by Lisa Jervis
“There’s a little more anger than necessary, and you leave going, Whoa, this is funny, but I feel completely attacked,” Wong concedes of BBCM. “Or, This is funny, but I feel misrepresented. I want to leave people with that raw nerve. Our ancestors worked too hard to get here for us to just sit and be comfy.”
The Princess: Gennifer Hirano
At 2001’s APAture, an Asian youth arts conference, Asianprincess strode onto the stage to the strains of “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” holding a pink boom box. A rocking horse sat on the stage, and a slide projected the silhouette of a woman on horseback onto the wall behind her, along with the words “Welcome to Asianprincess Ranch.” Wearing a wig of pink braids, a cowboy hat, a bikini top, a tiny skirt, a thong, and red platform sandals, Asianprincess wailed into the mic, then wriggled into the audience, where she performed for individual audience members, seductively straddling men’s laps. Around her, the audience’s faces evinced a mixed reaction: some clearly shocked, some offended, some confused, some amused, and some just having a great time.
The following summer, the photographic counterpart to this cowgirl burlesque act, Welcome to Asianprincess Ranch, was installed at Intersection for the Arts, a gallery in San Francisco. The show consisted of four medium-format color images framed by barbed wire with a magic wand stuck in it; in them, a blonde-wigged Asianprincess looks lost by the side of the road, wearing a thong, a pink chemise, and her trademark red platforms, carrying a pink case and a hobbyhorse. In the last of the four frames, she’s getting into a truck driven by a strapping white man. He leans toward her, and she smiles coyly over her shoulder at the camera, kicking up a heel.
During a panel discussion at the gallery, artist Gennifer Hirano posed the following questions from a prose piece she wrote as her own commentary on Asianprincess Ranch: “This hitchhiker is: A) Asking to be raped dressed like that on the side of the road. B) Asking for the viewer to make a deeper evaluation of the context of fashion photography, reality, and the constructions of sexuality, race, and gender. C) At the Burning Man festival bartering for fuel for her generator for her Asianprincess Ranch karaoke show.” Hirano plays the part of Asianprincess vividly, with so much conviction that it’s hard to imagine her out of character. She is unrecognizable in her regular outfit of fuzzy sweater, tortoiseshell glasses, and ponytail. She’s soft-spoken and articulate, even as she protests that her in-your-face, sexually over-the-top character is actually very close to her own personality.
The first Asianprincess photo series, called Empire, features images of Hirano taken at the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. She wears a blonde wig and Chinese minidress, and holds a paper umbrella. The photos are printed on Asian scrolls bearing Chinese calligraphy that says, “The meaning is nothing, nothing is the meaning.” Hirano explains that just because her parents happen to be Chinese American and Japanese, her appropriation of Asian iconography and objectification is no more valid than anyone else’s. “I used to think when I was in college that I owned my culture. That white people didn’t have the right to wear cheongsams or have Asian tattoos. Then I realized, especially after going to China, that I appropriate my culture all the time, every day. I’m pulling what I think is Chinese symbolism and cultural icons from what I think is Chinese-looking, from cigarette ads and 1970s calendar-girl poses and paintings.”
If Empire depicts an Asian-American woman in yellowface, Asianprincess Ranch, created two years later, is an Asian-American woman in whiteface. “It’s weird for people to see an Asian girl singing country music. I want them to think about why that’s weird, [to] think … deeper than, ‘I’ve never seen an Asian cowgirl before. Are you from Texas?’ ‘No. I’m not from China or Japan either.’ Which culture do I belong to, really, and which is fictitious? They’re all fictitious.”
Asianprincess grew out of Hirano’s undergraduate years at the University of California at Berkeley, where she earned a degree in art practice with a minor in Asian-American studies. Like Wong, she became an activist as she gained political awareness, at one point receiving a fellowship to organize a women’s-issues conference. She also began using sexuality in her art to express her anger at objectification of Asian women—“I would wear whiteface and chopsticks in a bun, crawl around on the ground, and break mirrors.”
