Tag: affects

Shattered Bodies and Broken Minds

Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of After War: The Weight of Life at Walter Reed, Zoë H. Wool, Duke University Press, 2015.

After WarIt is said that Americans don’t have social security. Soldiers do. Earnings for active duty military service or active duty training have been covered under the Social Security Act since 1957. Veterans get social security benefits after they are discharged. Military service members who become disabled while on active duty can file for disability claims. The social security system also covers families and relatives of a deceased soldier. Active duty military members can retire after twenty years of active duty service. In exchange, they receive retirement pay for life. Veterans get free or low-cost medical care through VA hospitals and medical facilities. They have access to special education programs, housing and home loan guarantees, job training and skills upgrading, small business loans, and even burial and memorial benefits. Their situation contrasts with the thirty million Americans who do not have health insurance and who cannot afford medical costs, and with the many more who get only minimal retirement pension and healthcare. In sum, when you join the US Army, Uncle Sam gets your back covered.

Fieldwork and care work

But being a soldier in a warlike nation comes with a high risk. Wars waged abroad bring home their lot of shattered lives, broken bodies, and crippled minds. These are the lives and bodies that Zoë Wool encountered while doing fieldwork at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington DC. Her book begins with a seven-pages lexicon of abbreviations and acronyms, from ACU (Army combat uniform) to VA (Department of Veterans Affairs). Any person who has approached a military administration will recognize the heavy use of jargon and code words that puts a distance between those in the know and the civilians outside. But the dehumanizing aspect of military language is soon countered by the vivid portraits from the gallery of characters that the reader encounters. Zoë Wool makes the book’s purpose and design clear in the introduction. Readers won’t find reams of statistics, or dates and facts arranged in a linear history, or the description of the running and functioning of an institution. Neither will they hear a vocal denunciation of the US military-healthcare complex. Although the author did some work with Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and attended congressional hearings related to the “war on terror,” her book centers on the lives of those with whom she spent time at Walter Reed.

Fieldwork, or spending time with people in order to answer research questions, is “the thing anthropologists do.” But the term “fieldwork” does not necessarily describe the kind of work researchers like Zoë Wool are engaged in. “Emotional work” or “caring” may be closer to what she actually did, although she wasn’t a caregiver or didn’t try to pass as such. But she cared about the people she encountered at Walter Reeds in a deep and emotional way. Whenever she could, she gave them a hand and helped them to do small things, she registered their ordinary thoughts, or lent an ear to their silence. Asked about the purpose of her research, she often said: “I just want to see what life is like here for you guys.” She wasn’t there to listen to their stories, for they had no stories to tell. Their broken bodies did the talking: missing limbs, infected bones, colostomy bags, catheters, intravenous lines, wheelchairs, and numbing medication. As for themselves, their experience and memory of the war theater was shattered and broken into pieces. Talk of war rarely took narrative form. Injured soldiers were often prompted to talk about their combat experience with visiting journalists and well-wishers, but the anthropologist didn’t add to their burden and ask them about this “asshole of a place” that was Iraq. They preferred to keep silent, and she respected that.

The most warlike people on earth

Life at Walter Reed follows very American norms. US soldiers and veterans swear only by nation, mother, and apple pie—or rather by country roads, girlfriend, and painkillers. A feeling of ordinariness permeates every situation in a place that nonetheless falls out of the ordinary. The fact that the patients are soldiers, and their injuries sustained during war, marks the situation in unique ways. Of course, Walter Reed has sheltered and treated other soldiers in previous engagements: Vietnam, Korea, World War II, and World War I. The United States is, after all, a bellicose nation, and Americans are the most war-prone people on earth if we judge by the twentieth century’s record. Heroism and patriotism have always been linked to the violence of war, and the image of the wounded soldier undergirds the national narrative of the United States. But this time was different. Injuries that were fatal in previous conflicts can now be healed or contained. A disproportionate number of soldiers were exposed to the blasting of IED or EFP (explosively formed projectiles) which have the purpose to maim and to cripple as much as to kill. These are the people that Zoë Wool encountered at Walter Reed. In addition to bodily injuries, they had to cope with PTSD, throbbing headaches, and the adverse effects of medication. Blown-up bodies can be stitched back; but broken minds can never be restored to normal.

The lives of injured soldiers at Walter Reed are characterized by an unstable oscillation between the extreme and the unremarkable, a balance the author calls “the extra/ordinary.” As she describes it, “Life was heavy and slow. Soldiers felt it in the excruciating sluggishness of each day. Hours died impossibly long deaths watching TV, playing video games, sleeping, smoking, nothing.” “Surprises were so expected you could almost see them coming.” Moments of intense boredom alternated with flashes of unbearable pain. People became fast friends without the preliminary step of getting acquainted, and they parted accordingly. While the atmosphere at the housing facility was made to recreate a “home away from home,” journalists and philanthropists popped in regularly, and people would get notes telling them Miss America will be making a visit. Publicity and patriotism saturated the place, with ubiquitous stars and stripes banners, yellow ribbons, and “support our troops” signs. Many patients hated going to special events for injured soldiers because doing so made them feel like a “charity case,” but they nonetheless accepted the invitation to be wined and dined by nation-loving benefactors.

Private donations and public support

Indeed, the mix of public support and private charity is what characterizes Walter Reed from the ground up. The housing facility in which Zoë Wool did her research, the Fisher House, is named after a married couple of benefactors who wanted to provide a living space for the spouses, parents and siblings of injured soldiers so as to recreate a form of family life. Each house functions as its own nonprofit organization and relies on the generosity of philanthropic organizations and individuals. Injured soldiers are never left alone: whether in the street or in their living room, grateful strangers come to see and meet and touch them in order to offer them thanks. The field of exchange in which soldiers are included is all at once moral, material, and affective. Claims about the sacrifice of injured soldiers are claims about the valuation of life and death in the context of America’s wars abroad. The deadly risk of soldiering is rendered sacred, and blood sacrifice is the measure the debt that society incurs. Soldiers do not always adhere to this moral economy: they do not see themselves as self-sacrificing heroes, and consider what they did on the war front as mere “work” or “a job”. Similarly, attending patriotic dinners, or accepting the grateful messages of strangers, is considered by them as part of their job.

The Fisher House at Walter Reed is also suffused with the ideology of the normative family. The institution was created to host the conjugal partners and close relatives of injured soldiers. It provides a space where couples can recreate a normal life before leaving to civilian residence. But normalcy can be elusive in the extra/ordinary context of Walter Reed. Soldiers typically married at a very young age shortly before getting enlisted, and never experienced married life as conventionally defined. Apart from their parents’ place, there was no place they could call home, a place where they used to reside and to which they could go back. Their injury and medical condition created new forms of dependency that raised specters of abandonment, isolation, and solitude. Families did not offer a refuge from the impermanence, instability, and boredom that characterized life at Walter Reed. They were torn by domestic violence, sexual frustration, or unwanted pregnancies. Soldiers held to intimate attachments like lifelines in a rough sea, while the material perks earned by their companion entered in the calculus of spouses who chose to love and to cherish for better and for worse. The pensioned veteran is the opposite of the single-mother “welfare queen”: social benefits and state support is what makes couples stay together.

The military-healthcare complex

Walter Reed General Hospital was built in 1908. It is the place American presidents visit to express the nation’s gratefulness to injured soldiers. It is also the place where Donald J. Trump got tested and treated for Covid-19. This mix of high politics and intimate care is what characterizes the military-healthcare complex. The expression “military-industrial complex” was coined by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to warn against the unholy alliance between the nation’s military and the defense industry that supplies it. Its medical equivalent raises another specter: that of a country in which a passage through the US Armed Forces is the only way to access decent living and healthcare for the disenfranchised classes. Military benefits are considered as the only legitimate form of social security. The welfare state is reduced to the warfare state. This dependency fuels an unending process of overseas wars and military entanglements. In her book, Zoë Wool doesn’t indulge in such social critique; but her deeply moving portrayal of shattered bodies and broken minds warns us of any temptation to consider homecoming soldiers solely as war heroes, victims of trauma, or bearers of patriotic pride.

Straight From the Gut

Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Animate Planet: Making Visceral Sense of Living in a High-Tech Ecologically Damaged World,  Kath Weston, Duke University Press, 2017.

