, reasoning that she had been able to attract a husband and must therefore be worthy as a woman.

This is, I think one of the most profound moments in the play, a magnificent distillation of the ways in which “the feminine” operates within patriarchal societies—as the projection of a certain kind of otherness, and as the expression of a will to power as knowledge. I shall return to this topic later, but it is important to recognize that this point in the play is a moment of transition, the explanation of deceit ushering in a sequence of unravelings by which Song's cross-dressing becomes a kind of undressing, and Gallimard's life disintegrates.

Again the play shifts locale. After having offered to marry Song and divorce his wife, Gallimard is transferred back to France, his advice having proven wholly inaccurate and an embarrassment to his country. In Paris, Gallimard finds himself confronted and accused by student activists, alienated from his wife and demoted in his job. He wallows in depression, eventually leaving Helga and retreating into revery about his long-lost Butterfly. But Gallimard's imaginings of Butterfly are penetrated by the less ideal reality of his relationship as well, and Song—who is present on stage as the material embodiment of Gallimard's imagination, but also as its foil—returns to confront him. Despite Gallimard's efforts to contain him in the image of his desire, Song insists upon changing—upon a transformation of persona and of clothing. The undressing of Song's cross-dressing occurs in the interstitial space that separates Acts Two and Three. Staged as part of the staging, it is an extraordinary moment in the play, when the fact of the theatre erupts into the foreground of illusion and taunts the audience with the possibility that there is nothing behind the curtain that is not also performance. At this point, Gallimard exits and Song metamorphoses from Butterfly into a conventionally dressed (suit and tie) man. Here, Song invites the audience to leave and take an intermission while he changes. The lights actually go up and for a moment it seems as though this is, indeed, a break in the drama. But with the possibility of a glimpse behind the scenes—actually an expansion of the scene into the back-stage—the audience generally remains, unable to resist this most entrancing of the play's strip-teases.¹⁷ Song's change is utterly spell-binding; before a mirror and the audience, he removes his makeup, his wig and his feminine attire. In a few brief minutes, the actor not only redresses but reorients his entire body, adopting a new walk, a new center of gravity, a certain hipless swagger, and all those myriad unidentifiable things which mark the male body for Western audiences.

Act Three then opens in a Paris court-room in 1986. In a scene that condenses the rationale of the play in simplest form, Song explains that he arrived in Paris in 1970 with the baby and that Gallimard supported him. The two continued their spying, with Gallimard photographing documents and supplying them to Song who sent them to China. In the court-room, Song is asked to explain how he could have deceived Gallimard for so long (20 years) and replies by stating that “Men always believe what they want to hear” and that the Western Man is confused by the East toward which he maintains an “international rape mentality.”¹⁸ Because the West conceives of itself as masculine, it conceives of the East, its quintessential Other, as feminine. Song continues to explain himself as he sees himself being seen by Westerners: “I am an Oriental. And being an Oriental, I could never be completely a man.”¹⁹ When the Judge asked him whether Gallimard ever suspected Song's identity, the latter says, simply, “I never asked.”²⁰

Gallimard intervenes and recaptures the dramatic narrative, but shortly thereafter Song takes over again, this time dressed as a conventionally clad man. The ensuing scene, which repeats and mocks the first encounter between the French diplomat and the Chinese opera star (where Song did not fully undress), has Song disrobe for Gallimard. Gallimard resists, saying that he doesn't want “to see”²¹ but Song persists, turning the diplomat's own perverse logic back on him and refusing Gallimard's claim that he wants the undressing to stop.²² Song disrobes, not as Butterfly but as Song Liling, emphatically claiming the identity of a man which he then suggests was Gallimard's true desire. Song tries to persuade Gallimard that the latter had loved a man all along, and that this love might be continued—but without the pretense and the dishonesty of heterosexuality as it is enacted in transvestism. Ironically, it is Song—the actor—who must learn from this, his most intimate audience, that Gallimard could love only the charade and that appearance was indeed everything. Song, naked before Gallimard, is bereft of what he imagined to be a potential gay love and humiliated by the rejection.

In some profound sense, then, Song has become Cio-Cio-San, the jilted Asian lover. His refusal to ask Gallimard whether the latter knew of his male identity began as a subversion of Orientalist fantasy. But by the end of the play, it has become an act of complicity with the Western feminization of the East. Even so, it is Gallimard who assumes the role of Madame Butterfly, dressing in silk kimono and killing her/himself after realizing that “the object of her love was nothing more, nothing less than … a man.”²³ The lights go down as Song calls out “Butterfly? Butterfly?” just as Gallimard had opened the play with the same desperate questioning.

