24

Superheroes in Shanghai

Constructing Transnational Western Men’s Identities

Phiona Stanley

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.”

Introduction

A young guy flips burgers in a fast food restaurant. He has limp, greasy hair, rounded shoulders and skinny arms. We learn that ‘back on his home planet of Canada, our hero was just another average guy’. Two blonde women onlookers clarify his status; he is a ‘geek’. But the protagonist does not remain ordinary for long. He arrives in Asia and undergoes an Incredible Hulk-like metamorphosis. This is narrated: ‘when he landed on planet Japan … he became Charisma Man’. We see the effects of this transformation: he is now a broad-shouldered hunk with a confident stance and chiselled cheekbones. He has a Japanese woman on each arm, their heads resting on his shoulders. Two other Japanese women in the background tell us of his new status; in Asia, he is considered ‘cute’. This is the beginning of ‘Charisma Man’, a cartoon series that appeared in The Alien, a Tokyo English-language magazine (Kashper 2003). It refers to an anecdotally common phenomenon: the elevated sexual appeal and status of Western men in East Asia. While the Chinese context differs significantly from that of Japan, in both places locally constructed notions of ‘Westernness’, and Western masculinities in particular, serve as a foil to local constructions of the ‘Self (Bailey 2007; Conceison 2004; Farrer 2002; 2008a; b; Ito 2007; Kelsky 2001; Moskowitz 2008; Piller and Takahashi 2006; Suzuki 2007; Takahashi 2006).

This article examines this ‘superhero’ phenomenon, by which I mean the context-dependent display of extraordinary ‘superpowers’ by individuals who are otherwise ordinary; this is the premise of ‘superhero’ narratives such as Superman. I focus on the influences of this phenomenon on the lives and identities of seven Western men in Shanghai. Their experiences were different from those of the Western women and non-‘Western’ transnationals I met in the same context, for whom there was not the same licence, and indeed pressure, to live up to local imaginings of Western masculinity. This discussion is timely and important because although the interplay of different notions of masculinity has been documented in other intercultural contexts (e.g. Malam 2008; Van Hoven and Meijering 2005) this article discusses something else: the lived realities of men whose own masculinities, and those attributed to their gendered national identities, do not match.

This is significant. Few other studies have focused on Western men’s own lived experiences in East Asia, although some mention these in passing, as Moskowitz (2008, 330) does, writing that Western men are ‘quite happily embracing the hedonistic identity that has been thrust upon them’. Are they? This article problematizes these men’s seemingly enviable situation, of being the object of desire among many women. The inspiration for this research came from my own experiences in China, where I noticed that some Western men became swept up in the ‘superhero complex’, while others harshly judged those who did and firmly resisted the suggestion that they were sexually, socially and romantically desirable mainly because of their nationality and ethnicity. This article describes the experiences and identity tensions of seven Western men in Shanghai as a basis from which to build understanding about the impact of border-crossing on gendered identity construction more generally. It is not, it must be said, a discussion of Western women’s experiences, or non-Western men’s experiences, or gay men’s experiences, or any other group. My intention is not to catalogue all people’s experiences of border crossings, but instead to use these men’s stories to shed light on the processes they engage in when constructing and living transnational masculine identities.

Theoretical Frameworks and Contextualizing Literature

This article exposes the process through which gendered identities are constructed in a transnational context. As background, I review literature on identity, culture-specific constructions of masculinity, Occidentalism and the staging of ‘authenticity’ to meet out-group performance expectations. I then briefly consider neo-colonialism in Shanghai and the role of sojourning English language teachers such as the men in this study.

