Mulan and America's Love-Affair with Masculinity (Part One)

And can I just take a moment to gush about how much I love this movie's artwork?

Do you enjoy Disney movies? Are you a feminist? If the answer to both questions is yes, then this blog post is for you! My favorite Disney movie of all time is Mulan, and today I'm here to talk about why it's only almost-feminist and why this makes it very American (Part One).

Ready to follow my Grad-school brain down that particular rabbit hole? Let's go!

First off, you can't talk feminism without acknowledging the existence of the patriarchy, and the movie neatly does this by opening with two scenes featuring only male characters: Men invading, men defending, men planning, men ruling the country, and as the Emperor points out, "One man could mean the difference between victory and defeat." (Dramatic irony alert: It won't be a man.)

I'm so manly I'm on FIRE.

The patriarchal context is then further established by the first musical number, "Honor to Us All." We are introduced to the character of Mulan through a cheery explication of her society's expectations of her as a woman and an illustration of her complete inability to conform to these expectations. "A girl can bring her family great honor in one way -- by striking a good match, and this could be the day!" (Dramatic irony alert: There might be more than one way.)

Good with chopstick, not so good at girl

Having failed to meet her society's standards of femininity, Mulan returns home in disgrace and reflects on her Reflection. In case we hadn't gotten the message yet, Mulan is not traditionally feminine. "Somehow I cannot hide who I am, though I've tried. When will my reflection show who I am inside?" (Foreshadowing alert: Could it be that her reflection will show who she is inside when she stops trying to hide?)

Now that we've established our patriarchal context, Mulan is faced with her first crisis, one that hinges on these strict definitions of gender roles. Her father, as the only man in the Fa family, is expected to fight for his country despite being old and infirm. A young neighbor of the Fa family acts as a foil for Mulan by volunteering to take his father's place. This option is denied to the female Mulan, whose willingness to speak up and defend her father only shames him. The movie takes a moment here to demonstrate that patriarchy can be dehumanizing. Mulan's father, who up to this point has been the only one cutting her any slack, suddenly turns on her with the harsh, "I know my place. It is time you learned yours."

Now Mulan is faced with a choice: Uphold society's definitions of masculine and feminine roles at the expense of her father's life or reject those definitions at the expense of her family's honor and possibly her own life. We are not surprised when she chooses the latter, considering how ill-suited she is to those definitions in the first place. However, the movie wants us to understand that this is not an easy choice. After all, it involves great personal risk. "She could be killed," her mother says. Her father replies, "If I reveal her, she will be." This is a rigid society, one that enforces its norms with the death penalty. After all, social deviancy is a slippery slope! As one of Mulan's ancestors says, "Traditional values will go down!" (Feminism alert: Maybe that's not such a bad thing...)

Still working on this "man" thing...

So Mulan takes on a masculine identity, cutting her hair and putting on man-clothes, but as soon as she arrives in the war camp, it becomes apparent that this change is merely superficial. Confronted with the alienness of the new role she is trying to fill, Mulan reverts to a more traditionally feminine self that finds the men around her "disgusting."

"I'm such a fail. Q_Q"

During this segment, the "naturalness" of the gender roles is initially reinforced by Mulan's inability to fulfill the requirements of the masculine role. This reinforcement is false, though, and serves merely to highlight the drama when Mulan finally shatters the divide between gender roles. Not only is she ultimately able to fulfill the requirements of the masculine role, but she even surpasses the men in her abilities. "Did they send me daughters when I asked for sons?" Yes, Li Shang, they did, and a good thing too. (Dramatic irony alert: He won't make a man out of her.)

WINNING.

 

At this point, the narrative's feminist message is on solid enough ground that it can withstand some playful exploration of the identity shifts Mulan is undergoing. Mulan slips off for a "girly" bath but is almost discovered when some of her comrades decide to join in. This scene cuts straight to the heart of the matter by revealing Mulan's discomfort with the physical differences between her female body and the male bodies of her companions. While her (culturally determined) gender may be fluid and alterable, her physical body is not. She may be masculine, but she can't be male.

