So are you still putting Sharia forward as a comparison or not?
Iâm still asking you to clarify your position, and you can feel free to do so however you want. If you want to compare it to Sharia, feel free to do so. If you donât want to, donât. But at any rate, let me know how we, as a society, should determine when there is sufficient home-grown objection to feel comfortable also voicing any concerns we also have.
As I said initially, the crassness was the only issue raised by Glitch that I though might be relevant. There hasnât seemed to be much real argument about this from Glitch. Iâll expand to my full position which is that I donât actually have a problem with cultural appropriation and stereotyping in art if it isnât crass, stupid, and mercenary exploitation with little redeeming value. Itâs difficult to do any art at all without appropriation and using stereotypes.
Determining the degree of crassness, stupidity, and the degree to which a work is mercenary exploitation is a public exercise. That has to be weighed against the artistic merit, yadacetera. I was simply pointing out that there didnât seem to be any obvious merit to Glitchâs outrage, nor any particular consensus about the use of traditional Japanese culture and stereotypes. Some stereotypes are garbage, of course, but I donât see F&Fâs work as substantially terrible in this respect, nor does there seem to be any general revulsion. Your own comment about âyellowfaceâ, where the model uses traditional Japanese costume and (not actually yellow) makeup without explicit caricature, seems to me to be pure hyperbole. How would a Nigerian production of Twelfth Night in Elizabethan dress seem to you?
To specifically answer you question, if you want to be a successful Culture Police you must be persuasive with your opinion and persuasive about your sincerity. When you brought up Sharia it made me wonder if you were for real or not.
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Ok, so your opinion as Culture Policeman is the one we all should accept? You might not have found F & Fâs work crass, stupid, or mercenary (or culturally insensitive), but if I did (and I did), then Iâm wrong. I would have to find a Japanese person (and presumably youâll decide who meets the criterion of sufficiently Japanese) to be offended before I can be offended?
I find that self-involved (and offensive).
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If you want F&Fâs work at the link to be universally denounced, then you certainly have a lot of persuasive work to do. Iâm a vanishingly small part of this debate.
How would you know if there is general revulsion, and what level of revulsion would an obscure artist duo need to generate? I mean, your answer to what is crass seems to essentially be âI know it when I see it,â and the same can be said about the requisite level of revulsion.
I donât know how you define caricature, but the costuming, makeup, and posing is hardly culturally traditional. The eye makeup in many pictures recalls the slant-eye stereotype, and in my opinion the general impression it gives is of a westerner indulging in their Japanese fantasies.
As for your comparisons to Nigerian Shakespeare, Iâm not sure I see the similarity. This isnât an American troupe putting on a Japanese kabuki or noh performance with period costumes and makeup. Itâs an American duo playing dress-up, drawing on their own ideas of what it means to be and look Japanese. It is the reinforcement of these American projections of Japanese-ness that the artists are free to walk away from in a way that the Japanese arenât. On the other hand, the Nigerians in a Shakespearean play can pretty easily walk away from any 17th-century English associations that are projected on them, and to the extent that they cannot walk away from being black they are much less likely to include association that would be damaging to black people.
Iâm not sure why the burden is on those who object to depictions they find offensive, while the artists have no moral burden to explain or justify their imagery.
And to shift this back to the original comparison to the Washington football club, why arenât you calling out BB for their cultural silo-ing when you can argue that up to 90% of native Americans think the name is OK? Have those objecting to the football teamâs name carried their persuasive burden?
Thatâs actually been your answer to the question, and you have exerted much effort into asserting your right to assign arbitrary moral value on cultural issues without discussing anything in any specific depth.
For me, the pictures at the F&F website are pretty clearly chosen to be the images of female Japanese which are exported by Japanese media and accepted in the West as symbols of Japan, in turn juxtaposed back upon actual locations in Japan. Some of these juxtapositions make the stereotypes look ridiculous, so to me itâs pretty clearly not a reinforcement of stereotypes at all, quite the opposite. Quite a lot of effort went into these images; theyâre not just screwing around. If these folks really were naively asserting their privilege it would show in other ways. Thatâs my opinion, of course, but even if Iâm wrong weâre a long way from making a unanimous case for pitchforks and torchlit outrage, or castigating BB/Xeni for posting it.