NARRATIVE THEATRE AND GENDER

In an interview with John DiGaetani, David Henry Hwang described his play, M. Butterfly, as being “about the nature of seduction—in the sense that we seduce ourselves.”²⁴ At this point in the interview, Hwang is speaking about the fabulous “true story” which originally inspired the play: a story of deception and seduction by which a male French diplomat believed his Chinese transvestite lover to have been a woman during a clandestine relationship that lasted for some twenty years, and which led both into conviction for espionage. M. Butterfly plays self-consciously with the problem of seduction in a layered set of narratives that operates around the tropes of cross-dressing and undressing. It is a veritable shadow-play of Western imperial consciousness and desire: a careful unveiling of those structures of power and knowledge by which geopolitical territory is sexualized and gendered.

Robert Skloot credits Hwang with a play that “forces the [audience] … into complicity with the discovery, dismantling, and the re-establishment of theatrical illusion while at the same time confronting them with challenges to traditional cultural and gender assumptions.”²⁵ It is, I think, a good but overly generous reading. Perhaps most worryingly, it accepts Hwang's own assumption that Western theatrical practise is, or can be, independent of the discursive formation that gave rise to Orientalism and the gendered narratives of desire on which it builds. Hwang himself seems to want the play to perform critical commentary; he wants to reveal and to contradict the nature of Orientalist fantasy, particularly its feminization of the “East.” But M. Butterfly remains blind to the ways in which Western theatrical strategies partake of the same narrative structures in which Orientalism operates. With the audience in its thrall, the play enacts and recuperates them. In order to undo what he perceives as the emasculation of the East, Hwang gives us a “gay” man who grows to accept Orientalism's heterosexual (and heterosexist) fantasy. Not only is Song drawn into the desire for the perfect Asian woman, but we, the audience are invited to identify with him in that desire. In the final cross-dressing scenes, the East goes West and the West is appropriately consumed by its own imagination. That perverse dream consumes all but the Orient, which, after everything else, remains embodied by a woman.

As will become apparent, my reading is a somewhat allegorical one, strongly influenced by feminist semiotics. And before going any further, I want to define some basic terms and assumptions. Here, I am most indebted to the work of those feminist theorists who have been concerned with questions of gender in narrative and spectacle. Much of that work has developed in cinema studies, and while considerable debate has focused on the differences between cinema and theatre, these questions, and the theoretical responses generated by them, remain relevant across the lines of genre. The discourse on Orientalism, equally crucial to my reading, is perhaps more diffuse, intersecting, as it does, with that vast body of literature living under the rubric of colonial discourse. Nonetheless, I have limited my consideration to Edward Said's first exploration of the concept in Orientalism.

Having said as much, I want to set up some of my own strategic binarisms as a starting point for analysis. As is now generally accepted, gender and sex must be distinguished from each other. Although sex and the biological body itself are, in some senses, discursive constructions, I am concerned here only with the historical constructions of gender as a social identity that encompasses but is not reducible to sexuality. I understand sexuality itself to be a nexus of discourse and practice, a fluid and historically unstable category of social being which is culturally specific at the levels of both definition and deployment. The fact that sexuality exists as a social identity, and that it is distinguishable from sex and gender, is itself a recent and local phenomenon.²⁶

The notion and nature of sexuality is of key importance for an analysis of M. Butterfly, not merely because of the conflict between heterosexual expectation and ostensibly homosexual practise, but because the play itself seems to assume the eternal relevance of the opposition between homosexual and heterosexual, where sexual identity is defined in terms of object choice. In M. Butterfly, transvestism, which initially seems to promise a means of transcending that opposition, is ultimately contained by the heterosexual opposition between male and female; the play defines the man-as-woman (transvestite) as the emasculated rather than the liberated male. The play goes further than this in its assumption of a binary opposition between sexualities, and conflates transvestism with homosexuality. In this context then, its primary task is the “re-masculinization” of the Orient.

Yet, if the opposition between sexualities is a major locus of dramatic tension, the opposition between genders (male and female) provides the fundamental axis of theatrical meaning. The play constructs its spectacle as an experience of looking in which the object of desire is always feminine. Moreover, it positions its audience as a masculine party to that desire. And in this regard it follows the archetypical pattern of narrative meaning in Western spectacle.

In speaking about a play's narrative form, I follow Teresa de Lauretis in assuming that classic Western narrative has conventionally tracked the path of masculine desire.²⁷ I want to make clear that I do not share de Lauretis' conviction that this structure is inherent in all narrative or that alternative narrativities are inconceivable. However, I do accept her analysis as accurate within certain historical parameters.²⁸ Thus relativized, de Lauretis defines the function of narrative as the mapping and production of sexual difference.²⁹ Such difference constitutes the basis of a radically unequal relationship between the viewer and the viewed. Here, the empowered (masculine) position is that of the desiring subject, while that of the disempowered (feminine) object is that of the person who desires to be desired by the other.³⁰ For de Lauretis, whose primary concern is with cinema, the vehicle of desire and narrative positioning is the “gaze.” It is by means of looking that the subject positions himself as subject and, more importantly for de Lauretis, as a positionally masculine subject.

