what a brave corporate logo!

[bossymarmalade]

This article in Feministe about the Telephone video is really pissing me off. In general because of the smug, insistent pedantry of it (look, just because the song's called "Telephone" it doesn't mean EVERY SINGLE EVENT must then revolve around the telephone; also, that is a honey bun and not a sandwich, idiot; also you are a fucking feminist writer and should know why it's not on to refer to the vulva as a "vagina"; also if you did the minimum of goddamn research you could refer to Gaga's partner in the prison yard as trainer Heather Cassils instead of "Very Friendly Smoking-Hot Butch Lady"), but in particular because of this:

And was it really necessary to subtitle the Asian woman's thoughts in a different language than everybody else's? No. No, it was not! I am not so cool with the ways that this video deals with race, I think. I mean, Beyonce's there, and presented as an equal and partner. Sure. But I am thinking like, this Asian girl and her special "hey, have you noticed this chick's Asian? Just thought I'd point that one out to you" subtitle ....

Hey there, did it ever occur to you that Asian women sometimes think and speak IN ASIAN LANGUAGES?!? Maybe she's thinking "a different language than everybody else's" (nice) because, hmmm, she has access to a "different language than everybody else". What's so wrong with her using it, or -- horror of horrors! -- reflexively reacting with it in her own mind? Is this a fucking performance sport?

This is a discourse that especially pisses me off as a diasporado, because as you all well know there are a TON of issues about many of us being systematically denied access to our source-tongues. I would *love* to be able to bust out cusswords or whatever in Hindi, even for my private unspoken reactions. Sometimes I feel like among Western white society, being an Anglophone when your source-language is a non-Romance one is taken as a sign of "goodness", like you're safer, more model of a minority, more assimilated; the reaction from Canadian white folks when I tell them, "no, I only speak English", is always one of surprise and approval. (It's a different story with Canadian brown people, but I'm not getting into that right now.)

So yes, maybe it *was* necessary to subtitle the Japanese woman's thoughts in Japanese in this context. Or did you assume that nobody watching the video would be able to understand those characters, so it was purely an exercise in exotification? Was her sudden Japanese subtitle making her Asianness a little too visible? Don't translate your own discomfort over the inscrutability (yes, I went there) of those characters into some generalizing "NO FOREIGN LANGUAGES PLZ" declaration for all of Western media, thank you.

Comments

[cathybites]

Yes. YES.

ALSO! Why the insistence that the guards MUST be trans? Has she never met female bodybuilders before?

LET'S MAKE A SANDWICH.

[cathybites]

ps- will you comment over there with this? I was thinking it'd be nice just to have the author confronted with an intelligent disagreement, but then I thought about it more and it's probably more likely to end up with you being accused of self-loathing and not capable of understanding how racism works against you.

[glass_icarus]

KILL IT WITH FIRE OMG WHAT

*ahem* And more coherently: sometimes even those of us who have lost our mother tongues will respond IN A DIFFERENT FUCKING LANGUAGE, Feministe. There are reasons why people learn curse words first.

[bossymarmalade]

WE SHOULD FORM THE COALITION OF ASIANS FOR GAGA, OR SOMETHING

The discussion in the comments about the Asian women is utterly ENRAGING! They've taken it to the extreme of "oh yeah obviously she's being portrayed as cute and childlike which is racist" and I'm like, "where the fuck are you even GETTING that from this video?!?"

[duraflame]

God, the subtitles were WONDERFUL. I loved that that lady's thoughts weren't subtitled in English! Because, as you said, maybe she wasn't THINKING in English!

I mean, this is worse than the "Gaga is ripping off Tarantino!" bullshit going around. First, shut up. Second, if you rip off a ripoff artist, are there still angels on the head of that pin?

[bossymarmalade]

I laughed out loud in utter delight when I first watched the video and those subtitles came up! Because shit, why SHOULDN'T her first instinctive reaction be in whatever tongue she calls mother?

Anybody who ever tries to claim that Tarantino's being ripped off should go live in a carnival funhouse.

