“Violated Angels”: Japan, Sadism, and Angela Carter’s Sadistic Orientalism

Abstract

This essay examines Angela Carter’s private journals and the British Library’s 2000 pages of letters from her time in Japan to explore Carter’s evolving thinking about the intersections between race, gender, power, and sexuality, from casual expressions of racist stereotypes in the early works through a more radical interrogation of those stereotypes, to a later, more intersectional approach to feminism and race. It explores her uncollected writings for men’s magazines, such as Men Only and Club International, where she describes Japanese attitudes towards sexuality and the practice of irezumi, Japanese tattooing, which she analyzes as an index of a Japanese culture of “repression, narcissism, masochism and superstition” (“Irezumi” 96).