Originally published at: Sexy Asian lady robots haunt science fiction - Boing Boing
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S.M. sterling’s Emberverse series suffers from the evil sexy Asian woman problem. I didn’t notice it the first time through, but on a second read it was really in-your-face.
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…another techno-Orientalist trick is to represent Asian people as robots – or, as Kanayama summed it up, “sexy Asian lady robots”.
beschizzas headline triggered sorayama in my head. kinda switched that trope with his robots, drawn off from western media like playboy;
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And then when you have a strong Asian woman as the story’s protagonist, whom do they cast? Why Scarlett Johansson of course!
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butbutbut…she is japanese, its her robot-body that resembles a white woman. total coincidence.
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It’s been a while since I’ve watched Blade Runner, but I’m embarrassed to admit that I forgot all of those major characters whom you mentioned. I’ll have to give it a rewatch. /s
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Right, so anything that seems to be science fiction but is not inclusive isn’t really science fiction.
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Orientalism has always been a handy tool for those who fret about real or imaginary decay in the West and want to shift the blame from Westerners themselves.
It’s only relatively recently that American and European publishers have included and prominently featured non-Western writers (esp. PoC) on the same level that they did Western ones. Some of it was due to additional costs for things like quality translations, but a lot had to do with the same commercial anxieties that drive film industry casting directors.
Examples?
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You’re actually proving my point. You’re arguing that Blade Runner is not science fiction because the people who made it did not belong to the tribe of science fiction creators and did not uphold the inclusive principles that you imagine all true science fiction creators to have.
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Authors have to work with publishers. Publishers have philistine and mercenary stockholders just like movie studios do. In many cases, they’re shared since many publishers are part of a media conglomerate.
The eternal dance between art and commerce is obviously a tricky one. While SFF publishing has managed it to better effect in comparison to movie studios, that doesn’t make it some paradise of diversity and writerly auteurism.
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Blade Runner’s use of Japanese, like in many 1980s cyberpunk works, was premised on the idea (common at the time) that Japan would rule the world economically and thus culturally in the future just as Britain’s and the US’s success spread the English language. There was no mystery as to where the actual Japanese were – they were in Japan, or in the off world colonies. They wouldn’t be hanging out in LA which was a minor backwater.
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Were it not a culturally appropriating and exploitive trope I, for one, would welcome our sexy Asian robots overlords.
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This is unnecessarily confrontational and speaking down to folks. Let’s be better than this.
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Then why have wall-to-wall advertising in Japanese all over the place in LA?
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As I said, their influence spread the language. Just like you can see advertisements in English in Western Europe today.
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Perhaps in more ways than you know, Mr. Johnson.
[Also, that link isn’t clicking through for me. In any case, it doesn’t take your superior level of enlightenment to know that non-Western SFF is now more frequently promoted by publishers than it was, say, two decades ago. What I said was that it’s a relatively new trend in Western SFF publishing (esp. if you compare to literary fiction).]
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