Gwen’s Girl Trouble
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If a “banana” is an Asian girl acting white, what do you call a white girl hiring an Asian girl to act “Asian”?
A white pop star hires four black men as back-up dancers. As part of the job, she requires them to follow her everywhere, even onto the red carpet, dressed in minstrel clothes, subservient to her whims. She calls them by names of her choosing and forbids them to speak to the press: “Damn, that’d be messed up, right?” There’d be an outcry: “Why, she’s treating them like slaves!” But packaging and selling a stereotype of Asian women just doesn’t read as racist to mainstream America, so Gwen Stefani’s treatment of her Harajuku back-up dancers is seen as just another of her hip “style incarnations.”
Stefani, frontwoman of ska-punk pop band No Doubt, has been getting press during the past year for her solo album Love.Angel.Music.Baby., her clothing line L.A.M.B., and her most recent clothing and accessories line, Harajuku Lovers. Harajuku, a pedestrian shopping district of Tokyo, has been famous for over 10 years for its youth street fashion. Teens create brightly mis-matched outfits by blending traditional Japanese clothing, Western styles like punk, goth and baby-doll dresses, high fashion and home-made pieces. Stefani says she was first inspired by Harajuku style when she visited Tokyo in 1996. Her new album includes a song entitled, “Harajuku Girls,” and two other songs, “Rich Girl” and “What You Waiting For?”, reference the subculture. For the finishing cross-promotional touch, last fall Stefani hired four dancers to be a kind of Harajuku fashion entourage: they appear in the videos for her new album, dance for her live performances, and have posed alongside her on the red carpet for several music award shows.
Since many youth subcultures, like Harajuku, emerge partly through a desire to resist mainstream culture, there is often resentment and possessiveness from its members when a celebrity borrows from it. Stefani deflects some of that resentment by positioning herself foremost as an admirer of Harajuku, singing in “Harajuku Girls”: “I am your biggest fan” and “Did you see your inspiration in my latest collection?” Honest about her position as an outsider, she sings “I’m fascinated by the Japanese fashion scene/Just an American girl in the Tokyo streets.” She admits to borrowing from the fashion style of Harajuku teens, pre-empting potential criticism by acknowledging that she’s stealing. She joked in a Rolling Stone interview, “I was thinking about calling the album Stolen Goods. . . Or It Was Yours and Now It’s Mine.”
The interplay between mainstream culture and subculture gets more complicated when a white celebrity borrows from a minority or ethnic culture. The possibility of playing into racist stereotypes, of exploiting a marginalized culture, or of exoticizing difference emerges. Non-white ethnicities can seem more interesting and authentic to white audiences, and musicians from Al Jolson to Elvis to Madonna and Eminem have enjoyed greater success then their African-American contemporaries while borrowing from black culture. Stefani, for all her professed adoration of the Harajuku style and Japanese culture, is doing little to challenge Western stereotypes of Asian women or Western beauty standards. By hiring four Japanese dancers to follow her and pose with her on the red carpet, she’s treating them as human accessories, equivalent to jewelry or teacup Chihuahuas.
When on the red carpet with the foursome, Stefani is the center of attention: she doesn’t acknowledge the presence of her entourage. In most published photos, she looks directly into the cameras while they look off to the sides, their gazes never meeting our own. Her Rolling Stone interview states that “. . . four Harajuku girls follow her everywhere she [goes] to promote her album. The four girls, whom Stefani named ‘Love,’ ‘Angel,’ ‘Music’ and ‘Baby’ are actually professional dancers whose main job - other than performing onstage with Stefani - is to stand behind her and look cute.” Excuse me, she “named” them?! Didn’t they already have names? And what did she name them? Love, Angel, Music and Baby, the same four words that make up her fashion label L.A.M.B. and the title of her solo album. The dancers, then, are not real people, but simply an extension of Stefani’s psyche, physical manifestations of her imagination, like her other creative projects.
This concept is reinforced in the music video for “What You Waiting For?” The four girls materialize in Stefani’s studio as she creates a new song. They sit in a line, watching her sing and gyrate, their faces passive. On MTV, during the Total Request Live performance of the same song, Stefani’s power over her dancers and their subservience to her was part of the act: the girls moved mechanically to the beat, their faces blank, not reacting even when Stefani sang a question right into their faces. At one point, she appeared to control, puppeteer-like, two girls’ dance moves.