"I don't really wanna take him anywhere."

But this is where things start to get problematic. Up until now, the character of Qi Fu, the Emperor's Consul, has served as a sort of minor villain, constantly threatening to send bad reports about Li Shang to the Emperor. The bathing scene is the first of many where Qi Fu's non-traditional masculinity becomes the butt of a joke. He attempts to join the men in their bath, but wearing a dainty towel, shower cap and slippers. We see the aftermath of this as he huffs off, repeating some of the insults the men have thrown at him. However, instead of inviting our sympathy for a character being bullied for non-conformity to gender roles, the movie wants us to laugh at him.

Qi Fu, I found your bathing ensemble stunning!

The movie, while championing a "masculine" female, still feels it acceptable to shame and ridicule a "feminine" male. In the world of Mulan, male characters are allowed to possess the full scope of the "masculine" personality (governed by their stomachs and sexual drives, slovenly, aggressive, etc...) but they are not allowed to infringe upon the "feminine" (concerned with clothing and personal appearance, picky about personal hygiene, feminine forms of speech, dislike of physical labor, etc...).

This tendency of the film is jarringly anti-feminist. After all, feminism aims to oppose patriarchy in all its guises, and it is patriarchy which has dictated these strict gender roles for both males and females. The movie's treatment of Qi Fu reveals its troubled relationship with the feminist principles it set out to champion. In the final analysis, we can't forget that Mulan is an American movie, created by Americans for an American audience, and its inability to fully embrace feminism is a symptom of this. The movie struggles with the parts of feminism that U.S. culture struggles with -- We are so in love with masculinity that we think EVERYONE should be masculine, men and women alike. When women aren't masculine (assertive, outgoing, independent, outspoken), we can accept it, even approve of it, but when a man dares not to be masculine we feel the need to shame him back into his proper role.

Spoiler alert: Qi Fu does scream [in the manner traditionally associated with a female].

But enough about our cultural failings. We have a movie to analyze here! Part 2 coming soon, wherein I discuss the benefits of non-surgical gender reassignment...

We Are the Universe's Fingertips

The great secret at the heart of existence is a gaping abyss of unmeaning.

Such is the proposition of existentialism. And on a night like tonight I can feel a truth in it. The entire trajectory of my life to now has been a headlong, wide-eyed stumble toward anyone or anything which I could fling between myself and that abyss. Anything that means I do not have to stand at its edge alone and feel its icy breath on my own skin.

But as soon as I take that step to the edge of the abyss and gaze into its nothingness, I do not find myself overcome with despair but rather with...inspiration. And with indignation!

My mind blossoms with thoughts. I cannot but question the abyss and demand it justify itself -- You there, if you are the end of everything, the singular truth of the universe, then tell me this about it: Why are we?

We, humans, thinking animals who step up to an abyss and try to understand it.

We are terrified of it; we tremble at its impersonal vastness, its finality, the death smell of it. But we refuse to stop at that. We step up to the abyss and we fling our self-ness at it: our questions, our fears, our poetry, our songs, our bodies, our loves, our passions. We would fill its emptiness with our own fullness.

Why is such a thing as us?

Standing here before the nothing, I cannot reject the us. I cannot accept that a universe, vast and empty as it is, governed by impersonal laws would, at some far-flung extremity of itself, vomit up the one thing incapable of accepting its impersonality: persons. I cannot accept that the engendering of the personal from the impersonal is a random accident.

A god? Perhaps not? But an order to the vastness, yes. A universe that wants to know itself, that strives to grasp its own existence and the unknowable laws which govern it -- the final order of the chaos is the mind. Our questions are the universe's ultimate aim, or its path toward that aim.

For are we not also the universe? If the universe were a body, we would be its senses, touching, hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling the entirety of our universal body. We are the universe's fingertips, groping a way through the dark, tearing back the skin of the future and revealing what lies beneath.