Hirano says she has always been interested in exploring her own sexuality as it relates to ethnicity—as far as she’s concerned, the two are inseparable. She suffered four separate sexual assaults in her young adulthood, and coming to terms with these experiences led her to work as a professional stripper for three years. Sex work, Hirano asserts, was an important part of the healing process because it forced her to learn to maintain sexual boundaries with men. “I never got to say no on time, in the right way. I didn’t get to speak up in time,” she says of the assaults; stripping offered her a chance to play at being overtly sexual, while learning how to speak up.
Hirano’s fascination with sex work and porn served as a catalyst for Asianprincess. “Asia Carrera was my first Asian sex-positive role model,” she states on her website. “I didn’t even know it was possible to do sex work and be intelligent and Asian until I discovered her and her website back in my angry-Asian-girl days in college when I thought Asian porn stars were ‘bringing my people down.’”
While Hirano continues to develop the Asianprincess character, and Asianprincess can still be hired as entertainment for parties and events, she has quit stripping for a living. She now teaches performance art and photography to kids, which is less grueling, if also less lucrative.
In addition to performance and photography, Hirano creates gallery installations and sells merchandise (which she calls “artifacts”) based on her own image. For a few dollars you can buy a Rice Rocket calendar, which features Asianprincess perched atop an Acura, eating from a rice cooker; 3-D postcards from panels of the Asianprincess Ranch photos; or a black-and-white sticker with an erotic image of the cowgirl with text in Old West—style lettering that reads, “Sexuality is constructed.” She sometimes sets up an Asianprincess Polaroid booth at gatherings and conventions (like pride festivals, Burning Man, and APAture), where for a few dollars, anyone can get her picture taken with Asianprincess and take home a piece of the act.
The full scope of Hirano’s intent is not readily apparent in Asianprincess’s act and artifacts, which are meant to be, for the most part, enticing and playful. For her more directly topical work, she relies on prose and poetry, which she plans to publish, and spoken word performed under her own name, out of character and often to live jazz bands—which she describes as a little more “castrating.” Instead of flattering and seducing people, as Asianprincess does, in these performances Hirano directly addresses her experiences, trying to promote awareness about sexual assault. However, Asianprincess is always willing to talk about these serious issues if people question her. Hirano says that every time she’s out performing and selling artifacts at festivals, at least one person will want to talk more about her intent. As for those who utterly misread her act as an invitation to treat her disrespectfully, she takes the opportunity to challenge their assumptions. “I do put myself out there so that I can come into these confrontations and teach people. I get to put a red light on people and say, ‘You are violating me.’ It’s [a very] empowering thing for a woman to be able to say that.”
ONE COULD ARGUE THAT WONG’S AND HIRANO’S AGENDAS may be too complex to be effective: Wong’s layers of meaning are buried beneath angry humor that hits so forcefully that one’s initial reaction, positive or negative, can preclude wanting or needing to look more deeply—which is what Wong would like her audience to do. Hirano’s various levels of engagement aren’t readily apparent when Asianprincess is out performing without a ready-to-consume political message—but she doesn’t care much what conclusions her audience jumps to. Such disconnect can not only lead to misreading but could be interpreted as contributing to the problem. When I first saw Asianprincess perform, for
example, Hirano’s approach seemed uncomplicated and not well thought out.
Does the fact that their work requires deeper investigation mean it’s either no good or ineffective? I don’t think so. Even though my first reaction to each artist’s work was very different—I got Wong’s spoof immediately, while Hirano’s live act made me squirm—both women upset my way of thinking about the performance of ethnicity and sexuality, and my responses to it.
What did my discomfort about Asianprincess say about me, for example? Had Hirano been a blonde, blue-eyed burlesque performer, I wouldn’t have cared, but I initially found it hard to accept that an Asian woman would perform a hypersexual character, simply because I would never be able to accept myself performing it. Hirano doesn’t respond to the phenomenon of Asian fetishization the way I do. In projecting the responsibility for my discomfort onto her, I also illustrated Wong’s point that the responsibility for an entire community’s representation can’t rest with one artist.