Insofar as I am concerned, de Lauretis' argument is a productive starting point for an analysis of classic Western spectacle, but she has, I believe, inadequately pursued the possibilities of female desire, either to construct a politics of Dis-pleasure (as Laura Mulvey³¹ has attempted) or as a means of recuperating desire for female viewers. So too, she has neglected questions about how gender is itself mutually determined by class, race, and ethnicity. Confining her analysis to the terms already provided (and naturalized) by Freudian psychoanalysis, de Lauretis effaces the historical dimension.³² And this despite the fact that her concern is with the social and structural construction of gender.

The historicity of gender is raised for us in slightly different terms by Michel Foucault, who argues that a gendered identity and a corresponding subjectivity understood in terms of sexuality is itself “originally, historically bourgeois.”³³ But even Foucault does not take us far enough in our attempt to map the various events and processes that are entwined in the making of the Western Subject. The question of race is also crucial. For, as Gayatri Spivak³⁴ rightfully reminds us, no theory of the modern (European) Subject is adequate without first considering how Europe consolidated itself, how the modern West came into being, on the backs of its imperial subjects.

Obviously, the problem of such articulation—of how class,³⁵ race and gender are related in history—is beyond the scope of this paper. Yet, these complex webs of social power are in some important sense the objects of David Henry Hwang's play … just as much as seduction is its subject or deconstruction its purpose.³⁶ It is doubtful whether Hwang would argue for the primacy of gender as the actual basis of narrativity per se, but it is clear that he shares de Lauretis' sense that other oppositions partake of gender when narrativized, and this is especially true of the Occident/Orient divide. And it is on these grounds that he dramatizes the feminization of the East in a conflict with Western imperial power. His attempt to subvert that process of othering is, however, constrained by the binary structures of gender embedded in his own theatrical practise, and by the fact that his primary critical strategy is not a rejection of opposition but an inversion of positional power relations. Thus, the opposition between male and female is never finally destroyed; it is merely recuperated as fashion in a drama wherein the dissimulating homosexual body constantly enacts heterosexual desire.

By the end of this vertiginous play, the transvestite has become a gay man, and the straight man a transvestite. The East has reclaimed its masculinity and the West now wallows in feminized debasement. One after another, these inversions seem to partake of that archetypical symbol of “enigmatic Asia”; nested Chinese boxes or dolls in a parody of infinite regress.

In M. Butterfly, the problem of inversion and its failure to ultimately destabilize the power relations between opposites can be understood in relation to the deconstructive tradition articulated by Jacques Derrida. Derrida himself describes the deconstructive project as dual in nature. In the initial deconstructive gesture, the terms of discourse and power are used against themselves through the reversal or inversion of differently empowered binaries (male/female, black/white, first world/third world, East/West, etc.).³⁷ The other, both an alternative and a secondary gesture, involves a retreat from and rejection of the structure (of meaning and power) altogether—an eruptive break with tradition. Derrida seems to suggest that the interlacing of these two techniques is the desired mode of critique, but never provides a programmatic statement.

Because the first tactic is always dependent upon the means provided by the dominant system and because it is always carried out within an already-existent representational field, its critical potential is limited. Because it will be read by that dominant system in the latter's own terms, the tactic of “over-turning” always risks being reclaimed in the moment of reading. This is the danger of irony and parody, that it will be “misunderstood” or read literally and therefore conservatively. However, the second tactic also entails the seeds of its own negation, and it necessarily runs the risk of repetition through naiveté. Derrida himself comprehends the risk of deconstructive criticism as one of accidental restitution and encompassment.³⁸ In the case of M. Butterfly, failure resides in the valorization of inversion as the predominant critical tactic. The feminine is empowered here only when it is undressed to reveal an essentially masculine core. In the end, the double disrobing of Song Liling/Mr. Shin merely proves that the ideal woman is a fiction, and that power resides in the male. Its own practise is less revealing of Orientalist fallacy than of the phallocracy of theatrical tradition in the West.

