sex – The Duke Reader

The Celibate Plot

21 Feb 2024 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life, Benjamin Kahan, Duke University Press, 2013.**

Celibacies Literary criticism has accustomed us to read sex between the lines of literary fiction. What Maisie Knew was what her parents were doing in the bedroom; The Turn of the Screw would have the heroin screwed if the door was unlocked; and Marcel Proust’s Lost Time was time not spent in the arms of his lover. According to this view, literature is when the author wants to suggest something about a person or thing, but then for whatever reason he or she may not wish to explicitly state what is on his or her mind, and so the author writes a novel, or poetry. Psychoanalysis has several words for this urge to dissimulate and beautify: sublimation, repression, transfer, displacement, defense mechanism, the conflict between the super-ego and the id. They all refer to the transformation of socially undesirable impulses into desirable and acceptable behaviors. But what if the opposite was true? What if no sex means no sex, and there is no dark secret to probe into? The French philosopher Michel Foucault hinted at this possibility in his History of Sexuality when he criticized the repressive hypothesis, the idea that western society suppressed sexuality from the 17th to the mid-20th century due to the rise of capitalism and bourgeois society. Foucault argued that discourse on sexuality in fact proliferated during this period during which experts began to examine sexuality in a scientific manner, cataloguing sexual perversions and emphasizing the binary between hetero- and homosexuality. By opposition, Roland Barthes, Foucault’s colleague at the Collège de France, proposed a concept to bypass the paradigm of sexuality and go beyond the binary construction of meaning: the Neutral. “I define the Neutral as that which outplays the paradigm, or rather I call Neutral everything that baffles paradigm,” he wrote. According to Barthes, the Neutral, or the grammatical Neuter (le neutre) operates a radical deconstruction of meaning and sexuality. It allows us to reexamine from a fresh perspective the question of le genre, understood in its dual sense of literary genre and of gender.

The repressive hypothesis

Biographies of Roland Barthes point out that he remained a bachelor all his life and shared an apartment with his mother, to whom he devoted a vibrant eulogy at the time of her death. Barthes was also a closet homosexual, never avowing in public his penchant for boys and his dependence on the gigolo trade. His works are almost silent on his sexuality. Barthes’s homosexuality concerned only a private part of his life; it was never made public, because it simply wasn’t. Homosexuality was never for Barthes anything other than a matter of sex, limited to the question of the choice of a sexual object. He wasn’t gay (a term that functions as a seal of identity), and would never have been part of the political movement for the recognition of homosexual rights. This indifference was not a repression: it was another way of expressing what being modern meant for him, even if Bathes’ modernity was closely related to a certain resistance to the modern world. In a society obsessed with the new and the rejection of conventional forms, it is attachment to the past that now constitutes a form of marginality or even clandestinity and, as such, a heroism of the ordinary. Being modern doesn’t just mean taking part in the intellectual or artistic spectacle of contemporary society. It also, and above all, means constructing meanings, words, ways of being, cultural and textual interventions that precede what a society makes available. To be modern is to make one’s desire come to language. In this sense, Benjamin Kahan’s Celibacies, a work of literary criticism and cultural history, articulates other ways of being modern. Focusing on a diverse group of authors, social activists, and artists, spanning from the suffragettes to Henry James, and from the Harlem Renaissance’s Father Divine to Andy Warhol, Kahan shows that the celibate condition, in the diverse forms that it took in the twentieth century, meant much more than sexual abstinence or a cover for homosexuality. To those who associate the notion of celibacy with sexual repression, submission to social norms, and political conservatism, he demonstrates that celibacies in the twentieth century were more often than not on the side of social reform, leftist politics, and artistic avant-garde.

Celibacies is placed under the sign of Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, with a quote used as an epigraph that opens the book: “Many people have their richest mental/emotional involvement with sexual acts that they don’t do, or even don’t want to do.” Sedgwick deemed the hermeneutic practice of uncovering evidence of same-sex desire and its repression in literature, “paranoid reading.” To this trend, she opposed a reparative turn in literary studies: reparative reading seeks pleasure in the text and works to replenish the self. Sedgwick’s injunction to move from paranoid to reparative reading has been diversely followed. On the one hand, queer studies continue to read the absence of sex as itself a sign of homosexuality or of repressed desire, as an act of self-censorship and insincerity. The closeted subject has internalized social norms and keeps the true self hidden from outside views, sometimes hidden from the conscious self as well. By opposition, the queer subject brings desire to the fore, and challenges tendencies to oppose private eroticism and the systems of value that govern public interests. On the other hand, queer theory rejects normativities of all stripes, including homonormativity. It understands sex and gender as enacted and not fixed by natural determinism. Since the performance of gender is what makes gender exist, a performance of “no sex” creates a distinct gender identity: no means no, and abstinence from sex is not always the sign of repressed sexuality. It is possible to theorize gender and even sexuality without the interference of sex. But according to Kahan, celibacy is distinct from asexuality, understood as the lack of sexual attraction to others, or low or absent interest in or desire for sexual activity. Celibacy is a historical formation or a structure of attachment that can be understood as a sexuality in its own right. Its meaning has evolved in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: it has be used as a synonym for unmarried, as a life stage preceding marriage, as a choice or a vow of sexual abstinence, as a political self-identification, as a resistance to compulsory sexuality, as a period in between sexual activity, or as a new form of gender identity organized in a distinct community culture. Celibacies used in the plural reflect these overlapping meanings and cast a light on literary productions illustrating the impact of modernism in America.

The educated spinster

Celibacy once was a recognized social identity defined by its opposite, heterosexual marriage. According to Simone de Beauvoir, “the celibate woman is to be explained and defined with reference to marriage, whether she is frustrated, rebellious, or even indifferent in regard to that institution.” Its determinants were political and economical rather than sexual or sentimental: celibacy was a necessary condition for middle- and upper-class white women to gain legal and financial independence. At the end of the nineteenth century, “marriage bars” required the dismissal of female employees upon their marriage or the prohibition of the employment of a married woman. Educated women who wanted to enter a career or a profession had to remain unmarried or to hide their marriage. They did so in large numbers: “Of women educated at Bryn Mawr between 1889 and 1908, for instance, fifty-three percent remained unwed.” For this reason, celibacy is at the very heart of the history of labor in America. It is also a key component of social mobilization and civic campaigns: in the United States, unmarried, educated women composed much of the rank and file of social movements campaigning for universal suffrage, temperance, and social purity. The centrality of celibacy for first-wave feminism cannot be emphasized enough. For the author, women’s “choice not to marry is indicative of a willingness to think outside existing social structures and thus it is associated with freedom of thought.” For their male contemporaries, it was also associated with ridicule. Women campaigning for female suffrage were belittled as “suffragettes”; and other expressions disparaged women who had chosen to stay single (“singletons,” “bachelorettes,” “old maids,” “spinsters.”) The male bachelor, by contrast, was seen as socially able to marry but having delayed marriage of his own volition; he could be characterized as “a good catch,” “a stag,” or “a jolly good fellow.”

Celibacy’s history is imbricated with the history of homosexuality. Discussing Henry James’ novel The Bostonians, Kahan investigates one of the most contested site of celibacy in the history of homosexuality: the Boston marriage. The term “Boston marriage” describes a long-term partnership between two women who live together and share their lives with one another. In James’s satirical novel, the romance between the heroin Verena Tarrant and Olive Chancellor, a Boston feminist and social campaigner, is placed on equal footing with the romance between Verena and her other suitor, Basil Ransom. This love triangle is often read as a lesbian plot: Olivia’s decision to leave her parents’ house, move in with Verena and study in preparation for a career in the feminist movement is seen as the result of a love attraction. Benjamin Kahan proposes another interpretation based on the constitutive role of celibacy as a means for independence and self-determination. The Boston marriage, which does not grow out of “convenience or economy,” is associated with collaborative literary production. It reflects Henry James’ own condition as a lifelong bachelor and his conception of authorship as a vocation. The artist, like the bachelor, is fundamentally monadic and stands apart from social spheres of influence: “rather than seeing James’s celibacy as only an element of a homosexual identity, I understand it as a crucial component of his novelistic production.” In a separate chapter examining the work of Marianne Moore, a twentieth-century American poet, Kahan sees echoes of her lifelong celibacy in her poetics and conception of time. Moore’s “celibate poetics” involve a lack of development within the poem, a lack of climax, a backwardness that reverses the passage of time, as well as pleasure in difficulty, lack of explicitness, and a style at once shy and flamboyant. Moore’s remark that “the cure for loneliness is solitude” makes solitary existence a fully contented mode of sociability and a crucial part of her poetics.

Black celibacy and queer citizenship

In his effort to make celibacy be seen as progressive and pleasurable, Benjamin Kahan underscores that the celibate condition in the twentieth century was not restricted to middle-class white women. Black celibacy was advocated by a now forgotten figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Father Divine, “an intellectual and religious leader who believed he was God.” His cult, the Peace Mission Movement, organized his followers into interracial celibate living arrangements called kingdoms. These celibate communes were a direct response to economic conditions: rents in Harlem were prohibitively high, making necessary for families to share apartments or take in lodgers. Cooperative housing also echoed the calls from Claude McKay, a socialist and a poet, to seize the means of production and organize the black community on a self-sustaining basis. Lastly, black celibacy and chastity vows countered racist depictions of the black body as oversexualized and promiscuous. By making a celibate identity available to black subjects, Father Divine allowed black men and women to participate in the public sphere and created economic and spiritual opportunities for racial equality. Celibacy was also used as a strategy for queer subjects to circumvent the prohibition preventing homosexual immigrants from becoming American citizens. Before the passage of the McCarran-Walter Act in 1952, the queer citizen could, according to the letter of the law, belong to America so long as he remained celibate or was not “caught in an act of moral turpitude.” The British poet W. H. Auden became an American citizen in 1946 by practicing “cheating celibacy,” a position both inside and outside the rules that he thematized in his 1944 poetic essay The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest”. This long poem is a series of dramatic monologues spoken by the characters in Shakespeare’s play in which Caliban renunciates his former self in favor of a queer form of belonging. But as Kahan notes, “black queer writers like Claude McKay, James Baldwin, and Langston Hughes had significantly less ability to move in and out of America’s borders than white authors like Auden.”

Kahan’s choice to associate Andy Warhol with celibacy is disconcerting. The pop artist was openly gay and had a reputation for promiscuity and swishiness. His art collective, the Factory, was populated by “drag queens, hustlers, speed freaks, fag hags, and others.” But “‘gayness’ is not a category that we can control in advance.” If Warhol’s declarations can be taken at face value, he claimed that he didn’t have any sex life: “Well, I never have sex” and “Yeah. I’m still a virgin,” he responded in an interview. Evidence also suggests that the Factory wasn’t the “Pussy Heaven” or “Queer Central” journalists once described: according to one witness, celibacy organized life at the Factory, and Warhol’s abstinence from sex shaped relations of power and subjection. As Kahan sees it, the tradition of celibate philosophers underwrites the Factory’s mode of government and theorizes a concept of group celibacy. Warhol’s marriage to his tape recorder exemplified his rejection of traditional marriage and emotional life: “I want to be a machine.” In the view of a contemporary, “everything is sexual to Andy without the sex act actually taking place.” His celibacy operates at a zero degree of desire. My Hustler, his 1965 movie with film director Paul Morrissey and actor Ed Hood, presents a twisted celibate plot characterized as much by sexlessness as by sex. Valerie Solanas tried to kill Andy Warhol in 1968 because she claimed “he had too much control of [her] life”. In the SCUM Manifesto she published before her attempted murder, the radical feminist urged women to “overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.” Kahan places both Warhol and Solanas in a tradition of philosophical bachelorhood that precludes sex in favor of alternative modes of governance.

Celibate readings

In the conclusion of Celibacies, Benjamin Kahan argues that celibacy should not be abandoned to the American political right, with its apology of abstinence before marriage and traditional gender roles. Celibacy from the 1880s to the 1960s has been on the side of reform and modernism. Celibate women could access public space and the professions at a time social norms prevented educated married women from entering the workforce. In the 1930s, celibacy was a possible option availing economic advantages to African-Americans in Harlem or allowing queer foreigners to access U.S. citizenship. Celibacy could also be a philosophical choice or a condition for artistic production. Having a room of one’s own was easier when one didn’t have to share the apartment with another person or raise a family. Forms of celibacies have also been animated by “sexual currents, desires, identifications, and pleasures.” Celibacy’s imbrication with homosexuality is not just a modern invention: depictions of “Boston marriage” in the late nineteenth century had strong implications of lesbianism. But celibacy was not only a pre-homosexual discourse or the result of sexual repression: it was a form of sexuality in its own right, entailing a more radical withdrawal than is the case with the closet homosexual or the scholar practicing sexual abstinence. No sex means sex otherwise, or a different form of sexuality. Looking to literary works of fiction and poetry through the prism of celibacy leads to valuable insights: Kahan reads a “celibate plot” in Henry James’ The Bostonians or Andy Warhol’s My Hustler, and highlights a “celibate poetics” in the poems of Marianne Moore or W. H. Auden. This book is published in a series devoted to queer studies because, as the author argues, “celibate and queer readings overlap without being coextensive.” Much as queer theory has the effect of “undoing gender,” the primary purpose of the Neutral according to Roland Barthes is to undo the classifying function of language and thus to neutralize the signifier’s distinctive function. “L’écriture célibataire” is the form the Neutral took in American modernism.

