Article Recommendation - All Eyes on You by Grace Gassin.
Dragon Ball, Sydney, ca. 1945, http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-147022814.
All Eyes on You: Debutantes’ Explorations of Chinese Australian Womanhood at the Dragon Festival Ball by Grace Gassin discusses the importance of Chinese Australian debutante experiences at the Dragon Festival Ball in Sydney from 1941-1972. The Dragon Balls had a historical, cultural, and social impact on Sydney, and Gassin argues that the debutante’s memories of the balls are ‘vital to understanding the Dragon Ball's multi-layered historical significances.' (Gassin 2021, p.533). The article covers a broad range of topics, including the history and people behind the Dragon Ball, how and why it began (and ended), the history of debutante balls in general, post-WWII conditioning about femininity and feminine ideals, the debutantes’ preparation for the ball, the fashion they chose, key moments of the Dragon Ball itself and why these women chose to be debutantes at all. Gassin’s argument centres on the complex ways in which these women explored and navigated ideas of femininity, community, culture, identity, race, and “Australianness” during the White Australia Policy through the Dragon Festival Debutante Ball, both at the time and reflecting on their experiences many years later.
Debutante balls are commonly considered oppressive and linked to socio-economic privilege, patriarchal constructs, and unrealistic beauty standards (Richardson 2019). But, as Gassin demonstrates, the idea of being seen in a beautiful gown and celebrated for beauty and girlishness was incredibly empowering for many girls of the Chinese Australian community. This was also influenced by the Euro-centric beauty and femininity standards that dominate the Western concept of beauty and intersect with racism and misogyny, as Gassin discusses:
'Assimilationist imperatives that encouraged adherence to an imagined (White) Australian ‘way of life’ all figured strongly in public discourse and mapped easily on to idealised representations of the passive debutante' (Gassin 2021, p.542).
Participating in a debutante event like the Dragon Ball was also chance to be seen as “normal” to the White Australia concept through participating in ‘a very Australian thing’ (Gassin, 2021, p.537) and challenged the narrative of that the Chinese Australian community was largely a “bachelor society”. The Dragon Ball also combatted racist stereotypes that depicted Chinese people and Asian cultures ‘as inherently more backward and oppressively patriarchal compared with a supposedly progressive Western culture.’ (Gassin 2021, pp.534, 539, 541-542). This is summarised in the following quote by Gassin regarding the Cumines sisters, whose uncle Albert Cumines was an organiser of the first Dragon Ball in 1938 (Gassin 2021, p.538). Chinese debutantes were first presented at the ball in 1941 (Gassin 2021, p.533).
While Chinese Australian women like the Cumines sisters may have had to wait until adulthood to see their female ancestors included in formal histories, as adolescents the Dragon Ball offered them a way to, quite literally, embody an affirming Chinese Australian story. The friendships and shared memories created during the event, meanwhile, helped to sustain this historically-defined sense of community among the older Sydney Chinese families (Gassin 2021, p.539).
To better appreciate Gassin's argument, it is also important to consider the origins of debutante balls. Before the 16th century Protestant Reformation, aristocratic men often sent their unmarried female relatives into convents to avoid financially supporting them, but since the Protestant religion does not include convents, the focus shifted to marrying the women off as a way to create advantageous alliances between families (Richardson 2019). Debutante balls were therefore created as a way to exhibit eligible women as marriage material to eligible men (Richardson 2019). However, Gassin's analysis demonstrates that marriage was not the main focus of the Dragon Ball and was instead an empowering expression of identity and femininity:
Debutantes were obliged to negotiate a range of historical and contemporary discourses around what it meant to be a woman. Though many of those messages were highly patriarchal and often contradictory, the [Chinese Australian] women demonstrated considerable agency…..Their efforts in resisting, diminishing and rejecting these outdated discourses demonstrate the value of analysing women's experiences on their own terms, exposing, in this case, the complexity of the debutantes' engagements with this seemingly anachronistic tradition (Gassin, 2021, p.548).
Gassin made this conclusion by analysing interviews she conducted with former debutantes and other Chinese Australian people connected with the Dragon Ball. These interviews are one of the article’s greatest strengths and give an insight into the Dragon Festival Debutante Ball tradition that could not be found elsewhere, demonstrating first-hand the lifelong impact it had on the debutantes' ideas about themselves, their gender, position in society, culture, and heritage. These interviews also demonstrate the importance of oral history interviews in historical and genealogical research, and provides compelling examples of how they can complement and integrate with academic sources.
Overall, this article is essential reading for anyone interested in or researching gender and/or identity in Australia.
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Bibliography
Gassin, G 2021, ‘All Eyes on You: Debutantes’ Explorations of Chinese Australian Womanhood at the Dragon Festival Ball’, Australian Historical Studies, vol 52, no. 4, pp.533-548, 10.1080/1031461X.2020.1858895.
National Film and Sound Archive of Australia [NFSA], n.d.,‘Australian History Timeline 3’, viewed 11 September 2023, https://www.nfsa.gov.au/latest/australian-history-timeline-1950s- 2000s.
National Library of Australia 2023, ‘First Women in federal parliament - Dame Enid Lyons and Dame Dorothy Tangney’, viewed 11 September 2023, https://www.nla.gov.au/stories/news/2023/first-women-federal-parliament-dame-enid-lyons- and-dame-dorothy- tangney#:~:text=Dame%20Enid%20Lyons%20became%20the,Parliament%20from%201943 %20to%201951.
National Museum Australia 2022?, ‘End of the White Australia policy’, viewed 11 September 2023, https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/end-of-white- australia- policy#:~:text=The%20Holt%20government%2C%20despite%20passing,renounced%20the %20White%20Australia%20policy.
Richardson, K 2019, ‘It’s Easy to Dismiss Debutante Balls, But Their History Can Help Us Understand Women’s Lives’, Time Magazine, 25 November, viewed 11 September 2023, https://time.com/5737250/debutantes-history/.