Ultimately, I appreciate that fellow Asian-American women made me question my assumptions. Both Wong and Hirano are admirably committed to not preaching to the converted—instead, they put their confrontational personae out in all kinds of spaces to reach a wide cross section of spectators. Their bait-and-switch tactics dauntlessly invoke questions of ethnicity and sexual agency without handing out any pat answers.
What Happens to a Dyke Deferred?
The Trouble with Hasbians and the Phenomenon of Banishment
Athena Douris and Diane Anderson-Minshall / FALL 2002
A LESBIAN WHO SCREWS A MAN IS SUCH A CLICHÉ, IT’S THE plot of a Kevin Smith movie, numerous Jerry Springer episodes, and thousands of pornos. For some straight men, it’s proof that lesbians just need some good dick. For homophobes, it’s a trajectory that follows God’s supposed plan for “normal” sexual relations between men and women. For many dykes, it’s a scandalous bit of gossip that makes excellent fodder for dinnertime conversation. And in the eyes of the dyke community as a whole, a lesbian who goes to men has committed the ultimate betrayal—a betrayal that can be properly punished only by exile.
We were two dyke friends who regularly chatted about the tragedy of lesbians who went to men. That is, until it happened to one of us. Out, lesbian-feminist activist Athena fell in love with a man. She lost her job. (She was a sex columnist; her boss quickly labeled her “straight” and “replaceable.”) Her closest friend, a former lover, stopped speaking to her. In the space of two months—the time it took for her to realize her relationship with this man was more than a sexual fling—she lost her identity. She went from lesbian to hasbian (a term that first appeared in print in a 1990 San Francisco Chronicle gossip column, in which lesbians who’d “gone straight” were declared “all the rage these days”).
Athena is far from the first hasbian, or the most infamous. That title might belong to JoAnn Loulan, who was the world’s leading lesbian sex therapist for twenty years. She authored our greatest tomes of lesbian sexuality, including Lesbian Passion and Lesbian Sex, and even coined the term “lesbian bed death.” When Loulan started a relationship with a man several years ago, her best friend also stopped speaking to her. She lost speaking engagements, book sales, and, she says, her sense of purpose in life.
“I feel like I got a quickie divorce against my will, like my wealthy spouse walked out with everything and I got nothing,” she says, speaking of her estrangement from the lesbian community in an interview with Athena earlier this year. “My life looks very empty to me now, compared to how it used to be. I’ve filled it up—I’ve made a life for myself—but it’s not the same.” Loulan says she’s been courted by bisexual organizations who’d like her to head their groups. She refuses because she doesn’t identify as bisexual. In an essay published in a 1999 issue of Girlfriends, Loulan wrote, “During the 20 years of my adult life that I loved and fucked (and was fucked by) women exclusively … I was a lesbian. Now a man comes along and his involvement in my life changes my identity? I don’t think so.”
But for most of the world—lesbian and otherwise—when a man comes along, it does change everything. Anne Heche, you might remember, stopped being queer in the world’s eyes the moment she bedded a cameraman. Heche didn’t identify as a dyke to begin with (she has said she was as surprised as anyone when she fell in love with Ellen DeGeneres), but then, many women who fuck women speak of their sexual identity in the same terms. Ani DiFranco has always sung and spoken openly about her relationships with both men and women. Yet when she partnered with a man, many of her fans disavowed their former icon, shuttered their fan sites, and moved on. Then, of course, there’s Julie Cypher, the woman who left her husband and sidelined her own film-directing career (remember Theresa’s Tattoo?) for Melissa Etheridge. They had two kids and became America’s gay family delegates, turning up at every rally, every benefit, every awards show. Then they split up, and suddenly Cypher was, dykes declared, straight all along.
The reasons behind this kind of rejection—a phenomenon we have termed “dyke banishment”—are many. Loulan believes that it’s a result of homophobia—that lesbians feel so overwhelmed and negated by society, we can’t see the pain we’re creating when we exile another woman. Often, dykes who reject women like Cypher say they’re justified because women who love men have easier lives, so they don’t deserve the protection, companionship, or support of the lesbian community. In some ways, they’re right: Male-female couples enjoy thousands of perks unavailable to queer couples, including the rights to marry, inherit, and share custody—not to mention the ability to walk down a street holding hands and not be bashed.
