Page 193 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND IDENTITIES: LIVING HYBRIDITIES

As she admits: ‘While white feminists have directed our anger at white men for their
sexual (and other) atrocities, there remains a common historical and cultural
heritage which carries with it a certain familiarity and even subconscious loyalty
to our skin and class privilege’ (1991: 308). These comments elucidate the fact
that white privilege does not have to do necessarily with overt or explicit forms
of racism, but with a much more normalized and insidious set of assumptions
which disremember the structural advantage of being white, and which generalize
specifically white cultural practices and ways of seeing and being in the world as
normal (Frankenberg 1993).
The extent to which this white self-exnomination permeates mainstream
feminism should not be underestimated. It is a core, if unconscious, aspect of
(white/Western) feminism, which appears unaware that even some of its apparently
most straightforward ideas and beliefs reveal its embeddedness in particular
orientations and tendencies derived from ‘white/Western’ culture. For example,
the well-known maxim ‘When a woman says no, she means no!’ to articulate the
feminist stance on rape and sexual harassment invokes an image of the ideal feminist
woman as assertive, determined, plain-speaking and confrontational. The slogan
does not just speak to men (who are commanded to take no for an answer), but
also implicitly summons women to take up these feministically approved qualities
and mean no when they say it. However, these qualities are far from culturally
neutral: they belong to a repertoire of rules for social interaction which prizes
individualism, conversational explicitness, directness and efficiency – all Western
cultural values which may not be available or appeal to ‘other’ women.
Many Asian women, for example, may well deal with male dominance in
culturally very different, more circuitous (and not necessarily less effective) ways.
A rather painful instance of this is staged in Dennis O’Rourke’s controversial
documentary film The Good Woman from Bangkok (1992), in which the Thai
prostitute Aoi, with whom the white Australian filmmaker has an affair, simul-
taneously gives in to and evades his chivalrous advances. The film drew a storm of
criticism, especially from white/Western feminists who saw the film as exploitative
of Aoi, the Asian woman. In the process Aoi’s own subjective, culturally specific
way of dealing with O’Rourke tends to be discredited or overlooked as feminists
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prefer to see her as representing the passive, victimized other. Viewing the (making
of the) film from Aoi’s point of view, however, we can witness the obvious power
and strength with which she handles her white male predator/suitor, not through
militant rejection but through the ambiguous tactics of subterfuge. She did not say
‘no’ in any straightforward manner, but that doesn’t mean she simply surrendered
to patriarchal power . . .
In other words, far from being culturally universal, ‘When a woman says no, she
means no!’ implies a feminist subject position and style of personal politics that
are meaningful and empowering chiefly for those women who have the ‘correct’
cultural resources. I am not saying that the maxim itself is ethnocentric; what is
ethnocentric is the assumption that it represents all women’s experiences and
interests in sexual relations – arguably it doesn’t even represent those of all

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