ABSTRACT
This chapter is Phiona Stanley’s ethnographic analysis of Western men’s identity in China. She investigates the “superhero” phenomenon in which Western masculinity is constructed differently in East Asia. She interviewed seven Western men, who were working in Shanghai as English language teachers, about their intercultural encounters with Chinese females. According to her, Western men in Asia may be treated as “superheroes” with implicit reference to the power bestowed by their racial and national identities. Her findings are strikingly similar to Kelly’s (Chapter 23) personal experience in Japan. Stanley reasons that Chinese women’s Occidentalist constructions attribute money, status symbol, and exaggerated sexual power to Western masculinity, which may endow the “Western man” with the superhero identity and permit them to “behave badly” in the Asian context. However, while benefiting from the inequality of postcolonial power relations, the Western male participants of her study also experienced uneasy objectification (i.e., being viewed as an interchangeable category) by Chinese women and the tension between the avowal identity that they appropriate subjectively and the ascribed identity imposed on the “Western man.”
