My Trouble With Mantis in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

I saw Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 a couple weeks ago, and since then I've been rolling stuff over in my mind about the Mantis character. My reaction during the movie was discomfort—I felt I was watching a portrayal that played to certain racial stereotypes. As often happens, though, I hesitated and questioned myself a lot, worrying I was being "oversensitive" or reading something into her that wasn't there.

The feeling persisted, though. I thought other people might write about this for me, but I haven't seen a lot along those lines, so I'm going to write about what stood out for me.

To properly discuss this, I'm going to use spoilers whenever necessary, and generally I'm going to talk like you've seen the movie. Be warned.

Here are the ways I felt weird about this character:

1) She "helps Ego sleep."

Let's talk about Ego. If you think about what he does, he is literally an exploitative sex tourist (he travels to one planet after another impregnating people). I can't tell you how many of those types I've met in real life who are obsessed with/fetishize the idea of obtaining (possession word used intentionally to describe this mindset) an Asian wife or mistress, usually because he thinks this woman would be some combination of submissive and exotic.

When I saw Mantis with him, I immediately read her as a woman filling that role, either in a sex worker way or in a mail order bride way. There's a clear power imbalance between them, and she seems cowed by him. The references to how she helps him sleep fit into a sexually suggestive framework, to my mind.

Okay, but isn't Ego the villain?

I wondered if that somehow mitigates this portrayal of Mantis. Can the movie be read as a story of her escaping Ego's clutches and finding her own voice in some way? But I don't think so, and that has everything to do with how Drax treats her.

2) Drax mocks and belittle Mantis and she seems to love it

The interactions between Drax and Mantis are coded as a romantic B-plot (her attractiveness is discussed, she seems to be a part of his moving on from the loss of his wife, and toward the end of the movie he both princess-carries her and compliments her). I found this relationship sinister, though, because it reinforces the image of Mantis as exotic and submissive, playing into the same qualities that Ego the sex tourist seems to see in her.

Mantis does take action to go with the Guardians—specifically, she gives them key information about Ego's true motives and actions. She also delays Ego for a key amount of time during the climactic battle. This does earn her appreciation with the Guardians.

I don't think it earns her enough or the right sort of appreciation, though. The main kudos I recall her getting come from Drax, who grudgingly tells her that she is beautiful after all—on the inside (implication being that she is actually physically ugly). At the theater where I saw the movie, this line drew laughs, but it's an ugly, backhanded compliment. Mantis's "obvious" beauty and Drax's personality quirks are supposed to mitigate how this lands, I think, but in context... they don't.

Pro tip: Insults that say something "obviously" false about someone else... are still insults. (See all the times terrible insults have been justified as humorous for this reason. For example, the debacle around The Onion's disgusting and crude tweet about Quvenzhané Wallis).

Mantis seems to take Drax's insults as deserved and complimentary, and that's not sweet, especially when I'm already seeing her as a possibly traumatized victim of sexual violence from Ego.

3) The way she is cast

Mantis is an empath. I think her casting illustrates the way artistic projects can work with stereotypes or against them.

There's nothing wrong with having a character who's an empath. But when I see the way Mantis is portrayed, I think OF COURSE they chose to make her a woman. OF COURSE they chose to make her an Asian-coded woman. (Actress Pom Klementieff is French, and her mother is Korean). The idea of the empath works entirely with the stereotype of the Asian woman as receptacle for the hopes, dreams, and penises of straight white men. I'm disappointed to see it played that way.

To cast an Asian woman as an empath without falling into this trap, the character, frankly, has to be written better and with more depth. For more automatic stereotype resistance, cast someone else who doesn't "fit" the idea—and don't play that for laughs. Imagine if the Mantis character was played by someone like Idris Elba (again, not for laughs about the "contrast"). The whole thing would feel very different.

(A brilliant example of casting that pushes against stereotypes is Andre Braugher as Brooklyn Nine-Nine's Captain Holt. The show brilliantly toys with stereotypes to force viewers to see Captain Holt as an individual. In particular, it accomplishes this by forcing tension between the stereotypes of a tough, no-nonsense black man and the stereotypes of a gay man. Because the character is both, no stereotype can settle.)