Although published in a book series high in theory octane, Kath Weston is not interested in theory. She prefers to tell stories. She is mischievous about it: in a field where theory is everywhere and academics have to live by their theoretical word, she plays with theory like a kitten plays with yarn. She wiggles it, unrolls it, shuffles it around, drags it across the floor, and turns it into a story. For stories is what she is interested in. Of course, as she herself acknowledges, “in an era when ‘post-‘ is all the rage and everyone reaches for a beyond,” she cannot ignore postmodernism, posthumanism, postcolonialism, new feminisms, the narrative shift, or the ontological turn. Or, being published by Duke University Press (and handpicked by its editor, Ken Wissoker), vibrant matter, animacies, new materialisms, the affective turn, everyday intimacies, experimental futures, global insecurities, and new ecologies (to quote book titles or series from the same press.) But she knows her strength lies in storytelling, not theory-making or abstract criticism. She realizes her book will be remembered for the stories she tells (or for the haunting book cover she selected), not for the theories she discusses or the concepts she forges. She uses references to the academic literature, especially in endnotes, to make clear that her book should not be considered as fiction or reportage, but as an attempt, as the subtitle puts it, to make “visceral sense of living in a high-tech ecologically damaged world.” She avoids ontological claims or conclusions: when she elaborates on animates and intimacies, she explores contemporary ways of living—and not ontology-based corrections of an error called modernity.

Bedtime stories

Animate Planet begins with a bedtime story. Its meaning is rather confusing: there is a before and an after, inanimate agents with capital letters (such as Alienation and Capital), birds and humans (such as in the picture on the book cover), lords and lieges, turtles and sea otters, glass castles and islands, forests and deserts, water and ice. The whole seems oddly familiar and yet alien, as in the liminal state of consciousness when bedtime stories are told, as the mind drifts into sleeping and imagination roams free. This is, as the author tells, modernity’s story, the dream in which we are caught and from which we may never awaken. It is a story of ecological destruction, resource depletion, rising sea levels, disappearing species, damaged habitats, and inevitable disaster. This initial folk tale is to be followed by many other stories, drawn from anthropological literature or from the author’s own research. Most stories adopt a language of crisis and catastrophe, of precariousness and destitution; some stories end with a more positive ring, as they develop ways to live in an increasingly inhabitable planet. They take us to places as diverse as northern India suffering from drought and water pollution, Japan living under the spell of Fukushima, and Navajo reserves marketing homeland products in the United States. Four main families of stories emerge, linked to the themes spelled out at the beginning of each chapter: food; energy; climate change; and water.

The story of food starts in a Californian school where pupils were mandated to wear an identification badge containing a radio frequency identification transmitter, or RFID. In the United States, RFID technology is widely used to track cattle in the agribusiness industry. It responds to the perceived need to trace animal products “from farm to fork” and to connect the consumer to the processed commodity, beyond species exploitation and labor alienation. We ask technologies to supply the intimate knowledge that people have long derived from direct contact and interactions. This “techno-intimacy” is especially relevant for the way we connect with food (we need “food stories” to consume a particular wine or dish), with animals (“Wir geben Fleisch ein Gesischt,” advertises a German farm producer) and with children (although the RFID badge project in the Californian school was finally abandoned.) Under the guise of biosecurity, US agencies track livestock and poultry to secure the food supply chain and prevent epidemics, even while farm inspection budgets are being cut and meatpacking regulations are being loosened. We grant nationality to animals (“US beef”) even while we deny it to undocumented immigrants. As the author records, “a cow in the United States might have as many as five different identification codes associated with it, each keyed to a different program.” Meanwhile, genetically modified organisms enter the food chain without any regulation or tracking. The techno-intimacies that are experimented on animals find their ways into social applications designed to track humans and monitor their behavior. 

Japan’s radiation moms

Kath Weston was in Tokyo in March 2011 when the great earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima catastrophe took place. Every day brought news of fresh radioactive releases and monitoring radiation became part of daily life, with new benchmarks and units such as megabecquerels (MBq), millisieverts (mSv), or counts per minute (CPM). For every measurement that the government sponsored, activists associated with the small but growing antinuclear movement created one of their own. People with no particular technical training would take technology into their own hands and equip themselves with Geiger counters and other portable electronic devices. The Internet became the preferred medium for circulating the results of grassroots radiation monitoring that appeared in the form of crowdsourced radiation maps and databases. Meanwhile, “radiation moms” took the habit of taking their Geiger counter to the market and scanning their rice and seaweed before preparing dinner. For Kath Weston, the blurring of lines between bodies, technologies, and contaminated ecologies creates a “bio-intimacy” in which humans incorporate contaminating elements into their daily lives. Treating the body as something to be protected from an environment imagined as “out there” makes no sense: the surrounding milieu is already part of the body and reconfigures it through absorbed radiations, chemicals, and poisonous substances. The pollution of our environment creates unwanted intimacy with invisible matter that creeps into our cellular fabric and alters its physiology. 

The chapter on climate change begins with the story of climate skeptics for whom “it doesn’t feel hotter these days.” People have always used their body in order to decode shifts in both wether and climate, and talking about the weather has always been a favorite topic of conversation. Trusting the body makes scientific sense: it is part of the “visceral” knowledge referred to in the book’s title. Bodies have long been integral to scientific inquiry: Marie and Pierre Curie exposed themselves to radium burns and took precise measurement of the lesions produced, and the geneticist J. B. S. Haldane wrote an essay “On Being One’s Own Rabbit” in which he recounted using his body for experiments. This being told, bodily sensations are a poor instrument for assessing climate change: perceptions are fleeting and subjective, and they can not monitor shifts that take place on a yearly basis or at the scale of decades, if not centuries. The important point is to link bodily observations with broader narratives generated by climate science: this way, body sensations can assume evidential status, and scientific evidence of climate change can make visceral sense and generate political engagement. Weather reports now use the notion of “felt temperature” or “bio-weather” to tell people what effects they might experience in their bodies. This kind of bio-intimacy with temperature, humidity, wind, and hydration is as important and no less scientific than objective measurement. Referring to the useful data generated by bird watchers who record migratory patterns, Kath Weston calls for a grassroots climate science that would mobilize the potential of citizen science and amateur observation to document an increasingly damaged planet.

Holy water

Water in some parts of India is so polluted that even birds reject tap water and drink only from the filtered water that is offered to them. Many rivers can only be described as “sewers”, and most household equip themselves with water filtration systems. Meanwhile, a water-and-architecture extravaganza called the Grand Venice has been built in the Greater Noida suburb of New Delhi. The real estate development project advertises “eco” features for visitors and residents, allowing them to cultivate a spiritual connection with water that is constitutive to Indian culture; but the gondola rides and cascade fountains come at the price of severe strain on water resources and energy consumption. Water from the tap in ordinary households comes laden with heavy minerals and is incompatible with life; while water in the Grand Venice shopping mall quenches people’s inherent need for spectacle and entertainment. Kath Weston reminds us that in the urban ghettoes of the United States, people have always opened fire hydrants in the streets in hot summer to play around; similarly, in monsoon regions like northern India, people rush outside as soon as rain comes and raise their faces to the sky to greet the first raindrops. The transformation of Indian rivers into sewer canals gives rise to scatological humor and lively public protests. Drawing on Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin, she calls this drive for fun and merriment the “carnivalesque” and considers it fair play. 

The destruction of the planet has been amply documented. But ecological consciousness doesn’t lead to political action. As Kath Weston asks, “What does it mean to know but not to grasp, to have realization end in a shrug?” Or, to put it differently, “Knowing what we know, why are we stuck?” Her answer is to substitute intellectual knowledge with a “visceral” sense of living. Some of our thoughts and feelings are deeply entrenched and rooted in our bodily existence. They do not come from the brain or from the heart, but “straight from the gut.” What is visceral is not only human: it also originates from the bacteria and germs that populate our digestive organs and that have a major influence on our metabolism. Viscera are an inter-species composite that forms what scientists describe as the microbiome and that makes us plural: from the perspective of our internal organs, we are multitude. But of course there are risks in advocating a visceral shift toward a more intimate engagement with the world that surrounds us: gut feelings may be wrong and lead us astray. We know what usually comes out from our bowels, and we don’t want to play with it the way we engage with thoughts and emotions. As an example, Kath Weston reminds us of the “new car smell” that car salesmen never failed to point out to convince potential buyers, notwithstanding the fact that the smell came from potentially carcinogenic chemicals such as adhesives and solvents that were used in the production process. Making visceral sense of the world may lead us to the same blunders that have caused our predicament.

The unrelenting power of narratives

Another way to affect behavior and to trigger a spiritual conversion is to tell stories. Narratives stay with us and linger in our memory for a longer time span than do theories. From the fairy tales of our childhood to the myths and legends that form the basis of whole civilizations, we live in a world shaped by stories in which we incidentally take part. Theories are interested in the general and seek to describe the specific in non-specific terms, whereas stories are time- and space-bound. Any theory mistakes the provincial for the universal; it reduces the yet unknown to a particular, provincial conception of things human. It denies the possibility that things could be otherwise than they are; that mutations of the possible might occur that we cannot grasp with our already established ways of thinking and knowing. A theorist already knows (everything). But what if the thing one attempts to think through in terms of this or that theory, in its own dynamic, in its own singular configuration, were such that it actually defies the theory used to explain it? By contrast, narratives start with the recognition that the new and the different is conceptually incommensurable with the already thought and known. They create an intimacy—recall the book’s bio- and techno-intimacies—that makes us familiar with the unknown, the unprecedented, the queer and alien. Even theories can be understood as narratives for the figures they summon, the rhythm they create, and the conclusions they reach. I, for one, read nonfiction books (and particularly books by Duke University Press) as bedtime stories. I am interested in the vistas they open to the world, their openness to the unfamiliar and the unexpected, their capacity to decenter and to displace well-established borders and categories. Theories I read and tend to forget; stories I recall and I revisit. This is why Kath Weston’s Animate Planet, with its stunning book cover and its tapestry of narratives, will linger with me.  

