Documentos de Académico
Documentos de Profesional
Documentos de Cultura
Volume 5 Article 24
2009
Recommended Citation
Gorman, Joe (2009). Oppression through Sexualization: The Use of Sexualization in “Going to Meet the Man” and “The Shoyu Kid”.
Undergraduate Review, 5, 119-124.
Available at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/undergrad_rev/vol5/iss1/24
This item is available as part of Virtual Commons, the open-access institutional repository of Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts.
Copyright © 2009 Joe Gorman
Oppression through Sexualization:
The Use of Sexualization in
“Going to Meet the Man” and
“The Shoyu Kid”
JOE GORMAN
Joe is a senior majoring in English White supremacy is a fleshy ideology; it’s very much about bodies.
-- Mason Stokes
with a minor in Secondary Education.
I
After his time at Bridgewater State n a world of differences and misunderstandings, disparities and distance,
College, he plans to attend graduate there is a seemingly endless myriad of modes by which human beings
categorize, segregate, and immobilize each other. History is filled with
school and a career as an educator.
repeated instances of groups asserting themselves through any necessary means
Joe wrote the following piece under in order to retain dominance and power. In a rather unnerving way, the human
the mentorship of Dr. Kimberly race can prove to be quite creative in its tenacity to oppress. Obviously, racism and
Chabot- Davis in the senior seminar cultural repression have proven to be weapons of choice time and again. Being of
a perhaps more primal and misunderstood nature, sex has also been employed as a
“Encountering Whiteness: Black tool of oppression, alongside race and culture. Writers such as James Baldwin and
and Ethnic American Writers and Lonny Kaneko explore the idea of how whites use race, culture, and sex together as
Filmmakers Return the Gaze”. a means of suppressing the cultural identities of non-whites. . Baldwin’s short story
“Going to Meet the Man” brings to life a white man whose entire racist ideology is
based upon a link between violence, sex, and his experiences with a Southern lynch
mob. His own masculinity is defined by the connection between racism and sexual
violence. Kaneko’s short story “The Shoyu Kid” reaches into another instance in
American history, by depicting a group of young Japanese boys whose ideas of
masculinity and identity are splintered and clouded by a pedophilic internment
camp guard. While the two writers draw upon quite different backgrounds and
contexts, they both exemplify the way in which sex is used to devalue the cultural
identities of non-whites. Through both the hypersexualization of the African
American male and the emasculation of the Asian American male, Baldwin
and Kaneko both explore how ethnic masculinity is attacked, white supremacy is
imposed, and non-white cultural identity is eventually invalidated.
James Baldwin’s short story “Going to Meet the Man” deals with the
hypersexualization of the African American man, and ultimately how white
masculinity and white supremacy are affirmed by the killing of a particular
black male. The story opens with its white male narrator, Jesse, struggling
to perform sexually with his wife after a day of law enforcement in the civil-
rights-era Southern United States. In the first full paragraph of the piece,
Baldwin writes of Jesse’s sexual desires, alluding to Jesse’s connection between
African Americans and sex: “He could not ask her to do just a little thing
for him, just to help him out, just for a little while, the way he could ask a
nigger girl to do it” (255). Baldwin goes on to write “The image of the black
The singular instance of a Japanese male other than the boys “Well, have you? I mean really seen one, Jackson? Seen
in the text comes in the form of a humorous chase scene. As what kind of prick they have?”
the boys watch an elderly Japanese man attempt to catch some “They don’t have one.”
sort of scurrying animal, there is a sense of mockery evident “That’s what I mean. Do you know what to do
from the narrator’s description. The crowd surrounding the with it?”
spectacle laughs at the man’s struggles, and his body movements
“Everyone knows. You get this hard on, see, and…”
are described as “[an] old man whose feet seemed to be moving
in two directions at once while his body was heading in a third. “Jackson, you got a hard on?” Itchy’s face was tight.
His arms…seemed to be confused about moving in a fourth “Yeah, don’t you? You’re supposed to.”
direction” (Kaneko 5-6). Being the only adult Japanese male
“N-no.”
in the story, the old man exudes a weakened representation
of masculinity, lacking strength or virility. The awkward man “What are you, Itchy, some kind of queer or something.
represents a feeble ideal for the younger Japanese boys to aspire Don’t you know you’re supposed to have a hard on
towards. In examining the failed male presence, Palumbo-Liu when you see a naked girl?” (Kaneko 3-4)
writes, “This comic figure presents itself doubly: it represents
the elder generation of Japanese-American males, formerly In explaining to Itchy what, in essence, it means to be a man,
figures of authority and power, now dissembled, fragmented, Jackson moves to affirm his masculinity. Puzzlingly, the only
and ultimately impotent” (94). Palumbo-Liu goes on to indication of where such notions would come from point
explain that within the internment camps, men like the elderly towards the seemingly omnipresent white male status. In
Japanese character in “The Shoyu Kid” were emasculated and his book Racial Castration, David Eng argues that Jackson’s
feminized by their surroundings. Given that Japanese culture failure to manifest his claims of manhood in a physical manner
is a patriarchal culture, the Japanese man’s ability to provide signifies his own misguided sense of heterosexuality and
for a family and protect that family was essentially rendered identity (127). Another interpretation lies with the fact that
useless by the forced camp living. The elderly man in the story the instance also proves to be a bonding experience for all the
has no real sense of power; he is reduced to a mere joke by boys except The Kid. The three boys who identify themselves
those who once respected his position. Because the duties and with white notions of masculinity all move towards confirming
role of being a man have been removed, the Japanese identity their heterosexual identities together, thus bonding in their
is lost (95). As the white American troops lock down the male identity. Essentially, Jackson, Itchy, and the narrator
move to equate masculinity and heterosexuality with whiteness