4) Her use of language and the jokes about it

Mantis speaks, to my ear, with an accent that seems to mock the typical sound of English as spoken by Asian people who've learned it as immigrants. She also, inexplicably, seems not to know certain words. I feel she's coded as an immigrant and non-native speaker, which plays into the way her character embraces Asian stereotypes.

For example, listen to the way she responds when Drax tells her she's disgusting. She proudly announces, "I'm disgusting," to Gamora, and the way she says it reminds me of the way Asian people sound when they don't speak English well.

In other words, Drax's abuse feels even meaner because it takes advantage of a character who doesn't seem to speak the language—and the movie plays this for laughs.

***

Given these things, the movie left a bad taste in my mouth (though I will laugh forever about looking desperately for tape, even in the future).

Here are a couple of links I've found that discuss issues with Mantis, though not quite from the same angle.


Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 Turned Mantis Into the Butt of a Joke by Charles Paul Hoffman
"Intentional or not, Mantis’ portrayal feels very much like the trope of the wife a soldier brought back to the United States after the Vietnam War."

A Good Chunk of Guardians of the Galaxy Is Devoted to Calling This Character Ugly by Morgan Baila
"Why, in a film promoting a misfits gang full of a diverse range of characters, with varying levels of skill, intelligence, and attractiveness, is this female character being singled out for her looks? It's a cheap and lazy plot line, and it almost ruined the movie for me."

Hawaii Is A Real Place

I was born in Hawaii, and lived there for the first decade of my life. My father was native Hawaiian, Chinese, and Portuguese and my mother is English. I grew up wrestling with difficult questions about race and identity, exacerbated by my own mixed blood and the feeling that I didn't belong anywhere, especially not after I left the island. As part of that, I feel a complicated mix of pride in Hawaii's history, anguish over the way it was illegally annexed and taken over by the United States government, and awareness that I was born a citizen of the United States and Hawaii is an important part of this nation now. My father served in the army during the Vietnam War, and that experience marked his entire life. In many ways, I'd say it was for the worse, but I also know I could never have buried him without the veterans benefits he had earned.

So this is complicated and important stuff.

I've had some weird racial experiences by virtue of coming from Hawaii. Once in the late 90s, near the Arizona border, I was pulled off a Greyhound bus by the INS, along with a group of Spanish-speaking people I'd been sitting with and talking to. (I think this may have been a case of racial-profiling-by-association, especially because when I'm tan I've often been mistaken for Latina). In the course of being searched and questioned, I presented my U.S. Passport. "Born in Hawaii?" the officer sneered. "When were you naturalized?"

To which I replied, "1959, when the territory was made a state." (I was born decades later than this.) I wish I'd said that to be clever or sarcastic, but I was speaking mostly out of utter confusion. I couldn't believe this person didn't know Hawaii was a state, and that I'd been a citizen all my life. But that was an important experience that taught me that not even my U.S. Passport could keep me safe from suspicion and ill treatment, from the sense that I somehow "don't belong here"—even though I've never lived in any other country.

I have sometimes been told, perhaps by people who are taking me for a Chinese immigrant, to "go home" or "go back to my own country." Again, I say, I have nowhere else to go. My home is in this country, and it has been for as long as I've been alive. And I find that brand of xenophobia particularly rich when it comes from the perspective of people who didn't respect the sovereignty of the Hawaiian nation. It makes me want to say, "No, you go home. Give the Hawaiian people back our kingdom. Give us self-determination. Give up the land you plundered."

I imagine, though I do not know for sure, that this bullshit happens to Native Americans from the continental United States, too. I bet they get told to "go home," and I bet they feel that particularly bitter burn in response as well. (And, for the record, that "go home" shit is an awful thing to say to anyone, it represents a piss-poor and cruel attitude, and anyone who says it should be ashamed of themselves, whether the target of the comment is an indigenous person or not. In no way do I mean to imply that it is "okay" to say this to actual immigrants. It is not. What I am highlighting here is that it is racist, cruel, and bitterly ironic to tell indigenous people to "go home.")