Same-Sex Marriage With Chinese Characteristics

Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Petrus Liu, Queer Marxism in Two Chinas, Duke University Press, 2015.

Queer Marxism.jpgSame-sex marriage in Taiwan became legal on 24 May 2019. This made Taiwan the first nation in Asia to recognize same-sex unions. You think it’s a progress for LGBT rights? Well, think again. In the midst of the clamor for legalized same-sex marriage, G/SRAT, a LGBT organization, marched to oppose the institution of marriage at Taipei Pride, proposing the alternative slogan of “pluralism of relationships” on their banner against “marriage equality.” Queer Marxism in Two Chinas is open to such perspectives that go against the grain of conventional wisdom and emerging consensus on gay marriage and LGBT rights. It argues that gay marriage legalization is a victory for neoliberal capitalism, which incorporates gay couples into its fold and wages a propaganda battle against communist China. If we define pinkwashing as the strategy to market oneself as gay-friendly in order to appear as progressive, modern, and tolerant, then Taiwan is pinkwashing itself on a grand scale. Threatened by the prospect of reunification with mainland China, Taiwan has focussed its diplomatic strategy on integrating into the global economy and on securing popular support from the West by promoting itself as a democratic regime with values similar to those in the United States or Europe. Granting equal rights to same-sex couples is fully congruent with these twin objectives, and it serves geopolitical goals as much as it responds to local claims for equal rights and justice for all.

The goal of pinkwashing in Taiwan is to paint China red.

Contrary to what most people may think, the author of Queer Marxism disagrees with the perception that political liberalism has advanced queer rights. On the contrary, if we follow Petrus Liu, the cause of gay and lesbian rights in Taiwan is used to cover up the many cases of human rights violations against queer subjects—be they prostitutes, drug users, AIDS patients, drag queens, transsexuals, illegal aliens, or money boys. These people living on the margins of society are excluded from the definition of a human being. Similarly, it is often advanced that gay visibility and LGBT rights have progressed along the path of economic reforms in mainland China: since 1997, homosexuality is no longer a crime, it has been removed from the list of mental disorders in 2001, while Gay Pride demonstrations, gay and lesbian film festivals, and gay cultural spaces have developed in the main Chinese cities. Modern critics therefore oppose a present and futurity of openness and visibility to a Maoist past where homosexuality was repressed and hidden. But this, according to Petrus Liu, is revisionist history, a reinvention of the past in which Maoist socialism is redefined as a distortion of people’s natural genders and sexualities. Homoerotic desires and longings were also present in Maoist China, albeit in a different form. This militates for a ‘homosexuality with Chinese characteristics,’ based on the recognition that China has a four-thousand-year record of tolerance and harmony when it comes to same-sex relations.

Why do some Asian queer theorists and activists appear as staunch opponents of same-sex marriage? How can they raise the question: “Is Global Governance Bad for East Asian Queers?” What do they want as an alternative to equal rights and entitlements? To answer this question, it is necessary to introduce unaccustomed readers to what ‘queer theory’ is about, and why its Chinese version might differ from the theoretical constructions developed in the West. Queer theory has emerged as a new strand of academic literature that criticizes neoliberal economies and political liberalism. Theorists point out that queer cultures are not always complicit with neoliberal globalization and the politics of gay normalization; nor are local LGBT scenes in Asia always replications of gay cultures in the liberal West. Queer critics underscore that Western liberalism has spawned a new normative order that dissociates acceptable homosexuality from culturally undesirable practices and experiences such as promiscuity, drag, prostitution, and drug use. As the majority of gay men and lesbian women are included into the fold of mainstream normality, other groups and individuals are categorized as deviant, pervert, queer, and socially unacceptable. To quote Judith Butler, a foundational author in queer studies: “Sometimes the very terms that confer ‘humanness’ on some individuals are those that deprive certain other individuals of the possibility of achieving that status.” Or to borrow from another author, “the homonormative movement is not an equality-based movement but an inclusion-based assimilation politics with exclusionary results.”

The norms of acceptable homosexuality

According to some critics, gay cultures have lost their radical edge and are now engaged in a “rage for respectability”: the primary task of the gay movement is to “persuade straight society that they can be good parents, good soldiers, and good priests.” Homonormativity suggests that assimilating to heterosexual norms is the only path to equal rights. It sets the participation to the consumer culture of neoliberal capitalism as the ultimate political horizon of the gay rights movement. The new homonormativity advocates a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption. It is grounded in liberal values of privacy, tolerance, individual rights, and diversity. It is fully compatible with neoliberalism: indeed, it reinforces tendencies already at work in neoliberal economies. The bourgeois gay couple is a capitalist’s dream niche market: double-income-no-kids, urbanite and fashion-conscious, it has the reputation of pursuing a lifestyle filled with cultural leisure and touristic escapades. The norm of acceptable homosexuality also sets new standards of governance and regulation for countries that are evaluated along their degree of adherence to LGBT rights as defined by activist groups and legal reformers in Western societies. According to this new standard, governments that legalize gay marriage and gay adoption, make assisted reproductive technologies available for same-sex couples, and encourage manifestations of gay pride and LGBT visibility are deemed as democratic and progressive. Conversely, states that keep sodomy laws on the books, discriminate along sexual orientation, and stick to a traditional view of family and marriage are relegated to the bottom of democratic governance rankings.

For many international observers, Taiwan has been a poster child of economic liberalization and political democratization. As gay visibility and LGBT rights occurred after the lifting of the martial law in 1987 and the multiparty election in 2000, it is natural to assume that gay and lesbian rights are a byproduct of the advent of the liberal-democratic state. Similarly, the People’s Republic of China has turned less intolerant towards its homosexuals and has even let gay cultures flourish in its urban centers as they reached a level of economic prosperity on par with the West. Narratives of sexuality and gender rights are therefore intrinsically indexed to broader theories of economic development and political transitions. These liberal theories tend to translate liberty as laissez-faire capitalism, and democratization as the formal competition between political parties. Petrus Liu takes a different perspective. For him, “any discussion of gender and sexuality in the Chinese context must begin with the Cold War divide.” The geopolitical rivalry between the two Chinas is the underlying cause for Taiwan’s construction of a liberal, gay-friendly political environment. The Republic of China is the People’s Republic of China’s counterfactual: it presents itself as a natural experiment of what the whole of China would have become had it not been affected by the victory of Mao’s Communists over Chiank Kai-shek’s Nationalists. It presents the “road not taken” in communist studies: what would be China today without Maoism and the Taiwan straits division? Is the People’s Republic of China simply catching up and converging towards Taiwan’s level of economic development and standards of democracy, or does it chart a different course that Taiwan will at some point be forced to follow?

Queer China and the Taiwan Strai(gh)t

The question of China’s futures has real implications for the rights and livelihoods of queer people in the two Chinas. For Petrus Liu, it is very difficult to abstract a discussion on queer human rights from the concrete national interests and geopolitical stakes that frame these rights. The invocation of LGBT rights is always anchored in a national context and expresses a desire for national, rather than cosmopolitan rights and entitlements. Democracy and human rights have progressed in Taiwan because the Republic of China constantly needs to distantiate itself from its socialist neighbor. This creates a mechanism akin to Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason’: history fulfills its ultimate rational designs in an indirect and sly manner, and liberalism advances for reasons that are, in essence, illiberal. It is always possible to mobilize the contradictions between national interests in the two Chinas for productive use, with the help of local and transnational coalitions. For instance, Taipei’s Mayor Ma Ying-jeou, who subsequently became President of the Republic of China, officially endorsed the Gay Pride in Taiwan’s capital for the first time in 2006 because he was prompted to do so by the Mayor of San Francisco, Taipei’s sister city, who sent a rainbow flag as a gift to his counterpart before the parade.

