The Affective Politics of Pop-Economics: How Racializing Japan Naturalized Protectionism and Welfare-Cuts in the 1980-90s
|
Economists argue that economic redistribution is the rational response to globalization. However, why then were trade tariffs against Japan accompanied with “ending welfare as we know it” (under Clinton) and reigning in “welfare queens” (under Reagan) in the 1980-1990s? The consensus in economics is that this makes no sense. By contrast, I argue that an attention to the affective and racial politics of pop-economic thinking offers an answer. I show that protectionism and welfare-cuts became commonsensical in racialized pop-economic thinking. I develop an explanation rooted in emotions. Based on a discourse analysis of bestselling novels and newspaper articles, I show that “Japan’s work ethic” was understood as an aspiration to be envied but also an enemy to be feared, while “African Americans’ work ethic” were portrayed as “leeches” to be disciplined and punished. This made anti-Japanese tariffs and anti-Black welfare-cuts feel natural because it promised to make America great again by restoring an imagined White/protestant work ethic.
The paper also contributes to the scholarship on comparative racialization. Existing scholarship emphasises how racializing Asians as “model minorities” is used to discipline less “model-like” non-Whites within a structure of racial capitalism. My paper suggests that there is also a less functionalist and more emotional logic to how Asian-ness and Blackness are racialized. I show how both are racialized as two sides of the White/protestant ethic: Asian-ness is racialized to stand for what the White protestant should be, but is not; and Blackness is racialized to stand for what the White protestant is afraid of becoming. |
The White Man’s Order: Gendered Racialization in Containment and the Open Door
|
This paper argues that the LIO is better understood as a White Man’s Order. Non-White members of international order are either included as feminine subordinates in need of an open door or excluded as masculine threats in need of containment. The paper illustrates this by showing how China gets racialized as feminine at the exact moments Japan gets racialized as masculine, and vice versa, across four epochs: the early 20th century (Russo-Japanese War and the US Open-Door Policy in China); the early Cold War (the CCP’s victory in China and the occupation of defeated Japan); the late Cold War (Nixon’s visit to China and the US-Japan trade war); the post-Cold War (the rise of China and Japan’s support of the Iraq War).
|
Gendered Orientalist: Anti-Communist Transcripts before and after the Sexual Revolution
|
This paper explores the role of gendered narratives about Asia for American perceptions of Communism in Asia, prospects for Asian democratization and development, and the role of dictators and strongmen in the region. It argues that the “Orient” has been feminized as the inverse of the Occident’s moral economy. During the Prohibition Era, ideals of White femininity were Victorian, emphasizing innocence, docility, sexual purity. After the 1970s however, the White feminine ideal underwent a radical change, now mimicking ideal White masculine ideals: independent, self-made, sexually liberated. Correspondingly, while before the sexual revolution, Asians were racialized as amoral, lazy, insubordinate, and hypersexualized; after the sexual revolution, they were racialized as communal, overly-hard working, sexually deprived, and prone to hysterical outbursts. The paper uncovers how communism was popularly thought of as a “Asiatic” influence: in the early Cold War, it was a sexual temptation toward malaise to be contained in the third world by developmentalist strong men, but by the late Cold War, an austere oppressive force whose victims needed free markets and sexual liberation.
|