Cultural appropriation and cultural sharing in Avatar: The Last Airbender compared.
Reblogging myself to talk about the ‘Disrespectful’ gif because Mai and Ty Lee’s disrespect in that scene is toward not only the Kyoshi Warriors’ culture but to the Warriors themselves as well. But that’s always the case, isn’t it? Cultural disrespect always goes with personal disrespect. Always.
Mai and Ty Lee’s attitude here plays into a really pernicious stereotype about women in colonialized cultures, that they are hypersexual seductresses out to sink their claws into men, especially men of the colonializing group. Of course the reality is that men of the colonizing group, and often women as well, hypersexualize and prey on the colonized people.
I mean, the Kyoshi Warriors were foraging in the middle of nowhere. They weren’t dressed up to look pretty: their clothes and war paint were their uniforms and ties to their heritage, not look-at-me-I’m-so-beautiful decorations. Yet so ingrained were the stereotypes Mai and Ty Lee had been taught about Earth Kingdom women, they took one look at the Kyoshi Warriors and dismissed them as exotic, sexualized creatures. The Fire Nation girls even seem to take OFFENSE at how the Warriors are dressed, as though their clothes are somehow demeaning or a provocation.
In the process Mai and Ty Lee subtly set themselves up as the more liberated women, the serious fighters as oppsed to these frivolous foreign girls. And I’m willing to bet a lot that the Fire Nation used its comparative gender equality for propaganda purposes, harping on the need to save the oppressed Water Tribe and Earth Kingdom women from Water Tribe and Earth Kingdom men. Sozin’s own stated motivation for starting the war was exactly what we would call a white savior complex if he were white. This is how white feminism and the white savior complex work to reinforce colonialism in our world.
While all the characters in ATLA are coded as POC, mostly Asians, these dynamics of colonialism and supremacy apply across culture and race. In fact I’m quite happy that ATLA depicts these issues between nonwhite peoples. Though colonialism by European and European-descended cultures is the most dominant currently in our world (hence the descriptor ‘white’), it has never been solely a European issue. Just look at how the Air Nomads are explicitly based on Tibet, which is suffering from decades of Chinese colonialism. China and other nonwhite colonializing powers have used their lack of European descent as a shield, but it’s not a defense. Just because European colonization has been massively destructive doesn’t mean other peoples can’t be oppressive as well.
I’d like to add to this idea that Earth Kingdom women are treated to a gendered form of racial or ethnic prejudice, because it runs though more than just the interactions Azula and her minions have with the Kyoshi Warriors. In “Zuko Alone,” for example, when Iroh sends Azula an Earth Kingdom doll, he writes, “And for Azula, a new friend. She wears the latest fashion for Earth Kingdom girls.“ What’s stressed are the aesthetics of her dress, and a hobby that Azula, and later Mai and Ty Lee, plainly associates with girlyness, not only femininity, but a childish, useless femininity.
This derision of Earth Kingdom girls and women as “girly” and overly feminine comes up again not only during the battle with the Kyoshi Warriors, but after as well. Mai for example talks about wanting to get out of the girly disguise she has to wear, i. e., dressing as a Kyoshi Warrior, and when Ty Lee suggests that the Kyoshi Warriors have less depressing make up than Mai.
We can contrast this with what Suki says about her uniform: “It’s a warrior’s uniform. You should be proud. The silk threads symbolizes the brave blood that flows through our
veins. The gold insignia represents the honor of the warrior’s heart.”Later, in the Comic “Going Home Again,” Azula puts a brainwashed Joo Dee in nominal charge of Ba Sing Se because she is so pliable. If the subjugation of Earth Kingdom girls is a rallying cry for public support for the war in the Fire Nation, it certainly does not trickle down to what happens on the ground. Just as normally happens in real life, Azula is perfectly happy to take over exploiting Earth Kingdom women in a gendered way similar to the way Long Feng did. There isn’t any enlightened spreading of feminist values here, not when gendered exploitation is so useful to the new colonial government.
The implied view that all Earth Kingdom women are oppressed also shows a cultural flattening of the Earth Kingdom. It’s pretty clear from the series that Kyoshi Island culturally distinct from Ba Sing Se or Gaoling. They have different gender roles and norms, and this is entirely ignored by Azula, Mai, and Ty Lee. This is also common to colonial powers historically, and still common today. Think of the way so many white western people treat East Asian ethnicities as interchangeable, especially with regards to and fetishization. In many ways, the implied attitudes of the Fire Nation people toward Earth Kingdom women and girls functions as a G-rated version of that same fetishization process.
Yup, the thing about the colonialist savior complex is that there’s no actual saving involved. These women are exploited in rhetoric to justify colonialism, and also in reality as well. It’s no wonder the Dai Li switched allegiance to Azula–she perpetuated the same system they were part of and benefited from, she just played the game better than Long Feng did.
One of the things I really liked about ATLA was how it showed the Fire Nation’s distorted perception of other cultures compared to their perceptions of themselves. The Kyoshi Warriors are a good example of this as you point out, as is what Earthbending means for Haru vs. the prison warden’s contempt for Earthbenders in the episode “Imprisoned.” The Earth Kingdom and Water Tribe characters have prejudices against Fire Nation people, too, with nearly deadly results when Jet tries to wipe out a village, but it’s also clear that the harm isn’t equal when the Water Tribes and the Earth Kingdoms are undergoing systematic genocide while the Fire Nation is facing, at its outskirts, insurgent pushback–some of it terrorist in nature, as in Jet’s case–from its aggression.
I like how the show’s response to all these complex issues was showing the diversity not only between common groupings but within them. Some Earth Kingdom women, like the Ba Sing Se upper crust, really are pampered and hyperfeminine, and that in itself isn’t a bad thing (though the system of economic exploitation underlying their luxury certainly is), the show’s subtle devaluation of girliness as bad notwithstanding. Katara, Toph, and Sokka all find something to enjoy in the Ba Sing Se high culture that caters to and is shaped by noblewomen. Some Earth Kingdom women are warriors and healers, others are everyday working class people like Jin. That kind of variety is a great antidote to the flattening view the Fire Nation imposed on other cultures, and in a way the whole show gives the lie to the idea of Asian interchangeability. (I mean it’s not perfect–it still follows the trope of “Asia” being primarily East Asia, with what could be a Southeast Asia analogue played largely as a joke and the Tibet stand-in presented as already dead and gone. But one story can’t do everything, and I can still enjoy it while seeing where it falls into common traps of thought.)
Let’s not forget Azula’s rant about how she was born to rule and is inherently better than Long Feng because of that. It reeks of a colonizational mindset.
Yes, absolutely Azula was speaking out of a colonialist mindset. I mean she did try to make it about class, referencing LF’s humble origins in contrast to her own royal heritage and I’m sure she believes that too. But she has absolute conviction in the “Fire Man’s Burden” and I think she purposefully toned down that part in that scene because she wanted the Dai Li on her side. Her harping on royal blood rings pretty hollow anyway when she deposed and imprisoned the Earth King whose blood is just as royal as her own. Clearly Earth Kingdom royalty, to her, means nothing.
To be clear Long Feng is a repressive, cruel, power-hungry man who could rise so far because he played into, and further corrupted, a corrupt system. I have no interest in excusing him or the ruling system of Ba Sing Se, and in fact I love that whole arc precisely because of the complexities involved. Colonialism is awful but the governments they replace can be terrible, too. In fact it might not even be much of a replacement, with the worst elements of the old regime, in this case the Dai Li, actively colluding with colonial rule.
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