[ SECRET POST #2622 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2622 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 076 secrets from Secret Submission Post #375.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[feotakahari]

I might believe more in respecting other cultures if I respected American culture. But the Americans I admire most are largely ones whose ideas aren't part of mainstream culture. I don't see any reason to put Japanese culture on a higher pedestal. (And it's not like Japanese writers are helplessly bound to write within cultural expectations any more than Americans are.)

[(Anonymous)]

I can't speak for the OP of course, but I didn't get the feeling that Japanese culture ought to be put on a pedestal. I more get the feeling that it's about people talking about feminism and gender in Japan from an American point of view, which...doesn't really work (and is kind of ethnocentric).

[feotakahari]

If someone really believes in American cultural values, that's the lens they're going to view things through, just as someone who really believes in Japanese values will view things through that lens. I wouldn't say they're necessarily right to do so (I'm not a cultural relativist), but judging someone or something by the standards you think are right and true seems a lot less patronizing than "making allowances" for the impact of cultural beliefs you think are wrong.

I suppose the most respectful way to read would be to judge each author by his or her personal standards, but you can't always know what their standards are. Besides, responding to a work with your own thoughts and feelings is an important part of evaluating its ideas--if you take the self out of it, you can only respond on base levels like "this story is well-written."

With that said, I'll grant that blanket dismissal is a bad move. Works like Superior or Ode to Kirihito say interesting, potentially meaningful things, and they shouldn't be disregarded just because of a bit of LOLJapan.

[(Anonymous)]

DA

No, that's not the same thing as what OP is saying. You have to take context and culture into account when judging a work, or else half the feminist literature of anywhere before like, 1980, is suddenly no longer feminist by today's standards. You can't just dismiss context, make commentary on something from your outsider's POV, then consider the result to mean anything more than one random person's personal, uninformed opinion

It's not about making allowances. It's like someone born in 2000 criticizing Rosa Parks for not doing more than refuse to stand up because if she were a real strong woman by today's standards, she'd have run petitions against the busing companies and staged protests at the bus stops. Context matters

[(Anonymous)]

Uh... Rosa Parks DID do more than refuse to stand up. She had a long history of activism before and after that incident.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

I'm...sorry, I guess I'm not expressing things very well.

I don't think it's about making allowances for the impact of cultural beliefs that you think are wrong. In fact, in the case of one of the anime pictured in OP's secret, the exact opposite happened: Western audiences judged it as a feminist work, when it was actually the exact opposite when viewed through a Japanese lens. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that on its face; as you say, we cannot separate our initial judgments or evaluations from our own values, and we can personally take meaning from a work that's different from what its author intends. The problem is when we take those judgments and evaluations into an activist space and begin to speak as if our interpretation is correct even when taking cultural context into account.

The main reason this is a problem is because there's a long and storied history of Western feminists trying to impose Western concepts of gender and sexual politics on other countries and cultures. The sorts of discussions that OP seems to be referencing can be off-shoots of this troublesome practice.

[feotakahari]

I guess I'm not really familiar with what OP is talking about. I'm sorry if I went in the wrong direction with this.