‘Identity’ is a much used but rather amorphous term rather than a unitary construct. At the most basic level, ‘identity’ describes the ongoing personhood and uniqueness of individuals (Joseph 2004). But identity work goes further than this, seeking to explain how we become and maintain the ‘selves’ we inhabit. Within this, there is a continuum of positions on identity between, on the one hand, Levi-Straussian societal constraint as determining identity and, on the other hand, Sartrean existentialism that places identity construction in the hands of individuals (Ivanic 2006; Joseph 2004; King 2000). The notion that our position in the society of which we are a part determines who we are is an objectivist position in which identity is attributed by others, from outside of the self. In contrast, the idea that we determine our own identity, or identities, by the way we (choose to) respond to stimuli and to perform (Butler 1990) is a subjectivist position in which we appropriate our own identity for ourselves (King 2000). Between these extremes, and the middle-ground understanding that I assume in this article, identity is something that is both appropriated by individuals and attributed by others. As a result:

So identity is a complex, messy interplay between our own claims about who we are (through narrative and performance), the ways in which others perceive us (through their own subjective ‘lenses’ with which they perceive the world), and our negotiations with others, and indeed with ourselves, where there are inconsistencies between these (Wodak et al. 2009).

Identity construction is therefore complex and ongoing, and its complexity is nowhere more profound than in the identities of ‘border-crossing’ individuals (Lindgren and Wahlin 2001). This includes the crossing of national borders but also, more generally, movement between social milieux. In such cases, appropriated and attributed identities may become incongruent and there is a need to renegotiate identities. Border-crossing therefore provides a chance to observe identity construction taking place as objectivist and subjectivist positions are negotiated. Additionally, as the world globalizes and people’s mobility increases, border crossing is increasingly common. Yet little is understood of the way this process occurs (Kelly and Lusis 2006). The present article addresses this need, focusing as it does on the way gendered identities are constructed when people cross borders and discover that their performances and appropriated identities, which may have hitherto gone largely unquestioned, are now at odds with local people’s expectations.

Some work has been done on the disparity between Western men’s appropriated masculinities as compared to their attributed masculinities outside of their own social contexts. Farrer (2002) describes the idealization and commoditization of foreign men by some Chinese women in Shanghai. This is attributable to the social construction of Western masculinity as a kind of über-masculinity in China (Zheng 2006); the idea that certain constructions of masculinity are prized over others is the premise of Connell’s (2005) work on hegemonic masculinity. Inter-group contesting of normative masculinities is not unique to China. The criteria for evaluating men’s gendered performances change according to context, with the norms of Western hegemonic masculinity challenged by, for example, chai chatri masculinity in Thailand (Malam 2008), machismo in Latin America (Willis 2005), and wen-wu in China (Louie 2002). Each of these is a different construction of masculinity from that of Western masculinity. When men interact interculturally, their gendered performance may be evaluated against their audience’s own norms of masculinity. Malam (2008) exemplifies this with her description of Western and Thai men’s negative evaluations of each other. Alternatively, role expectations may originate in cultural stereotyping, producing, for example, the ‘oriental butterfly’ notion of Asian femininity (Halualani 2008; Villapando 2000). This suggests that normative criteria may derive from neither the home nor the host culture but from imaginings about the ‘Other’. This explains the idealization in East Asia of Western men as über-masculine. This echoes Kelsky’s (2001) findings, from Japan, that Orientalism and its mirror image, Occidentalism, underpin the desire for partners whose sexual and social identities are infused, and perhaps confused, with attributed identities based on gendered stereotypes.

Occidentalism refers to the process whereby Westerners are exoticized and essentialized in the Chinese imagination (Cai 2003). This is in part post-colonial resistance to Orientalism but also serves to support the nationalism through which legitimacy is constructed both for the Chinese government in China and for China’s place in the world order (Gries 2006). Occidentalism has been documented in Chinese advertising (Li 2008) and theatre (Conceison 2004). But the ‘West’ is an imagined place, of which Zheng (2006, 170) writes:

This is similar to the notion of the ‘Orient’ as an ‘experiential entity’ that exists as a figment of the Western imagination (Balagangadhara and Keppens 2009). Clearly, places in the ‘West’ and the ‘Orient’ exist, but the coherence of ‘the West’ and ‘the Orient’ are constructed fictions. These provide frameworks within which transnational individuals’ performances may or may not ‘fit’.