Thatâs a different thread altogether and the points are not at all transferable. There isnât any artistic statement in using the term âRedskins,â itâs 100% arbitrary corporate branding bullshit. Thereâs no substantial connection to Indian commercial interests; 10% of a not-entirely-wiped-out-people in a probably bullshit statistic is still quite a bit more than a few internet scolds. Legally, itâs a matter of not allowing powerful interests to hold onto a brand they have no legal right to claim; enforcing this legal point is for everyoneâs benefit. The legal and moral issues seem pretty clear in this case, and have no bearing on the F&F site.
You, on the other hand, seem determined to undermine the clear facts of the Redskins case by asserting strange things about a portfolio of some art photography and Sharia law. Your conflation of the three never gets out of a muddled confusion, and your constant attempts to âcatch me outâ in the kind of stereotypical librul inconsistencies youâre reaching for would go much better without the constant confusion on your part about the simple meanings of words. As concern-driving trollies goes, itâs pretty incompetent. I wouldnât go as far as to label your effort offensive, just lame.
The comparison with the Indian clothing fad made elsewhere on the board is more apt. The other folks in the thread who donât like the F&F site certainly seem more sincere, but their criticism still runs into the issue that Japan is not marginalized in the world the way Indians and reservations are in the U.S.; Japanese women are marginalized, and thatâs a more important issue with an actual distant tie-in to Sharia law. So better luck with that the next time you wish to feign interest in those issues.
For my part I think Iâm done with this interaction.
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They have the right to make their images. I have the right to criticize. You are saying the criticism is inappropriate and that it is only valid if I carry the burden of persuasion and/or show that the targeted community is offended. I can articulate all sorts of reasons why I object to the depiction, but thatâs not the point of contention: the point of contention is you saying that only the targeted community is allowed to express distaste, effectively snuffing out any objection I have before we even get to the point of me articulating the reasons for my distaste. Note that you didnât ask why we objected, or what the basis for our objections were: you simply said that in the absence of Japanese criticism it wasnât our place to object and culturally silo these expressions.
I donât understand. Youâre saying that Japanese media exports images of Japanese women in non-Japanese locations as symbols of Japan, and that these artists are re-situating these images within Japan? Iâd like to know what media youâre consuming if this is the impression you have. I donât think this is some sort of tongue-in-cheek, satirical examination of how Japanese are depicted in the West that is going on here.
[quote=âandy_hilmer, post:27, topic:34743â]
You, on the other hand, seem determined to undermine the clear facts of the Redskins case by asserting strange things about a portfolio of some art photography and Sharia law.
[/quote]You think Iâm determined to undermine the controversy over the DC football team by expressing my distaste over these photographs? OK.
Again, what Iâm doing is addressing not the substantive nature of oppression or marginalization inherent in these photogrphs, but your desire to shut down the conversation before it even gets to that point. The point is not that there is substantive similarity between the issues, but the fact that Iâm not even allowed to criticize this photoset yet Iâm welcome to criticize either Sharia or the Potomac Indigenous Persons team name. Why? Well, Iâm still not sure, except that maybe it has something to do with art, maybe it has something to do with the percentage of targeted people that are offended, and maybe it has something to do with your gut feeling of how people operating under those conditions might feel and the relative intensity of their feelings of oppression.
So you get to define art and what is art and what is corporate? I mean, since you now want to bring concepts of legality into the discussion (remember, you earlier said that âthe response to offense is a matter of empathy and precedent, not a matter of crowning the winner based on false equivalence and jumping right into a legal frameworkâ), the law doesnât discriminate on the basis of artistic merit (at least not outside of obscenity, and itâs notable that it is exactly in the sphere of obscenity that Justice Stewart famously said âI know it when I see it,â which is the framework you have adopted in determining if something is sufficiently artistic or crass).
[quote=âandy_hilmer, post:27, topic:34743â]
Legally, itâs a matter of not allowing powerful interests to hold onto a brand they have no legal right to claim; enforcing this legal point is for everyoneâs benefit. The legal and moral issues seem pretty clear in this case, and have no bearing on the F&F site.
[/quote]The legal issues are irrelevant, because they will not prevent Snyderâs team from using the name. The moral questions are whatâs really relevant, and if youâre contending that 9% of native disagreement (which translates to about 0.08% of the total US population) with the name makes the moral issue âpretty clear,â then Iâm not sure that a few internet scolds responding to an obscure artistic endeavor is that much smaller.
So we can only complain about the most marginalized people and communities in the world. Well, by that token natives in the US are not marginalized nearly to the extent that some other peoples in the world are, so apparently we should also ignore concern over them.