M. BUTTERFLY AND ORIENTALISM

Thus far I have been concerned with the question of gender to the exclusion of the Orient. And I want to now consider how these issues intersect with those raised by studies of colonial discourse and Orientalist representation? How does narrative, as a social technology by which sexual difference is created and sustained, articulate with Orientalist inscription? And what are the possibilities for undermining or deconstructing these representations? Describing the genesis of M. Butterfly, David Henry Hwang says simply (remarkably simply) that “It all started in May of 1986,” when the New York Times ran a story about French diplomat, Bernard Bouriscot.³⁹ Bouriscot (and Mr. Shin) had just been convicted for selling French government secrets to the Chinese during his posting in Beijing in the 1960s.⁴⁰

Hwang has had considerable opportunity to recollect and reconstrue what originally attracted him to that brief story, and to then transmute it into a what he now terms a “deconstructivist Madame Butterfly”.⁴¹ In the “afterwards” to the published play, he describes the inspiration for an ironic retelling of the Puccini opera as one of almost epiphanous realization. Asking himself what Bouriscot thought he was getting in his Chinese lover, Hwang answered “He probably thought he had found Madame Butterfly.”⁴²

Hwang imagines for Bouriscot a confused attraction in which Japan (the setting of Madame Butterfly) and China, the site of Bouriscot's tragic passion, come together in a single cobbled-together image. At the time that he first encountered the tale of Monsieur Bouriscot, Hwang had never heard the Puccini opera, nor read Edward Said's account of orientalist representation.⁴³ Yet, pursuing his intuition, he found, as he expected, that Madame Butterfly “contained a wealth of sexist and racist clichés, reaffirming [his] faith in Western culture.”⁴⁴ Within 6 brief weeks, the Times article metamorphosed into the play that won such extraordinary critical acclaim.⁴⁵ Hwang himself wanted to call the play “Monsieur Butterfly,” but changed the title on the advice of his wife, who thought “Monsieur Butterfly” too heavy-handed and too obvious. The intended title would have made Hwang's own biases transparent, and the use of the French “M.” suggests an ambiguity often belied by the dramatic text itself. In any case, the play underwent other changes as it was being written. Hwang's desire to write a musical gave way to more classical theatrical form, although the play retained the libretto of the Puccini original and a score by contemporary Chinese composer and conductor, Lucia Hwong, as the core of its layered narratives.

In an interview with John Louis DiGaetani, Hwang says that he wrote M. Butterfly “as an attempt to deal with some aspects of orientalism.”⁴⁶ For him, Orientalism, is the “… notion that the East is mysterious, inscrutable, and therefore ultimately inferior.”⁴⁷ Of course, Said's original account, which Hwang read after his own play was in production, goes considerably further in its analysis of Western othering and it may be useful to review some of its most salient points. For Said, “Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture”⁴⁸ … It is, instead,

a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also a whole series of “interests” … it is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences …), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what “we” do and what “they” cannot do or understand as “we” do.⁴⁹

What this means, in crude terms, is that the “Orient” is a projection of the “West,” and Said asserts as much, though he does not pursue the psychoanalytic dimensions of projection per se. Said himself has been criticized for his repetition of the totalized and homogenizing opposition between East and West in his arguments for projection, and has himself acknowledged a certain polemical aspect of the text.⁵⁰ The problems attending this kind of totalization are perhaps most apparent in the refraction of the category “Orient” along Arabic and Asian lines, so that the “Orient” signifies different things for people of different class, age and national positions, and according to the historical moment of reading.⁵¹ But in many ways, the very fact of that fragmentation underlines the degree to which the category of the Orient is itself an empty signifier, the supposedly necessary Other, within whose contours “we” locate all that is different, and thus all that may be dominated through projection and encompassment.

Said's sensitivity to the theatricality of orientalist representation is particularly a propos for a discussion of Hwang's play. In the book's introductory chapter, he writes that,

the Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined. On this stage will appear figures whose role it is to represent the larger whole from which they emanate. The Orient then seems to be not an unlimited extension beyond the familiar European world, but rather a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe.⁵²

How perfect, then, seems Eiko Ishioka's minimalist stage, with its vertically bifurcated space, and its curving, encompassing ramp. Ishioka's stage design materializes the fact that, in Hwang's play, as in colonial discourse generally, the psychical space is exteriorized and the outer world interiorized through the metaphorics of the theatre. We begin and we end in the mind of M. Gallimard, which sees what it projects and projects what it desires. In between these matched interiors, the world and history—the Indo-Chinese War, the Cultural Revolution, the student uprisings in Paris, 1968—intervene, only to be excluded by a terminal fantasy of the “perfect woman” who has come home at last in the most bitter of ironies.

On this stage, Song Liling is China, resisting but also manipulating, and finally sharing the desires of Gallimard, who is Western colonial power. But Hwang's stage is not just the East; it is the world, and on that stage the East meets the West face to face. Reconstruing theatrical and geopolitical space in this manner, Hwang takes on Orientalism as the construction of a field and offers in its stead the liberal postmodern version of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. Instead of being “affixed to Europe” as its Other, Hwang's theatrical space encompasses Europe, and its stage is thus set for a more complex play of differences. Moreover, this staging occurs despite the fact that, in the end, M. Butterfly re-enacts what Teresa de Lauretis has described as the narrative of heroic masculinity. The lynch-pin of that final slippage occurs in the definition of the “we” for whom this drama takes place. The stage is constructed as the space of Gallimard's consciousness, a bourgeois Western, heterosexual male consciousness. For him, the Other, the empty signifier, is a heterosexual, Oriental woman.

