Agent Butterfly

Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams. By Karen Kelsky. Durham. N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001. 294 pages. $18.95 (paper).

For over a century, the trope of Madame Butterfly has served as apotent signifier of the power relations between the United States and Asia as symbolized by the relationship between a white American man and a Japanese woman. In the last few decades, the convergence of postcolonial studies and feminist studies has produced a fine body of scholarship on the gendered and sexualized nature of Western hegemony as exemplified by Madame Butterfly. These works examine the discourse of Orientalism that consolidates the Western power in part by feminizing the Orient; ¹ the material practices of sexuality that affirm and enhance the military, political, and socioeconomic imperatives of the Western powers in Asia; ² and the roles of white women and Western feminism in the gendered dynamics of East-West relations. ³ Conspicuously missing from many of these accounts is the voice of Asian women such as Madame Butterfly herself. While some recent scholarship has made important inquiries into the meanings of Western Orientalism for the racialized and gendered identities of Asian American women and men, ⁴ the problem of language and the divide between American studies and Asian studies have severely limited Americanists' examination of how the discourses and practices of American empire have shaped the lives and subjectivities of Asian women. Karen Kelsky's fascinating and provocative study, Women on the Verge, provides a powerful antidote to the U.S./West-centered approach to the study of Orientalism, globalization, and transnationalism. By studying Japanese women who actively "defect" to the "realm of the foreign," Kelsky shifts the focus of eroticized relationships between the United States and Japan to the latter, and sees Japanese women as active agents, rather than passive victims, of such relationships.

The subjects of Kelsky's study are Japanese women who turn to the "foreign"—in the form of travel, study, and/or work abroad, and often culminating in their relationships with white men—as a means to resist Japan's gender norms and social structures. These women are admittedly not "representative" of contemporary Japanese women as a whole: they are highly educated, urban, single, professional women between the ages of twenty and forty-five, with a significant level of English-language skills and experience abroad. Yet, the women's search for alternative life courses abroad are not an elite phenomenon but rather firmly grounded in the middle class. The figures Kelsky introduces—for instance, nearly 140,000 women (nearly 70 percent of all Japanese studying abroad) study abroad each year; in 1999, about 70 percent of Japanese applicants for the associate expert training program offered by the U.N. were female—show both the popularity and highly gendered nature of such transnational explorations by the Japanese.

These women typically adopt a discourse of "internationalism" that constructs the West—often made synonymous with the United States as well as with "whiteness"—as the site of emancipation where they can form a subjectivity detached from the Japanese nation-state. By scrutinizing how these narratives of "internationalism" work, Kelsky examines both the transgressive potential of the women's desire for the West and its limitations as a source of social change both in Japan and globally. This internationalist discourse rests on constructed binaries: between the "oppressive" Japan and the "liberatory" West, between the "feudalistic" Japanese men and the "internationalized" Japanese women. Whereas existing scholarship has tended to attribute such constructs to the West's ideological and material power over the East—and Kelsky never loses sight of Western, especially American, hegemony in Japan—what distinguishes Kelsky's work is that she locates the authorship of these narratives in Japanese women themselves. Her analysis adamantly posits "internationalist" Japanese women as active agents—not only of the Japanese longing for the West in general but also of the eroticized desire for the white man—even when the women themselves deny or reject such agency...