Chinese Movie Stars Are Beautiful and Vulgar

11 Jun 2022 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium, Mila Zuo, Duke University Press, 2022.**

Vulgar Beauty Everything has been written about the “male gaze” and the fetishization of Asian bodies on cinema screens. As film studies and feminist scholarship make it clear, white male heterosexuals fantasize about oriental ladies and make the exotic rhyme with the erotic. But Mila Zuo is not interested in white male cinema viewers: her focus is on the close-up faces of Chinese movie stars on the screen, which she finds both beautiful and vulgar in a sense that she elaborates upon in her book Vulgar Beauty. As a film scholar with a knack for philosophy and critical studies, she builds film theory and cinema critique based on her own experience as an Asian American who grew up in the Midwest feeling the only Asian girl in town and who had to rely on movie screens to find kindred faces and spirits. As she recalls, “When on rare occasion I did see an Asian woman’s face on television, a blush of shame and fascination blanketed me.” True to her own experience, she begins each chapter with a short recollection of her personal encounter with Chinese movies or Asian movie stars. The films that she selects in Vulgar Beauty, and the film theory that she develops, are not about them (American white males): they are about us (Chinese-identifying female spectators and actresses) and even about me (as an individual with her own subjectivity and life history). Her project is to “theorize vulgar Chinese feminity from the purview of a diasporic Chinese/Asian/American woman spectator.” She is “acting Chinese” in her effort to build film theory based on Chinese forms of knowledge and sense-making: the five medicinal flavors (bitter, salty, pungent, sweet, and sour); the practice of face reading or mian xiang; the role of blandness (dan) in the Chinese aesthetic tradition; the materialist cosmogony of traditional Chinese medicine; etc. Her conviction is that Chinese (or Asian American) film studies should not reproduce established patterns of normative knowledge production, but should be truly innovative and challenging even if it runs the risk of being vulgar.

From the male gaze to the female stare

In her endeavor, Mila Zuo does not start from zero. She enters a field rich in intellectual contributions, reflexive theorizing, and disciplinary specificities. The hallmark of Anglo-American cinema studies, and what sets it apart in a field previously dominated by European male theoretical thinkers, is its focus on identity politics and feminist critique. To the concept of the “male gaze,” first introduced by Laura Mulvey in 1975, Asian American feminist scholars have added a rich area of conceptual notions and propositions: the hyper-sexualization of petite Asian bodies; the inscrutability and artifice of the Asian face; the infantilization of actresses through notions of cuteness, perverse innocence, and capricious behavior; the masculinist ideology of Asian virtues such as submissiveness, modesty, and self-restraint; the idealization of filial piety and sentimental attachments. The corpus of theoretical references has been extended to include Lacanian psychoanalysis, Black feminism, and new materialism, all of which are discussed in Mila Zuo’s book. Efforts have been made to break off disciplinary barriers and academic compartmentalization: Vulgar Beauty does not limit itself to cinema from mainland China and includes discussions about blockbuster movies from Hollywood, art films from France, and non-movies such as Youtube videos of stand-up comedy actors. It remains within the paradigm of identity politics, with its emphasis on representing nation, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. But in focusing on female beauty, it raises a question that earlier feminist scholars had deliberately side-stepped. Indeed, in her seminal essay on “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” that introduced the notion of the gaze, Laura Mulvey stated provocatively: “It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article.” Mila Zuo’s intention is not to destroy beauty, but to reveal it and to connect it to the basic sensations of taste, smell, and body touch.

In the decades since Mulvey’s essay was first published, film and cultural critics have been extending the implications of her work. The paradigm of the male gaze is subject to a law of diminishing returns and has now reached a dead end. Synonym with male voyeurism and domination, it equates lust with caution and defines beauty according to a narrow ideological agenda shaped by the drives of the actively-looking male heterosexual subject. On the other hand, Asian American scholarship is experiencing a renaissance of sorts, a new birth fueled by the insights of critical studies that focus on differences in class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, ableism, animacy, materiality, and affect. It is from these new strands of inquiry that Mila Zuo draws her theoretical apparatus. To the notion of the gaze, which presupposes a male heterosexual spectator, she substitutes the concept of staring, which leaves open the sexual identity and ethnicity of the viewer. “It would be more apt to say that stardom, an amplification of the actor as mythic and exceptional, engage the eye through an incitement to stare.” The gaze connotes mastery and possession on the side of the male viewer and a passive, submissive role, for the woman on the screen. The stare responds to an interpellation and is always in waiting of an impossible returning glance: “movie stars appear to invite staring.” In particular, Chinese stars hail Chinese-identifying spectators into feeling Chinese. Chineseness is used here as a notion that is supposed to be “performative, contingent, and nonessentializing.” As Rey Chow first proposed, Chineseness is about seeing and being seen: “the jouissance of this experience lies in the elusiveness of seeing the act of seeing oneself, as well as fantasizing about others seeing us seeing ourselves as a validating act.”

Adding spice to a bland recipe

Racial beauties can elicit such staring and generate a form of perverse enjoyment. Several chapters focus on movies where there is only one Asian character (as in Hannibal Rising, Irma Vep, Twin Peaks, and The Crow). Ethnicity so conceived borders on racial appropriation: as bell hooks observed, it adds “a spice, a seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.” In Hannibal Rising, this spice has a bitter taste: Gong Li plays the role of a Japanese lady who trains the young Nazi-escaping Hannibal Lecter in the soft and hard arts of ikebana and swordsmanship. As one viewer commented, “Hannibal Rising puts the blame for a legendary serial killer where it belongs: with the Nazis. And the Communists. And the Japanese.” In Irma Vep and Twin Peaks, Maggie Cheung and Joan Chen add a salty and cool flavor to an otherwise predominantly white cast. Cheung, playing the role of an underworld criminal in a film-within-the-film, wears a tight latex costume modeled after Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman outfit and finds it cool. “Like the latex encasing her body, Maggie’s racial body becomes a formal property through which the elasticity of French identity is tested.” Irma Vep became an “infatuation film” for the director Olivier Assayas and his lead actress, as the two fell in love on set and subsequently married. Twin Peaks was the first American TV show to cast an Asian actress with a leading role, as the pilot episode opens with a closeup on Joan Chen’s cold makeup face. But she disappears midway in season two as her soul (or at least her face) becomes trapped inside a desk drawer knob (or whatever). In The Crow, the atmosphere becomes pungent: actress Bai Ling, herself a hot mess and a regular on TV talk shows, embodies the limits of liberal openness and multiculturalism in a “fascistic-gothic” film that legitimizes spectacular forms of punishment against racial others.

Mila Zuo has assimilated the lessons of Asian American scholarship from the past two decades and applies it to cinema studies. She replaces Asian Americans, and in particular Chinese immigrants, in a long history of victimization and racial segregation. She mentions the Los Angeles Chinatown mob lynching of eighteen Chinese immigrants in 1871, the lethal gas execution of a Chinese convict by the state of Nevada in 1921, and the ethnic tensions between Asian and African American communities during the 1992 riots in South Central Los Angeles. She does not develop the trope of the model minority, but gives voice to Asian-American standup comedians who are able to transform racial alienation into sour jokes and laughter. Charlene Yi and Ali Wong are anything but expressions of the model minority myth. The first, whose offbeat improvisations appear on Youtube videos and who self-identifies as a nonbinary “they”, deconstructs the myth of romantic love in a road movie where they set out to interview random people about love. The second develops a form of bawdy humor and off-color cynicism, as when she comments on her abundant vaginal secretions at age eighteen: “Oh, my god, it was so juicy. You could just blow bubble wand with it, just… ‘I slime you, I slime you. Ghostbusters!’” The model minority Asian in America is supposed to be obedient, hardworking, and self-effacing. By contrast, these comedians elicit laughter by turning their social awkwardness into transgressions that evoke the flavorful aesthetic of sourness. Think of a baby eating a lemon for the first time: as Mila Zuo notes, “the sour is capricious and unexpected; it gets off rhythm, off clock.” Likewise, “racial sour” follows “another tempo, pace, and beat that is out of step and misaligned with dominant demands of time.”

Bitter and sweet

The first Chinese movies consumed by international audiences left a bitter taste to the spectators. In the post-Mao era, bitterness emerged as a structure of feeling, a way to reckon with a traumatic past by “recalling bitterness” during China’s feudal and communist periods and exalting nationalist resilience. Actress Gong Li emerged as the sensual embodiment of China’s bitter flavor, participating in the process of national wound healing while making the aesthetic of “eating bitterness” (chiku) suitable for worldwide consumption. Through a close reading of Red Sorghum, Mila Zuo shows how Gong became the suffering embodiment of China-as-woman, generating libidinal attraction and nationalist longings for reparative justice. As the Chinese saying goes, ”you can’t really know sweetness until you eat bitterness.” But the tastes dictated by Chinese authorities and the flavors favored by cosmopolitan audiences do not always align. The pungent atmosphere of Lust, Caution directed by Ang Lee and starring Tang Wei created a violent backlash among Chinese communities in China and abroad for its vivid sex scenes and moral ambiguity. Recent saccharine comedies like The Knot and If You Are the One imagine Taiwan’s reunification with the mainland through cross-strait romantic stories and are conceived as a channel for Chinese soft power propaganda. They cast Taiwan as “a female partner who, even if she hesitates, ultimately defers to a benevolent, masculine China.” But a close reading of how Taiwanese stars Vivian Hsu and Shu Qi are “acting Chinese” in these movies tells a different story. Hsu’s over-the-top performance in The Knot, where her display of excessive sweetness turns mushy and cheesy, betrays the desperation of soft power’s cloying and calculating tendencies. Noting the frequent use of fade-to-blacks and story cuts, Mila Zuo notes that “the film’s stammering fades gesture to its rheumatic problem—it has a joint issue, in both formal and politico-ideological terms.” As for Shu Qi’s performance in If You Are the One (a film that gave birth to a sequel and a TV show), it is characterized by the same excess of saccharine and glucose. Commenting on the heroine’s remark that “soft persimmons taste the best,” Mila Zuo notes that “persimmons, like kiwis, should be eaten when they are a little overripe, that is, when their flesh begins to soften and bloat.” Unbeknownst to the propaganda apparatus, the soft-sweetness of overripe fruits can act as an antidote of nationalist poison.

Mila Zuo’s book is structured around the five tastes of bitter, salty, pungent, sweet, and sour. These flavors or weidao are more than descriptions of culinary savor: they are aesthetic, sensorial, and affective categories that play a prominent role in traditional Chinese medicine and in Eastern epistemologies. They express a vision of the world that engages the whole cosmos: for example, “a bitter taste in the mouth denotes a disturbance of the element wood in the body, which is internally related to nerves and locomotion, and externally related to the season of spring, the direction of east, and the period of dawn.” Flavors not only make for a good dish but also an ordered cosmos: as Sun Tzu wrote, “Harmony is like soup. The salt flavoring is the other to the bitter, and the bitter is the other to the salt. With these two ‘others’ combining in due proportions and a new flavor emerging, this is what is expressed in ‘harmony.’” What flavors do to the body, how they are internally processed and digested by bodily organs and the fluids or scents they generate, is a reflection of the cosmic balance between the various elements. Material ingredients and spices also combine with affects: for example, salty coldness and sour anger are two ways to cope with aggression and xenophobia. Using epistemologies that are relevant to the formations of China, Mila Zuo brings a new perspective on cinema studies that otherwise rely on western theorizations and abstract categories. In particular, tasting and eating provide foundational understandings of beauty: a woman can be described as tender (nennü) or as ripe (shunü), and the weidao (sensory essence) of charm includes the scent of her skin, the softness of her body, and the sweetness of her smile as well as the bitterness of her tears and the saltiness of her perspiration.

Vulgar is not vulgar

I had trouble understanding what the author of Vulgar Beauty meant by “vulgar.” Applying it to Gong Li (an actress I tend to idolize and fetishize) seemed to me not only wrong, but also blasphemous. Even if I now get it, I am not sure I agree with the use of the term as characterized by Mila Zuo. As she explains, vulgar does not always imply vulgarity, just like sexy does not always relate to sex. “Vulgar senses” designate the bodily faculties of tasting, smelling and touching, in opposition to the more noble sensory abilities of seeing and hearing. It also refers to the “bad tastes” of the bitter, salty, pungent, and sour, as opposed to more pleasant savors of sweet and bland. Mila Zuo opposes “a paradigm of visuality and aurality, on which cinema is predicated, to an affective structure based on the lower sensorium”: one can taste and smell a movie as much as one can appreciate its visual scenes and sonic atmosphere. She also implies that her analysis is vulgar—not because she uses the word f*** several times, but due to her materialist orientation and use of “bad ideas” borrowed from Chinese cosmology. She deploys vulgarity as a critical methodology to reinscribe the Chinese body into the core of media studies. Her film commentary is sensitive to the material aspects of beauty—the “minor acts” of “eye tearing, skin perspiring, smiles cracking, fingers pointing, legs waddling.” Chinese actresses and Asian American comedians can be vulgar in a more common sense—lacking distinction and poise as defined in a white Anglo-Saxon context. The book opens with a scene starring Zhang Ziyi performing sajiao, or childish behavior directed toward a male partner, and there is certainly a lack of class and decorum in this display of self-infantilization. The same can be said of the book cover in which Joan Chen from Twin Peaks applies makeup facing a mirror in a scene that usually remains off stage. “Acting Chinese” means displacing the Western canon of beauty by including the lower senses and material elements that make vulgar beauty generative and beautiful.