[rural_juror]

Sometimes I feel like among Western white society, being an Anglophone when your source-language is a non-Romance one is taken as a sign of "goodness", like you're safer, more model of a minority, more assimilated;

Probably b/c that way they (Western white society) can monitor (control) all discussion.

[bossymarmalade]

EXACTLY. Like, there's this big sigh of relief: "you don't know any foreign languages! therefore all of your discussions are available to me, thank goodness."

[marina]

UGH wtf article is WTF!

[bossymarmalade]

It's just so OFF in almost every conceivable way!!

[katarin]

Kanye West is a victim of many things, but one of the chief things he is a victim of is just saying what everybody is always already thinking about Beyonce. He succumbed to her power! As we all have! We cannot blame Kanye, just as we cannot blame a moth who draws too close to the candle flame and is burnt. Nor can we blame the candle, for burning! PS the flame is Beyonce. THE FLAME IS BEYONCE! And with that, I leave you.

I HONESTLY WONDER IF I HAD TYPED THIS LAST BIT IN MY DREAMS.

[katarin]

Beyond that! (my first instinct will always be to talk about Kanye West (in before we know, Kanye West)) I disliked the dissection of the trans thing because I feel like Sady is really off on that. I don't think the guards were intended to necessarily be trans at all, they were just commenting on Lady G's vag, as everyone else in the world has, it seems.

With regards to the Asian lady, there's nothing like white folks who try to work out the plight of the poor, fetishized, unempowered Asian woman... from high atop their pedestal of privilege. I'm not down with it and if I were offering criticism like that I would either get an Asian perspective (so Asian women could be part of the discussion, rather than talked ABOUT) or bring up contrary opinions to mine, as to what Gaga was trying to do with having that woman's subtitles be different than everyone else.

Sometimes, Sady is so dead-on I want to stand up and clap. Sometimes she's so off I want to scream. This is a big miss, IMO.

[bookshop]

omg thank you for this. i had sort of eyerolled at the paragraph about the asian subtitles, but by that point i'd already read so many stupid comments from people who were taking "one piece" literally as some kind of non-ironic reference to her feeling sexually harassed, aka a "piece", and the whole thing was so faily i sort of drew blinders over it. and then you came along and wrote this! and now i am like OH OI VEY, I DID NOT SEE ANY OF THESE THINGS IN THAT ARTICLE. it is true. i actually love the part that i quoted in the post i made about gaga last night, and i think it is fantastic that people are connecting dots all over the place with regard to her, in that article and elsewhere; i think part of this article's flaw is that it was written in a HURRY, i think it was one of the first to come out and it felt very hasty, very play-by-play. And there's so much to parse in the Telephone video, both A+++ and FFFFFF, lol, that you *can't* be smug and pedantic about your first, hastily drawn conclusions. Especially when as you just pointed out, your conclusions kinda suck.

♥!

[bossymarmalade]

The amount of discussion around "dress" and "one piece" was even more annoying. I am (possibly irrationally) annoyed that they are going to such lengths to discover what the translation of the Japanese text means and then to *further* dissect what was said; it's kind of a kneejerk reaction to languages that aren't English. I mean, fans did the same thing around the Quileute in Twilight: "there's words we don't understand! we must find out what they mean so we can access every single part of the movie/video!"

On an analytical level, yes it's important to have a translation; but I feel the fetishistic discussion in the comments (anytime people start talking about being "big anime fans" when talking about Japanese language it's a warning flag, imo) was crossing over into a need to "own" all aspects of the video and its narrative. I hope I'm making sense. *g*

[(Anonymous)]

Perhaps she's suggesting that Gaga should have used a MOAR ASIAN LOOKING actress and done english subtitles? *hands*

-antheia/kate-

[bossymarmalade]

Hey, as long as she wasn't subtitled in "a different language than everybody else's", she may as well have been played by a full-on geisha or some shit!!!

