- HOME
- INTRO TO THE FORUM
- USE AND MISUSE
- BADLY WRITTEN, BADLY SPOKEN
- GETTING
TO KNOW ENGLISH - PREPARING FOR ENGLISH PROFICIENCY TESTS
- GOING DEEPER INTO ENGLISH
- YOU ASKED ME THIS QUESTION
- EDUCATION AND TEACHING FORUM
- ADVICE AND DISSENT
- MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH
- STUDENTS' SOUNDING BOARD
- LANGUAGE HUMOR AT ITS FINEST
- THE LOUNGE
- NOTABLE WORKS BY OUR VERY OWN
- ESSAYS BY JOSE CARILLO
- A Potent Tool For Whittling Down Complex Sentences Into Simple Ones
- A Unified Approach To The Proper Use Of Punctuation In English
- A Unified Approach To The Proper Use Of Punctuation In English - II
- A Unified Approach To The Proper Use Of Punctuation In English - III
- Steeling Ourselves Against Common Subject-Verb Disagreement Pitfalls
- The Appropriate Way To Position Subordinate Clauses And Phrases
- ABOUT JOSE CARILLO
- READINGS ABOUT LANGUAGE
- TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR
- NEWS AND COMMENTARY
- BOOKSHOP
- ARCHIVES
TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR
This section features wide-ranging, thought-provoking articles in English on any subject under the sun. Its objective is to present new, mind-changing ideas as well as to show to serious students of English how the various tools of the language can be felicitously harnessed to report a momentous or life-changing finding or event, to espouse or oppose an idea, or to express a deeply felt view about the world around us.
The outstanding English-language expositions to be featured here will mostly be presented through links to the websites that carry them. To put a particular work in better context, links to critiques, biographical sketches, and various other material about the author and his or her works will usually be also provided.
The geisha beyond the Western and Hollywood sexual stereotype
What, beyond the Hollywood stereotype, is a real-life geisha? How come that what used to be teahouse hostesses in 18th Imperial Japan—painstakingly trained in the arts of singing and dancing as well as in conversation and letter-writing—became conflated in the Western mind with the idea of the consummate prostitute?
In Butterfly’s Sisters: The Geisha in Western Culture (Yale University Press, 336 pages), scheduled for release towards end-October, cultural writer-lecturer Yoko Kawaguchi makes a fascinating exploration of how in the West, Japanese women and geishas in particular have come to embody certain ideas about female sexuality, then examines how this world view—for both good and bad—has found expression in Western fiction, opera, the visual arts, and music videos.
In “The Call to Service,” an advance review of Butterfly’s Sisters in the October 13, 2010 issue of the online The New Republic, Rachel Shteir says that Kawaguchi’s work is an exhaustive history of the East-meets-West romance that found its finest expression in Puccini’s magnificent opera, M. Butterfly, from where the book drew its title. Shteir says that Kawaguchi wrote the book out of her great irritation over stereotypes of the geisha as “mincingly passive and sexually voracious.” The “dream women that haunt the western imagination,” Shteir quotes Kawaguchi, reveal more about the West’s neuroses than about the geisha, who “reflects changing western anxieties regarding female sexuality in general.”
Shteir says that Kawaguchi is obsessed with how Western reformers, writers, and artists confuse prostitutes and geishas, and makes the insightful conclusion in her book that as opposed to how the West sees the geisha, to be a geisha really means to excel at “a profession which places more emphasis on being pleasant to and pleasing others rather than the importance of being independent-minded and assertive.”
“Kawaguchi is best when using history to explore what literature, with all its attention to narrative and character, misses,” Shteir says. “She is at her worst when she tries too hard to condemn Western intellectuals [for thinking so lowly about geishas].”
Read Rachel Shteir’s “The Call to Service” in the online The New Republic now!
ANOTHER INTERESTING READING:
In “How Handwriting Trains the Brain,” an article in the October 25, 2010 issue of The Wall Street Journal, Gwendolyn Bounds writes about how researchers are finding that writing by hand is more than just a way to communicate. “The practice helps with learning letters and shapes, can improve idea composition and expression, and may aid fine motor-skill development,” she says.
Read “How Handwriting Trains the Brain” in online The Wall Street Journal now!