The Brazilian Buttock Lift

9 Jun 202114 Sep 2021 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Pretty Modern: Beauty, Sex, and Plastic Surgery in Brazil, Alexander Edmonds, Duke University Press, 2010.**

Pretty Modern In Brazil, women claim the right to be beautiful. When nature and the passing of time don’t help, beauty can be achieved at the end of a scalpel. Plastic surgery or plástica is not only a status good or the preserve of socialites and celebrities: according to Ivo Pitanguy, the most famous Brazilian plastic surgeon and a celebrity himself, “The poor have the right to be beautiful too.” And they are banking on that right. Rio and São Paulo have some of the densest concentrations of plastic surgeons in the world, and financing plans have made plástica accessible to the lower middle class and even to favela residents. While in the United States, people may hide that they have had plastic surgery like it’s something shameful, in Brazil they flaunt it. The attitude is that having work done shows you care about yourself—it’s a status symbol as well as a statement of self-esteem. Cosmetic surgery’s popularity in Brazil raises a number of interesting questions. How did plastic surgery, a practice often associated with body hatred and alienation, take root in a country known for its glorious embrace of sensuality and pleasure? Is beauty a right which, like education or health care, should be realized with the help of public institutions and fiscal subsidies? Does beauty reinforce social hierarchies, or is attractiveness a “great equalizer” that neutralizes or attenuates the effects of class and gender? Does plástica operate on the body or on the mind, and is it a legitimate medical act or a frivolous and narcissistic pursuit? Does beauty work alienate women or is it a way to bring them into the public sphere?

Class, race, gender, and plástica

Alexander Edmonds, an American anthropologist, answers these questions by mobilizing the three key dimensions of his discipline: class, race, and gender. Brazil is a class society with one of the most unequal wealth distributions in the world. It is also a society organized along racial lines, even though a long history of miscegenation has blurred color lines and made racial democracy part of the national identity. Brazil continues to have large gender gaps within the workforce and government representation. The country’s supposedly large number of exotic, attractive and sexually available women makes it a masculinist fantasy worldwide, while Brazilian feminists face enduring challenges. All these issues relate in one way or another to the availability of cosmetic surgery, the quest for beauty and attractiveness, and the development of medicine into new terrains of well-being and self-esteem. Pretty Modern mixes several strands of literature. It is a travelogue into contemporary Brazil, a deep dive into its history and culture, a journalistic description of the cosmetic surgery industry, a philosophical treatise on beauty and appearances, a personal memoir about the impasses of erudite culture and the wisdom of ordinary people. It even contains samba lyrics and color pictures of scantily clad models.

The Brazilian constitution recognizes the human right to health. It doesn’t recognize the right to beauty, but cosmetic surgery is provided for free or at subsidized rates in public clinics such as the Santa Casa da Misericórdia in Rio. Surgeons perform charity surgeries for the poor to get practice in large residency programs before opening their private clinics. Some medical doctors come from afar to learn how to operate barrigas (bellies) or bundas (buttocks), techniques that come predominantly from Brazil. Ivo Pitanguy himself, the pioneer of plastic surgery in Brazil, learned the trade from Europe before bringing it back to Rio and taking it to a new level. His democratic ethos has been maintained by his disciples who share his vision of cosmetic surgery as psychotherapeutic intervention that should be accessible to all. Pitanguy famously defined the plastic surgeon as “a psychologist with a scalpel in his hand,” echoing the saying that “the psychoanalyst knows everything but changes nothing. The plastic surgeon knows nothing but changes everything.” Women see their operations as a form of psychological healing; given the choice, they prefer the surgeon’s scalpel than the couch of the psychoanalyst. Plástica has psychological effects for the poor as well as for the rich: surgery improves a woman’s auto-estima, self-esteem, and is considered as a necessity, not a vanity. Appearance is essential to mental well-being, economic competitiveness, and social and sexual competence. If we follow the WHO’s definition of health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being,” then beauty work represents the new frontier in the pursuit of happiness.

The right to beauty

Of course, the growth of cosmetic surgery has not been without controversy. A “right to beauty” seems to value a rather frivolous concern in a country with more pressing problems—from tropical diseases, like dengue, to the diseases of modernity, like diabetes. Brazil has a health system divided into a public and a private sector with different standards of care, and the poor often see their universal right to healthcare obstructed by long queues, squalid conditions, and substandard practice. Cosmetic surgery stretches medical practice into an ambiguous grey zone where the Hippocratic oath doesn’t always fully apply. The growth of plástica has also been accompanied by a rise in malpractice cases, insurance fraud, and media stories of horrific complications. Some Brazilian critics see the new fashion of breast enlargement as a form of cultural imperialism brought by Euro-American influence in a country that has long valued small boobies and big booties (the ever-popular butt implant raises fewer cultural concerns.) Beauty ideals peddled by women’s magazines are blamed for eating disorders and body alienation. Cultural elites from the West see the pursuit of the artificially enhanced body as vain, vulgar, and superficial, betraying a narcissistic concern with the self. But who is one to judge? asks Alexander Edmonds, who confesses he shared some of the misapprehensions of the distanced scholar before he was confronted with a candid remark by a favela dweller: “Only intellectuals like misery. The poor prefer luxury.” Even though it is not common for a scholar to glance through local versions of Playboy or watch telenovelas titled “Without Tits, There is no Paradise,” the anthropologist knows the heuristic value of suspending one’s judgment and immersing oneself into the life-world of cultural others through participant observation.

Race raises another set of issues. Here too, North Americans have been accused of exporting their cultural imperialism, with its bipolar racial categories and immutable color line, in a country that has long prided itself for its racial democracy and color fluidity. In fact, Brazilians are very race-conscious. But rather than grouping people into races defined by ancestry, the local taxonomy describes subtle variations in appearance along a continuum. The national census racially classifies the Brazilian population in five color types: branco (white), pardo (brown), preto (black), amarelo (yellow), and indigenous. But in everyday usage, more than 130 color types have been identified. Brazil’s famous “rainbow of color terms” intersects with class and gender. In Brazil moving up the social scale can be seen as a form of whitening. For example, a light-skinned multiracial person who held an important, well-paying position in society may be considered branco while someone else with the same ethnogenetic make-up who had darker skin or was of a lower class may be considered pardo or even preto. But unlike in many parts of the world where lightness of skin tone is fetishized, in Brazil brown is beautiful. Many women pride themselves of being morena, a term that can mean both brunette and brown-skinned. On the other hand, blackness is stigmatized, and European facial features and hair confer social advantages. No wonder that “correction of the Negroid nose” is a standard surgery operation that raises few eyebrows, while Brazil remains one of the biggest consumer market for blonde hair dye.

The anthropology of mestiçagem

More than any other nation, Brazil’s self-image and national identity has been shaped by anthropologists. The Amazon Indian is known solely from the reports of ethnographers in the field, perpetuating the heritage of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Gilberto Freyre, a student of Franz Boas in the early twentieth century, provocatively reversed the scientific discourse on “miscegenation” and its racist underpinnings by affirming the virtue of racial mixture and cultural syncretism. Freyre’s celebration of idealized and eroticized mestiçagem played a central role in defining Brazilian national identity. Sexuality—especially across racial lines—became a key symbol for the formation of a new, mixed population with positive traits, such as cordiality and physical beauty. But more recently sociologists have deconstructed the myth of racial democracy by documenting the persistent racial inequalities in wealth and income, access to education and social services, and representations in the media and in the political sphere. Governments introduced controversial quotas to promote racial diversity in higher education and in the public sector. There has been a shift in the representation of race in the past twenty years. More dark faces now appear in telenovelas, ad campaigns, and variety shows, and multinational companies have found a new niche market for black beauty products, fashion, and cosmetics. Afrodescendentes are adopting a black hairstyle and a negra identity as well as narratives of racial pride and militancy. It is too early to say whether affirmative action and identity politics will substitute to mestiçagem and the rainbow of colors, but the emergence of the black movement in Brazil also confirms the significance of the aesthetic dimension of modern subjectivities.

What does cosmetic surgery tell us about gender relations and women’s roles? Contrary to a popular perception, women do not engage in beauty work to comply to men’s expectations and submit themselves to the male gaze. They do it on their own terms, to follow their own desires or to respond to society’s “interpellation.” Motives may vary across social class, age category, and marital status. Some Brazilian women can be openly frank about it: “After having kids, I’ll have to do a recauchutagem [refurbishing, normally of a car]. After shutting down the factory, nê?” Plastic surgery is closely linked to a larger field that manages female reproduction and sexuality. It is not coincidental that Brazil has not only high rates of plastic surgery, but also Cesarean sections (70 percent of deliveries in some private hospitals), tubal ligations (sterilization accounts for half of all contraceptive use), and other surgeries for women. Some women see elective surgeries as part of a modern standard of care available to them throughout the female life cycle. Cosmetic surgery can mark key rites of passage: initiation into adulthood, marriage, motherhood, divorce, and menopause. The transformative events by far the most often mentioned in connection with plástica are pregnancy and breast-feeding. Tensions between motherhood and sexuality are analyzed in detail by Alexander Edmonds, who mentions that both are equally important for self-esteem. Drawing on a range of examples—from maids who aspire to acquire cosmetic surgeries, to favela residents who dream of entering the fashion world, to single mothers who embrace plastic surgery as a means of erotic body scuplting—he describes how sexual and class aspirations subtly mingle in beauty culture.

The right of the Brazilian morena

In his last book Modos de homem, modas de mulher, published shortly before his death in 1987, Gilberto Freyre warned against “yankee influence” and the impact of “north-Europeanization or albinization”: “one must recognize the right of the Brazilian brunette to rebuke northern-European fashions aimed at blonde, white women.” In Pretty Modern, Alexander Edmonds shows that the right of the Brazilian morena is not to be abolished. The tyranny of fashion applies more than elsewhere in a country where bodies are being refashioned to fit aesthetic and sexual mores. But Brazilian plástica does not follow an American or north-European blueprint. If anything, it leads the way that other emerging countries in Latin America or East Asia are also beginning to tread. There, the female body is invested with hopes of social mobility and self-accomplishment that demand long-term investment and management. In poor urban areas, beauty often has a similar importance for girls as soccer (or basketball) does for boys: it promises an almost magical attainment of recognition, wealth or power. For middle-class cariocas, the body is a source of distinction and success. For many consumers, a lean and fit body is essential to economic and sexual competition, social visibility, and mental well-being. Beauty culture interpellates women as autonomous sexual beings and as economic agents in markets where physical attractiveness can be exchanged with various kinds of cultural and economic resources. This anthropologic study shows that cosmetic surgery arises in unison with a central concern for Brazilian women: staying young, sexy, and beautiful.

A Biased Perspective on Sex Change

15 May 202115 May 2021 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment, Aren Z. Aizura, Duke University Press, 2018.**

Mobile Subjects Imagine you want to go through a “sex change” or a gender reassignment. People identify you as a man, but you want to be identified as a woman, or vice versa. You may also plan to undergo medical treatment and take hormones or get surgery. What should you and your colleagues do at the workplace to manage this transition? According to the British government that published a guide for employers regarding gender reassignment, transsexual people should take a few days or weeks off at the point of change and return in their new name and gender role. Time off between roles is assumed to give the trans person as well as coworkers time to adjust to the new gender identity. It is usually announced that the trans person will go on a trip, which may be real or figurative; and this journey-out-and-return-home forms the transition narrative that will shape people’s expectations and reactions to the change in gender identity. What happens during this trip needs not be detailed. The journey abroad opens a space of gender indeterminacy that makes transsexuality intelligible within a gender binary. This transition narrative was pioneered by Christine Jorgensen who, in 1953, went to Denmark to get surgery and returned to the United States as a celebrity. As the (undoubtedly sexist) quip had it, Jorgensen “went abroad and came back a broad.”