[thoracopagus]

I read the article before watching the video, and for me it was like, she's on the screen for like TWO SECONDS, if she didn't have Japanese subtitles, she probably wouldn't have registered as Japanese for a lot of viewers, or stood out to anyone at all. So...yes OP, we do need the HEY DID YOU NOTICE I'M ASIAN subtitles, because they give dimension to a character who would otherwise fade into the background as a random diner patron.

[bossymarmalade]

Seriously, right? I felt like having her subtitled in what could be her mother tongue -- in her two seconds of screentime -- went more along the lines of normalizing non-Anglo USians rather than exotifying them. I mean, okay, let's break it down: young woman in US diner, wearing Western clothes, getting hit on by jerk. Nothing "exotic" there, nothing that a Taylor Swift lookalike couldn't have done. So then this archetypal USian character happens to be Japanese, and happens to think in Japanese. Where's the problem?!?

[slide]

so i make no secret of not really being invested in lady gaga or liking her at all, really, but that article is kind of insanely off the mark. some people do in fact think in other languages than english! THE SHOCK.

[bossymarmalade]

But it's oppression if that person is NON-WHITE! Or, god -- I don't even KNOW wtf that article was trying to say.

[torachan]

I would be really curious to hear why Lady Gaga (or whoever) chose to have her think "dress", though. It seems like the text was just chosen at random, like "Oh, it's just a bunch of squiggles! Put whatever, no one will know!" On the other hand, this is Lady Gaga, and having someone randomly think "dress" is by far one of the less bizarre parts of the video, so idk.

[bossymarmalade]

Oooh, does it really say "dress"? I wasn't sure if the commenters were reliable translators, and not being able to read Japanese myself, I couldn't say.

To me (which I readily admit might be hopeful reading-in and not Gaga's actual intent) it doesn't really matter what the English translation of the Japanese woman's text is, because if we Anglophones were supposed to understand what she was thinking *it would be in English*. I mean, they've got to know that Japanese-speakers would see the video, right?

[glockgal]

OMFG I love this post. It always makes me confused and uncomfortable when I enjoy something and then a white person lambasts it for being racist and I'm like "ok, I'm fairly well-versed in issues of racism...but are they right? am I wrong? am I just giving into self-loathing model minority syndrome because I enjoyed this?" when in reality I should just ask "just how much 'white man's burden' is this person feeling? did they talk to any person of colour about this? do they even care or are they too caught up in passing down judgements from their place of privilege to do so in the first place?"

So. <3

[bossymarmalade]

ahahahh YES. So perhaps that's another kind of sorry: "i'm sorry that you're being oppressed, and if you don't think you are, i'll explain to you why you're wrong!"

[delux-vivens.livejournal.com]

Hey there, did it ever occur to you that Asian women sometimes think and speak IN ASIAN LANGUAGES?!?

OMG you separatist!

*rolls eyes*

being an Anglophone when your source-language is a non-Romance one is taken as a sign of "goodness", like you're safer, more model of a minority, more assimilated;

b/c for these fools, they *do* think it makes you safer.

if they only knew.

[bossymarmalade]

Japanese only exists for white anime fangirls to copy! BADLY! How *dare* any Japanese actually use it?!?!

if they only knew

Heh heh heh. Nobody expects the Dinocorn Badassery!

[heathershaped]

WORD. Thank you so much for this.

I've been pretty disappointed with a LOT of the 'feminist' blogs that have done articles on Telephone - Jezebel's was another one that annoyed me - but this one's by far the worst.

[bossymarmalade]

Is it some sort of reluctance to appoint Gaga the New Face of Subversive Feminism or something? Because I can understand that -- Gaga is thin and white and blonde and a number of things that privilege her within the discourse -- but there seems to be a bizarre eagerness to tear her down in response. It's very strange.

[cimorene]

I was going to read it before reading your post so I could comment intelligently, but the smug nudge-nudge tone and all the offensiveness enraged me so much that I couldn't get past the "prison for bitches" paragraph. (Your comment about her use of vagina didn't really quite prepare me for how BAD it was.)