In East Asia, gay marriage as a social issue has often designated the marriage of a gay person with a heterosexual wife. This situation has provided the intrigue of many novels and movies, starting with Ang Lee’s Wedding Banquet. In Chinese language, gay men’s wives are designated as tongqi or ‘living widows,’ and their plight is a hotly debated topic on Chinese Internet forums and TV talk shows. Some estimates put their number at 16 million. For some critics, new sexual formations in Asia cannot be interpreted as the spread of Western models of homosexuality. Indeed, tongxinlian, tongzhi, and ku’er lilun may not even be translated as ‘homosexuality,’ ‘gay men,’ and ‘queer theory,’ as these concepts embody different histories and practices. The word tongxinlian reflects the era when sex between men was prosecuted under ‘hooliganism’ (liumang zui, disruption of the social order); and tongzhi, a political idiom meaning ‘comrade’, was appropriated by Chinese sexual countercultures in Hong-Kong and in Taiwan to refer to same-sex relations. Without endorsing the thesis that “Chinese comrades do it differently,” Petrus Liu acknowledges that sexual orientation and sexual practices are socially constructed. This echoes the arguments of historians who define homosexuality as a modern cultural invention reflecting the identities of a small and relatively fixed group of people, in distinction from an earlier view of same-sex desire as a continuum of acts, experiences, identities, and pleasures spanning the entire human spectrum. The argument of Chinese distinctiveness also reflects the often-made thesis that the individual doesn’t exist in Asian societies. Many Asian languages do not have a fixed term for the “I” as a sovereign subject who speaks with authority. They see the “I” as a result of social relations and as an effect of language. Consequently, in the Asian context, an individual doesn’t have rights; rights only exist in relation to others. Only when a person enters a set of social relations does it become possible to speak of rights. This sets severe constraints on individual freedom (gay persons may be obliged to marry the opposite sex for familialist reasons), but it also creates opportunities to press for a non-assimilationist, non-normative life escaping the strictures of homo- and heteronormativity.

“Better Red Than Pink!”

According to Petrus Liu, “Queer liberalism is a key tool with which Taiwan disciplines mainland China and produces its national sign of difference from its political enemy in the service of the Taiwanese independence project.” If the conclusion that he reaches is “better red than pink!”, then we are faced with a very serious case of intellectual confusion. A more generous interpretation would be to consider his text within the parameters of Western academic interventions, which offer a premium for radical provocations and disruptive ideas. But even so, Petrus Liu’s Queer Marxism pales in comparison to more conventional interpretations of Chinese queer cultures, such as the one proposed in reference to Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason.’ We saw that Taiwan uses a political ruse to promote its self-image as a liberal regime and tolerant society in opposition to mainland China; but this ruse of history has felicitous effects if it leads to the advancement of gay and lesbian rights. Similarly, one could always interpret marriage equality laws in Western Europe as a result of rising Islamophobia and as a contribution to a rhetoric of a clash of civilizations: this is, in essence, the thesis of homonationalism as expounded by Jasbir Puar in Terrorist Assemblages (which I review here). But this argument will only get you so far. The cunning of reason tells us that liberalism can sometimes be advanced through anti-liberal means. However, anti-liberalism more often leads to an erosion of individual freedom and a rise of authoritarian regimes.

Again, the case of China can be used as an illustration. In the post-Cultural Revolution period, political liberalism became an important system of thought against Maoism. Student demonstrators at Tiananmen Square built a replica of the Statue of Liberty; and Tocqueville remains one of the favorite reference of political reformers. On the other hand, Western cultural critics and academic genres such as postcolonial studies or postmodernism have been picked up in China by a clique of New Left academics, Neo-Maoist nationalists, and Communist Party apparatchiks. Critiques of Eurocentrism and of Orientalism are used to affirm the superiority of the Chinese culture and to support China’s rightful rise to world prominence after a century of humiliation. Like in the West, cultural critique in China is resolutely anti-liberal; but identity politics takes a very different form than in Western pluralist societies. It fuels cultural nationalism (wenhua minzuzhuyi) and nativism (bentuzhuyi), and it proclaims the irreducibility of national essence (guocuipai) and the superiority of Chineseness (zhonghuaxing). Queer theory, with its strong links to anti-humanism and anti-liberalism, could very much be mobilized for such ends, as in the arguments of the irreductibility of Chinese conceptions of homosexuality and queerness. There is no reason to fear that a book like Queer Marxism in Two Chinas won’t pass the test of censorship should it be published in Beijing in a Chinese translation. Like Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo wrote in an open letter protesting the sentencing of journalist Shi Tao in 2005, “Some writers in China say that nowadays they can write about anything they want. Yes, up to a point. They can write about sex, they can write about violence, they can write about human defects, but they cannot touch upon what is considered as potentially ‘sensitive’ information.” Petrus Liu doesn’t quote Liu Xiaobo in his book: by writing down his name on the free Internet, I am making this review potentially sensitive.

Making the World Safe for Tourism in Asia-Pacific

Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai’i and the Philippines, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Duke University Press, 2013.

Securing ParadiseWhen she was a little girl growing up in the Philippines, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez considered American tourists and soldiers that she encountered or heard about as a benevolent presence. They were there to protect the land and to share their riches with a people in need of security and prosperity. This positive image was reinforced by the missionary schools founded by Americans, the remittances sent from abroad by relatives, the proceeds from commerce and military bases, and the endless stream of American movies and serials flowing from television. Later on, when her family emigrated to the United States, she would accompany her father to the Douglas MacArthur Memorial in Norfolk, Virginia, and share the gratitude held by many Filipinos for the general who liberated their country from Japanese occupation. For her, America was still the land of the free, a beacon of hope and opportunity for those seeking a better life beyond their own shores. But then she went to study at UC Berkeley and her worldview changed. She learned about the history of American imperialism, the gruesome stories of the Philippines-American war, the propaganda machine of Cold War politics, the complicity with authoritarian regimes, the destruction of the planet by the forces of neoliberalism, and the cynicism of exploitative raw power. Her homeland, the Philippines, became associated with the image of a puppet regime led by a dictator clinging to power with the backing of the US military. She applied the same critical lenses to the state of Hawaii and its populations after the was nominated as Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. For her, the Hawaiian archipelago was forced into the American fold at the end of the nineteenth century by a coalition of military imperialists, colonial planters, and migrant laborers who relegated the natives to subordinary status and even to cultural extinction. Being herself a nonnative in an adopted homeland, Vernadette Gonzalez purports to speak on behalf of the Native Hawaiians who should, however implausible it may sound, reclaim their sovereignty.

In the introduction, the author asks: “What alchemy transforms the terror of imperial violence and American postwar occupation to deeply felt understandings of American rescue, liberation, and benevolence?” One could raise the opposite question: how did a young girl raised in the spirit of America’s gentle embrace turn against a familiar presence and came to see it as a force of evil? How to explain this complete reversal, and what turned her from a believer of American kind-heartedness into a staunch critic of US malignity? Was it her studies in social sciences at UC Berkeley? And why did she choose to study at this university in the first place? Although she doesn’t give any biographical clues, I see three general reasons for this conversion: history, ideology, affect. These factors work both ways: the same historical, ideological and affective formations that explain Filipinos’ conversion to a myth of American compassionate guardianship also explain the anger, resentment, and challenge to the United States’ past and present imperial role. In a reversion of values, the soldier and the tourist can be seen alternatively as the Good American or the Ugly Yankee. Like a Janus-faced figure, the two characters are one and the same. He can be invited by his hosts to come home as a guest or, in the same movement, told to go home and depart. Thinking about tourism and militarism in Hawaii and the Philippines allows Vernadette Gonzalez to vent her anger against US imperialism past and present, and also to disavow the young girl who held hands with her father in American Pacific War memorials. In Securing Paradise, she applies critical lenses to analyze the history, ideology and affects sustaining the “military-tourism security complex” in the Philippines and in Hawaii.

Tourists and soldiers

In a way, the tourism industry is the opposite of militarization. Tourism is a peaceful activity, and tourists don’t go to war zones or to places exposed to the risk of insecurity. Unlike the soldier, the tourist doesn’t engage in violent or threatening behavior. He brings with him a camera, not a gun, and leaves behind dollars and trinkets, not bullets and explosives. The tourist is more often a ‘she’ than a ‘he’: a softer, warmer version of America’s presence in the tropics that stands in stark contrast to the masculine figure of oppression and threat. For Vernadette Gonzalez, the desires and economies of modern tourism are central to American military dominance in Asia and the Pacific. Tourism and militarism are mutually constitutive: both are part of am American project of domination and imperial outreach, and Hawaii and the Philippines form the first line of this concentric projection of power and sentiments. The roots and routes of the US military in these sites are foundational to tourist itineraries and imaginations. Tourism normalizes the presence of the military, prioritizes its needs, and disseminates a racialized and gendered idea of security. Both militarism and tourism rely on sedimented notions of colonized land and people (especially women) as waiting idly for their arrival, passively there for the taking. In many places, tourism has its roots in the militarized “rest and recreation” industry that thrived in the periphery of war theaters. The security that military bases provide is a fiction that starkly contrasts the reality of sexual exploitation and social insecurity that develops in the vicinity of army camps. The male tourist and the soldier both harbor voyeuristic and violent fantasies and usually turn their gaze against the bodies of women. For the author, many modern tourist sites are tainted by the illicit sexual economies and violence produced in rest and recreation sites of military occupation.

