I found it on the official Margaret Cho website. They have an online store where you can buy DVDs of her tours, t-shirts…and the valuable item showcased above. Seriously, though, I’m going to give credit where it’s due; Cho is no idle star. She’s a woman after my own heart–not only is she a sharp comedienne but a hardcore gay rights activist and a destroyer of Asian-American stereotypes. That’s what this hippie likes to hear. During her “I’m the One that I Want” show, she illuminates these stereotypes by setting them up in an almost affectionate way. For instance, she relentlessly pokes fun at her mother. Cho scrunches her face up in a tight scowl, creates a double chin, and speaks poor English in a loud, shrill voice. This is what her mother looks like to Cho and the rest of America, and Cho knows it appears ridiculous. But it’s who her mother is, and Cho knows and respects that, too. And gays–Cho loves gay men. Loves them. And gives props to her lesbians out there. She plays on gay and lesbian stereotypes too–not to make fun of them or patronize them, but to say to her audience, These things that you’ve been hearing about them, yeah, they might be true. And it’s what I love about them. “Gay men,” she quips, “Love ass and Judy Garland.” Gay porn, not straight porn, is where you find the hot men. Lesbian women all love whale watching, and while imitating her mother, Cho shrieks, “I knew you were lesbian. I say, one day you grow up to be P.E. teacher.” In American society, gay men are constantly being feminized, lesbian women masculinized. It’s as if we say, Okay, if you’re gonna screw up your assigned gender role, we’ll just assign you the one opposite your anatomical sex. And Cho is smart enough to pick this up and subtly present both its truth and ridiculousness.
Cho’s TV show “All-American Girl” was canceled for a few reasons: her “round face,” her less than svelte figure, she was too Asian, she wasn’t Asian enough. And then “The Drew Carey Show” took AAG’s spot. “Because Drew Carey is so skinny,” she says. And it’s true. Cho makes a joke out of it but knows full well the ugliness of the double standard. Like Butler says, gender is a pastiche, a fabrication based on a series of repeated acts. Cho dredges up and rejects the gender role of “woman” as society–particularly, the media–has constructed. A producer insists that Cho sleep with him, and only then will he consider her screenplay. I doubt he’d say the same to a male screenwriter. Building off of Foucault, Butler writes, “the cultural inscription…the historical mode of signification, requires the destruction of the body…it destroys the body on which it writes” (2592). The body before, she says, is “stable and self-identical.” That’s how Cho was before the media got to her, and that’s where she has ended up after coming full circle. She’s funny but poignant. She jokes about the darkest times in her life, but she uses her art to convey the message. She’s a “fag-hag,” a self-proclaimed slut, a non-violin-playing Asian. In allowing herself to be these things, she is reclaiming her soul. Butler observes that the soul, the prison of the body, is the machine through which society can get the individual to ascribe to gender roles. To stay dormant, in a sense. And Cho sure as hell isn’t made to lie dormant.