As a result, individuals’ performances may be critically evaluated as (insufficiently) ‘authentic’, according to out-group constructions about the cultural identification ascribed to the individuals. Some research in this area has been conducted in tourism studies, into tourists’ search for ‘authenticity’. Accounts abound of tourists’ experiences of local people that are considered insufficiently ‘authentic’ when evaluated against tourists’ own constructions, often based on stereotypes, of local cultures (Ateljevic and Doorne 2005; Kontogeorgopoulos 2003; Little 2004; Oakes 2006; Robinson and Phipps 2005; Rojek and Urry 1997; White 2007). Like local constructions of Western men in East Asia, these are attributed constructions about (rather than appropriated constructions by) the people concerned. These constructions create a set of expectations against which individuals’ performances might be compared. As a result, tourism providers may ‘stage authenticity’; Bruner (2005) describes Masai performances for tourists in Kenya, for example. Crang (1997, 148) describes such work, of playing expected roles, as ‘the deep acting of emotional labour’. He analyses tourism performances, including ever-smiling airline staff and compulsorily bubbly, chatty and flirty bar staff in Mediterranean resorts, concluding that ‘these employees’ selves become part of the product … their personhood is commodified’ (Crang 1997, 153). However, it is more than just employees’ performances that are commoditized by these jobs. Their ascribed characteristics—ethnicity, gender, age and looks, for example—are ‘part of what is required from an employee’ (Crang 1997, 152). So in order to meet expectations, individuals may have to perform a hyper-real version of ‘themselves’, as they are imagined by others. This is relevant to the present study because of the ‘mutual gaze’ (Maoz 2006) between tourists and their hosts in which both sides observe and evaluate each other. My finding is that it is Western men in China whose identities may be commoditized by some Chinese women’s Occidentalist constructions of ‘typical’ masculinities of the Western Other. Although the Chinese are the ‘host’ culture, their ‘gaze’ has an effect on the gendered performances of Western men there.

Some research has been undertaken on Asian women’s eroticization of Western men and its basis in Occidentalist stereotyping. Piller and Takahashi (2006) interviewed Japanese women who constructed Western men as chivalrous and romantic. One example of a Western man idealized in this way by the Japanese media is the British soccer player David Beckham and Ito (2007) describes how Beckham, and his ‘gendered national identity’, are constructed in Japan as sincere, kind-hearted, fun-loving, intimate and the perfect husband. Bailey (2007) makes a similar analysis in his discussion of Western men teachers and local women students in Japanese language schools. In Taiwan, Moskowitz (2008) examined Western men’s and Chinese women’s constructed sexualities in Taipei’s dance clubs. There, he shows, Taiwanese women present to sometimes-naïve Western men their own sexual identities as chaste; Western men’s Orientalist notions about Chinese women support these fantasies. Similarly, Occidentalism supports the:

In addition to this, Western men may be perceived as providing wealth and opportunities to live abroad (Farrer 2002). This explanation for Western men’s desirability in China in particular may be explained by the greater salary differentials of Western expatriates to locals, compared to greater parity in Japan. For example, the teachers I interviewed in this study earn about US$18,000 annually. Although meagre in Western expatriate terms, this salary is considerable by Shanghai standards (People’s Daily 2009), and affords them the opportunity to live hedonistic lifestyles well beyond the means of many local people. This explanation is confirmed by Ewing (2009), who reports that Western men’s desirability in China has fallen since the global financial crisis. In East Asia, then, the cachet of Western men is explainable by various factors including the social construction of Western masculinity as more ‘decadent and free’ but also the idea that Western men are wealthy providers as well as sincere, kind-hearted husband material.