CROSS-DRESSING, UNDRESSING AND REDRESSING: HOMOSEXUALITY AS HETEROSEXUALITY IN DRAG

The drag-show element of M. Butterfly is at one with its double disrobings, with the archetypical image of the transvestite as strip-tease performer being mobilized to great effect. There are three main scenes of literal unveiling in the play, the first when the young Danish woman, Renee, undresses; the second when Song undresses for the audience; and the third when Song unclothes himself and exposes his sex to Gallimard. In the original New York production, the woman's undressing was complete, and the audience shared Rene Gallimard's experience of the young woman's (full frontal) nudity. However, in Song's disrobings, the body was never fully visible and Wong kept his back turned toward the audience at all times.⁵³ This unequal exposure indexes the degree to which M. Butterfly, the play itself, continues to operate within classic narrative conventions, and to respond to their demand for the woman's body as the privileged object of desire.⁵⁴

Recall that, in his jail cell fantasies with pornographic magazines, Gallimard's ultimate experience of power/pleasure comes not from the act of penetration or indeed, any imaginary contact of bodies, but from the sense that his gaze is desired. It is this desire “to-be-looked-at” which renders the woman's acts as acts for the male viewer, and which makes Gallimard's pleasure a truly voyeuristic one.⁵⁵ Gallimard's relationship with Song follows the path of progressive unveiling, but it is an incomplete unveiling to the extent that Song refuses to be seen. In this case, seeing is not just believing; it is knowing (in every sense of that word).

In the change scene (between Acts Two and Three), Song does not undress so much as he redresses for us. We experience his transformation as a revelation of the person rather than the body, and though we look with eager anticipation, the look is not one of desire so much as curiosity. In no way does Song undress for us. Indeed, he suggests that we leave, and carries on in utter disregard for the audience.

It is important to recognize here the degree to which the audience is constructed as male, and as heterosexually male. In the opening scene, Gallimard fantasizes an ideal audience who will understand and sympathize, even envy his tale. He addresses the audience as “you,” and thereby renders this shadow of the Western imperial self as masculine. Later, in the play, Marc addresses the fact of female viewers. But here, the women in the audience are not addressed. Rather they are discussed and even included within the field of Marc's desirous vision. Marc actually refers to “great babes” and the stage directions have him leer at the women not on stage.⁵⁶ Although the intent here is to ridicule Marc's juvenile libido, the scene effectively excludes the female audience from the role of active viewer and confirms what Gallimard has already intimated; that the ideal audience is always (heterosexually) male. Just as the ideal object of its vision is always female.

When Song does finally unveil, he controls the fact of vision and disrobes against Gallimard's wishes, thereby forcing the diplomat to know what he could not see and what he did not wish to know before, namely the sex of his lover. Song's transgressive disrobing, the reversal of his transvestism, is the point at which the play initially promises to become truly resistant of received gender categories. For, removing the ‘“woman's” desire to be desired’ from the domain of the heterosexual male viewer partly undermines the narrative construction of the woman as the reified object of visual pleasure. But Song's capacity to control his own objectification emerges gradually after he has assumed a fully male sexuality. Only in this new role does he become the agent of his own disclosure and pleasure, and only as a male does he escape the narrative equation of his own body as obstacle, space and field of vision.

Here, it is instructive to compare Song's disrobing with that of Renee insofar as both claim to thwart the power of the viewer and the hegemony of the gaze in Western representational ideology. Both Renee and Song unveil willingly, and both defy the gender expectations (passiveness and receptivity) which lie in the category of ideal woman. Renee initiates the sexual encounter and talks freely about sex and bodies, embarrassing and befuddling the older French diplomat. The overt text of the play leads us to believe that, in all of Gallimard's encounters with real women, he is disappointed by the fact that they are agentive beings, pursuing sensual pleasure and assuming positions of power, both physically and emotionally. This does not mean that Hwang has given us self-possessed female characters. To the contrary. Isabelle, Gallimard's first “lay”, pursues him only on the instruction of Marc, and Renee is a parody of feminist sensibility, a simplistic, overly essentializing⁵⁷ and verbally unsophisticated woman. Hardly a match for the superbly self-conscious master of rhetoric that is Song Liling. And one occasionally feels that if, for Song, “only a man knows how a woman is supposed to act,” for Hwang, only a man knows how a feminist should think.