In the song “Rich Girl,” Stefani sings about all the things that she would buy if she had the money: “I’d buy everything/Clean out Vivienne Westwood/ in my Galliano gown/No, wouldn’t just have one hood/A Hollywood mansion if I could/Please book me first-class to my fancy house in London town.” And in the next verse she sings, “. . . if I was a wealthy girl/I’d get me four Harajuku girls to/Inspire me and they’d come to my rescue/I’d dress them wicked, I’d give them names/Love Angel Music Baby/Hurry up and come and save me.” On the one hand, she is positioning herself as a fan again: they’re her inspiration, she looks up to them, they’re going to come to her rescue. But more disturbingly, they are also objects, akin to the designer clothes and mansions she’s just mentioned, dolls to be bought and named and dressed however she wants.
The music video for “Rich Girl” attempts to give the opposite impression, that it’s Stefani who is the doll, by ostensibly reversing the power relationship. At the beginning and end of the video, four Japanese girls in school uniforms (not her dancers, but actual young girls) play with a pirate ship and two dolls dressed to look like Stefani and Eve, her guest on the single. The girls are in control, laughing as they drop the dolls into an aquarium and shake the ship, causing the non-doll Stefani to lose her balance. The main body of the video, however, tells the real story: it cuts between Stefani on the deck of a pirate ship, below decks in a mess hall, and in another room, not in pirate clothes but in lingerie-like couture. Although her four Harajuku dancers appear on the ship’s deck, most of the shots of them are in this last setting. Again, their expressions while dancing and posing around her are empty, looking not into the camera like Stefani, but off to the sides. They never make eye contact with the viewers, not even during the close-up shots when Stefani introduces them as “Love,” “Angel,” “Music,” and “Baby.” As she sings “I’d dress them wicked,” Stefani runs her hands up and down one of the girls as with a mannequin.
The overall impression of the dancers from these two videos, the red carpet photos and the TRL performance is one of life-size dolls, belonging to Stefani, who do as she wishes. Despite the misleading intro and ending of the “Rich Girl” video, the real dolls are not Stefani and Eve, but “Love,” “Angel,” “Music,” and “Baby.” They are not persons in their own right, but figments of Stefani’s imagination, objects to be bought and dressed up.
These images, of silent Asian women willing to do whatever is asked of them, dovetail nicely with the Western stereotype of Asian women as quiet, shy, demure, and sexually submissive. The dancers flanking Stefani reinforce this stereotype: dancing attendance on Stefani’s every move, shadowing her with pale, emotionless faces, acting only as she instructs, they have no desires of their own. More damningly, at the end of the “What You Waiting For?” video and the TRL performance, the four cluster together and giggle behind their hands, covering their mouths like the good little geishas they’re paid to be.1
Stefani is discussed in the mainstream entertainment media as an adult, a married woman who is considering motherhood while juggling her various careers. Her dancers, however, are always referred to as “girls” (although their ages are never given). Their outfits and make-up often add to this distinction: the dancers will wear some variation of pleated schoolgirl skirts, sometimes with sailor-suit collars or knee-high socks and kneepads, while Stefani wears blazers or one-shouldered gowns. Stefani’s make-up is subtle and mature, the dancers’ is garishly colorful, often with circles of color on their cheeks, like dolls or girls playing with their mother’s make-up.2
By requiring her dancers to act and dress this way, Stefani reinforces racist and sexist Western stereotypes of Asian women. She also reinforces the lines of difference between “us” (Americans, Westerners, whites) and “them” (Japanese, Asian, non-white). Vogue.com reports that “. . . [d]espite their all being fluent in English, she has stipulated in their contracts that they must only speak Japanese.” So they are contractually required to be as “foreign” and “exotic” as possible; Western audiences aren’t allowed to hear their voices or perspectives on their experiences as “Harajuku girls.”
By always positioning herself in contrast to them, Stefani stands out as the white woman at the center of attention. Even as she takes fashion risks by borrowing from Harajuku, Stefani is safe in her position of privilege as a white woman. She is the dominant force in her group of five, standing a head taller than the four dancers, platinum halo and porcelain skin glowing. Like previous platinum blonde sex symbols (Jean Harlow, Marilyn Monroe, Madonna), her peroxided whiteness is a beauty ideal that Asian women will never reach. Even white women have to work at it: Stefani herself isn’t that white without peroxide. She is whiteness heightened, whiteness constructed to an almost impossible standard of beauty.