I thought it would have been fairly clear that criticism over a photoset that exclusively features Japanese women is criticism over how Japanese women are depicted. And while Japanese women are marginalized in any number of ways, both domestic (in which case your comparison to Sharia is more fruitful) and internationally, the photoset here feeds into the Western fantasy of Asian women and Japanese stereotypes, making the comparison to Sharia somewhat difficult (notice there is no Japanese version of Formentoâs set).
By the wayâand I donât think this should be particularly relevantâI am half Japanese. More relevantly, I have lived in Japan for a few years and am somewhat familiar with Japanese culture. Japanese and Asians may be considered model immigrants in the North American context, but youâre seriously mistaken if you think that Asians (and Asian women in particular) are not marginalized or stereotyped in North American society. But I appreciate you telling me that because Japanese are not marginalized to the extent to natives are, let alone women under Sharia, that objections to how Japanese are depicted are irrelevant.
You might also want to note that although Breakfast at Tiffanyâs has a slightly lower rating on amazon.co.jp than it does on amazon.com (4 stars v. 4.5 stars), more of the .com reviews appear to reference the sorry caricature of Yunioshi than .co.jp reviews do. How dare these American reviewers be internet scolds when the Japanese donât seem to care as much!
Gah. Still wrong and not a relevant point. I did not comment on the âappropriatenessâ of your comments (in a proscriptive sense) in this thread, except to note that they are meandering, lack coherence, and for the most part havenât merited much response. That said, exposing the exploitive irrelevance of your style of argumentation has seemed to stimulate an unfolding of sorts that you bury behind the lead. So by all means, do continue.
You are still confusing disagreement (or eyerolling boredom) with ânot allowingâ. The crass nature of your argumentation is that you donât actually make concrete criticisms about the subject on your own unless pressed very hard. To be pressed, you provoke. Itâs a weird thing and you should really learn how to provoke and press your own self. Cut out the middleman. Instead youâve chosen primarily to misrepresent me and attack me without adding much to the conversation yourself until after I poke you back right in the eye.
As I said to tubacat, it does matter if the Japanese themselves care, but not that it only matters if itâs Japanese. Itâs telling that thereâs a history of overwhelming indifference by Japanese culture to the themes of two or three of the images. Thatâs at the heart of this issue, itâs what you care about, so you might want to lead with that. Whatâs largely irrelevant (but gets most of your energy) is to blame the artistic commentary that makes us notice this problem in Japanese culture. Itâs more relevant that such a huge truckload of this imagery has leaked out to America that fashion photographers are using it in the artsiest of their personal, noncommercial projects. Thatâs quite a long way from saying that only the Japanese get to care. Kind of the opposite.
The photographer himself is Asian and grew up exposed to the expatriate community and diverse culture of Hawaii. Does that change your proscriptive framework of race-math? Perhaps your history gives you a different perspective, but itâs taken you a whole thread to get to that perspective. Up to this point itâs just been some random person spouting off in fairly non-specific ways, trying to turn a medium of discourse into interweb-team-sportball.
This is what I propose: you address the issue of women in Japanese culture (assuming this is your sincere interest, I think thereâs still a truckload of unfolding left for you to do) and any other traditional culture you find relevant (wherever you find it, even in the West!) without using it as a springboard for an irrelevant side-argument about thread-dominance with some random dude on the internet. Or be specific about Japan. Or be specific about linking to a particular element of Sharia (rather than just driving trollies with a lame punchline). Or talk about Appalachia or the culture of Puget Sound Islanders. But whatever you bring to the conversation, donât just hammer it into the shape of who-can-best-lawyer-their-rhetoric. Let it live on its own.
That shape of stereotypical internet-fight, for you, is done. Until you began exploring the thinking you finally exposed in this last comment of yours, youâve completely wasted your time. If you continue with lame bullshit, it really is all on you.
So in the future, lead with the sincerity and leave the lawyering for those times when someone is misinterpreting (or stubbornly misrepresenting) your ideas. When that happens, youâll actually know whatâs going on and be able to respond effectively.
Cheers. Iâm moooovinâ on.
Thatâs not what I got from how you opened the discussion:
And:
So even though you were saying it does have to be the Japanese are pissed off, you supposedly didnât mean to say âthat it only matters if itâs Japanese.â Well, that might be what you meant, but itâs not what you said.
This is rich, coming as it does from someone who has accused me of misunderstanding âsimple meanings of wordsâ, but also opened his very first post on the subject with âThat depends on what you mean by âcrassâ.â
As Iâve repeatedly said, my initial comments were not intended to âabout the subjectâ but about your insistence that id does have to be the Japense who are complaining. I apologise if my responding to a point you were making about whose complaints are valid is offensive to you.