Rene Gallimard denies from start to finish that he is intimately involved with a physiological male, and he denies further the possibility that he could desire such a person. He is not in love with a transvestite; he is in love with a woman and thus he will not convert his love to a homosexual one. Indeed, Song's failure to comprehend the fact that Gallimard will not desire him as a man is a function of his erroneous belief that Gallimard will love anyone who knows what he (Gallimard) desires. The assumption on which this final tragic misunderstanding rests is that the transvestite is always homosexual, that these two categories of being are somehow identical. Male homosexuality is represented as the maturation of transvestism, and becomes an odd kind of remasculinized emasculation. Thus, for Mr. Shin, the role of Song Liling is a moment of transition, a chrysalis stage. Hwang's assumption of continuity and linear progression between transvestism and homosexuality renders the change scene between Acts Two and Three a mere exercise in fashion management.

When Chin asks Song whether he is actually having sexual relations with Gallimard, Song mocks both his Comrade's naiveté and Chairman Mao's heterosexism. The exchange is one of the most delightful in the play, full of exquisite double entendre and campy humour. Chin begins by questioning Song about his/her cross-dressing and the conversation proceeds from there:

CHIN:
You're not gathering information in any way that violates Communist Party principles are you?
SONG:
Why would I do that?
CHIN:
Just checking. Remember: when working for the Great Proletarian State, you represent our Chairman Mao in every position you take.
SONG:
I'll try to imagine the Chairman taking my positions.
CHIN:
We all think of him this way.(58)

Clearly, a hidden homosexuality rather than a visible transvestism represents the greatest subversive potential for Song/Mr. Shin. This is reinforced later when Song/Mr. Shin is coerced into publicly, if cynically, confessing and disavowing the act of anal intercourse which he has performed with the diplomat. There are times when one almost feels that Song (as performed by B. D. Wong) has exceeded his writer's imagination, that the character has assumed a life of his own and realized the limitations of the script that he inhabits. At every moment when an argument for radical difference seems to be most powerfully available, the play slips into attenuation and revision. Mainly, its slippages occur around the question of what constitutes gay identity. The repulsion which Comrade Chin expresses upon hearing the act of anal sex verbalized is addressed by Hwang in his interview with DiGaetani. There the playwright explains that, in Chinese culture, gayness connotes passivity, and refers to the position one takes in sexual intercourse.⁵⁹ That is, to be penetrated is to be passive, and to be passive is to be gay. So long as a man retains phallic agency, he retains his “maleness.” In the play, this privileging of phallic agency extends to Gallimard (and the West) who cannot realize his manhood even in a heterosexual encounter (with the young Isabelle) when he is not the person “on top.” Indeed, Isabelle's initiation of the sexual act and her assumption of the superior position robs the act of both meaning and pleasure for him.

In this paradigm, that of Chairman Mao and of dominant heterosexual ideology in both the “East” and “West,” homosexuality is but a mimicry of heterosexuality, where woman means passive and man means agentive. Accordingly, gay connotes femaleness—despite the obvious contradictions provided by everyday practise. Yet, the assumption of passivity and emasculation allows both Hwang and his supportive audiences to accept the inevitable trajectory of transvestite to non cross-dressing gay man. And thus, the tale of homosexual identity is contained by the heterosexual narrative, where, as de Lauretis tells us, sexual difference is defined as a binary opposition between “male-hero-human” and “female-object-boundary-space.”⁶⁰

CONCLUDING POST-SCRIPT

When Gallimard learns to “tell fantasy from reality” and announces that “knowing the difference, I choose fantasy,” Song rebuts, “I'm your fantasy.”⁶¹ But he is gravely mistaken, and his error draws him into the reach of Orientalist illusion; the end of the play leaves Song on stage as the grieving lover, plaintively calling out, “Butterfly? Butterfly?” Shadowing and mocking the play's opening lines, we can only read this final moment as Gallimard's (the Orientalist West's) final encompassment of the Chinese diva. For here, Song is caught in an irony he cannot control. In his confrontation with Gallimard, he has already announced that he had expected more of Rene, whom he thought would have become “more … like a woman.” He is disappointed exactly as Gallimard is disappointed, by the fact that the woman of their dreams does not and cannot exist.

Hwang's critique of the Orientalist imagination—as elegant, clever and theatrically inventive as it is—appears somewhat anaemic in the end. A facile reduction would render it something like this: the East is not weak and is not female, cannot be dominated and will not be submissive; it is powerful, self-determining, self-possessed and … therefore male. This is why Song undresses in front of Gallimard—to show his maleness. And this is why Gallimard's vision of the Orient cannot tolerate the knowledge that he was in love with “nothing more, nothing less than … a man.”⁶² In the penultimate scene, where Gallimard dresses himself in silk kimono and draws his sword to his own breast, he realizes that he has become Butterfly, and this realization allows him to both become and to surpass the tragic heroine of the Puccini opera. It also allows him to surpass Song, who only impersonated ideal womanhood and who could not, in the end, perform the suicidal deed that would have rendered him perfect. But Gallimard becomes the dream even to this extent. And as he prepares himself for the sword, he looks into the mirror and sees there the lines of his face rearranging themselves. His visage resolves itself into its Other (in terms of both gender and race) and he becomes an Oriental woman: the very reflection of his desire.

