In the latter part of the 20th century, hegemonic North American masculinity has come under both ideological and institutional attack. Despite the steady, incremental erosion to male privilege that the women’s movement have brought upon men, some gay and feminist theorists continue to link heterosexual, mainstream masculinity with power and “the exercise of power in its most naked forms,” asserting that masculinity is organized for domination, and hence, resistant to change because of power relations” (Connell 1995:42). [1]  These ideological assaults on heterosexual masculinity have occurred at the same time that global capitalist practices have altered the positioning of the male protector/provider. With American manufacturing moving off shore and targeting a predominantly female labor pool (Nash 1983; Ong 1987, 1991), jobs that once marked working class American masculinities have been reassigned, both re-located and re-gendered. [2]  Not only has decentralized production rendered once-secure blue collar jobs almost extinct, over the past 15 years, wages for men in the unskilled-labor market dropped over 25% (Swoboda 1992). The number of male white collar workers has also declined, and in the American employment frontier, growing service sector jobs increasingly target women whose lower wages undercut men’s employment opportunities. [3]  Indeed, statistics indicate that in 1984 only 42% of men between the ages of twenty to twenty-four could keep a family of three out of poverty compared to the 60% in 1963 who could do so (Pfeil, 1995). So despite women’s lagging wages, material conditions no longer permit men to construct and valorize a protector/provider masculinity for themselves.

These economic transformations have had an immediate effect on American heterosexual relations. Not only has increased economic dependence on women diminished male authority, economic opportunities for women, in conjunction with birth control, changed sexual norms, and other factors have lessened the pressure to marry or stay married (Ahuvia and Adelman 1992). These changes have given rise to a dramatic increase in the number of older singles in the workforce who will, given the capitalist imperative of employers to maximize profits, relocate with employment opportunities. With accompanying disruptions to social networks, many older singles have fewer opportunities to meet other singles and often seek companionship in personal ads... It is here in the personal section of newsprint publications that some men first engage with the ... culturally undifferentiated representation of Asian women, Orientalist constructions that rivets their attention to the nostalgic imaginary that made Asian women “the centerfolds of the imperial voyeur,” [4] images still reified by media images thereof (Moy 1993; Marchetti 1993; Bernstein & Studlar 1997).

While circumstances of location in the United States differ, Asian women, have been situated similarly to other non-European women. [5] Not only has American social structure been built on the racial and sexual legacies of the colonial period, America’s dreams of empire also rely on sexual control to assert power and privilege. [6]  The use of sexuality to draw distinctions has been, and still is, utilized in America’s involvement’s abroad—particularly in Asia. The United States’ multiple military engagements and occupations throughout Asia have spawned an entire industry around both American bases and R&R destinations that cater to needs and desires of young men sent overseas on duty. Predominantly female military support personnel— entertainers, dancers, hostesses, prostitutes, and household helpers—work at fulfilling the sexualized desires of soldiers on the R&R breaks as well as tend to the chores daily living for men stationed on foreign soil. (Enloe 1989, 1993; Sturdevant and Stoltzfus 1992; Nakashima Brock and Thistlethwaite 1996; Takagi and Park 1996). That socio-economic circumstances often compel military support personnel to take on this line of work is often overlooked by soldiers who continue to bring back tales that fuel the imaginary of the submissive Asian woman—ready and willing to please. [7]

This, however, is not the only imaginary of Asian femininity. Asia’s rising eminence in the new world order in the past 25 years has also left its mark, and new elements have also been incorporated. Asian women, once constructed primarily in terms of subservience and service, now also personify the energy, intelligence and economic vitality of the Pacific Rim. With nostalgic notions of Asian female passivity folded into new myths of power, the positioning of Asian women has shifted. Constructed as objects of domination as well as marked as a commodity that can confer status, she has entered the purview of some middle and upper class men (Walsh 1990) who, along with some lower class men, have turned away from “American” women to seek solace in the imaginary of the Asian woman. [8]

Notes

[1] For a more problematized perspective of masculinity and male power, see the works of Segal (1990), Hall (1991), Pfeil (1995), and Connell (1995), for example.

[2] For additional examples of that trend, see Sun (1987) Gray, Bohlen, & Fernandez-Kelly (1987). Harroway (1985[1990]) takes this argument further, suggesting that displacement and destruction of the male-dominant working class indicates a feminization of work and the workforce. According to Harroway, feminine is equated with the vulnerability to be “disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labor force; seen less as workers than as servers...” (p.208)

[3] By 1991 the number of men working full-time was declining by 1.2 million each year while the number of women working full-time increasing by 800,000 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1992).

[4] Phrase used by Stoler (1991). The use of the term nostalgic here refers particularly to constructions that hearken back to the colonial context or to military experience which, by and large, implicates a certain social strata of the society. Relations between colonizer and colonized or soldier and prostitute are predicated on power relations specific to time and location which are not easily transposed to other settings. While not all relationships between soldiers and non-American women are grounded in the economies of power and privilege, studies on servicemen’s wives corroborate the difficulties of sustaining these relations outside the context of origin (Kim 1972; Simpson 1993).

[5] The removal of Native Americans from EuroAmerican landscapes was the initial strategy of boundary maintenance. However, sex was also used as a tool of domination. According to Green (1990), dominant images of Native American women as virtuous princesses who save white men and savage squaws who share their beds with the colonizer are historically grounded in the conquest of Native Americans in America. Given their removal to reservations, Native American women did not invoke the same sexual apprehensions to EuroAmericans as African American women who were integrated into the daily lives of Southern plantation owners and workers. Perhaps it was because of the fluidity of racial and class boundaries in this context that legislation regulating sex came to be necessary, particularly in relation to African slave women who lived and worked in close proximity to EuroAmericans (Jordon, 1968; Giddens, 1984; Takaki ,1977; hooks, 1992).

[6] While Stoler’s work (1991, 1992, 1995) does not deal directly with Asian women in America, her scholarship lays the foundation for an interrogation of the sexual positioning of non-white women “at home.” Moving beyond iconography, she examines sexual control and racial policies of imperial rule. Citing the figurative and literal use of imperial pornographies by European colonial administrators to appease the colonizing ranks, she interrogates the historical and contemporary slippage between the sexual symbols of power and the politics of sex by exploring the multiple levels on which sexual control secured colonial authority. Sexual policies and practices were “a fundamental class and racial marker implicated in a wider set of relations of power” (1991:55) both between the colonizer and the colonized, and among the colonizers. While Stoler’s earlier works (early 1990’s) focus on the management of sexual practices between the colonizer and the colonized, her more recent work (1995) expands the field of sexual discourse to boundaries of citizenship and nationality located in Europe.

[7] In 1996 three American soldiers kidnapped and raped a Okinawan school girl. During the much publicized trail the American assailants testified that they did not mean any harm. However, implicit in their testimony was the misunderstand ing that Okinawan women were, in general, ready and available for their taking.

[8] While Asian women are the focus of this essay, a perusal of the personal ads publications such as the L.A. Weekly or the L.A. Times indicates that other non-American women, particularly Latinas, are also sought after.