The interplay of Chinese and Western gendered identities may also be overlaid with power relations based on the imperial legacy inherent in Western-led globalization (Kelly 2008). Imperialism is not new in Shanghai, which is steeped in a semi-colonial history in which European countries partitioned the city into foreign ‘concessions’. Sojourning Western English teachers in Asia and elsewhere have been convincingly framed as agents of neo-imperialism (e.g. Kelly 2008; Phillipson 1992). However, as imperialism, employing Western English teachers in China is perhaps atypical as it is primarily a demand-led phenomenon borne of China’s scramble to implement a massive English teaching program for its own ends (Graddol 2006). China’s recent education reforms stipulate foreign language teaching, almost always English, throughout most of compulsory education. English teaching occurs from grade three of primary school, throughout secondary school, and for at least two years of tertiary education in all disciplines. Two crucial ‘gatekeeping’ examinations test students’ English: the College Entrance Exam and the College English Test. This means that, without English, students can neither enrol in nor graduate from tertiary education (Ryan 2010). However, this amount of English teaching is beyond the capabilities of China’s homegrown English teaching cadre, whose own English may lack communicative competence (Hu 2005) and in which fluent local English teachers may be lured away from teaching by higher salaries in other industries (Jin and Cortazzi 2003). Transnational teachers of English are therefore in great demand, and this demand far outstrips supply (Watkins 2006). I conceive the teachers in this study, then, less as imperialists than as opportunists.

Method, Context and Participants

This article is a qualitative case study of seven Western men in Shanghai that aims to illuminate the field rather than represent a wider population from a sample (Stake 2005). It draws upon data collected over two academic years (2007–2009) and three visits to Shanghai, totalling four months. Grounded theory informed the data collection, coding and analysis (Charmaz 2006), and the study made use of more than 200 hours of recorded data gathered in semi-structured conversations, both individual interviews and focus groups, with a total of over 60 participants. This was triangulated against other data sources including classroom observations, ethnographic research and document analyses. This study is informed by my seven-year connection with Shanghai, during which I have worked and researched in various contexts there.

The seven men whose stories appear in this article were recruited as study participants though my participant research at People’s Square University (PSU, a pseudonym), the Shanghai university where they work. This university, which ranks in the top 100 of 1700 tertiary institutions in China (Chinese Academy of Management Science 2009), was my research site because it offered access to a heterogeneous, bounded sample of Western teachers, whose identities, roles and training needs were the subject of the larger study from which this data is drawn. In addition, two of their women colleagues’ voices appear here. The biographical data of the quoted participants appeal in Table 24.1; all names are pseudonyms.

My own positionality is central to this research. I am a White, British-Australian woman and I was 34 when I first met the participants, who are also ‘Western’, and mostly White, and whose mean age was 28. Like them, I am interested in China, have lived and worked in Shanghai, and have been an English language teacher overseas. I also sought out common ground on which to bond: we talked books, travels and language learning. I consciously emphasized such commonalities and built trust with my participants, staying in touch by email and on Facebook between my visits to China. By luck and planning, I was able to ‘belong’ among the foreign teachers at PSU.

Positionality became particularly salient in 2009, by which time I was finding gender differences in the data on teachers’ experiences. To find out more, I asked the participants to comment on parts of the earlier data in which gender differences were mentioned. Some of these conversations became very personal: some of the younger men (aged 23–26) talked about having sex with their students, teaching when ‘stoned’, and lads’ nights out involving ‘nailing a lot of birds’ and ‘banging hookers’. I thought again about the effect of my own identity. It helped that I had met most of the teachers before and that I had built two-year friendships with some of them. As a result, I was introduced to the later participants as a friend of a friend. But my own identity helped too. I am 10 years older than some of the men cited in this article; too old (and, if I am honest, not ‘hot’ enough) to be of sexual interest to them. But I am still young enough not to make them think they are talking to their mothers. (In fact, one of the teachers e-mailed me some more data in response to his interview transcript, telling me ‘don’t tell my mum!’) My ‘Western’ culture and White ethnicity also played a part, as some of the discourses I encountered were strongly Orientalist. I doubt I would have heard so much about ‘submissive’ Asian women if I had been an Asian woman and so, presumably, constructed as ‘submissive’ myself. Additionally, the men I interviewed did not seem to feel it necessary to ‘prove’ their masculinity to me; perhaps with a male researcher they would have been less candid about their vulnerabilities.