“Militourism” is designed as the activity fusing the two activities of militarism and tourism: making historic battlefields fit for tourism, creating memorials and museums to commemorate past military engagements, displaying military presence as a guarantee of security for foreign holidaymakers, or attracting active military personnel and retired soldiers to beach resorts and scenic sites. It also involves transforming former military bases into vacation sites and other sources of economic revenue, or building dual-use facilities and infrastructures such as scenic highways or helicopter landing platforms. In Asia and the Pacific, these “militourisms” take place on terrains that have long felt the impact of being objects of imperial desire. The first touristic explorations and adventures in the Pacific also doubled as military reconnaissance and imperial prospection. The image of the tropics as paradise was instrumental in justifying a policy of land grabbing and imperial expansion; it also served to lure young soldiers enrolling in overseas tours of duty. The world of the soldier and that of the tourist are often one and the same. The business of tourism benefits from the high drama of war: places like Pearl Harbor remain popular because war is at the core of America’s past and present identity. Likewise, the US military benefits from the glorification of American cultures of war that occurs in sites memorializing past military engagements. Gonzalez describes the activities of “remembering Pearl Harbor” at the USS Arizona Memorial or “playing soldier” on former US training grounds in  Subic Bay as emotional labor: the labor that it takes to shape a national myth that is instrumental to Hawaiian dispossession and to the Philippines’s subordination.

History, ideology, affect

History is at the heart of people’s ambivalent attitudes towards the United States. The history of Hawaii and of the Philippines can be told in two very different ways: one eliciting sympathy and hope, the other criticism and grief. One reason for the adherence to the myth of American benevolence in the Pacific is that its believers are served with a rosy picture of history. And one reason for their conversion to the message of “Yankee Go Home” is that they come into contact with a very different story. It is this black book of misery and sorrow that Gonzalez presents to her readers. As she notes, Hawaii before the annexation by the United States was a sovereign kingdom that was undergoing struggles for internal unification and also fighting off external attempts on its autonomy. Massive population decline following the arrival of European explorers and sailors had produced conditions for exploitation, dispossession, and cultural ethnocide. A coalition formed by white plantation owners, missionary elites, and the US Navy collaborated to roll back native sovereignty with the Bayonet Constitution of 1887, the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893, and the annexation of the islands in 1898, creating America’s first foothold in the Pacific. This history is paralleled by America’s expansion westwards and its collusion with the Spanish empire in the Philippines. The Spanish-American War of 1898 was soon followed by the Philippine-American War, a nasty and brutish conflict in which torture was used against the native insurgents. This brought the Philippines into the American fold, and allowed the US Navy to strengthen its presence in the Pacific. Indeed, Hawaii and the Philippines would share linked fates as part of the American chain of garrison islands.

American tourists and soldiers are served a version of history that stands in stark contrast with the unofficial narrative told in Securing Paradise. They visit landmark sites and museums that present a sanitized version of the United States’ imperial expansion in the Pacific. America’s presence in the Philippines is retold as a story of rescue, liberation, and sharing of riches. The US administration of the Philippines, from 1898 to 1946, and the period following the annexation when Hawaii became a US Territory, from 1989 to 1959, are characterized as a progressive era during which the United States implemented a benign and modern form of stewardship. The authorities undertook a slate of reforms, hygiene, education, and economic projects that uplifted the population and created sympathy even among former insurgents. For example, in the Philippines, the military took on projects such as road building and land clearing to rehabilitate its public relations, substituting promises of constructive colonialism and economic development to its recent history of brutality and oppression. But it is the Pacific War that sealed the fate of these two territories and anchored them in the grand narrative of the United States’ national history. For the American public, Hawaii and the Philippines remain forever associated with Pearl Harbor, Corregidor, and the Bataan Death March. The enduring narratives of masculine sacrifice and heroism in World War II constitute the framing through which the two archipelagos are imagined and understood. This history is made visible and concrete through memorial sites and scenic circuits that have become a magnet for tourists. In these sites, visitors pay their respects to the dead, take part in rituals of remembering, and celebrate a bond of brotherhood with American soldiers, sealed with blood and anchored in Cold War rhetoric. Pilgrimage to historical military sites is not the preserve of American tourists or local visitors: even Japanese tourists are invited to “Remember Pearl Harbor” or to discover Corregidor as the “Island of Valor, Peace, and International Understanding.” For the author, the fetishization of December 7 overwrites January 17, 1893—the day the Kingdom of Hawaii was overthrown and its native population dispossessed.

Neoliberalism and neoliberation

The second factor that has the strength to induce positive or negative attitudes towards the United States is ideology. For Gonzalez, militarism and tourism in Asia-Pacific embody the ideologies of neoliberalism and what she calls neoliberation. Since the departure of the US military from the Philippines, Subic Bay and Clark Base have been transformed into special economic zones under public-private partnerships and now operate as commercial and tourist hubs integrated into global circuits of capital, labor, and commerce. The “post-base” era has not put an end to military cooperation between the US and the Philippines: on the contrary, US forces benefit from an advantageous Visiting Forces Agreement, they participate in joint training operation with their Filipino counterparts, and they are at the vanguard of the fight against Muslim extremist groups the southern region of Mindanao. The US Army left the Philippines through the door and came back through the window of opportunity provided by the fight against terror. Just as the war theaters of the Pacific War were transformed into symbols of liberation from Japanese occupation and fraternal collaboration between Filipino and American soldiers, the discourse of neoliberation transforms the exploitative economies of predatory capital and imperial outreach into narratives of security and shared prosperity. American military occupation and economic hegemony are cast in the same heroic light that fuses the twin ideologies of neoliberalism and neoliberation. The “return” of the base properties to the Philippines are presented as evidence of American generosity; meanwhile, the American military continues to occupy and tour the Philippines, and foreign capital, bolstered by the structural adjustment policies dictated by the Bretton Woods institutions, benefit from zero taxation and rampant violation of basic labor rights in the Special Economic Zones.

Or at least this is how Vernadette Gonzalez presents it, based on her own biased ideology and slanted perspective in which the United States is cast as the villain and its policies as conspirational schemes to maintain neocolonial influence over its dominion. This is, in a way, a missed opportunity: because beyond the Pavlovian denunciation of neoliberalism as evil, Securing Paradise raises many important economic issues. There is indeed an economic case to be made about the links between militarism and tourism. Both activities stem from certain comparative advantages and resource endowments, like having a long and accessible coastal line to build bases and resorts. Both generate rents and drive domestic prices up, giving rise to a particular version of the Dutch disease. Both military bases and tourism resorts may be the only viable economic sectors in territories that are otherwise too far away from centers of capitalistic concentration. There are complementarities between the two activities, as when the soldier goes on vacation as a tourist or when tourism is made safe by the presence of soldiers. But there are also contradictions, especially when the local population becomes more educated and more prosperous than the soldiers posted in their midst. Beyond a certain threshold, tourism development holds more promises than military build-up. When they are consulted about their own destiny, local populations will aspire to transform their territories into islands of peace, as opposed to hosting bases of discontent. But these issues of territorial specialization and economic reasoning are not raised in this book. Instead, the author adheres to a primitive notion of economics-as-witchcraft, with neoliberalism as dark magic and the Bretton Woods institutions as wicked witches. I don’t know where Vernadette Gonzalez got her economics, but it’s certainly not from UC Berkeley’s economic faculty. Even the variant known as international political economy, taught in political science departments and exerting some influence on literary scholars, has more consideration for basic facts and logical explanations than her casual treatment of economic factors.

Combat boots clamping and digital cameras clicking in Asia-Pacific

A conversion is always an affective turn: from love and attachment to abhorrence and alienation, from warm feelings of joy and happiness to dark motives of grievance and hate. Sometimes this reversal of sentiments can be triggered by a traumatic experience or a dreadful event: as when a story of rape and sexual aggression by soldiers or tourists turn the local population against any foreign presence. For Vernadette Gonzalez, the defining moment may have been provided by the image of President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda leaving the Malacañan Palace and fleeing the country in US army aircrafts after having been ousted by the people. She also describes a traumatic scene that happened to her shortly after September 11, when she was faced with the barrel of a gun for having committed a small breach of security protocol in a tourist resort. For her, tourism and violence are intimately intertwined. In the eyes of local authorities and American strategists, tourists’ safety and comfort take precedence over the needs and aspirations of the local population. The US military wants to make the world safe for tourism. It prioritizes certain forms of mobility and border-crossing at the detriment of others. As a result it makes the world more insecure, not less, and exposes local populations to new risks and insecurities. Although Vernadette Gonzalez doesn’t explicitly formulate policy recommendations, the solutions that can be inferred from the author’s presentation should be resolutely de-colonial: let the US forces go home for good this time, severe the ties of dependance and domination that bind local populations and indigenous peoples in exploitative conditions, reclaim the sovereignty of native right-holders and democratic representatives, protect the environment from the encroachment of army bases and tourist resorts, and bring an end to the tourism industry’s deleterious influence on the social fabric of host nations.