I Only Sail on Fictional Ships

Perhaps you are aware of shipping. (If you are not, you may enlighten yourself here). I personally became aware of shipping sometime c. 2009 when I started getting into The Big Bang Theory and accidentally stumbled across the hordes of rabid Shenny (Sheldon+Penny) shippers.

I was further enlightened when I made my maiden voyage on the Vampire Diaries Delena (Damon+Elena) ship. One google search for "I+ship+Damon+and+Elena" later, and I had been initiated into the tidal wave of feels that is the #Delena tumblr tag (SO MANY SEXY GIFS). (Perhaps this would be a good moment to pause and say that, "Yes, I understand that admitting my membership in this fandom will open me up to ridicule," and "No, I don't care... But I'm certainly not going to spill ALL of my fandoms...").

But as I went further down the rabbit hole, I began to notice a disturbing trend within shipper culture. Perhaps I first became aware of it because as I swam gleefully through the ocean of Damon and Elena love I saw almost as many references to Ian+Nina, the names of the two actors who played these characters in the CW television show. I found this odd. After all, the books and TV show made it clear that there was some sort of attraction between the two characters and gave us tantalizing glimpses into the development of their romance. The two actors, on the other hand, were two people who had been hired to pretend to be these characters for a few hours every week and then presumably went back to living their regular lives. And never the twain shall meet...

Or so I thought, until I discovered that Ian Somerhalder and Nina Dobrev actually were dating IRL. That made me feel minimally more comfortable with the existence of Nian ship, but only minimally. This was because I knew from my overconsumption of pop culture news that actors who worked together often ended up dating...and just as often broke up.

The entertainment media make this out to be some sort of great tragedy of the fast-paced and glamorous Hollywood lifestyle -- relationships simply can't hold up under the scrutiny of all those cameras. Yet if we step back and examine the situation a little more realistically, it is obvious that this is an exaggeration.

Follow: If you consider the romantic life of an average person in the U.S., the majority of romantic relationships that they have will end. After all, untimely death and polyamory aside, you will probably only end up making a lifelong commitment to ONE person in your entire life. On the other hand, you will probably have relationships of varying seriousness with more than one person. Do you see the issue here? Most of us experience more break-ups than we will lifelong loves. This holds true for the famous people as well.

And this is why I only sail on fictional ships. Fictional relationships are created within the fantasy realm of idealized romantic love. In that realm, people meet and go through drama and come out the other side with forever love. Then the story ends, and we get to imagine our OTP together for eternity, or at least as much of eternity as we are capable of conceiving of. Real people, on the other hand, don't have happily ever afters. They have lives that go on and on until they die. They have reality, and in reality most romantic relationships end. Just like Ian and Nina's did.

Knowing this, when I see two public figures I admire dating one another, I wish them well, but I don't expect them to be together forever. The ship is probably going to sink, or at least glide uneventfully back to harbor to let us all down at the dock before it's put into dry dock and decommissioned. For me, at least, that's not the kind of cruise I fantasize about. I prefer to sail off into the sunset on my fictional ships.

The Persistence of Memory

In recent years, I've found myself thinking of my grandmother more and more at this particular time of year. I suppose it is common to think of your lost loved ones the most during the holiday season, and perhaps that's part of it. But for me the association goes deeper. My grandmother's passing took place right around the time we were celebrating our most beloved holidays.

The last time I saw her, spoke to her, told her I loved her (thank God) was Thanksgiving of 2007. We were at my grandmother's house, and the feast was over. My family -- mother, aunts, uncles and cousins -- were all lying about the living and dining rooms happily drowsing and digesting. My grandmother was puttering about in her own room in the back of the house, having already completed her yearly post-Thanksgiving-engorgement nap. We were taking turns heading back to her room to each have our private chat with her. There were so many of us there who loved her, who loved being near her, and I guess we all knew that our time with her couldn't last much longer.

