applejack wrote:Simon_Jester wrote:I've watched it, but...
1) Pointy ears are an Asian stereotype? Really? That I had never heard.
He
might be talking about the Fu Manchu stereotype of Asians that got transfered over to Asian and non-Asian (though potentially Asian analogue) characters, some depictions of which had pointed ears. Here are some examples...
Well yes, but it's not like pointy ears show up uniformly on WWII anti-Japanese propaganda posters and other racist caricatures or anything. And I'm pretty sure not ALL the characters from that era with pointy ears are supposed to be Asian or Asian-analogues.
Pointy ears are a fairly common way to depict someone as humanoid but not human. I mean, tell me
Namor the Sub-Mariner is supposed to be Asian and I'm going to laugh.
Simon_Jester wrote:2) The "Asians are obsessed with science and logic" stereotype in the US... I don't think that really took off until Asians started outperforming whites on college entry exams and the like, with large numbers of Asian immigrants being seen as a threat to the white majority because of education and being stereotyped as unimaginative crammers.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but that started happening in the '70s or so... after Spock's character was already established. And Spock pretty much defined the basic parameters of Vulcan culture with few or no modifications having been made at later times. You can hardly blame Star Trek for invoking a stereotype that didn't exist until after the show went off the air.
I suppose it's possible for the stereotype to insinuate itself after the establishment of the character for certain elements of the population? In fact, the pointy-eared versions of the Mandarin and Ming characters I show above didn't happen until well after they first appeared on film/print, and all versions of those Fu Manchu-type characters (including Fu Manchu himself) with pointy ears seem atypical going by google image searches of those characters.
Agreed. That's kind of my point- that while there are a lot of 'Oriental' stereotypes that DID exist in the 1960s, very few of them are a good match for Spock. About the closest you can come is the 'scheming Oriental genius,' who isn't a good match either, because they're generally evil, treacherous, murderous, and duplicitous, whereas Spock is good, reliable, usually rather nonviolent, and on the whole honorable.
I don't quite see the connection to the degree that Ziggy Stardust is seeing with respect to the Spock character or Vulcans in general, but then again I live in Hawaii and I'm probably not likely to be exposed to anti-Asian attitudes too often.
Thing is, there just... isn't that much support, so far as I can tell, for the idea that in the 1960s it was a common stereotype for Asians to have pointy ears or to be hyper-logical to the extent of being smarter than typical
Caucasians humans.
Broomstick wrote:In the episode with the "space nazis" Kirk attempted to explain Spock's pointed ears as an unfortunate childhood encounter with a rice-picking machine, which so far as I can remember is both the earliest conflation of Vulcans and Asians, and the only one I recall hearing until now... though admittedly, I don't spend a lot of time looking at SF aliens and going "which stereotype does this remind me of...?"
That was actually the episode where they time travel back into the 1930s to stop McCoy from accidentally changing the course of history, but yeah.
And it's pretty clear that this is Kirk just trying to invent an excuse in a hurry for why Spock "looks foreign."
Ziggy Stardust wrote:Hell, just google "Vulcan Asian stereotype" and see all of the articles that have been written on the subject. This is not by any stretch of the imagination a novel comment on my part (and I can't even take credit; it's not something I noticed until it was pointed out to me).
I'm not saying you
made it up. But I am saying it's kind of a stretch, at least in the context of the 1960s when the basic character of Vulcans was established.
If anything it's the other way around; the stereotype has started to be more plausible
since the 1960s their very high academic performance and the way that Asian economies have boomed at the expense of Western economic dominance. So racists who previously thought of Asians as a bunch of jabbering coolies who were just smart enough to make 'monkey copies' of the work of their betters... now think of Asians as a bunch of 'book smart' dweebs who get ahead by working fourteen hour days and having no life.
It's not that Vulcans are stereotypical Asians. It's that
our stereotype of Asians changed, into something that looked like Vulcans. Which is hardly
Star Trek's fault, since their depiction of the Vulcan character has been preserved more or less unchanged since before that stereotype changed in the first place.