Unlike Cio-Cio-San, Gallimard-as-Butterfly knows that it is his love for Song that renders him that ideal woman, knows that it is his desire to be desired, and therefore to be contained within the logic of classic Western narrative, that subjects him. And so Gallimard experiences what Song had known all along, that only a man can be a perfect woman—because she is, by definition, his own creation. Such knowledge remains the preserve of the male characters in M. Butterfly, and, by contrast, the women are startlingly unsophisticated in their analysis of gender. So too, the fact that the Orient is the Occident's projection continues, in some important sense, to elude the Chinese characters. Song/Mr. Shin leaves behind his Oriental costume and adopts Western dress in the moment of his self-realization. Yet, his devotion to a homogenous “East” remains, although now revalued as masculine and hence, positive.

As is abundantly clear at this point, M. Butterfly is deeply ambivalent about the position that Song should occupy. In Hwang's universe, he must be male in order to counter the “international rape mentality” of the colonizers. But as a man, Hwang does not permit him to desire the man in Gallimard, and he seeks the woman instead. Barring the matter of whether there are indeed female and male elements in each psyche (and I have already suggested my opposition to such an analysis), one cannot but conclude that the play accommodates Song's homosexuality only insofar as it heterosexualizes it.

What I want to suggest then, is that such hetero-sexualization is the inevitable outcome of a theatrical politics which privileges inversion as its strategy of critical engagement. There are, I think, lessons to be learned here that exceed this particular play and which have relevance for theatre in general, especially insofar as theatre is a site for the construction of gender. What this means for political theatre is that resistance cannot take the form of mere opposition (in the sense of inversion); it means, moreover, that power must be understood as a diffuse entity, circulating through various means and mechanisms. To isolate gender or the Orient as loci of power, without understanding that these categories are themselves constructed in and through shared representational strategies (of which theatre is one) that both precede and sustain them, is to severely limit the scope of political critique. M. Butterfly takes on the feminization of the Orient; it does not take on the concepts of the feminine, nor the role of the female in theatrical practise generally. For this reason it cannot redress the errors of either Orientalism or heterosexist discourse in theatre or elsewhere. Instead, it gives audiences a strip-tease, a taste (albeit a delicious one) of yet-hidden possibilities. There is, of course, something irresistibly seductive about a (good) drag show, but the appeal is not the revelation so much as it is the illusion that necessitates the strip in the first-place. M. Butterfly is, as Hwang says, a play about seduction. But ultimately, Hwang is as seduced by the illusion as anyone else. This is normative postmodernism in the drag of resistant theatre.

Notes

1. Hwang 1989, p.4.

2. I thank Susan Turner for her acute readings of both the play and this paper, the latter of which has evolved substantially in response to her criticisms.

3. Auslander, Philip. “Toward a Concept of the Political in Postmodern Theatre” (Theatre Journal 39, 1987).

4. Hwang 1988, p. 4.

5. Hwang 1989, p. 4.

6. It is generally agreed that Madame Butterfly belongs to the neo-realist movement in Italian Opera, itself a reaction against German and French romanticism, and a positive response to the literary social realism of French and British writers, particularly Emile Zola. For a general overview, see The New Oxford History of Music: The Modern Age: 1850-1960. Ed. Martin Cooper (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), especially “Italy and the new Realism,” pp. 153-64. Also, see Puccini: A Critical Biography by Mosco Carner (Second edition, Duckworth: Old Working Survey, 1974 [1958]), especially pp.379-400.

7. Hwang 1989, p. 5.

8. Hwang 1989, p. 10.

9. Hwang 1989, p. 10.

10. Hwang 1989, p. 11.

11. Hwang 1989, p. 17.

12. Hwang 1989, p. 32.

13. Hwang 1989, p. 41.

14. Hwang 1989, p. 48.

15. Hwang 1989, p. 49.

16. Hwang 1989, p. 63.

17. Insofar as I am aware, no one has ever taken up the opportunity for drinks and refreshments. The intermission is part of the play.

18. Hwang 1989, p. 82.

19. Hwang 1989, p. 83.

20. Hwang 1989, p. 83.

21. Hwang 1989, p. 87.

22. The relevant lines go as follows: “You know something Rene? Your mouth says no, but your eyes say yes” (p. 87).

23. Hwang 1989, p. 92.

24. DiGaetani, John Louis. “M. Butterfly: An Interview with Henry David Hwang,” p. 143.

25. Skloot, “Breaking the Butterfly: The Politics of David Henry Hwang,” (Ref: 59).

26. There is a large and growing body of literature on this topic. In addition to Foucault's History of Sexuality (Trans. R. Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1978), see Arnold I. Davidson's essay “Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality” (Critical Inquiry 14:17-48, 1987). Davidson argues that “sexuality itself is a product of the psychiatric style of reasoning” (p.23). Here he shares Foucault's sense that sexuality and gender are deeply entwined with the medicalization of social life in modern Europe. However, he departs from Foucault in his concern with philosophical style. I myself share Foucault's sense that sexuality is but one site among many through which power is diffused and exercised, but find the essay an extremely useful exploration of the issue.