[bossymarmalade]

the smug nudge-nudge tone

I'm glad it wasn't just me who got that! It's ... well, it's really a very sophomoric critique, imo, with all the "oh you silly bint i am hilarious and smart and now i will skewer you in a hilarious and smart way by pointing out how dumb and low-culture you are" rhetoric.

Plus, all the VAGINA business. WTF WTF

[crossedwires]

Hey there, did it ever occur to you that Asian women sometimes think and speak IN ASIAN LANGUAGES?!?

*raises hand* I mean, I don't say what I'm thinking in Fukien around white people because the effort of having to explain/translate isn't worth it, but, sometimes, some phrases just don't have the same impact in English.

(This is DIFFERENT from being asked to speak Chinese on cue, nice white person who did that not so long ago. With the bonus of trying to get me to converse with another person who speaks Mandarin. Er, NOT THE SAME DIALECT. Which I explained. Which the white person didn't understand? or was not paying attention or whatever.)

My thoughs on Yuri. I mean, Gaga.

[la_vie_noire]

Okay, I finally watched it. My internet sucks, okay. I can say that I still don't understand the deal with the "One Piece" thing, it was probably a reference to the manga (as you, I would totally use it as an expletive). And I loved the girl on girl action and subtext, and all the weirdness. Sure, lesbian action is popular, but not so much with bunch women, or the "let's get rid of men" thing (the subtext on Beyonce and Gagas wasn't lesbian fanservice, but it was emotional/relationship thing).

But it was cissexist, Girl Power = Pussy Wagon, and the penis comment made me cringe.

Re: My thoughs on Yuri. I mean, Gaga.

[la_vie_noire]

The feministe review is just ridiculous though. *now she can go and read reviews*

[devilc]

Hey there, did it ever occur to you that Asian women sometimes think and speak IN ASIAN LANGUAGES?!?

Heresy.

[trixie]

Oh good lord. Sady is so hit and miss for me. I either love her pieces or hate them, but rarely anything in between. And this, of course, I hated. I feel like she missed the point of so much (or at least, missed that there might be a point other than the most basic of readings) and the race thing was just so completely WTF.

I am, sadly, mono-linguistic, but I immediately clapped in delight at that subtitle, because "yay! thinking in her first-language!" What a cool way to do that!

I'm a little more puzzled to learn that it means "dress". But I wonder if Gaga isn't simultaneous recognizing that people don't all think in English (so I'm going to give you the subtitle in her mother-tongue), and also poking fun at white people's habit of treating Asian language as exotic and ultimately interchangeable (eg, people's stupid kanji tattoos and the airbender movie's use of gibberish in place of what was actual language) and using the title of a popular manga as a short hand? Things can have more than one meaning on a critical level, yes? Probably I'm really stretching this, but I think until/unless Gaga talks about it, I'm going to interpret it that way.

[dragovianknight]

Hey there, did it ever occur to you that Asian women sometimes think and speak IN ASIAN LANGUAGES?!?

The hell you say!

[softestbullet]

Thank you for writing this! Number one, it is TRUTH, and number two, it is some annoying white bullshit that I pull sometimes, ugh.

[starlady]

Don't translate your own discomfort over the inscrutability (yes, I went there) of those characters into some generalizing "NO FOREIGN LANGUAGES PLZ" declaration for all of Western media, thank you.

Seriously. Thanks for the post.

[(Anonymous)]

I just wanted to add that the Japanese does not say wanu piisu, it says waso piisu. IHNI what that means, but it's not what that person who translated it on Femniste says it is. And for all I know it was a mistake.

[timeasmymeasure]

Maybe she's thinking "a different language than everybody else's" (nice) because, hmmm, she has access to a "different language than everybody else". What's so wrong with her using it, or -- horror of horrors! -- reflexively reacting with it in her own mind? Is this a fucking performance sport?

Thank you for putting that into words I couldn't manage.

[(Anonymous)]

YES.
It pisses me off, too!
I LOVE YOU.