Guerilla Women And Men In Silk Dresses: Diplomacy and Orientalism during the 1860 Japanese Mission

Abstract

Abstract: In the summer of 1860, seventy-seven samurai conducted a month-long tour of Eastern Seaboard cities during a diplomatic mission to advance the fledgling US–Japan relations. The delegation became an instant sensation. News coverage of the visit revolved around a few motifs: feminized representations of the Japanese diplomats; white women's enthusiastic receptions; and castigations of white women's autonomous participation in formal and informal diplomatic arenas. This article interprets the press's feminizing discourse as an instantiation of American orientalism and argues that diplomacy, due to its inherent and historically specific workings, undercut and subverted the press's feminization of Japanese men and devaluation of white women's political capacity and that white women's interracial sexual desire was imagined in such a way that disconnected the organization of sexuality from a rigid male–female gender binary.