Richard Dyer writes that “only non-whiteness can give whiteness any substance,” that is, white people are defined by what they are not, since they have no cultural identity of their own. Seen this way, the four dancers help define Stefani and affirm the superiority of white beauty, the desirability of white women over Asian women. We, the audience, aspire to be her, standing front and center, not them, her four interchangeable background dancers. Framed by them, she can be the star, more so because they are so “different” from her.
By playing up their exotic foreign-ness, she also uses them to highlight her place as white hero(ine) in the cultural narrative. The five women (white at center, ethnic minorities off to the side) uphold the Western cultural myth which teaches only whites deserve to be the subject of a story. A white person can assume the positive characteristics of an ethnic minority identity, while keeping the privileged position of hero (as in the films The Last of the Mohicans or The Last Samurai). Stefani’s four dancers reinforce the geisha stereotype of Asian women, but she isn’t restricted to such a stereotype: she can be wilder, louder, more bare-midriffed. Layering another cultural identity onto her white skin, like Madonna has for years, Stefani gains a patina of “hip”-ness and individuality. She can speak in her own voice; she gets both the privilege of whiteness and the unique-ness of Harajuku. Yes, the girls are an extension of her creative imagination, another aspect of her identity, but she doesn’t want to BE them: she wants to be her own (white) self.
One could argue that Stefani, a savvy self-promoter and cross-marketer, is only doing what any good businesswoman in the entertainment industry would do: maximizing her audience of consumers. She’s borrowing from Japanese culture - all the better to sell her albums and clothes in Japan. Why shouldn’t Westerners feel free to borrow from the East or any other culture?3 Isn’t that what Harajuku has been doing for over 10 years, blending styles of East and West? Don’t the non-Western, non-white audiences have the ability to read the image of a white pop star taking on other ethnicities as flattery, instead of imperialism? And after all, how many Americans would know about Harajuku if not for her? Stefani’s recognition of the growing global community (and marketplace) could be seen as a positive thing.
Perhaps, too, Ms. Stefani thinks she’s invulnerable to accusations of racism; in the United States, borrowing from Japanese culture is not as loaded for a white person as borrowing from African-American culture. And criticism over the ethnic posturing of her “girls” is difficult because she positions herself as such a fan. As Jerry Seinfeld asked, “If I like their race, how can that be racist?” Sheridan Prasso, in her 2005 book The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls, & Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient, answers, well, yes, it can. “Like or dislike, a judgment about someone - how he or she might behave, think, appear, perform academically, be able to dispense advice, or anything else - according to his or her race, is a kind of racism.” Prasso differentiates between “racism” - the negative, discriminatory aspects of such judgments - and “race-ism” - the neutral or positive stereotypes people hold about other ethnicities. Asian women, she says, can feel “objectified and valued not for who they are as people, but for their race or perceptions of the culture they come from . . . ‘Race-ism,’ then, can be just as uncomfortable as ‘racism.’”
But maybe Ms. Stefani is only playing with racist and sexist stereotypes of Asian women. Maybe I’m some white girl getting my PC panties in a bunch on behalf of Asian women when the four dancers are really putting on a tongue-in-cheek performance mocking such stereotypes. Should we be reading irony into the dancers’ giggling behind their hands? It’s hard to do when we know that the Asian women aren’t in charge of this show; Stefani is telling them what to do. Some might argue that in this postmodern world we are free to collage any identity we like for ourselves, but these dancers aren’t doing that - Stefani is doing it for them. Although Asian-Americans are making visible headway in the American mass media, there are still very few portrayals of Asian or Asian-American women. Because Western audiences’ exposure to images of Asian women is limited, so is their ability or inclination to read irony into such performances.
Even with the many-faceted global media machine, the U.S. is insulated: it exports more culture than it imports, and we most often experience other cultures through a lens of exotic “foreign”-ness. We’re not encouraged to look beyond stereotypes.4 Gwen Stefani reaches a wider Western audience and so has more power to shape views than any Asian or Asian-American. A white celebrity is using her position of power to perpetuate Western stereotypes of Asian women and the idea of Asians (specifically the Japanese) as “Other” in a media environment where the visibility of Asians and Asian-Americans, especially women, barely registers. How much can Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle or The House of Flying Daggers do to counteract Stefani’s giggling gaggle of geishas?