Neoliberalism and white privilege

This line of conduct is presented as good practice to ease transition at the workplace. But Aren Aizura is not happy with this recommendation. For him, the journey narrative is tainted by neoliberalism, white privilege, colonial exploitation, and gender prejudice. As he puts it, “the particular advice to take a transition vacation places us firmly in a corporatized framework of neoliberal racialized citizenship.” This is, in a way, stating the obvious: remember that the advice comes from a guide for employers, and from the analysis of workplace policy documents. The labelling of corporate practices as “neoliberal” is a well-established convention in the social sciences and in critical discourse on globalization. More surprising is the author’s call to “remain alert to the racial and colonial overtones of ‘elsewhere’ in this fantasy of an ideal gender transition.” Denmark was never a colony, and neither was Thailand, where many gender reassignment operations now take place. Nor are the recommendations of the Women and Equality Unit of the British government tainted by a white bias or by structural racism. Contrary to what Aizura states, they do not assume the whiteness of the trans or gender nonconforming subject: this racial assignation only takes place in the author’s imagination. As for the gender bias implicit in these guidelines, it results from Aizura’s claim that gender is not necessarily binary: presenting transition as the passage from man to woman or woman to man “contains the threat of gender indeterminacy and the possibility that gender may be performative and socially constructed.” Again, nothing in the above-mentioned guidelines appears to me as contradicting these claims.

Christine Jorgensen’s journey was considered as inspirational for generations of trans people or gender nonconforming persons in the United States. As the author of Transgender Warriors put it, “Christine Jorgensen’s struggle beamed a message to me that I wasn’t alone. She proved that even a period of right-wing reaction could not coerce each individual into conformity.” Her story also contributed to posit Europe as a place where gender reassignment technologies were more widely accessible and accepted. It was a typically American success story, emphasizing individual autonomy, self-transformation, and upward social mobility. In this respect, it was fully congruent with the “capitalist liberal individualism” that Aizura so vehemently denounces. But this doesn’t turn it into a story of white privilege or settler colonialism. The deconstruction of the rags-to-riches transition narrative not only annihilates the hopes and aspirations invested by earlier generations of trans people; it leaves non-trans persons with no reference point or narrative to interpret the gender identity change that some of their colleagues or relatives may go through. The fact that Christine Jorgensen was white and middle class seems to me fully irrelevant to the power of her narrative. Aizura does envisage the case that a gender nonconforming person of color may wish to benefit from the same corporate procedure described in the British guidelines; but he immediately dismisses such person as “the token brown person or cultural diversity representative” put forward by corporate communication planners. For me, dismissing racial inclusion and diversity policies as an expression of tokenism is a deeply problematic gesture.

French cabaret

I wasn’t familiar with the story of Christine Jorgensen. However, my French upbringing made me recognize the names of Amanda Lear, Capucine, and Bambi, whom the author claims underwent vaginoplasty surgery at the Clinique du Parc in Casablanca in the 1960s. This is a blatant fabrication, based on gossip and rumors that circulated at the time but that a rigorous scholar ought not to reproduce. The life story of Amanda Lear is shrouded in mystery, as her birthdate and birthplace have never been confirmed. But throughout her singing and acting career she strongly denied the transgender rumors that circulated about her, stating at one point that it was a “crazy idea from some journalist” or attributing them to Salvador Dali’s sharp wit. Capucine, a French actress and model, was never a transgender or a cabaret performer as alleged by Aizura: he confuses her with the transgender club singer Coccinelle, who did travel to Casablanca to undergo a vaginoplasty by the renowned surgeon Georges Burou in 1956. She said later, “Dr. Burou rectified the mistake nature had made and I became a real woman, on the inside as well as the outside. After the operation, the doctor just said, ‘Bonjour, Mademoiselle’, and I knew it had been a success.” As for “Bambi”, she is better known in France by her name Marie-Pierre Pruvot and soon left the cabaret stage to become a literature teacher and an author of bestsellers. When she was awarded the Order or Merit by the French Minister of Culture Roselyne Bachelot (herself a celebrity among trans and LGBT people), she dedicated this distinction to “all those (celles et ceux) whose fight for a normal life endures.”

These stories are distorted and silenced by Aizura, who only examines English-language accounts of gender transition. He considers these narratives as normative, without acknowledging the fact that his own account is deeply influenced by norms and conventions developed in North American (and Australian) academia. Accusations of white privilege, cultural appropriation, and heterosexual normativity are part of the “culture wars” that are waged on Western (mostly American) campuses. They should not be treated lightly: these charges carry weight and can lead to the shunning or dismissal of professors and students who are accused of cultural misdemeanor. It is not therefore without consequences that Aizura targets Jan Morris, Deirdre McCloskey, and Jennifer Boylan, three public intellectuals who have authored transition narratives, with potential repercussions for their reputation and career. The first (who passed away in 2020) is accused of “blatant colonial paternalism” because she describes her trip to Casablanca along an “unabashedly orientalist perspective.” Deirdre McCloskey is inappropriately described as a “Chicago School economist.” Although she taught at the University of Chicago for twelve years, she didn’t identify with the neoclassical orientation of her colleagues from the department of economics. On the contrary, she focused her work on the “rhetorics of economics” and took a decidedly heterodox approach to the discipline. But Aizura isn’t interested in McCloskey’s scholarly contribution: as with Jennifer Boylan, he accuses her of “institutional recuperation” and “cultural appropriation” because she dares to compare her experience of crossing gender barriers with the plight of immigrants entering the United States. When McCloskey writes: “You cannot imagine the relief in adopting my correct gender. Imagine if you felt French but has been raised in Minnesota,” Aizura is prompt to denounce her Eurocentric perspective (but doesn’t notice the small bruise done to Minnesota’s pride.)

Pinkwashing

Moving to the examination of a set of documentary movies documenting the trajectories of gay and transgender migrant workers in First World locations, Aizura formulates a new set of accusations: these films are voyeuristic, manipulative, culturally insensitive, and “metronormative” (they exhibit an urban bias.) Commenting on Jennie Livingston’s 1991 documentary Paris Is Burning, he questions the logic wherein “a middle-class white lesbian film-maker could produce a document about poor and marginalized queer and trans people of color with questionable benefit to the participants.” Regarding Tomer Heymann’s Paper Dolls, a 2006 documentary that follows the lives of transgender migrant workers from the Philippines who work as healthcare providers for elderly Orthodox Jewish men and perform as drag queens during their spare time, Aizura reproduces the charge of homonationalism and pinkwashing made against Israel’s gay-friendly policy by Jasbir Puar in The Right to Maim (which I reviewed here). Sebastiano d’Ayala Valva’s documentary Les travestis pleurent aussi, located in the Clichy suburb near Paris, offers a “deliberately bleak picture of the precarious existence of queer immigrants in Europe.” Indeed, Aizura takes issue with the “race, classed, and spatial politics of representation” made by documentary cinema that renders the bodies of migrant workers visible to white, mostly non-trans audiences at LGBT festivals or in “transgender 101 courses.” As he comments, “Queer film festivals are far from politically neutral spaces, however, and embody transnational politics,” again taking issue with Israel’s sponsorship of the San Francisco LGBT Film Festival.

Mobile Subjects is also an ethnography of transgender reassignment practices done through “extensive fieldwork in Thailand and Australia between 2006 and 2009.” Here again, the author reproduces the charges of white privilege, Orientalism, and racial exclusiveness that taint the testimonies and observations he was able to collect. He viciously settles scores with the medical doctor who denied him proper treatment by reproducing a scathing obituary that circulated on social media at the time of her death: “Ding, dong, the witch is dead!” (his “Dr. K.” will be easily recognizable, as the Monash Health Gender Clinic in Melbourne was the only institution to deliver gender reassignment prescription certificates in Australia.) He contrasts the “gatekeeper model” of obtaining gender reassignment surgery or GRS with the more open and entrepreneurial framework that characterizes Thailand. Cheaper services, better techniques, and ease of travel make the Thai model more attractive for the transnational consumer. But Thailand is not without its own prejudices against its kathoey population, and its medical services are not accessible to impecunious patients. Besides, there are legitimate concerns about a consumerist approach that treats bodily modification as a commodity. But Aizura’s main concern is about race: in the eyes of the Americans, Britons, and Australians he encountered in the high-end clinics that offered services to non-Thai foreigners or farangs, Thailand was synonymous with exoticism, feminine beauty, and the fulfillment of desire. The Thai women—and a few kathoeys—who catered to their needs were perceived as the responsive and subservient Asian female subjects that echoed their orientalist fantasies. Their self-transformation into “full womanhood” was therefore predicated upon a racial hierarchy that posits Asia as the feminine and the West as the masculine part of a heteronormative dyad.

Misconstructing Asia

As is clear by now, my concern with this book goes beyond sloppy scholarship, lack of fact checking, “naming names” for opprobrium, and slavish following of “woke” intellectual fashions. The obsession with whiteness and its alleged privilege seems to me more than delusional: it betrays a basic ignorance of current trends shaping South-East Asia, where Americanism or Eurocentrism increasingly appear as a thing of the past. There is not a word on China’s presence in the region, although the international clientele for gender-affirming treatments in Thailand increasingly comes from mainland China and other countries in the region, while online platforms for prescription hormones mostly cater to a regional market. Thailand is becoming a global destination for gender change, regardless of race or ethnicity, and references to colonialism are fully irrelevant in a country that never fell under Western colonial domination. I don’t want my critique to be misconstrued as the expression of gender prejudice or transphobia: again, the objurgation of transgender persons through the deconstruction of their valid testimonies is on the author’s side, not mine. Of course, Aren Aizura is entitled to his politics, which he sums up as “decriminalization of sex work; loosening immigration restrictions and national border controls; and making welfare, health care, and social safety nets available to all people regardless of immigration status” (I wish him luck, regarding the American context in which he operates.) He is also free to pursue scholarship in line with “trans and queer of color critiques,” “transnational feminist studies,” and “critical race studies.” I am not familiar with these lines of inquiry, and I picked up Mobile Subjects to get a better sense of what they might mean. My experiment was inconclusive, to say the least.

Kiss the Frog

23 Feb 202124 Feb 2021 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, Mel Y. Chen, Duke University Press, 2012.**

“Inanimate objects, have you then a soul / that clings to our soul and forces it to love?,” wondered Alphonse de Lamartine in his poem “Milly or the Homeland.” In Animacies, Mel Chen answers positively to the first part of this question, although the range of affects she considers is much broader than the lovely attachments that connected the French poet to his home village. As she sees it, “matter that is considered insensate, immobile, deathly, or otherwise ‘wrong’ animates cultural life in important ways.” Anima, the Latin word from which animacy derives, is defined as air, breath, life, mind, or soul. Inanimate objects are supposed to be devoid of such characteristics. In De Anima, Aristotle granted a soul to animals and to plants as well as to humans, but he denied that stones could have one. Modern thinkers have been more ready to take the plunge. As Chen notes, “Throughout the humanities and social sciences, scholars are working through posthumanist understandings of the significance of stuff, objects, commodities, and things.” Various concepts have been proposed to break the great divide between humans and nonhumans and between life and inanimate things, as the titles of recent essays indicate: “Vibrant Matter” (Jane Bennett), “Excitable Matter” (Natasha Myers), “Bodies That Matter” (Judith Butler), “The Social Life of Things” (Arjun Appadurai), “The Politics of Life Itself” (Nikolas Rose),“Parliament of Things” (Bruno Latour). Many argue that objects are imbued with agency, or at least an ability to evoke some sort of change or response in individual humans or in an entire society. However, each scholar also possesses an individual interpretation of the meaning of agency and the true capacity of material objects to have personalities of their own. In Animacies, Mel Chen makes her own contribution to this debate by pushing it in a radical way: writing from the perspective of queer studies, she argues that degrees of animacy, the agency of life and things, cannot be dissociated from the parameters of sexuality and race and is imbricated with health and disability issues as well as environmental and security concerns.

Intersectionality

Recent scholarship has seen a proliferation of dedicated cultural studies bearing the name of their subfield as an identity banner in a rainbow coalition: feminist studies, queer studies, Asian American studies, critical race studies, disability studies, animal studies… In a bold gesture of transdisciplinarity, Mel Chen’s Animacies contributes to all of them. The author doesn’t limit herself to one section of the identity spectrum: in her writing, intersectionality cuts across lines of species, race, ability, sexuality, and ethnicity. It even includes in its reach inanimate matter such as pieces of furniture (a couch plays a key part in the narrative) and toxic chemicals such as mercury and lead. And as each field yields its own conceptualization, Mel Chen draws her inspiration from what she refers to as “queer theory,” “crip theory,” “new materialisms,” “affect theory,” and “cognitive linguistics.” What makes the author confident enough to contribute to such a broad array of fields, methods, and objects? The reason has to do with the way identity politics is played in American universities. To claim legitimacy in a field of cultural studies, a scholar has to demonstrate a special connexion with the domain under consideration. As an Asian American for instance, Mel Chen cannot claim expertise in African American studies; but she can work intersectionally by building on her identity as a “queer woman of color” to enter into a productive dialogue with African American feminists. The same goes with other identity categories: persons with disabilities have a personal connexion to abled and disabled embodiment, while non-disabled persons can only reflect self-consciously about their ableism. Even pet lovers, as we will see, have to develop a special relationship with their furry friends in order to contribute to (critical) animal studies.