I was less fortunate when I interviewed Chinese students. I conducted focus groups and individual interviews with volunteer students, women and men, and in these meetings my ethnicity and age meant that I was very much a foreigner and a teacher rather than an insider. I heard many depersonalized accounts from the women students: their friends have (or want) foreign boyfriends, their friends experiment, their friends do this; they themselves are respectable. This is a performance. It allowed for the acknowledgement of truth but also the preservation of feminine respectability in front of a female interviewer. Bailey (2007) shows how his (White, male) identity allowed for greater access to Japanese women’s truths than a female researcher may have been able to access. Similarly, my (White, female) identity allowed me to access Western men’s truths. And this is an article about Western men.

The seven men whose stories appear here are English language teachers and all worked in Shanghai between 2007 and 2009. All were relatively young (between 23 and 40), all were unmarried, all identified as heterosexual, and all are ‘Westerners’, a difficult label whose meaning is discussed below. English language teaching may be regarded as a low-status expatriate role (e.g. Cresswell-Turner 2004; Matei & Medgyes 2003; Thornbury 2001), and English teachers in China are often ‘gap-year’ sojourners. While exact foreign teacher numbers are unknowable because of China’s decentralized work permit processing and the myriad visa types on which they may be employed, around 100,000 non-Chinese teachers of English are employed in China each year, in both public and private education sectors (People’s Daily 2006). Of course, ‘low status’ is relative, and sojourning teachers nevertheless choose to leave home, and have passports and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986) that allow them to do so. Additionally, most of the teachers in this study have an English language teaching qualification, and all are university graduates.

A note on terminology is necessary. In Shanghai, the term ‘Westerner’ usually denotes Whiteness but also a notion of ‘cultural’ Westernness (Zheng 2006). Leo is the only non-White participant cited here; he self-identifies as Chinese-Canadian, and his struggle to reconcile his attributed and appropriated national identities is discussed below. ‘Western’ is a different construct from ‘native English speaker’, and some non-native English speakers from mainland Europe are employed at PSU as ‘Western’ teachers. Another term the participants have appropriated is ‘foreigner’, a translation of the Chinese terms waiguoren and laowai. These Chinese terms lack the negative connotations of ‘foreigner’.

Becoming Superheroes

The focus of this article is not the causes of the superhero phenomenon but the experiences of Western men themselves. However, it is useful to begin with a brief examination of the participants’ perceptions of Chinese women’s motives, as this provides an insight into the identity construction the participants undertake. The stereotype described above, of foreigners as hedonistic, appears to explain one motive ascribed to Chinese women; that of utilizing a sexual relationship with a Western Other as a way to experience a lifestyle that may otherwise be out of bounds to young Chinese women in Shanghai (Farrer 2002). Three participants in a focus group discussed this motivation; the Chinese women they describe are those they have encountered in Shanghai:

So curiosity over Westerners’ lives is one motivation these men perceived. But stereotyping about Westerners among the Chinese people I interviewed went beyond the mystique of the foreign Other, with Western men assumed to be gentlemanly, sexually accomplished, free of Chinese concerns (or positioning) of social class/province of origin, wealthy, and as providing an opportunity for international travel and residence. These, forms of capital, particularly the last two, appear to be highly prized in Shanghai. In addition, several Chinese women I interviewed described the hope that a (White) foreign husband might mean having not only several children (as opposed to the single birth to which most women are limited by Chinese law), but that these children might have pale skin; this is considered a marker of high status and beauty in China, as it is elsewhere (for example in Mexico; Winders et al. 2005).

So Western men appear to be desirable among women in Shanghai for reasons other than wealth alone. Beth explained her perception:

This construction of Western men as ‘racier’ can be attributed to stereotyping about Western masculinity, perhaps borne of Hollywood and other media. This was mentioned by several participants and often framed as an attack on Chinese masculinity and/or on Chinese women’s ostensible sexual passivity. Four participants discussed this issue:

Occidentalist constructions of masculinity appear to work in Western men’s favour. However, this may also result in them making evaluations of Chinese men and women’s sexualities as deficient, as above. This appears to be both informed by, and in turn reify, participants’ Orientalist framing of the feminization of the East and its penetration by the West.