27. De Lauretis, Teresa. “Desire in Narrative,” in Alice Doesn't. (Blooming: Indiana University Press, 1984:103-57), p. 107.

28. One of the most succinct, charming and convincing statements about the limits of a narrative theory constructed within psychoanalytic parameters, i.e., within the conceptual frame of the Oedipal myth, is provided by Donna Haraway in an interview with Constance Penley and Andrew Ross entitled “Cyborgs at Large: Interview with Donna Haraway,” in Technoculture, eds. Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991):1-20, esp. pp. 10-13. Haraway considers African-Americans' slave experience and their exclusion from the category of humanity. What this means for Haraway is that African Americans were excluded from Western European and American myths of family, hence from the Oedipal myths. She then argues that an alternative, non-Oedipal narrativity can and does exist.

29. De Lauretis 1984, p.121.

30. De Lauretis 1984, pp. 142-3.

31. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, No.3 (1975).

32. See Mary Ann Doane's excellent essay, “Remembering Women: Psychical and Historical Constructions in Film Theory,” (in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: Routledge, 1990:46-63) for a historicist alternative to de Lauretis' universalizing theories. Doane's essay points out both the failure of such totalized accounts to address history, and the complicity of feminist film theory in upholding the paradigms of the patriarchal representation.

33. Foucault 1978, p.127. Foucault's other works in The History of Sexuality series, and his edited volume, Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth Century Hermaphrodite. (Trans. R. McDougall, New York: Pantheon, 1980) are also relevant sources.

34. Spivak, Gayatri C. “Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12:243-61.

35. Hwang is concerned with class only insofar as he stages his drama within the upper middle class. Implicitly, he affirms Foucault's assertion, but he does so with a seeming lack of self-awareness on the subject and it is primarily race and gender which engage him.

36. Hwang describes the play as a “deconstructivist Madame Butterfly” in the “afterwards” to his play, p. 95.

37. Here, Derrida's vision of deconstructive practise runs parallel to de Certeau's account of popular cultural resistance. See The Practises of Everyday Life (Trans. S. F. Rendall, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

38. Jacques Derrida, “The Ends of Man,” in Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 132.

39. Hwang 1989, P. 94.

40. The New York Times, May 11, 1986, cited in Hwang, under “Playwrite's Notes.”

41. Hwang 1989, p. 95.

42. Hwang 1989, p. 95.

43. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1978.

44. Hwang 1989, p.95.

45. M. Butterfly won the 1988 Tony Award for best play, the Outer Critics Circle Award for the best Broadway play, the John Gassner Award for Best American play, and the Drama Desk Award for the best new play.

46. John Louis DiGaetani, “M. Butterfly: An Interview with David Henry Hwang,” p.141.

47. DiGaetani p.142.

48. Said 1978, p.12.

49. Said 1978, p.12.

50. For a recent statement of Said's thinking on this subject, see “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology's Interlocuters” (Critical Inquiry 15, 1989, pp.205-25).

51. For Europeans, the Orient seems to operate primarily as a signifier of things Arabic, while for Americans, it's connotations are emphatically Asian. This may change somewhat in the aftermath of the gulf-war, but for Americans, a resurgence of Japanese-oriented xenophobia is also likely to reconsolidate the felt antithesis between Occident and Orient as one between Asia and North America.

52. Said 1978, p. 63.

53. DiGaetani pp. 149-51.

54. See de Lauretis 1984, discussed above.

55. In this regard I mean to distinguish between voyeurism in the strict sense of the word and a kind of “peeping tomism.” The locus of voyeurism's power/pleasure is not necessarily the sense of looking without the object knowing, but the sense that the object cannot return the gaze even when she does know she is being thus observed. The voyeur's ostensible power consists in the fact or the belief that what he or she sees exists solely for him or herself. The notion of a woman's “to-be-looked-at-ness” comes from Laura Mulvey, in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975).

56. Hwang 1989, p. 9.

57. Renee attributes the world's political problems to the very existence of the penis, and thereby surrenders any possible engagement of the social construction of the phallus as power.

58. Hwang 1989, p. 48.

59. DiGaetani p.145. See Simon Watney for an argument against any definition of homosexuality based on object-choice, and for a critique of the binarism in the discourse of homosexuality (Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS and the Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

60. de Lauretis 1984, p. 121.

61. Hwang 1989, p. 90.

62. Hwang 1989, p. 90.