This isnât telling of anything. Japanese culture for internal Japanese consumption is different than non-Japanese culture created using Japanese props for foreign consumption. Thatâs why the fact that native American high schools that also use Redskins as a team name arenât that telling for Snyderâs case, and why African American usage of the n-word isnât that telling for white use of that word.
What exactly is âthis problem in Japanese culture,â and how are these foreign photographs making us notice it?
What imagery are you talking about? Simple kimonos? Kimono bondage? Kimono + katana? Surely you realize itâs possible to depict aspects of a foreign culture in non-exploitative ways, even though those same elements can be depicted in an exploitative manner.
Obviously not, as you removed the part of the quote where I said I think my heritage is pretty irrelevant: itâs you who think it is relevant. And since I think itâs irrelevant, itâs hardly a proscriptive framework of race-math. Indeed, you are the one who think the race of the objectors is highly relevant, not me.
The problem is that the substantive issue is not women in Japanese culture. As I said, this art project isnât aimed at the Japanese, and the Japanese arenât their audience. Japanese audiences viewing this project would be much less likely to be internalize this Western fantasy of Japan. The problem is that this project, aimed squarely at Western viewers, reinforces not particularly helpful stereotypes of Asian women prevalent in the West. And itâs because these images are aimed so squarely at the Western community that interpreting them from a Japanese lens itâs pretty irrelevant what native Japanese think about these images, as this cultural baggage is unlikely to projected onto them in a meaningful way.
According to the photographs, Japanese women are âtraditional,â exotic, kinky, etc. They reinforce these not-so-helpful stereotypes and cloak them in the aura of authenticity by using bastardized presentations of kimonos, kabuki makeup, and retro '50s styling as set-dressing, as though their imagery reflects some established Japanese qualities. regardless of how damaging these photographs may be, however, the photographers are completely free to walk away from their project without feeling any repercussions. They will never be exposed to the sort of marginalization of Asian women that they have contributed to. This sort of one-way street whereby they are free to capitalize on, and profit from, the sterotyping of others while simultaneously being immune from the negative stereotypes theyâre perpetuating is what makes cultural appropriation exploitative.
You might also notice this is pretty much what I said in response to you Nigerian Shakespeare example.
Gah. Still wrong and not a relevant point. The reference to Sharia was obviously not a point about the substantive nature of Sharia but about whether outsiders get to voice an opinion about the cultural practices of another society (as Iâve repeatedly said). But I totally understand why you think you have the market cornered on people misrepresenting your ideas.
At no point have you given me the impression that you actually care more about the topic than scoring points off the surface (not to say you donât care about the topic, just that you are too diverted by your urge to scold people). So in the interest of not being blamed by you for your own tiresome yammering, I wonât be reading past the airing of grievances with which you open every comment. I wonât be answering irrelevant digressions except to note their irrelevance. It should keep the threadâs wordcount down, if nothing else.
Like I said above, if you have something of substance to say and want me to respond, donât bury it beneath a bunch of whining.
Says the guy who opens every comment with an airing of grievances, but admittedly doesnât even read the comments he replies to.
Iâve gotten to the point where Iâm not reading either of you; I canât even tell whoâs arguing what anymore, never mind what relevance it has to the subject of Xeniâs post.
Could you take it to PM? Maybe report back here if one of you succeeds in building a primitive gunpowder weapon out of bamboo, saltpetre and sulphur and defeats the other.
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Does it count as âyellowfaceâ if most of the models are asian? Are the bondage pictures â the ones with the nipples â more or less offensive than similar pictures by, say, Araki Nobuyoshi?
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Itâs an interesting question. If I saw the pictures without the filenames, I would have assumed that most of the models are at least half-Western (and Iâm still not sure this is incorrect). Many of the models do not look classically or traditionally Japanese (especially some of the noses), and itâs really weird because the makeup and styling is decidedly un-Japanese, while also imitating what seems to be someoneâs idea of what Japanese look like. Cheekbones are emphasized with heavy makeup as though they want to make someone look more Asian and exotic, eyes are made to look more slanted, etc.
From what I can see, Arakiâs pictures are different in that they use women that are more typically Japanese in appearance, against typical Japanese backdrops, in typical Japanese makeup, and mostly with Japanese public hair. When I look at his pictures, they look like Japan, and the people look Japanese. Perhaps a seedy Japan, but not the plasticy, Wachowskian Speed Racer-style fantasy of Japan that I see in the Formentos. His pictures may be fetishistic, but his fetishes are bondage and sex, and not Japan.