Zero to Hero

I now turn to examining the superhero phenomenon as the study participants experience it. Of course, as most of the participants are still in Shanghai this is perhaps prescient, and the findings in this section are necessarily partial. However, through my two-year study of the PSU teachers I have been able to track some changes over time.

There are doubtless some positive influences of the superhero phenomenon, and these were frequently articulated in interviews:

Ryan’s and Todd’s are convincing testimonies to some positive influences of the superhero experience for the men themselves. However, they are borne of an imbalance of power between Western men and Chinese women, and the consequent demand among the latter for the former. Comparing Chinese and Western women, Ryan illuminates this power imbalance:

Ryan’s critique is perhaps persuasive, particularly given its emic framing in Chinese cultural terms, and he constructs the role of Chinese women as different-but-equal to the role of Chinese men. Ryan’s Taoist, yin–yang framework runs deep in Chinese culture (Louie 2002). However, it does not ring particularly true in modern Shanghai, whose women inhabitants are notoriously strong, feisty, and dominant of men, at least in the private sphere (Farrer 2002). While Ryan’s assertion is doubtless based in his own and his peers’ experiences, Chinese women in these encounters may choose to make themselves powerless in their pursuit of Western men at any cost, as Western men are highly valued commodities (Farrer 2002). Despite Ryan’s claim to the contrary, this is not feminism but the interplay of neocolonial power relations. Ryan’s critique can, then, best be described as an Orientalism in Taoist clothing. The powerlessness of Chinese women in relationships with Western men is a postcolonial inequality in which Western men are perceived as desirable because they are Western men. Thus, rather than ‘worshipping’ femininity, Ryan reduces and essentializes Chinese women. This appears to be one cost of the confidence boost experienced by men who become superheroes in Shanghai.

However, most of the men in this study did perceive increased self-confidence, social empowerment and external validation of social and sexual success, and these can be said to be positive outcomes for the men themselves. But the superhero phenomenon appears to have had more negative than positive outcomes for the study participants, and possible negatives include: the perception of transactional relationships, tensions between socially constructed roles and the personal identities of individuals, and the sanctioning of enacted identities considered socially unacceptable at home. These are discussed next.

‘We Are Interchangeable’

As discussed above, Chinese women’s pursuit of Western men may be about Western men as a category rather than necessarily about the individual. This issue led some of the Western men to feel objectified by Chinese women:

While Sam and Dan felt they were being used by the Chinese women with whom they had formed relationships, other Western men either rejected the notion that they were being objectified, or denied that it was problematic:

Having said that he felt objectified but that this was unproblematic for him, Jon described how expectations about Western men affected the reality of his relationships with Chinese women. Here, he and Alan negotiate the issue:

The extent to which objectification is felt to be problematic may depend on the individual’s purpose. Jon says that he just ‘wants to have fun’, and that, as a result, he is not concerned that he may be objectified or that he cannot be himself in a relationship. Beth describes encounters between Western men motivated by ‘having fun’ and Chinese women motivated by ‘experimenting’ as a ‘culture of mutual exploitation’, and I am inclined to agree. But not all men feel comfortable about possible objectification or the role constructed by (perceptions about) Western men as a category. This points to an important issue, that the ‘superhero’ phenomenon affects individuals differently.

Conflicting Identities

A second potential negative consequence of the superhero effect is exemplified by Alan’s story, which is of tensions between his appropriated identity and the identity attributed to Western men. Beth begins Alan’s story:

Alan tells his own story:

Alan’s discourse is complex. On the one hand, he resists the insincerity of the ‘groundwork’ required to have casual sex with Chinese women and says he feels uncomfortable about deceiving those who are ‘too innocent’. On the other hand, Alan’s discourse is framed in terms of ‘nailing birds’ and describing women who have casual sex as ‘sluts’, and he presents his unwillingness to occupy the Western-man-in-Shanghai role as ‘too much effort’ rather than as morally wrong. Alan’s comment above was recorded in a focus group in front of Todd, Jon, Sam and Dan, and it is possible that this complexity is due to peer pressure; Alan is both ‘one of the boys’ and not ‘of the boys’, and his discourse represents a skilful navigation between his own, personal identity and the identity he enacts to be accepted among his peers. On a subsequent email, Alan confirmed that ‘the bastard role’ made him ‘feel uncomfortable’ (Alan, e-mail, 2009).