I remember I went back to speak with Maw-Maw (as we call her) after my cousin Stephanie had just returned from a long, satisfying chat with her. I found her in the middle of hanging a new bookshelf, a necessary addition to support her library-like collection. She asked me to help her, and I gladly agreed. I wish I remembered what we said. It must have been a conversation of inconsequential things, the kinds of matters that slip just as easily out of our minds as they do into them. What I do remember is the feelings I had as I spoke to her -- regret that I didn't speak to her more often and a dull sense that this conversation might rank among the last that I ever had with her. Of course, I hadn't an inkling that it would be the very last.

I must have seen her, if only briefly, at least one more time before I headed back up to my college town at the end of Thanksgiving Break. But all I can call back to my mind is those twenty minutes I spent in her cluttered little bedroom -- full of the paraphernalia of a nearly eighty-year life -- leveling a small bookshelf and chatting of nothing much at all.

A couple of weeks later, in the first week of December, she suffered a major heart attack. It put her into a coma that she never really woke up from. My memories of Christmas 2007 are vivid with hospital room visits; my mother so, so lovingly stroking her mother's still, veiny hand; old friends gathering to laugh and cry and remember the wonderful times; and waiting. All of us waiting for the inevitable end.

She passed away January 7, 2008, just after the turning of the new year.

I think of her often now. The pain of her passing seems as fresh as ever. Growing up, she was more like a second mother to me than a grandmother. My mom, raising two daughters on her own while holding down a full-time job as a teacher, relied upon her heavily to look after my sister and me when she couldn't be around. It was my grandmother who, when I was in elementary school, saw to it that I ate breakfast, got dressed and got to school on time. On days when I forgot my coat, lunch, pet rock or homework, it was my grandmother who got the phone call from the school office and, whatever she was doing, dropped it and rushed up to school to bring me what I needed. It was my grandmother's house where I spent my after school afternoons, waiting for my mom to finish work and come to take me home. I played there, watched TV there, did my homework there, made friends with the neighborhood kids, explored the attic, made messes, destroyed a few irreplaceable and precious family heirlooms... On days when I was sick and had to stay home from school, it was my grandmother's house that held my sick bed, and it was my Maw Maw who took me to the doctor, got my medicine from the pharmacy, nursed and coddled and scolded me back to health.

There is no moment of my childhood, from my earliest memories up until the time of her death when I was 22 years old, in which my grandmother did not figure strongly. Looking back, I realize now that her passing for me was the passing of an era. In many ways, I mark that moment as the end of my childhood. I may have been well into my twenties by then, living away from home and with a bachelor's degree under my belt, but up until that moment I was still living in a world where at any time I needed her, my Maw Maw was there to help me in any way she could. Her passing was my first experience of losing that kind of support, that kind of shelter from all that life demands of us. I suddenly felt as I never had before my own exposure to responsibility and the burden of caring for myself by myself. Perhaps this is part of why her loss still echoes so strongly in these chambers of my adult life.

My quilt, made by Maw Maw

Many things call her back to me now -- quilts, old songs, blue station wagons, the neon green bathing suit she sewed for me. Especially, I look for her in myself. In the mirror, I study my jawline and think how its strong, square shape mirrors hers. When I smile, I think that the shape of my smile is very much like hers was. Tonight, I spoke a sentence out loud to myself and my voice was an echo of hers, when she used to sing to me, "I love you. I love you. Can't help it if I love you."

I used to read in books or hear in movies or TV shows the idea that people we love are never truly gone, that they live on in our memories, in our hearts and minds. I always thought this was merely a reference to our memories' ability to call back cherished moments of the past. Since my grandmother's passing, I have come to understand the truth of this idea in a completely different light.

I now live in a foreign country, many thousands of miles away from my childhood and my grandmother's house. When I am homesick, I can close my eyes and conjure in my mind a memory of home. But it is more than a mere recalling of the details of a place, of a location or the faces of the people who live in it. It is a feeling of warmth and safety and protectedness, of being surrounded by the people who raised and cared for me as I was growing up -- my mother, my aunt, my sister, and of course my grandmother. And when I remember home, when I reconstruct its flesh and bones within my mind, I never remember that my grandmother is no longer alive. In my memory of home, she is always there. In her house, filled with afternoon sunlight, she sits in her favorite armchair and hums an old hymn, off-key, to herself as she embroiders a patch of quilt. And I sit on the floor on an old, dusty rug, content and knowing that I am loved and cared for. In that moment I know that as long as the people who love her live, my grandmother will never die.

