The plot of M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang intrigued me, not only because it was surprising to read at first that, somehow, Gallimard had been tricked into marrying a man disguised as a women. I liked how the work inspired me to think both about the toxic masculinity men experience, and the misogynistic notions of what it means to be a women, in an Asian context. I feel that Gallimard feels threatened by constant comments about his relationship with Song. The fact that he had been tricked and has been deemed as gay greatly threatens his masculinity. In defense, he reacts by reaffirming social constructs that he knows Song is a woman because she is sexually submissive and emasculates himself by acting as Pinkerton, who does not respect women. He is also able to emasculate himself by hardly opposing when his friend, Marc, insists that he can exert his power over women whenever he wants, sexually. This is obviously incredibly sexist, and shows how men who feel that their masculinity has been threatened will turn to affirming that women are submissive to him, which throws LGBT members to the wayside as well, since he was offended to be called gay in the first place.

An article that I feel represented this duality well is an article by Andrew Kung, who talks his experience as a photographer that explore the different problems that face Asian-Americans. He meets a drag queen, Jeffrey, who must deal with the desexualization of Asian-American men, which Gallimard continues to do to Song in M. Butterfly, and the fetishization of Asian-American women, which characters in M. Butterfly do to women. Marc insinuates that women are just there for pleasure, and therefore Gallimard can overtake them sexually whenever he wants, exemplifying this fetishization. Kung talks about how he wanted to show the soft side of Asian American men in his book, ” Because we have been historically desexualized, there is often an underlying pressure to portray traditional visual cues of masculinity: chiseled jaw lines, elevated cheek bones, sculpted bodies. Instead, I wanted to celebrate a level of intimacy…” He is able to achieve this through Jeffrey’s photoshoot, and present the same problems that M. Butterfly does.

Kung, Andrew. “The Desexualization of the Asian American Male.” CNN, Cable News Network, 3 Mar. 2020, www.cnn.com/style/article/andrew-kung-asian-american-men/index.html.