Racial Bondage: How White Culture Shackles Asian Men in Society

I am an Oriental. And being an Oriental,

I could never be completely a man.

- Song Liling, M. Butterfly

As Song Liling implies in David Henry Hwang’s play M. Butterfly, Asian is the antithesis of manhood. White society has erected racial barriers to undermine Asian masculinity. We can revise Freud’s theory of fetishism by applying it to the Asian man: the white man greatly undermines a clearly existing, Asian male penis. This “racial castration” indicates a severe hindrance of Asians from assimilating into society. In the white man’s universe, they are considered effeminate, weak, and submissive. Simply because of his ethnicity, an Asian man “could never be completely a man.” Drawing upon Edward Zwick’s film The Last Samurai, this paper seeks to address Western influence and dominance over the East, and how this superiority of one culture over the other has forced Asian men to either adopt the white man’s ways or suffer as outcasts in society.