Presenter: Brian Goedde

Audience: Faculty

In-Person: Bonnell, B1-08

 

• Learn about four powerful, provocative texts: The short story “Madame Butterfly” by John Luther Long (1898), the opera by the same name by Giacomo Puccini (1904), the Tony-Award winning play M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang (1988), and its subsequent film adaptation directed by David Cronenberg (1993).
• Learn how these two generations of Butterfly texts had noble DEI intentions for their respective times, but aged badly. In time, what began as progressive statements became examples of prejudice.
• Be invited to engage in discussion on what such ultimately regressive effects tell us about their initial progressive intentions.

 

 

My selection of texts for literature classes is largely motivated by diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. A work of theatre that I have taught for years has been M. Butterfly by Chinese-American playwright David Henry Hwang, which is a critique of the short story and opera Madame Butterfly from a century before. Even though the authors of Madame Butterfly may have intended to deliver an anti-racist, feminist message for the turn of the 20th century, Hwangʼs play asserts, it perpetuates racist and sexist stereotypes to do so.

 

These texts have vibrantly engaged my students in discussions of racism and sexism, especially in the critique presented in Hwangʼs play. However, in more recent years, my students have presented me with an equally compelling argument for how Hwangʼs play, though anti-racist and feminist in its critique of Madame Butterfly, is itself homophobic and transphobic. In other words, Hwang arguably makes the same misstep: M. Butterfly asserts a progressive agenda, but (unwittingly?) perpetuates different forms of prejudice. Is this a matter of hypocrisy?

 

Is it a matter of the evolution of the Butterfly stories, and our DEI conversations inspired by them? What can we learn from texts that age badly to reveal prejudice to subsequent generations of readers, viewers, professors and students?