One may or may not agree with these solutions; but they appear to me as severely out of sync with the present geopolitical situation in Asia-Pacific. As the author herself acknowledges, the region is increasingly becoming more insecure; and the blame cannot be put solely on the presence of US forces, less even so on the continuous flow of American tourists. Any person who has travelled in the region can attest that the majority of tourists are no longer Americans or Europeans. These new tourists, who may be followed by soldiers as in the previous historical sequences described for Hawaii and for the Philippines, bring with them different dreams and aspirations, and interact with local populations and the environment in different forms and modalities. They too are looking for a paradise to cherish and to hold, but their version of heaven is based on different cultural and political assumptions. (For a local version of the mix between militarism, exoticism and affect, I recommend the 2016 Korean drama series Descendants of the Sun and its local adaptations by Vietnamese and by Chinese television.) One should lend an ear to the growing sounds of army boots and tourist crowds in Asia and the Pacific: are they harbingers of a new era when the digital camera will prevail over the machine gun, or will they repeat past experiences on a larger and more devastating scale? This is why I find books such as Securing Paradise useful: they allow readers who come to them with an unjaundiced eye to enter the fabrique of sentiments, and they enable us to envision a future that may not be determined solely by militarized tourism and the touring of armies on and off duty.

Too Much Shock, Too Little Therapy?

Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Well-Being in Postsocialist Russia, Tomas Matza, Duke University Press, 2018.

Shock TherapyWhen Russia broke away from socialism, reformers implemented a set of economic policies known as “shock therapy” that included privatization, marketization, price liberalization, and shrinking of social expenditures. In retrospect, critics claim there was “too much shock, too little therapy”: the economy spiraled down into a deep recession, currency devaluations sent prices up, and inequalities exploded. Huge fortunes were built over the privatization of state assets while the vast majority of the population experienced economic hardships and moral disarray. The indicators of social well-being went into alert mode: the psychological shock and mental distress that was caused by Russia’s transition to market economy was evidenced in higher rates of suicide, alcoholism, early death, and divorce, as well as precarious living conditions. People learned to adapt to freedom and the market the hard way: some took refuge in an idealized vision of the Soviet past, while for others traditional values of Russian nationalism and Orthodox christianity substituted for a lack of moral compass. The society as a whole experienced post-traumatic stress disorder. But contrary to the claim that economic shock therapy was “all shock and no therapy”, on the psychological front at least, therapy came in large supply. During the 1990s and 2000s, there was a boom in psychotherapeutic practices in postsocialist Russia, with an overwhelming presence of psychology in talk shows, media columns, education services, family counseling, self-help books, and personal-growth seminars. Shell-shocked Russians turned to mind training and counseling as a way to adapt to their new market environment. Political and economic transformations were accompanied by a transformation of the self: in order to deal with “biopoliticus interruptus”, homo sovieticus gave way to a psychologized homo economicus. Long repressed, discourses of the self flourished in talk therapies and speech groups in which, under condition of anonymity and privacy, individuals could say things about themselves that they wouldn’t have confessed even to their close friends or relatives. Russia became a talk show nation: the forms of psychological talk cultivated by TV hosts came to define the way Russians saw themselves as they sought guidance on how to adapt to their new environment.

Supply and demand

There are at least two ways to interpret this psychotherapeutic turn. The first mobilizes the tools of standard economics to analyze the growth of therapeutic services in terms of supply and demand converging under conditions of liberalization. Russia transited from centrally planned economy to market capitalism by removing state controls and unleashing the forces of the market. Under market conditions, supply meets demand, and pent-up demand leads to a supply boom when the constraints limiting market entry and expansion are lifted. The supply of psychotherapeutic services in the Soviet Union was severely restricted. Individual were to blame for affective disorder and social maladaptation, which diverted energies from the building of a socialist society. Care providers and psychologists had to adhere to a strict materialist approach, and subjective approaches of the self were replaced by neurophysiology and rational psychotherapy. Mental health and psychic wellbeing were tools of state control: political opposition or dissent were interpreted as a psychiatric problem, and the KGB routinely sent dissenters to psychiatrists for diagnosing to avoid embarrassing publiс trials and to discredit dissidence as the product of ill minds. During late-Soviet liberalization and perestroika, new therapeutic approaches were introduced and ideas from the West began to gain influence. This turned into a full psychotherapeutic boom after 1991: market entry conditions were relaxed, as anybody could set shop as a psikholog or a psikhoterapevt, and entrepreneurs began to advertise their services to the fraction of the public that could afford private counseling. Talk therapy and self-help, virtually nonexistent in the Soviet Union, became a booming industry. Private corporations established human resource departments and began to emphasize the cultivation of soft skills and emotional intelligence. Under volatile market conditions and with the disappearance of Soviet institutions, people strived for stability and points of reference. There was a new demand for treningi (training), koyching (coaching), and personal growth (lichnyi rost) or leadership (liderstvo) seminars. Raising a child also became a new challenge, and anxious families as well as school administrators began to use psychological services to improve performance and guarantee success.

A second interpretation, not necessarily contradicting the first, understands the psychotherapeutic turn in Russia as a symptom of the global expansion of neoliberal capitalism. In social science studies and critical discourse, neoliberalism is identified with notions of individual rationality, autonomy and responsibility, entrepreneurship, and positivity and self-confidence. These discourses and associated techniques constitute the neoliberal subject in ways consonant with neoliberal governmentality. Neoliberalism extends to education and to the self the vocabulary and mindset of economics: individuals are compelled to assume market-based values in all of their judgments and practices in order to amass sufficient quantities of ”human capital”, “invest” in skills and capabilities, and thereby become ”entrepreneurs of themselves”. They are led to believe that they are autonomous subjects responsible for their present condition and they have control of their own destiny. Those who fail to thrive under such social conditions have no one and nothing to blame but themselves. The cost of social protection, which was once supported by state programs of social security, is now transferred to the individual or to families and communities; and social ills such as unemployment, poor health, obesity, drug abuse, or school failure are blamed on individuals, as opposed to putting the blame on the societal system as a whole. Self-development discourse instills stronger individualism in society, while constraining collective identity, and thus provides social control and contributes to preserving status quo of neoliberal societies. Within the logic of global neoliberalism, the role of government is defined by its obligations to foster competition through the installation of market-based mechanisms for constraining and conditioning the actions of individuals, institutions, and the population as a whole. Neoliberalism is not laissez-faire, but permanent vigilance, activity, and intervention. The rationality of neoliberalism consists of values and principles that must be actively instituted, maintained, reassessed and, if need be, reinserted at all levels of society.

Neoliberalism at work

When he set foot in Saint Petersburg to study the psychotherapeutic complex operating in various state and private sector institutions, Tomas Matza expected to find neoliberalism at work: as he notes, there is “an extensive literature that describes how the neoliberal reforms of privatization and marketization are not just accompanied but in fact depend on the cultivation of particular kinds of citizens—namely, self-sufficient, individualized subjects of freedom able to survive austerity measures such as the withdrawal of state social programs.” But instead of homo neoliberalis in the making, he met concrete individuals with their ideals and hopes, their fears and frustrations. The story of neoliberalism couldn’t give full account of the way people perceived changes in their environment and in their own selves. The growth of the new psychotherapy market was linked to numerous reasons and motives: happiness, self-realization, improved relations, healing, change from routine, discovery, and learning. Therapists and patients came together in search of an alternative kind of social experience, rooted in an heightened form of togetherness. They described their first taste of group therapy as a kind of electric shock: “It was a new way of thinking, a new point of view. We called each other by first name […] It was shocking how new it was.” Psychotherapy was associated with a liberation of the self, a blossoming of free speech and a new age of freedom: hardly the imposition of new constraints and disciplines that critics of neoliberalism would have us believe. Besides, care providers identified themselves as political liberals as opposed to supporters of free market neoliberalism. Their technologies of the self were not aimed as much at the rational actor motivated by self-interest as at a particular kind of individual flourishing in a well-functioning democracy. They straddled a divide between political and economic liberalisms: insofar as they had political programs or opinions, these were for reforms of political practices to achieve more transparency and put a halt on immoral greed that was corrupting the basic values of society. Psychotherapy had a social and political purpose in Russia; but it was more aligned with the political values of classical liberalism than with the economic imperatives of neoliberalism.