Perhaps more importantly, Araki is Japanese and cannot escape the perceptions of Japanese-ness as easily as an American art duo (who will never be confused for being Japanese) will be. (Of course this ignores the issue of whether Arakiâs imagery is a good thing for Japanese women in the domestic Japanese context, but thatâs an entirely different issue.)
Uhh⌠because I did address these points in the stuff youâve admitted you didnât read? Like, I talked about Sharia, but your response indicates you havenât read it.
Donât know what this has to do with personal issues, either. Iâm certainly not the one engaging in name calling here.
Says the guy who hasnât aired a single issue I havenât already opened up, nor makes an honest attempt to address his own personal issues.
For example, why donât you actually describe how you think Sharia actually affects the discussion? Apart from snide punchlines, I mean. Youâve mentioned a couple times that it affects the discussion, but have never been willing to let your ideas bubble above the dumb snide rhetoric and other bullshit. Let your flag fly. You might be rewarded with an actually positive response rather than the negative wanking your love for the gutter brawling suggests.
When you hide them under piles of abusive, lying garbage no. Keep quoting me, trolley, and Iâll keep replying. If you want an actual answer, stop being an abusive trolley.
I truly donât care about the abusive idiocy, but Iâm not going to reward you for being a scumbag.
Where was I being abusive? If you think anything I wrote was abusive, please feel free to flag it.
But itâs kind of hard to criticize me for not responding to things when the truth is that you havenât read them.
Youâre a gentleman and a scholar.
Reply with something on topic, and I might respond with something in kind. Right now itâs pretty clear you are just griefing, so I reply to the griefing. Grief on, troll.
Iâm not an expert on make-up â indeed, I barely notice it on a conscious level most of the time â but it seems to me that the slanted eyes and high cheekbones are a thing that Western make-up styles do tend to emphasize a lot anyway, and you see it often on Western women in Western contexts. Whether this is to do with fin de siecle Orientalism, perhaps, or if it goes back further, I donât know, but it may be that enough time has passed for this fashion to be its own thing rather than a conscious reference to Asians or Western ideas of Asians.
Iâm sure I donât have to remind you of the heavy artificiality of âtraditionalâ geisha make-up, whereas up-to-the-minute modern Japanese make-up seems to be (from my recollections and a quick google survey) about emphasizing or signifying extreme, child-like youth; no less an artificiality in its own way than geisha or Western styles. In this context, is a Western make-up style any more significant than just the way that Mrs Formento was trained to do make-up? Is there some essential nature to Asians that is being insulted by applying mascara and highlighter, in contrast to the heavy white foundation and powder of a geiko, or the rosy cheeks and more subtle paleness of a Loli style? (Not to mention ganguro; is that still a thing?)
As to the photography, while there is definitely a very Western, fashion-magazine style to the Formentosâ pictures, in their lighting, staging and other visual tropes, is this itself a bad thing, and does it actually have anything to do with fetishizing Asians, rather than fetishization being a feature of Western photography? Does a woman stripping from her kimono to a bikini on a street corner in a Japanese city uniquely signify anything that, say, a Western woman stripping from a ball-gown on a street corner in Los Angeles doesnât?
The location changes the meaning of the photo in the viewerâs mind, undoubtably, but that meaning depends on the viewer to a large extent: we take away from the photo what we bring to it, more than what the photographer puts there. A kimono will mean a different thing to a Tokyo-ite than it does to me, and the act of taking one off in somewhat surreal circumstances will mean something different to each of us; if I am an Orientalist, does that mean that my interpretation is of greater significance than, say, that of the Japanese model in the photo, and does that mean that the photo should not have been taken?
You have a right to be offended by whatever offends you. If you want others to understand and empathise with your offence, though, it helps if you can bring something to the discussion other than the mere fact of your offence and distracting irrelevancies such as Sharia and the Washington Redskins.
Finally, it seems an odd thing to this pale white Brit with Gaelic-Celtic-Pict-Roman-Angle-Saxon-Norman-other ancestry for a half-Asian to comment on the degree of Asian-ness of the models in this shoot, almost as though thereâs something⌠wrong with being Asian and having a feature or two that does not conform to âtraditionalâ patterns. Surely this should be a phenomenon you are familiar with and reconciled to.
