Through the Looking Glass of Madame Butterfly: Narrative Gender Transition in the Writings of Angela Carter

This article situates Angela Carter's Japanese writings in the context of multiple interconnected discourses in the 1960s and 1970s: on the one hand, anti-imperialism, postcolonialism, and feminism among European intellectuals and, on the other hand, "self-orientalism," anti-Western nationalism, and global capitalism in postwar Japan. As a white woman in Japan, Carter was not only, as previously argued by scholars, doubly objectified as woman and foreigner, but "subjectified" in a patriarchal/colonialist discourse and made aware of her complicity in objectifying, emasculating, and exploiting the native. Carter's Japanese and post-Japan writings reflect a newly acquired awareness of gender in a colonial context, demonstrated by her conscious use of male pronouns and gender transitions, effectively problematizing the othering tendency of European orientalists and the Japanese self-orientalist exploitation of it.