Using this yardstick, Mel Chen qualifies by all counts to her transdisciplinary endeavor. She identifies herself as Asian American, queer, and suffering from a debilitating illness. She gives many autobiographical details to buttress her credentials. She mentions that her parents were immigrants from China who couldn’t speak proper English and used singular and plural or gendered pronominal forms indifferently. She grew up in a white-dominated town in the Midwest and was used to hearing racist slurs, such as people yelling “SARS!” at her—this was before a US president publicly stigmatized the “Chinese virus.” She shows that prejudice against the Chinese has a long history in the United States. The book includes racist illustrations dating from the nineteenth century featuring Chinese immigrants with a hair “tail” and animal traits that make them look like rodents. Chen analyzes the racial fears of lead poisoning in the “Chinese lead toy scare” of 2007 when millions of Chinese exported toys made by Mattel were recalled due to overdoses of lead paint. She exhumes from the documentary and film archives the figure of Fu Manchu, a turn-of-the-century personification of the Yellow Peril, and proposes her own slant on this character that is said to provide “the bread and butter of Asian American studies.” Mel Chen’s self-reported identity as queer is also documented. She mentions her “Asian off-gendered form” when describing herself, and frequently refers to her own queerness. In an autobiographical vignette, she designates her partner as a “she” and puts the pronoun “her” in quotes when she refers to her girlfriend (Chen’s own bio on her academic webpage refers to her as “they”). Her scholarship builds on the classics of queer studies such as Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and she feels especially close to “queer women of color” theorizing. She exposes to her readers some unconventional gender and sexuality performances, such as the category of “stone butch” designating a lesbian who displays traditional masculinity traits and does not allow herself to be touched by her partner during lovemaking (to draw a comparison, Chen adds that many men, homo or heterosexual, do not like to be penetrated.)

Feeling Toxic

But it is on her medical condition that Mel Chen provides the most details. Moving to the “risky terrain of the autobiographical,” she mentions that she was diagnosed as suffering from “multiple chemical sensitivity” and “heavy metal poisoning.” This condition causes her to alternate between bouts of morbid depression and moments of “incredible wakefulness.” She makes a moving description of walking in the street without her filter mask and being in high alert for toxins and chemicals coming her way: navigating the city without her chemical respirator exposes her to multiple dangers, as each passerby with a whiff of cologne or traces of a chemical sunscreen may precipitate a strong allergic reaction. In such condition, which affects her physically and mentally, she prefers to stay at home and lie on her couch without seeing anybody. But Mel Chen doesn’t dwell on her personal condition in order to pose as a victim or to elicit compassion from her readers. Firstly, she feels privileged to occupy an academic position as gender and women studies professor at UC Berkeley: “I, too, write from the seat and time of empire,” she confesses, and this position of self-assumed privilege may explain why she doesn’t feel empowered enough to contribute to postcolonial studies or to decolonial scholarship. More importantly, she considers her disability as an opportunity, not a calamity. Of course, the fact that she cannot sustain many everyday toxins limits her life choices and capabilities. But toxicity opens up a new world of possibilities, a new orientation to people, to objects and to mental states. As we are invited to consider, “queer theories are especially rich for thinking about the affects of toxicity.”

This is where the love affair with her sofa comes in. When she retreats from the toxicity of the outside world, she cuddles in the arms of her couch and cannot be disturbed from her prostration. “The couch and I are interabsorbent, interporous, and not only because the couch is made of mammalian skin.” They switch sides, as object becomes animate and subject becomes inanimate. This is not only fetishism: a heightened sense of perception of human/object relations allows her to develop a “queer phenomenology” out of her mercurial experience. New modes of relationality affirm the agency of the matter that we live among and break it down to the level of the molecular. Mel Chen criticizes the way Deleuze and Guattari use the word “molecularity” in a purely abstract manner, considering “verbal particles” as well as subjectivities in their description of the molar and the molecular. By contrast, she takes the notion of the molecular at face value, describing the very concrete effects toxic molecules have on people and their being in the world. These effects are mediated by race, class, age, ability, and gender. In her description of the Chinese lead toy panic of 2007, she argues that the lead painted onto children’s toys imported to the United States was racialized as Chinese, whereas its potential victims were depicted as largely white. She reminds us that exposure to environmental lead affects primarily black and impoverished children as well as native Indian communities, with debilitating effects over the wellbeing and psychosocial development of children. Also ignored are the toxic conditions of labor and manufacture in Chinese factories operating mainly for Western consumers. The queer part of her narrative comes with her description of white middle-class parents panicking at the sight of their child licking their train toy Thomas the Tank Engine. In American parents’ view, Thomas is a symbol of masculinity, and straight children shouldn’t take pleasure in putting this manly emblem into their mouth. But as Chen asks: “What precisely is wrong with the boy licking the train?”

Queer Licking

In addition to her self-description as Asian, queer, and disabled, Mel Chen also claims the authority of the scholar, and it is on the academic front, not at the testimonial or autobiographical level, that she wants her Animacies to be registered. Trained as “a queer feminist linguist with a heightened sensitivity to the political and disciplinary mobility of terms,” she borrows her flagship concept from linguistics. Linguists define animacy as “the quality of liveness, sentience, or humanness of a noun or noun phrase that has grammatical, often syntactic, consequences.” Animacy describes a hierarchical ordering of types of entities that positions able-bodied humans at the top and that runs from human to animal, to vegetable, and to inanimate object such as stones. Animacy operates in a continuum, and degrees of animacies are linked to existing registers of species, race, sex, ability, and sexuality. Humans can be animalized, as in racist slurs but also during lovemaking. “Vegetable” can describe the state of a terminally-ill person. As for stones, we already encountered the stone butch. Conversely, animals can be humanized, and even natural phenomena such as hurricanes can be gendered and personified (as with Katrina.) Language acts may contain and order many kinds of matter, including lifeless matter and abject objects. Dehumanization and objectification involve the removal of qualities considered as human and are linked to regimes of biopower or to necropolitics by which the sovereign decides who may live and who must die.

This makes the concept of animacy, and Mel Chen’s analysis of it, highly political. Linguistics is often disconnected from politics: Noam Chomsky, the most prominent linguist of the twentieth century, also took very vocal positions on war and American imperialism, but he kept his political agenda separate from his contribution to the discipline. In How to Do Things with Words, J. L. Austin demonstrates that speech acts can have very real and political effects, and in Language and Symbolic Power, Pierre Bourdieu takes language to be not merely a method of communication, but also a mechanism of power. Mel Chen takes this politicization to its radical extreme. She criticizes queer liberalism and its homonormative tendencies to turn queer subjects into good citizens, good consumers, good soldiers, and good married couples. Recalling the history and uses of the word queer, which began as an insult and was turned into a banner and an academic discipline, she notes that some queers of color reject the term as an identity and substitute their own terminology, as the African American quare. She also questions the politics by which animals are excluded from cognition and emotion, arguing that many nonhuman animals can also think and feel. Positioning her animacy theory at the intersection of queer of color scholarship, critical animal studies, and disability theory, she argues that categories of sexuality and animality are not colorblind and that degrees of animacy also have to do with sexual orientation and disability. She brings the endurance of her readers to its break point by invoking subjects such as bestiality and highly unconventional sexual practices. Her examples are mostly borrowed from historical and social developments in the United States, with some references to the People’s Republic of China. She exploits a highly diverse archive that includes contemporary art, popular visual culture, and TV trivia.

Critical Pet Studies

According to “Critical Pet Theory” (there appears to be such a thing), scholars have to demonstrate a special bond with their pet in order to contribute to the field of animal studies. Talking in abstract of a cat or a dog won’t do: it has to be this particular dog of a particular breed (Donna Harraway’s Australian shepherd ‘Cayenne’), or this small female cat that Jacques Derrida describes in The Animal That Therefore I Am. Talking, as Deleuze and Guattari did, of the notion of “becoming-animal” with “actual unconcern for actual animals” (as Chen reproaches them in a footnote) is clearly a breach in pet studies’ normative ethics. Even Derrida failed a simple obligation of companion species scholarship when he failed to become curious about what his cat might actually be doing, feeling, or thinking during that morning when he emerged unclothed from the bathroom, feeling somehow disturbed by the cat’s gaze. Mel Chen’s choice of companion species is in line with her self-cultivated queerness: she begins the acknowledgments section “with heartfelt thanks to the toads,” as well as “to the many humans and domesticated animals populating the words in this book.” The close-up picture of a toad on the book cover is not easily recognizable, as its bubonic glands, swollen excrescences, and slimy texture seem to belong both to the animal kingdom and to the realm of inert matter. Animacy, of course, summons the animal. But Mel Chen is not interested in contributing to pet studies: she advocates the study of wild and unruly beasts or, as she writes, a “feral” approach to disciplinarity and scholarship. “Thinking ferally” involves poaching among disciplines, raiding archives, rejecting disciplinary homes, and playing with repugnance and aversion in order to disturb and to unsettle. Yes, the toad, this “nightingale of the mud” as the French poet would have said, is an adequate representation of this book’s project.

Let’s Talk About Sex

6 Feb 2021 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia, edited by Purnima Mankekar and Louisa Schein, Duke University Press, 2013.**

This is not a book about Asian sex videos. Indeed, reading Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia should lead the reader to question why the category “Asian sex video” exists in the first place, why Asian bodies are disproportionately represented in Internet porn, and how we should react to such unregulated flow of images. In fact, none of the entries in this book deals with explicitly erotic content or with pornography, and the only chapter that concerns the Internet as a medium, a study of online discussions about correspondence marriage between the US and the Philippines, insists on rejecting facile analogies with the sex trade or with mail-to-order catalogues. For scholars and for feminists—and most authors in this volume are women—, the erotic has to be distinguished from the sexual. And writing about eroticism should in no way lead to stoke the base instincts of the reader. The erotic extends beyond sex acts or desires for sex acts to become “enmeshed in, for instance, yearnings for upward mobility, longings for ‘the homeland,’ formulations of nationhood and citizenship, and ruptures of ethnic and racial identity.” Desires for sexual encounters intertwine with those for commodities and lifestyles. Such a paneroticism may break gender, class, ethnicity, or age boundaries. Synonymous with desire, it may be at odd with an Orientalist vision of Asia as feminized and the West as setting the standard for homo- and heteronormativity. For instance, “what constitutes ‘lesbian’ desire may look both and function differently than it does within Euro-American social and historical formations, and draw from alternative modes of masculinity and feminity.”

Editing a volume for Duke University Press

The book is an edited volume composed of ten chapters and a dense introduction in which the two editors explain what they mean by “media,” “erotics,” “transnational,” and “Asia.” It is difficult to strike the right balance in the introductory chapter of a collection of scholarly essays written by different authors. One the one hand, the editors want to add value to the book chapters by giving coherence and theoretical depth to the assembled pieces. On the other hand, they need to reflect the diversity of the contributions and leave open their conceptual relevance for theory-building. The introduction is often the book’s signature, its most ambitious part and the text for which it will be remembered. The risk is to promise more than the book chapters can deliver by engaging in intellectual virtuosity, or to remain at the plane of immanence and offer a paraphrase of the book’s content. Mankekar and Schein lean on the theoretical side. Their introduction is thick, sometimes obscure, and heavily referenced. Their ambition is to “construct a transnational analytics” to account for the mediation of erotics in Asia and beyond. They position the book for a broad audience spanning several subdisciplines—Asian studies, media studies, gender studies, and sexuality studies, as well as anthropology and critical theory. And yet they address scholars, and it is as scholarship that they want their contribution to be noticed and remembered. My reading as a non-scholar may therefore miss the mark or misinterpret the intent of the authors. But this is a risk I am willing to take.

One way of studying erotics through transnational media in Asia is to read texts, watch pictures or videos, listen to recordings or radio shows, and then to write about their form and content using the tools and methods of literary criticism and media analysis. This is not how the authors in this volume proceed. For them, desire and erotics can only be revealed through participation in mediated worlds, in a combination of textual analysis and ethnographic research. Erotics is what people make of it: a medium or a text can only be deemed erotic if the viewers invest it with fantasies and emotional longings. Eroticism is in the eye of the beholder: we should “suspend any bounded or determinate option of what comprises erotic texts.” The preferred method of studying erotics is through ethnography and participant observation, or face-to-face interviewing. But the ethnographer cannot only approach his or her informants and say: “Let’s talk about sex.” As Purnima Mankekar notes: “I deemed it neither ethical nor culturally appropriate to interrogate my lower-middle-class and working-class informants about their attitudes toward sex or, worse, their sexual practices.” She doesn’t explain why she considered sex talk inappropriate or unethical, but her reticence probably has something to do with academic norms of proper behavior as much as with cultural sensitivities in a lower-middle-class Indian context. In any case, some of the contributors to this volume do talk to informants about media and sex, as in Friedman’s analysis of the film Twin Bracelets and its reception among interpretive communities in the United States, Taiwan, and China, or in Manalasan’s discussion of the reception of the movie Miguel/Michelle among queer Filipino audiences in Manila and in New York. In other situations, the ethnographer had to listen to her informants’ “silences, hesitations, and discursive detours” and “go beyond the verbal, the discursive, and the visible.”

