9 December 2000

Where Chinese and British knowledges intersect, there are two things taking place that have attracted my attention. Both of them are quite strange. Firstly, perhaps because I am writing this from the perspective of a white, middle-class heterosexual man working within the emergent field of Men's' Studies, someone who tends to see things from a broadly gender-based perspective, it seems to me that at the moment within British culture, Chinese culture is being feminised.

Commodities like those mentioned above, both goods and services, along with stereotypes and cultural icons such as film stars, novelists and fashion designers, are being imbued, through representation, with attributes that dominant discourse calls feminine. These are traditionally to do with the human interior, feelings, spirit and empathy; nurturing and passivity; roundness and smoothness (think of those pebbles); healing and introspection; holism and homogeneity; creativity and calmness. Of course, there is nothing essentially feminine about these attributes, it depends on your point of view. The problem is the ways in which gender constructions are perceived by different institutions within society, and the effects those perceptions have on power relations.

Maybe within dominant British discourse there persists a relation between ethnicity and gender, an association of ideas about Nationhood and masculinity that influences the way marginal identities are perceived. This was the case during the Victorian age and during the first part of the twentieth century, and centuries take a long time to die. British culture was understood as being strong, dominant, authoritative, keeping a watchful eye on its colonies; above all it was felt to be somehow masculine, with everything that implied at the turn of the century. One way of reading the feminisation of Chinese culture in the UK would be to look at the relations between Britain's Imperial past, its cultural history of penetrating to the uttermost ends of the earth, and the conditions of its present status as being penetrated by Other cultures, which interpenetrate each other within the discursive bounds of Britishness.

In Britain we are now living through a moment when traditional notions of national identity stand a chance of being renegotiated. It is at such a time that you can expect old ideas to reassert themselves. The feminising of Chinese culture may be one of the ways in which dominant discourse is trying to keep up with what is happening to traditional notions of private and public, home and abroad, us and them, as a way of maintaining the power differential. This isn't limited to Chinese culture. Consider the language used by the Conservative party, addressing the asylum seeker issue: 'they' are coming in floods and waves, presumably threatening to engulf and drown 'us'. Eerily, this fits psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan's model of traditional masculine identity. He imagines dominant masculine psychic structure as a fortress, all clean and pure and white, which is always on the look out for threats of engulfment by anything impure, a category which is often characterised as being feminine. (Imagine a lighthouse battered by the sea, with the Tories retreating higher up the stairs as the waters rise. Poor old William Hague. I hope he's got enough tins of spam, enough baked beans ...)

My second point is about one of the things that makes this gendering possible, which is the ways Chinese culture within the UK is being marketed. Everything sold purporting to be Chinese, is Chinese plus the enculturating effects of being Made in Britain. This makes it legible in a particular way, one which makes it attractive and saleable. And even if authenticity is unfashionable, and if nobody cares whether representations are any longer genuine as such, what does this state of affairs tell us about the relationship between British and Chinese culture in the UK? How much empathy for Chinese culture is there? Are we talking exchange or appropriation? Contrast this with Asian culture, which has had a relatively large influence on recent ideas of Britishness. White kids wearing bindis and tugging the salwar chemise over their Levis. The popularity of Talvin Singh and Cornershop and Goodness Gracious Me. Asian cool was all about what Asians were actually doing (and the English who copied them) whereas Oriental chic is more to do with ripping off and misrepresenting non-indigenous traditions and ideas.

Dominant perceptions of Chinese culture in 21st century Britain need to be renegotiated in order to assert a positive, durable vision of Britishness (and if Scotland gains full independance, Englishness) that is celebratory, pluralist, permeable and yet strong enough to resist the right.