Hell, the third Google hit with that search term is an article from the long dormant main site, here. I'm not saying you have to agree with it or think it's an issue, but I am honestly shocked that this is somehow news to anyone. It's one of the most common criticisms of science fiction as a genre in general.
The hit on our main page is there only because it happens to be an essay on racism in SF in general, which contains the words 'vulcan' and 'Asian' in the same paragraph. It doesn't even talk about comparing vulcans to stereotypical Asians.
The other links I found on the first page, in a cursory search, all unthinkingly copy this "Asians are stereotyped as logical and emotionally repressed, Vulcans are logical and emotionally repressed, therefore Vulcans are fantasy versions of stereotypical Asians" thing.
Trouble is, again, the stereotype of East Asians as logical (and to a large extent, as emotionally repressed)
isn't that old. To a large extent it post-dates the original series of
Star Trek.
It's like how "authoritarian hyper-organized efficient German" was a stereotype that existed in 1900 but did not exist in 1800 because that was before the rise of Prussian militarism and a unified industrialized Germany. You can't just say "these people are portrayed as hyper-organized, efficient, and authoritarian in this 1700-era novel, so they must be thinly fictionalized Germans."
Now, you can legitimately point out that some
modern people writing Vulcans are making them "too Oriental" in flavor, incorporating too many elements of Eastern culture and philosophy and not enough element of Western (or African or Native American or whatnot) culture and philosophy. Or not making up enough entirely unknown elements to put in.
And it IS undeniably the case that the makers of
Star Trek have borrowed heavily from East Asian elements to portray the Vulcans; a variety of motives can be ascribed to that, the most obvious one being a desire to make the Vulcans look
different in some recognizable way compared to the Western-derived clothes and architecture you'd expect from Western-identified humans.
But it's unfair to accuse the entire concept of the species of being an 'Asian stereotype' in the sense that TNG-era Klingons are clearly a "black Viking" stereotype.
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Other pages I find are... frankly, chronic hypersensitivity run rampant (the second link Google provides can be quoted saying " Captain James T. Kirk was played by William Shatner, who is Jewish. However, Shatner looks and sounds like a gentile! This is not a Semitic looking guy! White gentiles watching Star Trek could easily see him as one of their own, identifying with him, and forgetting that he was Jewish! What could be more Anti-Semitic than selecting a Jewish captain who neither looks nor sounds Jewish?"
...Which makes me think that Dr. Frederickson, who is being interviewed, wants William Shatner to just
not have a career at all, since he will
always be a "guy who doesn't look Jewish" even though he actually is Jewish.
It also reminds me of the issue made on the '
racism page you referenced, which is that there's somehow this notion that people from a designated minority race HAVE to be all torn up about portraying their minority identity and this has to dominate their personality, and they're not allowed to just be... not all that different from other people around them. Which is a potentially very condescending and patronizing way to talk about race.
So yes, it's easy to find on Google people who claim Vulcans are Asian stereotypes... but from a cursory survey, they're so chronically hypersensitized on racial issues that it's hard to imagine ANY good work of televised art (or other art) which would satisfy them.
Ziggy Stardust wrote:Well, again, I find the vast volumes of material on the subject that come up with a simple Google search indicative of my point that it is a common critique. There are
entire books dedicated to the subject (in fact, dedicated to specific subsets of the subject). It's discussed on both Wikipedia and Memory Alpha. A quick Google search finds mentions of it in a large number of other books about
the show and its cultural impact. Hell, it even pops up in sociology
books. I clearly did not make this up.
Some of those links you provide don't have much to say on that issue. The last one certainly does...
But again, I'm not claiming you made this up any more than Broomstick is. My (our?) point is that it's open to debate, and relies heavily on a stereotype of 'overeducated Asians' that was not nearly as much in play in American culture at the time the Vulcans were first imagined in fiction.