Getting a book published

When writing a text and seeking publication, the scholar has to choose between three options: the self-standing book or monograph, the journal article, or the chapter in an edited volume. Getting a book published by an university press is the most difficult option: academic publishing houses are fortresses guarded by stern gatekeepers, and getting access involves a long process of book project’s proposal, manuscript editing, and peer review. The publication of a first book, commonly one that is drawn from a dissertation, is a critical event in the career of a scholar, and the book will usually remain the author’s signature to the wider academic community for the rest of his life. Publishing a journal article is more standard: for a scholar, a good publication record is a sine qua non, and life on the academic front is ruled by the discipline of publish or perish. Getting published depends on the prestige and disciplinary slot of the academic journal and necessitates a capacity to adjust to scholarly criteria of presentation without necessarily requiring literary talent. The book chapter is the most flexible contribution: contributing authors are usually invited by the editors to write a chapter for the book, based on presentations they made at conferences or in a rewriting of previously published research material. The editors will be reviewing and accepting the chapters and also be suggesting the authors if any revisions are needed. Though they are supported by their publishers, editors remain of sole responsibility when it comes to the content integrity of their book. Again, the importance of writing an excellent introductory chapter cannot be overstated. The introduction should serve as a “lure” that attracts the reader, allows the reader to comprehend the book’s intent, and encourages the reader to continue reading. In terms of bookshelf longevity, the full-fledged book comes first, then the edited volume and, last, the scholarly article.

Most contributors to Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia have published a book, sometimes two or even three, with Duke University Press. Having read and reviewed some of these books on this blog, I will draw a comparison between the full-length books they have published and the chapters in this volume. My favorite author in the sample is Everett Yuehong Zhang, author of The Impotence Epidemic, a study of changing attitudes about sexuality in an increasingly globalized China. The chapter he offers here could have been included in his previous book and centers on the host and participants of a radio talk show addressing sexuality from a clinical perspective. It is only loosely connected to the twin themes of media and erotics that define the edited volume: radio broadcasting is not the medium we first think about when studying transnational media, and there is nothing erotic in talking about premature ejaculation, masturbation, or erectile failure with a medical doctor—even though desires to be normal, to enjoy a fulfilling sexual life, and to have fun talking about personal matters after decades of Maoist silence are also addressed. Dr. Ma, the talk show host, treats both male and female sexual issues and is very open about discussing sexual desire and pleasure in public. His co-host, Ms. Sun, recalls how uncomfortable she was at first using the technical term for masturbation, shouyin, with two characters meaning “hand lust,” and how talking about masturbation became easier in the 1990s with the adoption of a new word, ziwei, meaning “self-consolation.” This change of words signals a transition from the desire to be moral to the desire to be normal, and from a moral economy of seminal essence and revolutionary ardor to the realm of medical normality and individual gratification.

From the book to the article

Whispering Tonight, the call-in radio show and its case study by Everett Zhang, is a microcosm of all the issues raised by The Impotence Epidemic. One the one hand, it contextualizes sexuality within the social changes brought by recent economic reform and through the production of various desires in post-Maoist China. It relocates the body from the periphery where it was confined under Maoism toward the center of public attention, private concerns, and emotional investments. It provides a thick description of call-in patients’ complaints and doctor’s comments, based on extensive fieldwork and ethnographic documentation. On the other hand, and perhaps more explicitly than in the book, this volume’s chapter is a piece of applied theory. It draws on a rich array of concepts borrowed from French theory, and especially Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of flows and affects. Deleuzian notions are sometimes hard to grasp and may provide more obscurity than light, but Zhang uses them in a simple and straightforward way, giving added depth and relevance to his text. The second piece of medical anthropology in this volume, a chapter by Judith Farquhar on “Self-Health Information in Beijing in the 1990s,” also echoes a book by the same author (Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China), but is written in a more personal and reflexive way. Farquhar starts by describing her encounter with two men poring over an illustrated sexual disease textbook in a bookstore, and wonders what meaning this experience had for them—seeking sexual satisfaction or documenting a medical condition—and for the anthropologist, who didn’t dare interrupt and ask. She then examines a number of methodological problems that plague efforts to understand the popular and the everyday in any scholarly project. Self-health manuals, pop psychology books, and other mass-consumption publications can be used as an archive of everyday living in post-socialist China, but do not reveal how this information is read and assimilated by readers.

In addition to the introduction, Purnima Mankekar provided a chapter in this volume that is based on the research she presented in her two books published by Duke University Press, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics and Unsettling India. I usually prefer to read full-length books in anthropology than journal articles or edited volumes. My feeling is that the author needs space in order to set the scene, present the characters, and flesh out his or her argument, and that a single book chapter or article usually falls short on these three counts. But Mankekar’s chapter in this book, “Dangerous Desires,” nicely complements the two books she wrote based on the same ethnographic material: the reception of TV programs, and in particular state-sponsored television serials, viewed by upwardly-mobile, yet lower-to-middle class urban women in New Delhi. Her objective in this chapter is to examine the place of erotics in the reconfiguration of gender, family, class, caste, and nation, through the eroticization of commodity desire in TV commercials and the proliferation of sexual content in programs broadcast by transnational satellite networks. As noted above, she couldn’t just go out and ask her informants to have a “sex talk” on what they were viewing; she had to learn to watch alongside them and over their shoulders, interpreting bodily cues and discursive detours that saturated their conversations. For instance, many women she spoke with expressed their erotic longing via their yearning for certain commodities. On other occasions, her informants expressed their attitudes, feelings, and, very occasionally, their experiences of sex and erotics while discussing television programs. Desire for commodities and sexual longings were very often perceived as threats to proper gender behavior, to social status, and to the Indian nation as a whole. But Doordarshan state-run television no longer has a monopoly of public broadcasting, and the proliferation of satellite channels is having an impact on perceptions and values.

Telling better stories

Anne Allison, who provides the last chapter in this volume, teaches cultural anthropology at Duke University and has published several books on Japan. She wrote the book Nightwork on hostess clubs and Japanese corporate culture after having worked at a hostess club in Tokyo, and she has also researched erotic comic books and mother-son incest stories. The novel she reviews in her essay, Memoirs of a Geisha, doesn’t belong to the erotica literature: it is a fictional memoir of a Japanese geisha, penned by an American man and made into a movie by Steven Spielberg with Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi. Others would call it a story of cultural appropriation or a bad case of Orientalism; but Allison chose to focus on the reaction of (mostly female) American readers who, in the interviews she had with them and in the comments they wrote on Amazon, felt titillated by the fiction and enthralled by its exoticism. She reads erotic desire through the lens of the allure of fantasies generated by being transported to another place and time. In this case, desire is thoroughly political, but it doesn’t involve the masculine fantasies of empire and domination that Edward Said saw as the hallmark of Orientalist thinking. Exotica functions as erotica in the blurring of historical fiction and personal memoir, the minute description of sexual rituals such as the mizuage (by which a young geisha sells her virginity), and the allure of soft kimono fabric and intricate tea ceremony. “When readers described their experience of Memoirs to me,” writes Allison, “it was often in language befitting a love affair. They would smile and get excited, talk quickly and move their bodies. Passion, bordering on arousal, was palpable.” This, concludes Allison, raises a challenge for the anthropologist: “How to tell better stories that are imaginative and compelling, without falling into the trap of exoticizing or essentializing?”

Same-Sex Marriage With Chinese Characteristics

24 Jun 201924 Jun 2019 Etienne RPLeave a comment

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

Queer Marxism.jpg Same-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.

Timeless, Bottomless Bad Movies

5 May 201924 Jun 2019 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of The End of Japanese Cinema: Industrial Genres, National Times, and Media Ecologies, Alexander Zahlten, Duke University Press, 2017.**

The End of Japanese Cinema Cinema is an industry. But very often aesthetics gets in the way of analyzing it as such. For cinema—or some portions of it—is also an art. Industry or art: these two approaches give rise to two distinct bodies of literature, one focusing on professions, publics, and profits, the other one on visual style, narrative content, and film textuality. There are movie industry specialists who may teach in professional schools or in economics and sociology departments, applying the standard tools of their discipline to one particular sector that represents up to one percent of the US economy. And there are cinema critics and film studies academics who develop concepts such as genre, auteur, style, form, periods, and apply them to a canon of authorized films conserved in national archives. Film studies may emphasize culture (cinema as representative of national culture), psychology (a movie reflects the inner psyche of its director), formalism (focusing on the formal or technical elements of a film), history (itself divided into the history of genres and national traditions), or theory (film theory as a branch of applied philosophy). What these approaches have in common is that they consider a movie as worthy of cultural commentary and critique. By contrast, an industry specialist is more interested in macro factors such as film production, distribution, and box office figures. He or she will focus on context more than content, on cost and revenues more than artistic quality. In the case of Japanese cinema, an art critic will focus on directors such as Kurosawa Akira or Ōshima Nagisa, specific genres such as jidaigeki (samurai movies) or kaijū eiga (monster movies), and techniques such as Ōzu Yasujiro’s signature tatami shots and multiple scene framings; while an industry specialist will study the studio system long dominated by Shōchiku, Tōhō, Tōei, Nikkatsu, and Daiei, the unionization of workers, or the distinct distribution channels for hōga (domestic movies) and yōga (foreign movies).

Pink Film, Kadokawa Film, and V-Cinema

In The End of Japanese Cinema, Alexander Zahlten combines the two approaches. He analyzes cinema as a cultural form and as a socio-economic activity with deep political ramifications. He proposes concepts that bridge the gap between the artistic and the industrial, the qualitative and the quantitative, the individual movie and the whole economic sector. It helps his case that the three categories he discusses—Pink Film or sexploitation films, Kadokawa Film produced by one single, multi-media entrepreneur, and V-Cinema made straight for the video market—are almost devoid of any artistic value. In fact, they are ignored in critical and academic discourse on films from Japan, and do not feature in Japanese movie histories. Like the infamous AV (adult videos), a large fraction of them may not even be included in film production statistics. But collectively they form an archive of close to 8000 movies: enough for the social scientist to build models, test inferences, and draw meaningful conclusions from such a large sample. They matter for a genuine history of cinema in Japan that is willing to go beyond the time-worn theories of auteurship, national character, and genre normativity. For all practical purposes, watching a movie in Japan meant, for a large fraction of the public and during a significant period of time, attending a film that belonged to one of these three categories. The reason academic work on films in Japan hardly discusses or even mentions these movies is because they cater to the base instincts of the public and are generally considered of bad taste and poor artistic value (some Pink films nonetheless made it to the Euro-American cinema festival circuit). If some of them achieved high scores at the box office or on video rental figures, it is because the public was lured by sexual attraction or by marketing ploys and media campaigns. This is particularly the case for Kadokawa films, which include a few blockbusters: but they were derided by the critics and the art movie profession, who declared that “Kadokawa films are not films” and, in the case of Kurosawa Akira at the 1980 Cannes film festival, refused to shake hands with the producer.

Sex sells, and it is no wonder that sexually themed films feature heavily in the sample studied by the author. In fact, it has been estimated that adult films represented up to 40 percent of the video rentals in the 1980s, and that close to 75 percent of films produced in Japan in 1982 positioned themselves in this market segment. Nudity and sex officially entered Japanese cinema with Kobayashi Satoru’s controversial and popular independent production Flesh Market (Nikutai no Ichiba, 1962), which is considered the first true pink film or pinku eiga. Pink films are not to be confused with Roman Porno films, a series of theatrical erotic movies produced by the movie studio Nikkatsu riding the wave that the first Pink movies had created. Nor are they similar to Adult Videos, pornographic films adapted to Japanese proclivities and visual censorship rules. Alexander Zahlten gives a strict definition of the Pink Film genre: a one-hour length format with regularly spaced erotic scenes (shot in color while the rest of the movie is often in black-and-white), a budget of around 3 million yens since the mid-1960s (decreasing in value over the years), an independent system of production, distribution, and exhibition (with specialized Pink Film theaters), extremely fast scripting and shooting schedules (tantamount to guerrilla warfare), and intensely misogynistic content. Pink movies carry explicit titles such as Meat Mattress (Niku futon), Naked Embrace (Hadaka de dakko) or Mature Woman in Heat Ball Licking (Jukujo hatsujō tamashaburi). But in fact, these films were much less explicit that their titles suggest. The same holds true for V-Cinema, which included sub-genres such as jokyōshi (female schoolteacher), danchi-dzuma (suburban wife), and chikan densha (train groper): the video cover sleeves were covered with titillating pictures that far exceeded the film’s actual explicitness. As for Kadokawa movies, they were geared for a mass audience and limited the stoking of the male public to the exhibition of underage starlets (the three Kadokawa girls, or Kadokawa san-nin musume). But they indulged in another kind of porn: the titillating of national feelings, with the screening of a national identity discourse that passed itself for cosmopolitanism and contemporaneity.