Thus Alan appears to be negotiating the difference between his personal (appropriated) identity and the relational identity attributed to (and enacted by some) Western men in Shanghai. But other Western men may be less able to compartmentalize and manage their appropriated and attributed identities, and may, as a result, feel they are taking on an identity with which they are uncomfortable. One such case may be Ryan, who comments:

Ryan’s point is echoed by Jon, who describes himself as having become ‘a bit dirty’ as a result of the role he is expected to play in Shanghai. Leo described the metamorphosis Western men may experience:

The extent to which individuals feel comfortable feigning ‘Western masculinity’ as it is imagined and expected in the context depends on the individual’s skill in negotiating the competing pressures of their pre-existing identity and the pressure they encounter both from Chinese women and from their peers. Some, like Alan, seem able to achieve this balance through skilful discourse and finding a longer-term relationship; others, like Jon, compartmentalize their attributed and appropriated identities. Still others may begin a relationship while continuing to ‘play the field’, leading to feelings of guilt over the ethics of it; this is the situation Ryan describes. Another tack, taken by Leo, is to resist the identity of Westernness at all, and take refuge in another identity; Leo uses his Chinese identity. Other men, of course, may find a closer match between their appropriated identities and the role constructed for Western men, and may enjoy the opportunity to behave in ways considered unacceptable at home.

Men Behaving Badly

Many of the men in this study described behaviours in which they engage in Shanghai but which may not be socially sanctioned in their home communities. These included paying for sex and pursuing sexual relationships with their students. Karen described her perception of these behaviours as ways of forming group solidarity among Western men:

Todd, Ryan, Jon and Alan confirmed that many of the Western men in their social group use sex workers in Shanghai although few had done so in their home countries. Todd rationalized the practice with reference to local norms, although his rationalization is somewhat unpersuasive and it seems he may be trying to convince himself:

Another ‘bad’ behaviour is the culture of ‘banging students’; while this is ostensibly forbidden, almost all the participant teachers at the university raised it in interviews, and the practice seems to be commonplace for some of the Western men. While at least one of the Western teachers at PSU (not quoted here) has formed a long-term relationship with a woman who was originally his student, there is also a culture among some of the younger Western men of objectifying their female students (and other Chinese women) and of having casual sex with a series of women, including their students. Beth described the phenomenon:

Ryan also described the issue, citing Jon as an example:

Beth’s more nuanced description of an incident from Jon’s story highlights her perception of his agency as well as his outward behaviour:

Ethically, it must be noted that Jon himself confirmed the details of these quotes, and that Jon is not the only teacher about whom this kind of story was told in the data. Here, his story is used to exemplify a wider phenomenon.

From the participants’ discourse there is clearly an awareness that these behaviours would probably be considered ethically wrong in their home cultures. However the stronger pressure seems to come from the men’s peer group, perhaps because they are a long way from home, family and old friends, and are conscious of the need to fit in socially among their peers. They are also in a foreign culture but in a role in which they seem to be expected to portray the outward confidence expected of (Occidentalized notions of) ‘Westerners’. It may be that engaging in ‘bad’ behaviours allows for this confidence to be projected even if it is not felt. Clearly these behaviours are potentially dangerous both in health terms and in terms of job security. (While none of the teachers in the participants’ peer group actually lost their jobs because of sexual involvement with their students, it was the stated policy of the university that this was grounds for immediate dismissal of foreign teachers; rumours circulated, but little could be proven and no official disciplinary procedure was ever instigated.)

Some men in the study strongly condemned these behaviours as exploitative or as damaging to the men themselves and Dan explained his frustration with the university management that allows this culture to flourish:

Sam and Leo made similar comments about their discomfort with the culture of ‘banging students’, and expressed concern that they and other Western men may be tarred with the brush of those who behave ‘badly’.