So there is some context that might help a person understand how I felt when I read this quote from U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions:

"I really am amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the President of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and Constitutional power."

I know I'm not the only one who's talked about how upsetting it is for a quote like this to come out of the U.S. Attorney General's mouth, but I feel it's important for me to say so as well, clearly and explicitly.

This quote brought me back to the incidents I've personally experienced, such as those I've described above. In a historical and political context, the statement is wrong and desperately unfair. (I'm focused here on the disparagement of Hawaii in particular, but I also want to note how wrong Jeff Sessions is about what's "clearly" the president's statutory and Constitutional power.)

For better or worse, Hawaii is an integral part of the union that makes up the United States. Pearl Harbor, anyone? My father, fighting in the Vietnam War wearing this nation's uniform. The heroism of former U.S. Senator Dan Inouye. The birthplace of former president Barack Obama. Patsy T. Mink, the first woman of color elected to Congress. Mazie Hirono, the first Asian-American woman in the U.S. Senate, and this nation's first elected Buddhist. I could go on and on.

What I felt when I first learned about the court ruling that prompted this statement was an intense sense of pride in my home. Hawaii is a diverse place, where people from many cultures must interact and work together, and it makes sense to me that a place like that would have an important message to send the nation as a whole about the harm that is done through bigotry and isolationism. Rather than disparaging the island in the Pacific where I was born, Jeff Sessions ought to be damn grateful that the United States gets to benefit from the perspective and wisdom that comes from that place.

And the sarcastic part of me says that if he thinks an island in the Pacific is so unimportant, he ought to ask himself why the United States government was so unwilling to give it back to its people after the illegal actions that overthrew its government in the first place...

On The Red Hills of Georgia

I got into writing erotica partly because I found myself telling more of the truth when I wrote in the genre--not just about sex, but about life. Topics I avoided in other writing (addiction, hopelessness, hopefulness, politics, abuse, gender issues, and many more) suddenly carried irresistible attraction. In the realm of the forbidden, nothing is sacred and everything is worth discussing. My pseudonym became a rallying cry for my psyche, braver than me, bolder, sexier, and smarter.

One of the biggest tests of this to date came with my story, "On the Red Hills of Georgia," which posted last week at Every Night Erotica. I've written about all kinds of things, but race always seemed too delicate, too dangerous, too easy to get wrong.

But like sex itself, if you're not willing to get it wrong, you're going to be boring for the rest of your life. And while this story has a serious subject and message, it's got lots of sex, too. Here's an excerpt:

Maureen shifted uncomfortably. She had hoped for a huge cock the night she’d met Kareem at a club. But she still wouldn’t have given her number to just anyone–or, at least, she didn’t think so.

Kareem pursed his lips and lay back down. “Baby, people like what they like. I don’t know if we can control that. Maybe when I see you’re an Asian girl, there’s a bunch of stuff I expect with that. Maybe you’re doing the same thing to me. But it’s been a year, and I think I see the person you are, too. You know?”

His words made sense, but what he’d made her discover inside herself had her burning with shame. She tried to find a comfortable position. She couldn’t bring herself to face him right now, or to hold him.

He sighed. “You think too much, Maureen.” He turned her toward him, running his hands up and down her spine, parting her legs, wrapping them around his waist.

The best part of Kareem’s body was actually his tongue, not his cock. On their first date, he’d put a cherry stem from her drink into his mouth. A moment later, he showed it to her on his tongue, tied in a perfect knot.

He slid down her body. Her cunt had already gotten wet at some point, and her juices trailed up his chest until he sank his face into her folds. He handled her easily, one hand gripping her ass and the other feeding fingers into her cunt–one, then two, then three. She clenched around his fingers while he traced his tongue in patterns over her clit with exquisite, teasing patience.

Eventually, she came hard enough to forget her worries.

Read the rest here.