A Moment of Silence

Today, at 2:46 PM, we observed a moment of silence to mark one week since the earthquake and to honor the victims. My life has been irretrievably altered... I love this country, though. I think we've a few miles yet to travel together along this road. It is March 18th. In four more days, I will have been in Japan for an entire year.

日本、一緒に頑張りましょう。

Not Trying to Be Emo or Anything, But...

Lately I've been feeling very lonely in my new home. It's not the kind of loneliness that can be cured simply by spending more time with people. It's a deeper loneliness -- I am lonely for the people who love and know me best. I think the hardest thing about moving to a new place like this, all alone, is not having a single relationship that I feel sure of. Every relationship I have here is new, fragile and uncertain. I can never be entirely sure where I stand with anyone, even the people I rely on the most (Perhaps especially the people I rely on the most).

Talking to friends and family back home over the internet helps, but even in the best interactions there is still a lack: the distance alone destroys, in part, the very intimacy I am seeking. And even an hours-long conversation can't change the fact that these are no longer the people I am making a life with. The end result is that my every relationship is marred by distance, whether emotional or physical. It is a painful state to live in continuously.

But live I must. So I live on the hope that tomorrow will be better than yesterday, and that perhaps the day after that will be better yet, and that slowly, with painstaking work, every day's little moments are pebbles being added to the pitcher, so that soon I will be able to quench this soul-thirst.

The Drill Sergeant in Yellow Sneakers

Yesterday, I was at elementary school again. Because it was only my third time going to that school, most of the kids there still didn't know me, so I had to dust off the old self-introduction and bring it out for several classes-ful of kids to "oo" and "ah" over. One kid, upon seeing me enter the room behind the Japanese teacher of English, actually said, "Sensei, did you just bring in some random stranger off the street?" (or the Japanese equivalent thereof).

At lunchtime I was with a class of unreasonably adorable second graders, one of whom I think I actually talked into believing that I was around eighty years old. One of the great things about kids this age is that their language is at a low enough level that I don't have too much difficulty understanding them. The other great thing is that at that age, they don't mind, and in fact often don't even notice, carrying on a more or less one-sided conversation. All it takes is a few well-placed "sou desu ka?"s and some vigorous nods of the head to satisfy them that I'm holding up my end of the deal.

For some reason they weren't having cleaning that day, so after lunch we all went straight to play time. I wandered out into the school yard behind the kids, hoping to find a nice, sedate game of jump rope or, barring that, some tag. I approached a likely-seeming group of 5th-grade girls, but they merely nodded politely and then scurried off, giggling. Eventually I came across a large group of kids playing some strange hybrid of dodge ball and red-rover that had, somehow, lost all of the violence native to those two games in the merger.

I had just begun to chat up a Peruvian girl in Spanish when all of a sudden I sensed a presence off to my left and about two feet down. I glanced around until at last my eyes lighted on a round, serious face glaring up at me, the two sharp eyes sizing me up and very possibly finding me wanting. The Peruvian girl took my distraction as an opportunity to escape back to her game and I suddenly found myself alone with this small, intense person. She began to speak to me very quickly and in such a thick Tochigi accent that I hadn't a clue what she was saying.

"Nani?" I tried. First mistake. I should've just gone for the smile and nod approach again.

She let out an exasperated sigh, adjusted the little cardigan stretched across her stomach (rendering it no less crooked, I might add) and then repeated everything she'd just told me just as rapidly and just as unintelligibly. This time, however, she tacked on the end, "Mitai?"..."You wanna see?"

I raised my eyebrows, cocked my head to the side in my best "Huh?" gesture, smiled and repeated, "Nani?"

