Political Dis-identification of Colonial Performativity: From the Sublime to the Queer of M. Butterfly

Despite its first premiere more than a century ago, Puccini’s classic opera Madame Butterfly remains a commercial sellout in both West and East. The unabated popularity of the opera would not have been possible without the geisha’s performative immortality as Butterfly. The performative colonial fantasy mediated through the abstract body of the sublime has been as prevailing and effective as before, insofar as the geisha’s symbolic death eliminates the ontological gap between the geisha and Butterfly, which turns her into a sublime being of immaterial corporality. It refers to the state of both racial and sexual fantasy realized at its purest level even beyond the spatial and periodic set of Anglo-European colonialism. Hwang’s M. Butterfly satirizes such a clichéd relationship between East and West in the original. It mocks the latter’s race and gender-specific fantasy,while criticized for reinvigorating Orientalist fantasy that renders Asian women submissive and subordinate to Western men. His play critiques the West’s projection of colonial desire onto the Oriental body by interjecting Asian otherness into Western subjectivity. In the play,Gallimard’s self-killing refers to a traumatic failure of maintaining the ideological consistency of Western subjectivity as grounded upon the tropes of masculinity and heterosexuality. The play contradicts the presumed colonial dynamic in the sense that the West’s obscene sexuality turns hysterical and the supposed hysterical one of the East becomes perverted. Gallimard’s trans-racial homosexuality exemplifies the Janus-faced dimension of the sublime, for its traumatic, as well as queer, revelation radically transforms the fascinating love object of Butterfly into something repulsive, unfathomable, and monstrous. His reluctant but inevitable coming-out opens up excessive otherness that has been repressed in the ontological kernel of his Western male heterosexual subjectivity. It makes him an unidentifiable void in the ideological reality that taboos his sexual, gender, and racial orientations. His queer performance obscures such deep-rooted ideological binaries as East/West,male/female, and subject/other; however, his suicide in a Butterfly costume makes for the restoration of systemic consistency in the ideological reality of coloniality, Hwang’s re-fashioning of Butterfly as queer is so effective that it de-familiarizes Butterfly’s colonial materiality to be obscene, perverted, and oppositional in light of dis-identification.