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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Scott and his team put an incredible amount of thought and detail work into the production design. For the billboards he specified images of geishas doing unhealthy things like smoking or popping pills. As I recall, for some convoluted canonical reason the pills were supposed to be birth control.
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I forget who did it, but one standup comedian had a throwaway line about “Growing up as an Asian-American girl, I didn’t have many strong Asian female role models – only Lucy Liu, Michelle Yeoh, and Scarlett Johansson …”
Annalee’s piece doesn’t mention the SFF conference a few years ago which proposed a panel on “Spicy Oriental Zeppelins”. I think the idea was to discuss Asian-themed steampunk, which is certainly an interesting topic --but the thoughtless use of “Oriental” triggered a predictable and very understandable backlash. The title alone made it clear that whoever dreamed it up had never discussed their idea with anyone of Asian ancestry.
ETA: I Googled this, and the reality is even worse than my summary above. The person behind “Spicy Oriental Zeppelins” reportedly resisted the criticism of his title, saying that it was “a fannish in-joke”. John Scalzi pointed out that no one else ever seemed to have heard of this supposed in-joke and that, in fact, Google recorded only one case of the phrase ever being used … by the person who had dreamed up the panel.
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Science Fiction can reflect the best of humanity. But the people who write it are human, and prone to the same failings as other humans, and that includes bigotry in all its forms. The Asian erasure talked about in this post is pretty hard to argue with, frankly, and no amount of rationalizing an explanation for it…
…changes the fact that none of the major characters in a lot of the Sci-Fi properties are Asian.
And, again, this isn’t the only form of bias and bigotry that exists in classic science fiction. A few years ago, before I knew that Apple was producing a tv series based on Asimov’s Foundation series, I reread the original trilogy for the first time since I was in high school. The first thing I noticed was the complete lack of women in the first book. This is supposedly an elightened future, our enlightened future, full of amazing technology and interstellar travel…and not one of the political or scientific leaders in this world are women. Even considering the time Asimov wrote that story, it seems like an incredible lack of imagination to create an advanced future where women have no place in the leadership of that world. Or, more likely, Asimov just ignored the existence of women. Of course, a woman did play a major role in the plot in the rest of the trilogy, but women were still conspicuously absent for the most part. Science fiction is not so special that it is immune from human failings.
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