길들여진 몸짓/거부하는 몸 - 미국무대에 등장한 동양인 배우의 몸에 관한 문화적 고찰

Tamed Gesture/Resisting Body: A Cultural Study on the Body of Asian Actors in the American Theatre

&nbsp;&nbsp;In recent years, the body has been redefined as a cultural concept rather than a natural reality. Societies produced ideals of the "proper body" in order to define their identities, because identity has a lot to do with how people perceive their own and other people&quot;s bodies. Since the nineteenth century, the American theatre has been representing Asia and Asians as an exotic Other, a perpetual foreigner. "Oriental" plays and musicals underscored the alien body and inscrutable mind of the Asian. America&quot;s formation of Asia as its Other was part of the nation&quot;s struggle to make sense of the fast expanding world, in which Americans referred to themselves (along with Europeans) as the "West"--a cultural more than geographical entity-and called Asia and Asians the "East." They needed Asia to be utterly Other, because there could be no West without its East, no Self without its Other, no America without its foil.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;As for the Asian American actors, who had to achieve their dreams in an industry where everything depended on "looks," they were expected to inhabit the stereotyped image of unassimilable foreigner. They needed to be "tamed" as their own country&quot;s Other. Yet Asian American actors were not mere helpless victims of the society&quot;s racism Actors like Anna May Wong, while they strove for more visibility on the American stage and screen, struggle to change the stereotype. Her off-stage "counter-identity," in fact, helped people begin to see the complexity of Asian American-and American-identity and culture.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;The dominant society tried to fix the "being" of the Other by fixing its "seeming" (look) to a certain image-i.e., a stereotype. Yet, as we have seen through the Asian American actors&quot; struggle between the tamed gesture and resisting body, when people keep imagining and creating an alternative "seeming" of the Self and the Other on the stage and screen, both the Self and the Other are in a continual state of "becoming." Seeming, being, and becoming, therefore, constitute fundamental dialectics of the construction of identity in the theatre.