Seeing Faces, Making Races: Challenging Visual Tropes of Racial Difference

Seeing Faces, Making Races Challenging Visual Tropes ofRacial Difference TERRY KAWASHIMA When mostforeigners look at mangafor thejirst time today and see characters iuith huge saucer eyes, lanky legs, and what appears to be blonde hair, they ojten want to know u>hy there are so many "Caucasian" people in the stories. When told that most ofthese characters are not "Caucasians" but "Japanese," they arejlabbergasted. (Schodt 1996, 59)1 — Frederik Schodt, DreamlandJapan: Writings on Modern Manga According to Frederik Schodt, the most visible English-language authority on Japanese comic books, the majority of viewers born and raised outside ofJapan who encounter Japanese comic book and animation figures for the first time find it difficult to accept these figures as representations ofJapanese characters, concluding that they "look white." Sailor Moon, a popular figure from a Japanese comic and animation series targeted mosdy at young girls (see ), is a good example ofthis puzzling state ofaffairs. My personal experience (as well as that ofcertain ofmy colleagues) confirms Schodt's assertion; I am asked the question "why do these characters look white?" almost every time I introduce manga, or Japanese comic books, to acquaintances (both academic and non-academic) or students. I begin with this assessment: Sailor Moon looks just as "Japanese" as she looks "white." If she looks exclusively "white" and not at all "Japanese" to a viewer, it is only because that viewer has been culturally conditioned to read visual images in specific racializedways thatprivilege certain cues at the expense of others and lead to an overdetermined conclusion; there is nothing inherently "white" about the way in which [Meridians:feminism, race, transnationalism 2002, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 161-90)©2002 by Wesleyan University Press. All rights reserved. 161 Sailor Moon's bodily features are configured. This visual reading process operates at a level below everyday awareness and is thus naturalized; it is central to the ways in which "race" itselfis conceptualized, perpetuated, and constantly reconfigured. For this reason, we must insist on examining in detail the contingency of visually-constructed "race" and the consequences ofits naturalization. Recently, I sat in on a graduate seminar on gender and race offered by a well-established women's studies department, and the question of "white imitation" was raised. A briefdiscussion of"non-white" women desiring to mold themselves after "white" ideals—pale skin, lightcolored hair, etc.—proceeded very sympathetically by contextualizing the phenomenon within hegemonic colonial and postcolonial economies of power, with attention to capitalistexploitation and oppressive discourses that promoted such ideals. I was impressed by the discussion, yet left with a certain sense ofdissatisfaction: whywas I simultaneously glad and disturbed to heara student say: "it's terrible that 'non-whites' would want to 'look white'; they are oppressed to the point ofnot recognizing their own beauty"? It seems to me that the seamless conflation of so-called "white features" with "whiteness" is so "natural" thatwe fail to grasp the opportunity to examine the very mechanisms through which "race" is constructed. In the past decade, postcolonial, ethnic, race, and whiteness studies have focused upon the various discourses of "race" as a socially constructed category. Theorists have illustrated the extent to which "natural" or "essential" racial attributes are, in fact, products ofspecific historical, social, and political circumstances. Discourses of "race" and "racial difference" are shown to be charged with tensions ofglobal power relations , such as (perceived) disparities in economic and cultural capital.2 Such scholarship encourages us to reexamine carefully past assumptions about any racial classification; these theories have opened up new grounds for investigating "race" in a way that empowers the discriminated and disempowers the discriminator by pointing to the instability of oppressive discourses. In addition to arguments that expose "race" as a social construction, however, it is still necessary to situate "race" as a category that is constructed uisually. In other words, although the category of"white people" has been skillfully shown to be a discursive one laden with specific significances (such as "privilege" and "power") in particular historical and social contexts, the very concrete bases for racial classification need 162 TERRY KAWASHIMA to be put into question. These bases are quite often visual: blond hair and blue eyes are almost unquestionably considered "white...