For Tomas Matza, the psychotherapeutic turn in Russia is better described as postsocialist. It was determined by a set of experiences specific to Russia, of which the import of economic disciplines and psychological doctrines from the West was only one element. Shock Therapy attempts to describe Russia’s psychotherapy boom following the collapse of the Soviet Union by attending various terrains: psychological education camps and municipal counseling services in public schools, adult training and personal growth seminars, messages appearing in the advertising industry or exchanged in TV talk shows, and a psychoneurological outpatient clinic. Tomas Matza studied these various sites by doing participatory observation:  he took part in the kid camp’s discussions, wrote answers to the questionnaires, drew images and made clay representations of his “internal world”, and attempted professional school meetings where the cases of “problem children” were discussed. He shows that psychotherapy inherits from a long story of applied psychology in the Soviet Union. There were several periods when an interest in the subjective factors of human behavior emerged in Soviet science—the 1920s, 1960s, and 1980s. The early efforts to join Freudianism and Marxism were thwarted by the dogmatism of Pavlovian science and the Stalinization of psychology, which was banned from the faculties and redesigned as a subfield of philosophy. The fact that Soviet psychology was based on Marxism did not do away with the diversity of theoretical concepts and therapeutic approaches, which sometimes paralleled Western psychodynamics and in other cases offered home-grown discourses and concepts. Yet even in the 1970s, psychotherapists could be questioned by the KGB for mentioning Freud in group discussions. Modern practicians and academics remember the widespread repression and control that characterized late-Soviet psychology: “In the Soviet Union, there was no need for therapy.” Doctors would give a moral lecture to their patients, lie to them in an adversarial relation based on deception, and transform the clinic into a “theater of the absurd” in which power was exerted in an erratic and contradictory fashion. However, things began to change with late-Soviet liberalization and Perestroika. New approaches to education, healthcare, work, and sports were proposed, emphasizing the “human factor of production” with a huge potential yet to be tapped. More frequent exchanges between American humanistic psychologists and Soviet researchers also spread new therapeutic orientations in the USSR. The rapid expansion of psychotherapeutic services in the reform period was thus prepared by intense discussions and experimentations in the late-Soviet era.

Russian psychotherapy

As a result, Russian therapeutic practices and vocables only partly overlap with Western science. Russian professionals developed a lexicon of domestic words to translate or adapt concepts imported from the West, or to propose home-grown versions of talk cures and self cultivation. Freedom, translated as svoboda, has a more social connotation in Russian than in English: it has historically connoted a form of “freedom with”, and an emphasis on the idea that “we are free together” rather than a limitation on individual freedom. Samootsenka, now translated as self-esteem, was in Soviet times conceived as a transformation of the self that would make self-sacrifice possible. The idioms of dusha (soul), energiia, and garmoniia,  which were often used in psychological training sessions, had meanings different from their English equivalent. Through these terms and others, a new language was invented and circulated for thinking about society and the self, providing reassurance and meaning in a time of increasing anxiety and change. Some of the affects produced by psychotherapists have a strong religious undertone: “tears of bitterness and joy” flowed from the eyes of a participant attending a conference by American psychologist Carl Rogers in 1986. Some American ideas and mindsets were transmitted wholesale through seminars and book translations; others doctrines were imported from Germany, such as the “systemic constellations” theory of Bert Hellinger (a “Zulu-influenced ontology of trans-generational connectedness”); yet others were produced domestically by best-selling authors such as Vadim Zeland (“transsurfing reality”), Mirzakarim Norbekov (“how to get rid of your glasses”) or Valery Sinelnikov (“love your disease”). Tomas Matza doesn’t expand much on these doctrines, and he presents the content of the psychotherapeutic sessions in a neutral, nonjudgmental way. Another way to look at it would be to assess their scientific value based on some rational benchmarks, or to do an internal critique of the ideas and messages they convey. Shock Therapy lacks a detailed description of the therapies that are provided to the individuals in state of shock. But even a faint acquaintance with the self-help literature and personal development methods covered in the book can make the reader highly suspicious of their intellectual or humanistic value. More than the “education of freedom” that their promoters advocate, these commercial methods of self-manipulation seem to provide the “opium of the people” that Marx identified with religion.

All the psychotherapeutic work that Tomas Matza attended and that he describes in Shock Therapy do not fall into the categories of sham and scam. There is indeed some value in training the emotional intelligence of children, in cultivating the values of teamwork and leadership, or in providing support to people in times of distress. The work of care, whether it addresses the body or the soul, is a valuable endeavor. But it comes at a cost, and this financial burden is not distributed evenly across the Russian population. Tomas Matza compares two different kinds of institutions he was able to observe close-range, the first servicing primarily the children of the elite, the second focusing on poor children in difficult circumstances. While both were concerned with children’s interiorities, the first addressed children’s psychology in terms of potential, while the second brought the issues of pathology and abnormality. The psychotherapeutic turn in post-socialist Russia is associated with social inequality which it helps produce and reproduce. New forms of care focusing on well-being and the flourishing of the self are generally much more available to the better-off. Psychologists have been enrolled in the cultivation of the new elite, inciting a potential-filled, possessive individualism through the development of techniques of self-knowledge and self-esteem. For the upper and middle classes, parenting has been turned into a commercial enterprise, an activity involving financial investment, expert knowledge, and careful planning. By contrast, in municipal institutions applying psychological knowledge to public schools, resource constraints and a new management culture have squeezed their services into prophylaxis for the “problem child.” Psychological lenses are used for the management of risk and the anticipation of various possible problems: computer addiction, substance abuse, delinquency, various troubles at home, and poor school results. These differential uses of psychology may have the effect of deepening social differences and hierarchies: the soft skills and emotional intelligence acquired through supplementary education can make the difference between success and failure in the market society, while the hasty use of diagnostics with children at risk can deepen the troubles associated with the psychosocial environment.

Close-range concepts

Self-work in Russia is therefore a far more complex enterprise than simple references to the onslaught of neoliberalism would allow for. The “psychological complex” involves both the cultivation of the self and the attention to others, and it has been profoundly shaped by privatization and the emergence of consumer culture in Russia. It provides healing and care, but also reproduces social difference and class structures in a society characterized by deep inequalities. To call this complex assemblage “neoliberal governmentality” misses important details. What is at stake in the turn toward psychological explanations and therapy is not so much the construction of neoliberal subjectivity, but a search for new interpretations and new modes of sociality in a society turned upside down by the demise of socialism. Rather than stratospheric notions such as “neoliberalism”, Tomas Matza provides close-range concepts that help understand a specific situation: “psychosociality” describes the warm feeling of togetherness experienced by participants in talk groups and psychotherapy sessions; “precarious care” refers to the provision of care and the cultivation of self under conditions or precariousness; “commensuration” brings together norms and values belonging to different spheres, such as the ethical and the economic, the political and the individual. The book offers social critique while taking into account the testimonies and feelings of the persons involved with the work of care. Psychologists and psychotherapists have their own views about the social and political effects of their work. They claim to be promoting a democratic spirit and personal emancipation by helping people “learn to be free.” Other practitioners invoke the negative side effects of marketization and rationalization to argue that they are fostering social connection. The paradox is that these claims contradict the social context in which these psychotherapeutic techniques take place: they are complicit with a social hierarchy that they help reproduce, and they feed on the anxieties of people that they are supposed to assuage.

When the Korean Wave Hits the Screens

Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Tourist Distractions: Traveling and Feeling in Transnational Hallyu Cinema, Youngmin Choe, Duke University Press, 2016.

tourist-distractionsKorean government officials nowadays distinguish three waves of hallyu. The first one occurred serendipitously with the unintended success of Korean TV dramas in Japan, China, and South-East Asia. The second wave was brought by the marketing strategies of entertainment companies that targeted growing markets and developed export products in the form of K-Pop bands, TV co-productions, computer games, advertising campaigns, and restaurant chains. According to these Korean officials, the third wave of hallyu will cover the whole spectrum of Korean culture, traditional and contemporary alike, and will be engineered by the state, which sees the export of cultural content as a linchpin of its creative economy strategy. Korean cinema sits rather awkwardly in this periodization. Korean movie directors didn’t wait for the first ripples of the Korean wave to gain recognition abroad: they featured early on in the Cannes film festival and other international venues where their talent and originality won critical acclaim. Cinema studies constituted Korean films as a topic for analysis before hallyu became a theme worthy of scholarly research and commentary. The first books that addressed Korean cinema as a genre, such as Kyung Hyun Kim’s seminal essay on The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema, were written in the tradition of Asian cultural studies that sees each countries’ movie productions as a distinct whole, thereby overlooking the transnational dimension that is so prevalent in the reception of Korean hallyu.