The politics of time and the aesthetics of confusion

Watching one of the first Kadokawa productions, Proof of the Man (Ningen no shōmei) made me feel particularly ill at ease. Besides the dismal performance of George Kennedy, a veteran of Japanese movies and one of the worst actors in the history of cinema, I couldn’t pinpoint the reason for my malaise, but it certainly had to do with the mixed-race character who provides the plot that the movie unfolds. The movie, and the TV drama that came after it, are suffused with deep-seated fears about miscegenation and inter-racial contact. We find the same ideologies of nationhood in the movies and dramas adapted from the novels of Yamazaki Toyoko. The question of the Other and the question of temporal hierarchy—with Japanese time being in front of its Asian neighbors yet still behind Euro-America—is a common theme of the three genres. As the author notes, “industrial genres performed complex negotiations concerning a position vis-à-vis dominant temporal discourses such as colonial time, sequential time, straight time, and homogenous time.” Pink Film rejected the possibility of a clear separation between past and present, showing how postwar Japan was haunted by remnants of its militaristic and colonial past. Kadokawa Film exchanged history itself for a perpetual present which brought confusion between the native self and the foreign Other, the victim and the victimizer, the movie plot and its reincarnation in other media supports. V-Cinema used video technology’s ability to manipulate time by starting, pausing, rewinding, stopping, and rewatching at the viewer’s convenience, thereby creating the temporality of the rewind and the fast-forward. Each industrial genre illustrates a politics of time. Each genre also generates an aesthetics of confusion: a mixing of identities, temporalities, geographies, and media. Pink Film insisted on the messy, confusing and contradictory experience of Japan two decades after the war. Kadokawa Film conflated genre and textuality with the trademark and business strategy of a corporation. V-Cinema was an untidy and disorganized collection of cheap flick pics, sleazy journalism, endless serials, how-to tapes, and soft porn videos. Not only the movies but also the viewers were confused: they deserted movie theaters and retreated to other pastimes (in 1984, motorboat racing boasted attendance figures twenty-five times the total audience of theatrical film.)

For traditional film critics, Japanese cinema offers a meta-narrative of Japaneseness: elements of culture are isolated and reflected in the form and content of a particular movie or in the history of a genre. For Alexander Zahlten, movies and genres in his sample are self-reflective. There is “a match between the textuality of the film and the textuality of the industry structure.” The aesthetics and business organization of the industrial genre is a reflection of the filmic codes and narrative patterns of the films that compose them. The story of an industrial genre is the story of a movie writ large. Textuality can be found at the level of the business structure, corporate strategy, labor relations, spatial organization, and lifecycle of industrial genres. Pink Film tells a story (largely fabricated) of antisystem resistance, oppositional realism, class politics, cultural avant-garde, and student warfare. These narrative elements are found in the films’ stories and style but also extend beyond it to encompass the identity politics of those involved in the production of Pink films, as well as their viewers and those who commented upon them. For Kadokawa Film, business practices were part of the product that was marketed to the public. The “media-mix strategy” that the company developed was a package of films, mass market paperbacks, magazine covers, and movie theme songs marketed by a single entrepreneur to the widest possible audience, with each product advertising the others. The larger-than-life personality of Kadokawa Haruki himself was part of the service package he proposed and was reflected in the movies in which he made guest appearances. He famously declared: “I like Japanese films, but I detest the Japanese film world.” His strategy was the opposite of business as usual: he broke cartels and pitted the majors each against the others, outsourced work, released Japanese films in theaters usually reserved for foreign movies, destroyed the block-booking system, deployed blitz media campaign to advertise the release of a new blockbuster, launched the careers of the first kawaii idols, and bypassed the critics to appeal directly to the audience. The story that V-Cinema narrates is one of postbubble angst and endless repetition.

Bridging the gap between art and industry

By narrating the story of industrial genres and reflecting upon the movies they encompass, Alexander Zahlten bridges the gap between art and industry, aesthetics and business. This theoretical gesture operates a transformation of what textuality itself entails. It is no longer attached to a story, a character, a subgenre, or a national space: in contents industries or platform business models, the media model is no longer based on a clear distinction between producer and consumer, with the media text delivering a message between them. The new media ecology emphasizes mobility and connectivity rather than a transmittable and consumable narrative. In today’s multimedia environment, the medium is the message: this is a truly McLuhanesque moment that is materialized in the growth of user-generated content and jishu (self-directed) productions, but that Zahlten also sees at work since the 1960s in the trajectories of the industrial genres. Kadokawa Haruki initiated the media-mix strategy by simultaneously releasing film, book, music theme, and media articles. His younger brother Tsuguhiko, who took over the company when Haruki was indicted with drug offense, introduced the platform business model that leverages user engagement and content creation. Moving away from novel adaptation, the company largely shifted to fictional characters from manga, anime, light novels, and games for the media mix, targeting a public of otaku millennials. The new media ecology in Japan marks the end of Japanese cinema: shinecon (cinema complexes) compete for viewers’ attention span, offering a free flow of subgenres, narratives, and characters without discernible borders, while the platform model shifts the emphasis from owning the commodity to owning the world in which the commodity exists and that generates commodifiable activity. The “contents business” has gripped the imagination of policymakers who see in Japan’s “Cool National Product” a vector of international influence and soft power. The story these new assemblages tell is still the story of Japan, but the visual plot is increasingly blurred by users’ online comments, viral internet memes, and gaming devices.

Are there general lessons that the economist or the business executive can draw from reading this book? The concepts that Alexander Zahlten proposes—the industrial genre, the politics of time and the aesthetics of confusion, the new media ecologies and the platform model—operate at both levels of industrial structure and textual content. Indeed, perhaps unwittingly, Zahlten borrows many concepts from industrial organization, the branch of economics that studies industrial sectors and firm strategies. Although he doesn’t always use these terms, he addresses issues of barriers to entry, sunk costs, market power, product differentiation, price discrimination, customer segmentation, niche markets, collusion and signaling. More specifically, his analysis can be linked to the organizational ecology approach associated with the names of Michael Hannan and John Freeman. There is the same focus on populations and cohorts as opposed to individual organizations and single movies or directors. The ecological approach insists on the environmental selection processes that affect organizations through a cycle of variation, selection, and retention. Similarly, Zahlten describes a wild creative exuberance and high profit margins at the beginning of an industrial genre’s life cycle, followed by a period of consolidation and attrition in which the genre ossifies and loses part of its innovative aspect. The history of industrial genres also illustrates the Galapagos syndrome that affects many Japanese productions: no movie in the sample succeeded in making a significant impact abroad. The media ecology is a closed system with no gateways or pass-through. There may however exist a subterranean influence exerted by Japanese industrial genres on the history of Korean cinema, as can be attested in the movies collected in the Korean Film Archive on Youtube. We find the same kinds of sexploitation movies, B-Films, and formulaic genres that were produced at a time when Japanese cultural exports to Korea were officially banned.

Spirited Away

Alexander Zahlten explains in the acknowledgments section that his book was long in the making. His PhD dissertation project spanned space and time between Germany, Japan, and the United States, and involved curating film programs for various institutions including the Athénée Français cultural center in Tokyo. While in Japan, he must have heard the sentence “you know Japanese cinema better than we do” many times. And indeed, his knowledge of the three industrial genres he covers in The End of Japanese Cinema makes him without peers. Only a film freak or a movie otaku may have accumulated more data and material on such a narrow topic. He complements his documentary work on film archives with interviews with directors and producers, analysis of trade journals and specialized publications, and readings of key texts in film theory and Japanese studies. He seems to know everything there is to know on Pink Film, Kadokawa Film, and V-Cinema. Like the young girl Chihiro in Miyazaki’s movie, he may have been “spirited away” by his topic: he spent an inordinate amount of time in a world of cheap movies and low-budget productions. For despite his timid denial, the movies covered in the book must have been a pain to watch. They are, to take the title of a Korean movie that is sometimes shown in indie-art theaters, “timeless, bottomless bad movies.” And yet, art can emerge from the rubble, and one can detect a certain beauty in the whole picture that each of these movies dots. Not only in the sense that art is in the eye of the beholder: the curator that guides the public through a selection of cultural productions is himself an artist, for he has the power to change our vision and to make us see things from a different angle. Who knows, next time I visit Japan, maybe I will pick one of these old movie tapes kept on the dusty shelves of sleazy video rental shops in the back alleys of train stations, between the pachinko parlor and the second-hand manga reseller.

Queer Theory in Dark Times

27 Jan 201913 Oct 2023 Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Jasbir K. Puar, Duke University Press, Tenth Anniversary edition, 2017.

Terrorist Assemblages offers, as the foreword to the 2017 edition puts it, “queer theory in dark times.” The times that form the backdrop of queer theory are very dark indeed. The book was written at a time when, in the wake of revelations about torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, New York Times editorialist Thomas Friedman could write: “I have never known a time in my life when America and its president were more hated around the world than today” (yes, the year was 2004, and the president was George W. Bush). It was, and it still is, a time of death and mourning, of war and aggression, of terrorist attacks and nationalist hype. This historical conjuncture has been described as “the age of the world target”: what is being targeted are not simply terrorist networks and rogue states, but the world as an object to be destroyed. In this context, Terrorist Assemblages exposes the United States not only as a targeting war machine, but also as a targeted nation, as the target of terrorist assaults and radical critique. There is a political urgency that is to be felt at every page, no less in the 2017 postscript titled “Homonationalism in Trump times”. This book is not the work of an ivory tower academic or a closet intellectual, pondering over the course of world’s events from the safety of an academic perch. It is a text steeped in violence and accusations, a disruptive and unruly intervention that leaves no field of inquiry unscathed. The starting point of the acceleration of time that Terrorist Assemblages manifests is September 11, 2001, which forms the degree zero of writing and thinking about our present situation. 9/11 is conceptualized as a “snapshot” and a “flashpoint”, an explosion and a lightning, allowing different temporalities to emerge and, with them, a range of issues hitherto suppressed. These weird and unhinged times offer a space for the untimely, the unexpected, the forever deferred. The politics of time that the epoch brings to the fore, with its tactics, strategies, and logistics, is a politics of the open end, of allowing unknowable political futures to come our way, of taking risks rather than guarding against them.

Advancing a nationalist agenda in the name of sexual freedom

The times are queer, and so is theory. Queer times is a historical juncture when new normativities are emerging, new subjectivities are being hailed, and new bodies are being assembled. More specifically, Jasbir Puar argues that the production of terrorist bodies is inseparable from the affirmation of queer subjects in a context where homosexuality and LGBT rights are being tied to a nationalist agenda. This book was not the first to use the expression “homonationalism”: the topic was a matter of discussion in Europe long before American academics began to notice, and the assassination of Pim Fortuyn in 2002 was a watershed in this respect. The striking feature that distinguishes contemporary European nationals parties from their older counterparts is the invocation of gender equality and LGBT rights with an otherwise xenophobic rhetoric. Indeed, despite their masculinist political style and occasional homophobic slurs, those parties have increasingly advanced their anti-Islam agendas in the name of sexual freedom and gender rights. Sexual diversity has thus been instrumentalized in the service of sexual nationalism, whereby migrants’ and Muslims’ integration and loyalty to their hosting western nations are tested by means of their commitment to the sexual values of these nations. This sexualization of citizenship posits that Muslims and other non-western migrants are intrinsically homophobic and that Islam is, in essence, “anti-gay”. Some western progressives even use this argument to call for a slower pace of social reforms in Europe, advancing that our open and increasingly multicultural societies are “not yet ready” for the recognition of sexual minorities’ rights. Puar brings these European debates to the post-9/11 American context. Centering her attention on the intersection between gay politics and US exceptionalism, she emphasizes the exclusionary state as the master signifier of the contemporary focus on male radicalized Others as misogynistic and xenophobic enemies of western civilization. More specifically, Puar discusses the encounter between US nationalism and queer sexual politics in terms of “collisions”, which she sees as productive of a “homonationalist” formation. Puar’s “homonationalism” thus both describes the mobilization of gay rights against Muslims and racialized Others within the American nationalist framework, but also refers to the integration of “homonormativity”—that is, domesticated homosexual politics—within the US agenda of the war on terror. As Puar puts it, homonationalism is a “discursive tactic that disaggregates US national gays and queers from racial and sexual others, foregrounding a collusion between homosexuality and American nationalism that is generated both by national rhetorics of patriotic inclusion and by gay and queer subjects themselves.”

Violence of theory, violence of the state, violence of the self

Terrorist Assemblages is a violent book that both condones and denounces violence. As the author writes, “it is easy, albeit painful, to point to the conservative elements of any political formation; it is less easy, and perhaps much more painful, to point to ourselves as accomplices of certain normativizing violences.” The first form of violence that the author exposes is the violence of theory. It is the chasm “between those who theorize and those who are theorized about.” It is telling that, in the context of the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib and the outrage that pictures of maimed bodies elicited, no one took the pain to inquire who these tortured Iraqi individuals were, what experience they felt, and how their lives and those of their relatives were affected. Or that trauma analysis portrays war veterans and victims of terrorist attacks as worthy of compassion and care, whereas people who have lost loved ones as a consequence of US foreign policy elsewhere are not depicted as sufferers of trauma or injustice. Why is there a double standard when dead bodies are counted in the aftermath of military campaigns, with the Iraq war claiming 773 US fatalities but more than 10,000 Iraqis killed? Or, to return to the Abu Ghraib case, why are these photos any more revolting than pictures of body parts blown apart by shards of missiles and explosives as a consequence of targeted attacks launched by unmanned drones? For Jasbir Puar, theory is intrinsically violent. She turns this violence against queer theorists and progressives of a radical bent, and ultimately against herself. The author draws attention to the manifold ways in which the US state of exceptionalism and exception has co-opted important sections of the gay movement. Rather than a mere instrumentalization, or tactical exploitation of the theme of gay rights by nationalism, Puar thus highlights the active involvement—and responsibilities—of the queer movements themselves that have supported (wittingly or unwittingly) this new racist configuration. Queer theory itself, with its insistence on LGBT exceptionalism and impossible standards of radicalism, partakes in this contemporary violence. A typical discursive move of Puar is to bring forth a progressive or radical argument proposed by a fellow theorist, then highlight its blind spots, its undeclared essentialism and hidden normativity. On that count, few arguments survive her critique, and even her own argumentation is not immune from self-criticism. As a result, the author paints herself into an inhospitable corner: normativity, homo or hetero, is not something that we can escape.