Second mistake. I should've just said "Yes."

My small interlocutor's exasperation then ratcheted up a notch, and she shook her head, took a deep breath and then barked out in a shockingly spot-on interpretation of a drill sergeant, "Na! Ma! Chi! Mo! No!"

"Namachimono?" I repeated, slightly bewildered.

"Chiga-!" she yipped. "Kakikukeko no che! Na! Ma! Che! Mo! No!"

"Namachemono?" I corrected myself, realizing now that I had mis-heard her the first time.

"Chiga-!" she yelled. "Kakikukeko no ke! Na! Ma! Ke! Mo! No!"

"Oooooh," I said. Apparently I'd misheard her both times. "Namakemono?"

"Sou! Mitai?" she barked at me again, and then leaving nothing to chance this time, she took me firmly by the hand and began dragging me off to the other side of the school yard. I hadn't a clue what a "namakemono" was, but I was intrigued. Once there, she led me to the bars and proceeded to show me just how well she could hang upside down from them. I thought it best not to point out that she was showing her underwear to the entire student population of the school.

Her demonstration completed, she climbed back down, made a few closing comments, dusted off her hands and then launched into her next unintelligible speech. Having learned nothing from the first "conversation" with her, I once again attempted to have her repeat herself, and it wasn't long before I found myself being barked at again: "Shi! Ri! To! Ri!"

I thought it best to try the smile and nod approach, which elicited yet more exasperated sighs on her part (Looking this word up in the dictionary later, I discovered it was a sort of Japanese word game, which I surely would have failed at). Giving this latest suggestion up as a lost cause, she took me by the hand once more and began leading me over toward a small grassy mound on another edge of the school yard, maintaining the entire way her litany of strangely accented Japanese. I smiled, nodded, expressed concern, approval, agreement or sympathy as seemed appropriate and before long found myself being ordered to squeeze my nose shut and hold my breath as we summited the peak before us.

Once we'd safely made it down the opposing slope without passing out from oxygen deprivation (fortunately we never got TOO high above sea level), she gave me an approving pat on the back and then began leading me over to a nearby tree. She pointed at a sign on the tree that displayed the species name. I read it to her, but she seemed to find it necessary to correct my pronunciation in her own inimitable manner: "Ku! Mo! Ki!"

At this point I felt it appropriate to ask her her name, even though I could read it quite clearly on her name tag. She nodded sagely, confirming that I had indeed chosen the right thing to do and then said, "Chi! Ho! Ha! Chi! Sai!"

"Oh, I see, Chiho. So, you're hassai (eight years old)?"

"Hai! Tan! Jou! Bi! Wa! Ha! Chi! Gatsu! Ichi! Nichi!"

"Ah, so your birthday is Hachi-gatsu tsuitachi (August first)?"

"Hai!" And then she pointed to her shoes, which were an eye-opening shade of yellow and asked me if I wanted to race. I agreed, and then without further ceremony she began to run full-out across the school yard. I followed at a pace that I felt made it seem that I was trying but that wouldn't tax my abilities too hard. Inevitably she won.

She allowed herself a small smile to celebrate her victory and then once again pointed to her shoes.

"It's because of these," she asserted. I was beginning to be able to decipher her speech. "They're all 'pika! pika!' I like kiiro. In English kiiro is YELLOW! Can you say kiiro?"

"Kiiro," I said.

"Good," she admitted, and I glowed with pride. Chiho didn't seem the sort who gave out praise lightly. And then the bell rang signaling that play time was over, and just like that Chiho was giving me a brisk wave and a curt nod good-bye before dashing off toward her classroom.

As soon as I was back at the table in the staff room, I pulled out my phone and used its dictionary function to figure out just what the heck a "namakemono" was. A moment's search discovered that it meant "sloth," as in the animal that likes to hang from tree branches all day without moving a muscle. Apparently Chiho had simply wanted to demonstrate for me the proper way to imitate a sloth. Good thing, too. Not sure I would've been able to continue as an ALT without that knowledge...