Karen also explored this issue, framing it as her responses to the behaviour of the Western men with whom she works and socializes:

These quotes tell the stories of Westerners who appear to be struggling with the ethics of the behaviour condoned, and arguably encouraged, of those playing the role of ‘young Western man in Shanghai’. One response, taken by Jon, is to compartmentalize behaviour in Shanghai as a ‘year out’ of ‘real life’ or as ‘having fun’ while one is young. But other men, perhaps older, or those who hope to make Shanghai their home, may question the ethics of the situation and may feel uncomfortable with the role as it is constructed by the expectations about Western men in Shanghai.

Depending on the extent to which Western men problematize their attributed identity, and the extent to which they live outside of their own values while they are in China, there may also be problems when these men return to their home societies. Karen commented on this, citing the experiences of Western men she knows who have returned to the UK and the USA.

Cultural re-entry was the subject of speculation for several of the participants in this study, but further research on returned expatriates would be necessary to understand the experiences as they occur in the lived realities of individuals.

Conclusion

This article has presented and discussed the stories of seven Western men in Shanghai. All of them appear to be struggling, to a greater or lesser degree, with the very complex, cross-cultural, neo-imperialistic, powerful/powerless situation in which they have put themselves, and the situation influences their own identities. While some enjoy the ‘hedonistic’ masculinity attributed to them, most experience a discord between this and the subjective identities they appropriate.

They respond to this differently. Jon is very clear that this is a phase in his life that will one day be behind him and he embraces the playboy role seemingly expected of Western men in Shanghai; though he engages in ‘bad behaviour’, his experiences may be among the least challenging to his own identity. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Leo has appropriated a Chinese identity and rejects being associated with Western masculinity. Nevertheless, he does engage in some of the staffroom ‘boys’ chat’, perhaps as a way of bonding with other Western men and/or to prove his ‘Westen) identity’, on which his job is predicated, in the absence of stereotypically ‘Western’ Whiteness on which to legitimize himself as a ‘Western’ teacher.

Between these extremes, Alan, Ryan and Todd appear to be struggling with the performances expected of them, the conflicting demands of peer pressure, and the pre-existing identities they bring to the encounter. Alan has responded by removing himself from the “bad behaviour’ while still framing his discourse in peer-approved terms. Ryan says he disapproves of much of his own behaviour, while seemingly having internalized much of its implicit Orientalism. Todd attempts to normalize and rationalize his behaviours with reference to local norms, though it appears he is trying to convince himself of the acceptability of practices in which he and some of the other teachers engage. Finally Dan and Sam, who perhaps struggled most with the identity attributed to Western men, have decided to leave Shanghai. Clearly other factors are at play here, particularly professional frustrations, but both have also expressed their difficulties with the ‘superhero’ phenomenon and the social isolation they have encountered by not joining the ‘boys’ club’.

Thus although the lived experiences of the superhero phenomenon differ according to the individual and the identity construction discourse undertaken, the superhero phenomenon appears to have had primarily negative influences on the Western men in this study. This has important implications for our understanding of geographies of masculinities, in that individual men’s gendered performances, and the implicit criteria against which their masculinity may be evaluated, are subject to pressures beyond that of hegemonic masculinity but also beyond that of notions of masculinity specific to other contexts. The Western men in this study are expected, and pressured, to behave according to a model of masculinity based neither on hegemonic masculinity nor Chinese masculinity, but on Occidentalist Chinese constructions of what Western men are like. Thus even though most of them disapprove of the behaviours sanctioned by this model, they perform, to a greater or lesser extent, the roles expected of them. The ‘gaze’ both of Chinese women and of their Western peers forces them to stage an ‘authenticity’ that is attributed rather than appropriated, and to commoditize themselves in the process. But they struggle with the morality and congruity of their actions, responding in different ways to the enforced dualism of their identities. They are supposed to be Superman, but secretly they may feel they are Clark Kent.

Acknowledgements

Heartfelt thanks to Professor Alistair McCulloch (University of South Australia) and Dr Jill Brown (Monash University) for their insightful comments at various stages of this article’s creation. The advice of anonymous reviewers has also been tremendously useful and I raise a glass to them.

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