Indeed, for months after the debut of her entourage, the media followed Stefani’s lead, calling the “girls” “geisha-like” and “Stefani’s indispensable accessory these days.” I could find no personal information or background history on her dancers. What are their real names and ages? Were they into Harajuku before they were hired by Stefani to wear her outfits? Her picture of them as non-people is so entire that the mainstream media have no curiosity at all about who they are when they’re not playing their assigned roles. There isn’t even an acknowledgement that they might BE playing roles.
Over the winter, short rants on blogs and online posting boards were the only critical voices. Finally, in March and April, Bitch magazine and Salon both ran articles criticizing Stefani. A “Free the Gwenihana Four” website went up and the conversations on-line heightened.5 The real surprise came a few weeks later, when Jane magazine ran a blurb in the May issue identifying the dancers: they “aren’t just another Asian fantasy/speechless wonder. They are professionals repped by the same talent agency Kevin Federline’s managed by . . . Maya Chino (Love), San Diego State University alum Jenny Kita (Angel), former Japanese pop star Rino Nakasone (Music) and Mayuko Kitayama (Baby).” So they’re not imports from Tokyo after all; they’re represented by Bloc, an LA/NY dance agency. A quick Google pulls up background on their dance training, education, hobbies, even an interview with Nakasone. Instead of caricatures, we see real women building their careers.
Do I enjoy Stefani’s music? Yes. Do I think she’s evil? No. She seems genuinely enamored of Japanese culture. But an “oh-how-cute” infatuation with Harajuku does not entitle her to a free pass on her problematic representations of Asian women.6 Her packaging of subculture and ethnicity for mass consumption, her take on Harajuku girl-dom, creates and reinforces racist and sexist stereotypes of Asian women. She’s using them to enhance her desirability as a white pop star. Unfortunately, a free pass is just what Stefani gets from the mainstream media. But no matter how blind the entertainment press is, the fact remains that Stefani is treating these “foreign” women as less than people. She’s the star, and they don’t even get their real names in the credits.
Endnotes
1. Check out www.japanesestreets.com or flip through the books Fruits and Fresh Fruits, two collections of Harajuku teen portraits taken by the photographer and Harajuku fanzine founder Shoichi Aoki, and you’ll see the difference between Harajuku girls on the street and Stefani’s hired foursome. These girls (and boys) are in charge of their own images: they gaze directly into the camera, proud of their individuality and creativity, and confident in their unique, exuberant sense of style.
2. Apart from feeding a Japanese schoolgirl fetish, this language mirrors that of many mail-order bride websites. In her book The Asian Mystique, Sheridan Prasso details such sites’ “anti-feminist rhetoric . . . [and] references to finding ‘traditional’ ‘ladies’ and ‘girls’ instead of ‘demanding unappreciative’ ‘women.’”
3. As a white woman with a partner of Indian descent, I’ve been known to throw on a bindi and a sari - So who am I to point fingers? Ethnic borrowing by a white person isn’t always a negative thing, but Stefani crosses the line between respect and exoticization. She is reinforcing racist Western fantasies of what Asian women are, or should be.
4. This “we” assumes a division between East and West that excludes the many millions of Asian-Americans who identify with aspects of both Eastern and Western cultures. In using the word “we” for American mainstream media and culture, I don’t mean to dismiss these perspectives. It can’t be denied, however, that to the majority of Americans, the mainstream media portray white (or African-American) culture as “us” and Asian cultures as “them.”
5. Many posters defending Stefani argued that “. . . the four girls signed the contracts. No one forced them to do anything.” “They’re not chained in Gwen’s basement.” This defense sidesteps the question of how the performance of stereotypes can perpetuate said stereotypes in the larger culture, and releases the dancers from any obligation other than one of personal success (they’re getting paid and advancing their careers). Prasso writes that Anna May Wong and Lucy Liu both responded in kind when questioned about playing roles that perpetuate stereotypes: “when you are just starting out, you don’t have much choice about the roles you get to play.” Minority entertainers, then, face both appreciation for their visibility and the criticism that comes with being typecast.
6. Stefani seems to have loosened the geisha-doll leash and allowed her dancers a little more personality recently. The video for “Hollaback Girl” actually shows them changing expression, smiling, making eye contact with the camera, showing attitude. This shift is also apparent in Trace’s October photo spread. (Although I’m not sure how to take her dressing her “girls” in hip-hop homegirl make-up and Harajuku Lovers threads emblazoned with the word “bananas”.)
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