Hallyu cinema as a subset of Korean film history

Youngmin Choe, who is the coeditor of a Korean Popular Culture Reader, bridges two strands of research: Korean cinema studies—that takes national boundaries as a given and addresses the aesthetic content of movies—and hallyu studies—which are by nature transnational and focus more on reception. She does so by limiting her study to the films produced between 1998 and 2006—the high mark of the Korean wave—and by addressing one particular theme: tourism, or the movement of people and emotions across national borders. The films examined in this book seem to anticipate the travels of their audience. They display traveling and tourism as a theme in their narrative, and present locales and sceneries in a way that is bound to induce travel plans and touristic yearnings. They are, in this way, self-referential: travel or boundary-crossing features both on-screen in the stories that are narrated and in the off-screen transnational movements that these films generate. This allows the author to construct hallyu as a category worthy of academic research and to propose the notion of hallyu cinema as subset of Korean film history. As she states at the outset, “the largest ambition of my study is to transform hallyu, which has become first and foremost a marketing strategy, into a bona fide critical term.”

It all started with Winter Sonata. The TV drama featuring Bae Yong-joon achieved a huge success in Japan and set the standard for the crossover and tourist potential of the Korean wave. Locales shown in the drama became the destination of fan tours and touristic pilgrimages. Middle-aged Japanese ladies craved after the sight of “Yon-sama” and developed a cult-like followership. This in turn set the stage for the ongoing Korean wave, which reached publics well beyond Japan and sparked an interest for all things Korean. Although she doesn’t address this particular drama—she only considers films—Youngmin Choe discusses several movies that were produced in Winter Sonata’s wake. April Snow, a film released in 2005 and featuring the same actor Bae Yong-joon, was produced with the Japanese public in mind. Filmed in locations on the eastern coast of Korea, the film contains a self-referential invitation to what the author calls affective tourism: affective images are projected onto affective sites so that the experience of the traveller reproduces the emotions felt by the viewer. Inspired to visit these locations because of the movie story, the tourist travels as if he or she were in the film. Unlike visitors to Universal Studio Hollywood theme park in the United States, tourists at the April Snow sites are invited not only to the places where the movie was shot, but as if into the diegetic and affective space of the movie itself. For instance, in the small city of Samchok, tourists interested in April Snow can sleep in the same room as the characters in the film, eat the same food, sip coffee at the same table, and walk the same streets, with signs and posters depicting images from the corresponding scenes in the movie.

Tourism, drama, and the emergence of an Asian identity

Tourism and drama are associated with modernity in Asia. Indeed, television series and touristic travel shape the imagined communities of East Asia. They are the modern equivalent of the newspaper printing press and the political exile, two agents that Benedict Anderson saw as central in the emergence of national communities in nineteenth century Europe. In Asia, the leisure class takes the form of the travel group. Mass tourism is the foremost expression of the newly gained access to leisure and mass consumption. The Asian tourist has often been identified with the group-centered, photo-taking, cliché-seeking participant of organized package tours. But there’s more to it than just group-think: Asian tourism creates a new form of commodified experience, which is less centered on exotism or escapism and more on emotions and affects. In this respect, the Asianization of Asian tourism is accompanied by a displacement or tourists’ interest. Less focus is placed on history and cultural heritage, more attention is devoted to bodily experiences such as eating, shopping, and scenery-viewing. The Asian tourist looks for the experience that will yield photo opportunities and conventional memories to be shared with others. Asianization, before being analyzed in economic or political terms, can be conceived as a shared affective experience shaped by regional tourism and media consumption. These networks of travel contacts and emotional yearnings among Asian populations are what made hallyu’s rise possible in the first place.

Lest we forget, the tourist imagination in East Asia began with pornography. Japanese tourism to Korea from the mid-1960 until the late 1970 was predominantly male and centered around sex tourism, often combined with business meetings. Known also as kisaeng tourism, this kind of sexual encounter harkened back to colonial practices in yojong establishments and epitomized the imperial consumption of the colony itself as an object of desire. Youngmin Choe opens her book by a close examination of Park Chul-soo’s Kazoku Cinema, the first film collaboration between Japan and South Korea following the lifting of the ban on the import of Japanese cultural products in 1998. Kazoku Cinema is a self-reflexing film about the making of a film, with strong sexual undertones. As the author writes it, “pornography becomes an allegorical mode of historical reconciliation that foregrounds everyday banality.” The desire for sexual intimacy and physical touch also shapes the story of Asako in Ruby Shoes, which cuts back and forth between Tokyo and Seoul as the two heroes engage in Internet porn, and of April Snow, which narrates an adulterous liaison. The whole production of the Korean wave can in a way be interpreted as soft porn, as the cravings of middle-aged Japanese ladies for “Yon-sama” or the provocative attire of K-pop idols suggest. In turn, these sexual desires and erotic feelings contribute to the transformation of once rival nations unto cooperative friends open to transborder flows. Sex, in Asia, is political.

The political is never far in Korea, a land divided between two states separated by the 38th parallel. Any visitor to the DMZ has experienced the strange feeling of being at the same time in a movie scene and in a tourist attraction. On the face of it, the reality of the place contradicts both impressions: the tension between the two Koreas is very real, and the DMZ is first and foremost a military zone. But visits to the DMZ are shaped as a tourist experience, not least because of the many films that used the zone as their locale. Park Chan-wook’s Joint Security Area (J.S.A.) begins with an aerial shot of the DMZ, as a group of foreigners on a guided tour of the southern side are surveying the Military Demarcation Line that runs through the middle of the demilitarized zone. It ends with picture shots taken by the tourists in this initial scene, which reveal the whole story that has been unfolding. The commodification and marketization of military zones is not limited to the DMZ. The Korean War film Taegukgi illustrates a process labelled as “post-memory”: the memory of a trauma that was never personally experienced, but whose lingering effect is felt by following generations. This Korean blockbuster, produced shortly after the liberalization of the movie industry imposed by the US as part of the FTA, thematizes the struggle against Hollywood hegemony, the nation’s simmering anti-American sentiments, the rise of an Asianization discourse, the realities of national division, and the hopes for reunification. As the film Silmido, set on an island off the coast of Incheon, it has given rise to a theme park and also was the focus of a temporary exhibition, thereby fueling the rise of film-induced tourism. The author opposes the Korean War Memorial, which illustrates how the Korean War should be remembered—as heroic, masculine, and patriotic—, and the “false memorials” created in the wake of war movies, giving way to alternative modes or remembrance that are more feminine, leisurely, and affective.

How do all the movies analyzed in Tourist Distractions relate to hallyu? As Youngmin Choe makes it clear, most of the films she addresses are not part of the Korean wave as defined by state authorities and media reports: only movies geared towards a Japanese audience like April Snow, or the blockbusters produced after the opening of the market to Hollywood competition, qualify as such. The hallyu discourse does not emerge in Korea until 2001. It has roots in twentieth-century visions of Asian integration and serves to support the corporate strategies and geopolitical ambitions of newly-developed Korea. The author links hallyu to neoliberalism, cultural nationalism, and postcolonialism, and she uses the words “neo-imperialist” and “sub-imperialist” to qualify Korea’s projection of cultural power. But her book does not discuss political integration and economic processes in detail. As she states, “I am more interested in the formation of a shared affective experience that transnational cooperation requires in order to build its networks for the exchange of products and capital.” In a reversal of Marxist thought, culture is not the reflect of underlying economic forces, but forms the infrastructure basis or enabling factor which makes economic and political developments possible. Her category of “hallyu cinema”, strictly delineated in time and in scope, is defined by the aesthetic criteria of self-reflexivity and affective content, not by the movies’ marketing strategies or their impact at the box office. Self-referentiality in hallyu movies refers both to the content of the movies—as the films examined in the book seem to anticipate the travel of their audiences—and to their production and circulation that foster transnational exchanges. Tourist films and film tourism are closely interconnected.

The affective turn in cultural studies

Beyond contributing to cinema studies and hallyu studies, Tourist Distractions points towards what has been described as an “affective turn” in cultural studies. The notion of affect—pre-individual bodily forces, linked to autonomic responses, which augment or diminish a body’s capacity to act or engage with others—has become a central tenet of cultural studies. Affect is a concept that places emphasis on bodily experience and that goes beyond the traditional focus on representations and discourse. The turn towards affects is therefore a turn, or a return, to the body. It is also a turn towards new kinds of imagined communities. Affects and emotions help us connect with some people while distancing us from others and in material form can be used for economic and political purposes, making it a form of capital. Emotions help form the boundaries and relationships between individuals and society; they determine the rhetoric of the nation. The hallyu nation, or global Korea, is built on networks of affective exchanges. Korean movies and dramas are valued for their emotional content, for their ability to move people in many ways, including geographically. Call it, if you will, the Greater East Asia Co-Sentimentality Sphere. The emergence of this new affective space that stems from the diffusion of tourism and of films, lies at the core of this groundbreaking study of hallyu cinema.