Iconography and the Asian face

Saint Ia the Teacher

Today is the Sunday of Orthodoxy, the day on which we commemorate the vindication of the veneration of icons in the Byzantine Empire, but I find that I’m still trying to process what happened in Atlanta this past week. An intensely-religious young man suffering from sexual frustrations and loneliness took out his rage and self-loathing on the bodies of women, with six of the eight known victims being Asian-American women. How can we deal with this?

If we are honest, we must acknowledge the several dimensions of this case. It is simply not enough to write off this case as a mere example of individual misogyny and sexual frustration. That is a partial truth at best. Several conservative commentators have tried to do so already, including Rod Dreher (who is never short of excuses when it comes to explaining away American culture’s lowkey mistreatment of Asian Americans). If the Asian women involved were ‘just’ prostitutes, and their killer was ‘just’ a deranged sex pervert whose problems can be dismissed as individual psychosis, it becomes that much easier to dismiss them and anyone who might find broader grounds for concern. On the Sunday of Orthodoxy, though, we must beware of dismissing the full humanity of any person, or need for a full rather than a partial justice, and we must bear in mind the sort of table fellowship that Christ Himself kept.

There is in my icon corner, an icon of the Chinese saints of the Boxer Rebellion. I keep this icon – a reminder to my children that there is holiness in faces that look like theirs – in a place of special prominence, next to icons of the Maccabee martyrs, and next to an icon of Saint Niketas the Goth – which serve as reminders to me that there is a holiness in faces that look like mine. There is a reason for this placement. The light of Christ shines through ‘yellow’ Asian faces, just as much as it shines through ‘white’ European faces; just as much as it shines through ‘black’ African and Melanesian faces; just as much as it shines through ‘brown’ South Asian and Middle Eastern faces; just as much as it shines through the ‘red’ faces of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The icons of the saints show us that Christ is fully present, that the full nature of transfigured humanity is entirely present in every single person, regardless of their sex, their class, what job they have, where their ancestors came from or what colour skin they have. Iconography demolishes racial difference by placing it beneath the universal-personal Reality of Christ. Saint Ia the Teacher appears to us as she truly is in her icon.

This is the opposite of how the broader society treats Asian faces. This is the opposite of the way Dreher, and Hughes, and others, expect us white men to treat women with Asian faces. Dreher even quotes, with tacit approval, a reader on his blog who literally defends the ‘mysterious and magical’ racial archetype of the Asian ‘exotic seductress’ – an archetype which is created and reinforced by the demands of the market in prostitution and pornography – even as that same reader recognises and decries the fact that it’s all a calculated act, for show.

There is a reason why Fr Seraphim Rose referred to pornography as ‘the devil’s iconography’, and why Plato’s Socrates made connexions between prostitution and the sorts of crowd-pleasing acts that demagogues in the public square do. Even though skin is shown, and touched, what is felt and beheld is not the real person. The aspects of the real person that are there, are falsified even in being shown, because they are marketed as the instruments of another’s lust – another’s desire to dominate. Pornography does the exact opposite of what iconography does: it occludes the real person being portrayed. Our society’s exoticised, eroticised, submissive ‘yellow-fever’ portrayal of Asian women is a hindrance to seeing them as they truly are.

What Dreher and Hughes deliberately refuse to understand, and refuse to understand because of the New Cold War and culture-war angle that is part of their own marketing strategy, is that pornography does have an inescapably racist dimension. This is precisely because it appeals to a disordered desire to dominate, and racial power disparities are marketable. The same logic holds true for prostitution: backdoor brothels are businesses, and they simply would not sell Asian bodies to frustrated men if there were not a marketable power disparity there. These things do the opposite of iconography and the opposite of relic veneration, in that they take pieces – body parts, aspects of identity – of real women, and turn them into an illusion of actual connexion: a sham, a façade, a facsimile of love. They turn the meeting of body with body into an occasion of idolatry, the worship of the self. The men who visit prostitutes – or who look at porn – do so because it gives them an illusory sense of power over women. The same logic holds true of men (whether white or otherwise) who frequent prostitutes or pornographic images of women of another race: that illusory sense of power over someone of another race is part of the ‘product’.

Fr Seraphim Rose spoke wisely. Iconography and relic-veneration do destroy these illusions: precisely because being one in Christ destroys these power differences between Greek and Jew, slave and free, man and woman. At church, I take care to venerate an icon of Saint Mary of Ægypt. She was, for much of her life, a prostitute – and a particularly shameless and indiscreet one at that. She is venerated because she repented, but her repentance consumed the entire latter half of her life. Here’s the thing: when I venerate this particular (brown-skinned, half-naked, Middle Eastern) woman, I am acknowledging before her and before Christ my own powerlessness, my own weakness, and I am not given back any illusion of power or any sense of entitlement to satisfaction, sexual or otherwise. (She is the saint. I am not.) The meeting of my lips and hands with her image is not the occasion for lust or for idolatry. It is the occasion for healing, however slow and however arduous (just as it was for her), from both.