But in other ways, the matter may not be so simple. An out dyke can be marked for the rest of her life, no matter who she’s with. Athena’s queer past means that her future in-laws, who are fundamentalist Christians, will not allow her to take her boyfriend’s two-year-old niece into the yard to play (the “gays molest children” fallacy). She has been barred from family gatherings that fall on religious holidays (the “God hates fags” myth). One future in-law accused her of satanism. At a time when some lesbians refuse to see her as one of them, she’s dealing with the most vitriolic homophobia she’s ever faced.
The root cause of dyke banishment may also lie in the queer community’s concept of sexual orientation. In today’s GLBT culture, there’s a belief that sexual orientation has a permanent, biological core. It’s a concept frequently expressed by women who say, “I was born a dyke,” by most coming-out narratives, and by T-shirt/bumper-sticker slogans like “I can’t even think straight.” This sentiment can be traced to the late 1800s, when sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld claimed that queers were “born that way” in order to advance gay rights in Germany. The theory found modern expression in the early 1990s, when the GLBT community seized upon the work of Simon LeVay for the same reason. LeVay found a link between hypothalamus size and homosexuality in men. This finding was spun into an argument for civil rights based on the thesis that if being gay isn’t our choice, then it isn’t our fault—and we deserve all the rights of people born with a larger hypothalamus. As it applies to lesbians, the biology-is-destiny theory is used by the queer community to discredit the lives of dykes who end up in love with men. By this logic, women who were “born gay” (i.e., women whose behavior is consistent) are real, authentic dykes who deserve the support of the lesbian community. Women whose behavior is inconsistent, on the other hand, appear to be shifty, confused liars who dart all over the sexual continuum, not because they were born that way but because of poor choices—which is why they are rejected not only by the lesbian community as a whole but also by their closest friends, who can’t reconcile their concept of lesbian pride with their best friend’s morphing sexual orientation. And so the questions are: Are dykes who fuck men confused? Have we made poor choices? Were we straight all along—as we’ve been told by friends, family, and the media? Did we go from licking pussy to sucking cock because we wanted to betray the lesbian community? The answer t
o all these is no. In fact, dykes who fall in love with men can be seen as acting on the principle that love sees no gender—a long-used catchphrase of the queer community itself. If the GLBT community could begin to accept the idea that a lesbian’s sexual orientation may change over the course of her life, dyke banishment might become less severe. But to eradicate the urge to ostracize altogether, the lesbian community would need to address our negative stereotypes of male-female relationships. Although some progressive heterosexual women may find this hard to believe, many lesbians consider any relationship between a man and a woman to be inherently detrimental to the woman. Due to this mischaracterization, a false polarity is created between heterosexual and lesbian relationships, whereby the former are seen as inferior and the latter as superior—not just sexually, but as they reflect female development.
Both stereotypes are false. Being a lesbian does not guarantee relationship bliss—domestic violence, for example, occurs among lesbians just as it does among heterosexuals. Likewise, having a male partner does not doom a woman to a life as the perpetually frustrated housekeeper of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. If we truly care about the lives of dykes, we should care about their lives even after they’ve partnered with men. We should not assume that their queer identity short-circuits the minute they make love to a man. We should not jump to the easy conclusion that a lesbian who’s with a man was “never a real lesbian.” We must make an effort to understand how these women identify—as dykes, as bisexuals, as queers, or as women who do not identify at all—and respect their self-determination. Because, ultimately, the question is not, Do these women deserve to be called lesbians? The questions are, rather, Why do we, the queer community, find it necessary to punish dykes who step outside some predetermined boundary of lesbian culture, and how can we stop? What are the queer possibilities in a relationship between a dyke and a man? How can we offer support to a woman who’s in the process of being banished? And, most important, how can we include partnerships between dykes and men in our formal and informal queer communities? The answers to these questions will transform lesbian culture—by broadening its scope and changing its face—and it’s a transformation that’s been a long time coming.