The second form of violence that Terrorist Assemblages addresses is the violence of the state. For Puar, this violence has reached a new intensity with the war on terror and the isolation of the homeland that followed September 11, 2011. The state has morphed into a war machine which, like the desiring machines of Deleuze and Guattari, is animated with a will of its own and produces in its wake a multiplicity of infectious affects and afflictions: patriotism, racism, security, death, torture, terror, terrorism, detention, deportation, surveillance, and control. The bodies of foreign terrorists are constituted as bodies without organs: they are eviscerated, stripped bare of any subjectivity and left to survive as living dead in zones of non-law such as Guantanamo and black sites of detention. In the neo-Orientalist vision of geopolitics in the Middle East, terrorists are perceived as queer: “failed and perverse, these emasculated bodies always have femininity as their reference point of malfunction, and are metonymically tied to all sorts of pathologies of the mind and body—homosexuality, incest, pedophilia, madness, and disease.” The biopolitical state turns foreign subjects into figures of death at the same time as it associates gay couples and queer individuals with positive ideas of life and productivity: hence gay marriage, the exaltation of difference, and the market segmentation of LGBT communities into profitable ventures. For Puar, “this benevolence toward sexual others is contingent upon ever-narrowing parameters of white racial privilege, consumption capabilities, gender and kinship normatively, and bodily integrity.” The affirmation of sexual difference is concomitant with the ascendency of whiteness: in popular representation, the homosexual other is always white, while the racial other is straight. By extension, the invocation of the terrorist as queer, nonnational, perversely racialized other has become part of the normative script of the US war on terror. Of course, there is no way to tell where this process of scapegoating and excluding unworthy subjects from the national body will stop.There is always the risk that you may be next in line and that, after having targeted terrorists, illegal aliens, immigrants, law trespassers and deviants, the state may come after you.

Thirdly, Puar underscores the violence of identity. Assigning a person to a fixed and defined identity is a violent act of normativity. It elides and forecloses other affiliations and belongings, and creates a sense of loss and mourning for the other futures and possibilities that never will be. Our belonging to a certain community, group or category is a purely arbitrary fact, a given without meaning. To be born in a certain country, within a certain ethnic group or with a predetermined sexual orientation is not the result of a conscious decision or a choice: to have one’s identity defined by these contingent parameters is a form of violence that nothing compels us to take as granted. Norms exclude certain people and deny their rights as much as they include other people and grant them privileges. Queer theory has been designed to bring such norms at risk and to return against the bearer the violence that they apply to nonconformist bodies. Queer means trouble: it breaks down the established and stable categories of identity, it refuses to accept that genres and genders can be clearly defined, and instead focuses on the expansive production of sexualized selves through performance and affects. But the proliferation of shifting identities and the compulsive invocation of difference is no less violent and normative than the compulsory orders of residence that puts us under house arrest. Although queer theory emphasizes difference, mismatch, and nonnormativity, queer as a category creates its own normative power, its ability to mold subjects and discipline their conduct. As Puar shows, all queer bodies have not been included in the category of queer. Despite its claims of intersectionality, queer politics have prioritized only one factor, sexuality, as the primary sense through which they structure their action. In particular, queer theory is underpinned by a powerful conviction that religious and racial communities are more homophobic than white mainstream queer communities are racist. By implication, for queers of colors a critique of homophobia within their home community is deemed more pressing and should take precedence over a criticism of racism within mainstream queer communities.

The West as an arbiter of civilizational standards

Jasbir Puar reverses that order of priority. She revels in exposing the bigotry of queer organizations such as InterPride or OutRage! who send politically correct messages with an exclusionary subtext. Complicity with white ascendency and heteronormativity can take many forms. As with the construction of model minorities by elites from certain ethnic groups, wealthy white gay males create an ideal of the homosexual family (gay marriage, adopted children, bourgeois lifestyle) that is no less normative and exclusionary than its heterosexual version. Nationalism is on the rise in every segment of society, and progressive sexuality is heralded as a hallmark of western modernity as opposed to the backwardness and obscurantism of the Middle East where the war on terror is waged. Islam and homosexuality are constituted as mutually exclusive; and queer people of color, or gay Muslims, becomes the significant others to be rescued from their culture or communities. The West regards itself as the arbiter of civilizational standards. Just as exotic women are waiting to be liberated by white males, gay Arabs need to be saved by white gay men, and they are granted asylum status accordingly. In the progressive narrative, gays and lesbians are the last recipients of civil rights that have already been bestowed on racial minorities. This rosy vision not only falsely assumes that discrimination and prejudices against ethnic minorities are a thing of the past; it also relieves mainstream gays and lesbians from any accountability to an antiracist agenda. The two issues are treated as substitutes, not complementary: Puar reminds us that the legalization of interracial marriage in 1967 coincided with increased criminalization of homosexuality in US laws. Likewise, the growing visibility and inclusion of gays and lesbians into the national fold comes at the expense of racialized subjects and foreign others who are targeted by discriminatory laws justified by the war on terror. Against affirmations of sexual exceptionalism that depicts the United States as a haven for the poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe sexual freedom, Puar shows that America lags far behind in the recognition of sexual minorities’ rights. And she notes that visa restrictions and deportation policies have created a new diaspora of former US residents cast away from the homeland or seeking refuge in neighboring Canada.

The publication of Terrorist Assemblages was part of the 9/11 industry machine: a kind of scholarly porn, where each critic would try to outsmart the competition by providing even more radical perspectives on what was construed as a landmark event ushering a new geopolitical era. By focusing on the production of the figure of the Muslim terrorist as queer, Puar offers a radical critique of liberal agendas that take the emancipatory nature of feminism and queer movements as granted. She shows that many segments in society continue to produce the sexual other as white and the racial other as straight. Bodies that don’t fit into this equation are construed as either racialized queer terrorists, whose political grievances are explained away by pathologizing their motives, or as exotic fairies who need to be saved from their oppressive environment. The famous critic Gayatri Chakrabarty Spivak coined the phrase “white men are saving brown women from brown men” to underscore that the voice of the subaltern woman is always silenced by patriarchy and imperialism. For Jasbir Puar, queer and lesbian racialized others are being saved by gay-friendly white men: the progressive stance of liberal positioning becomes a normative agenda, whereby how well countries treat their homosexuals becomes the litmus test of acceptable governance. Israel uses pinkwashing to market itself as a gay-friendly destination and to silence the critiques of its human rights record, and the European Union spends political energy on LGBT rights to cover its absence of strategic vision on governance issues. Meanwhile, at the national level, attitudes toward gays and lesbians become a barometer of whether immigrant minorities are acceptable to the national polity. The fixation on the certainty of greater homophobia in Muslim communities or immigrant cultures gives credence to a nationalist camp that extends its constituency to white homosexuals while comforting its hold on racist and anti-immigrant voters. For Puar, the discourse on rights and liberalization must always be complemented by the two questions: rights for whom, and at whose expense? LGBT liberation is a legitimate goal, but it also works to distract attention from intense forms of regulation that seeks to control and exclude the activities of bodies not deemed suitable for the national body politic. The very idea of sexual identity and of gender is part of the way imperialism works and operates as a form of silent colonization of our lifeworlds.

Jasbir Puar claims that her analyses “draw upon more than five years of research conducted in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut involving community-based organizations, activist events, meetings, protests, teach-ins, and panels, as well as pamphlets, educational materials, propaganda, and press releases from both alternative and mainstream media.” Her status as a participant observer is attested by her involvement in activist groups representing gay and lesbian South Asians, or by her familiarity with gurdwara communities where Sikh Americans had to distanciate themselves from suspicions of terrorism by claiming that “the turban is not a hat.” Many observations made by the author, as well as her analyses of feminist and queer responses to various events, show her deep involvement in the issues she is addressing. But Terrorist Assemblages is not a work of ethnography. Empirical facts and data are limited to a few casual observations, and works of art or media performances often take centerstage, as in the book’s illustrations. Puar thinks her background in community advocacy and activism gives her enough credentials to take a stand as a scholar and to engage in social critique. She is also theoretically literate: her references to the scholarly literature are cutting-edge, she is not afraid to engage with feminists and queer theorists on their own turf so as to expose some of their limitations and shortcomings. She gives flesh and substance to abstract notions and constructs such as affect theory, analyses of nonvisual perceptions, differences between foucaldian disciplines and deleuzian control, and emphases of embodied modes of existence. Her reading of the Sikh turban as an assemblage that folds together cloth, skin, hair, odors, and tactile sensations, is a model of the genre. But theory does not a philosopher make, and a philosopher she is not. She uses an elaborate style—and some sentences or paragraphs require repeated readings—to state ideas or expose facts that are quite simple and straightforward. She throws concepts like a boxer would throw blows: she doesn’t hit every time, but what matters is to stay in the fight and aim for the prize. The publication of a tenth anniversary edition of Terrorist Assemblages shows that, for some readers at least, Jasbir Puar hit the mark and came out alive and kicking.

Appetite for Food and Sex is Nature

29 Oct 2017 Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China, Judith Farquhar, Duke University Press, 2002.

“Appetite for food and sex is nature.” Or so says the sage Mencius, as translated by D.C. Lau. But Judith Farquhar begs to differ. For her, food and sex, and our appetites for them, are historical matters through and through. As proof, she points the fact that, in contemporary China, attitudes towards carnal and dietary consumption have changed dramatically in the course of less than two decades. China has transited from a socialist to a market economy and, in the process, a new body has emerged, with new attitudes towards food and sex, with new appetites and desires. The new Chinese body differs substantially from its previous socialist version. The socialist body was frugal, martial, and asexual. The new body is gluttonous, relaxed, and sensual. If what constitutes our most intimate dimension can change in such a short span of time, then it is proof that food and sex do not stand on the side of nature, but belong squarely to the camp of history and human society. Appetite for food and sex is not nature: it comes from our second nature as social and historical beings.

Mouth is from the right, work is from the left

Things in China under Mao used to be so simple. Land owners and capitalist exploiters were the gluttonous class. They fed themselves at the expense of the masses, and ate their feast on the back of poor people. The Chinese character for ‘right’ has the element ‘mouth’ in it, and ‘left’ comes up with the element ‘work’. For Maoists, the explanation was simple: the capitalists, on the right of the political spectrum, were big mouths that endlessly needed to be filled, while the workers from the Left were defined by their work. Revolution was to reverse this unequal repartition by feeding the masses and forcing the idle landowners to work. Mao himself frequently used food metaphors in his political speeches and writings. He famously remarked that “revolution is not a dinner party,” and also argued that “if you want to know the taste of a pear, you must bite into it.” He described “political synthesis” as akin to eating crabs: “eating one’s enemy” involves absorbing the flesh and expelling the waste. Class struggle existed “at the tips of people’s chopsticks”: every pang of hunger, every bite of food, every sip of drink had a class character and an almost martial significance. Providing the “iron rice bowl” was one of the main slogans for communism: the Chinese Communist Party was supposed to provide job opportunities for everyone. Propaganda rejoiced in the newly gained abundance: “in the old society we didn’t see meat from year to year, but now we can have dumplings whenever we want.”

The public discourse on food shifted dramatically in the reform period, but it did not disappear. Economic reforms and the introduction of private forms of property started with agriculture: the objective was, again, to feed the masses and provide a steady diet to everyone. Much of the rationale for “market socialism” had to do with food: private control of the land and entrepreneurship in distribution would “liberate the enthusiasm of the people for labor” and thus be more efficient in meeting the nation’s dietary needs. But people had higher hopes than merely to fill their stomach: their dreams and desires made them pursue not only satiation but pleasure, not only three meals a day but long days of strength, health, and enjoyment. For many, the market economy offered glowing visions of feast and abundance. The return of the banquet, with its elaborate order of dishes and drinks, came to symbolize this newly acquired material prosperity and became a central technique for building and maintaining social relationships under the new entrepreneurial order. For some, the excesses banquets indulged reflected the new social evils in post-Maoist China: the excessive indulgences of the nouveaux riches, the arrogance and corruption of public officials, the disregard for the environment that makes guests cherish treats taken from endangered species, etc. Gluttony led to obesity, to the point that China now has the largest overweight population in the world. Meanwhile, the one-child policy was promoted with the bizarre slogan: “Have fewer children, raise more pigs.”

Have fewer children, raise more pigs

Political change had direct consequence at the dinner table. People could now pick and choose among a variety of domestic and foreign dishes, and they understood their newly-gained pleasures in contrast to their memories of a simpler, poorer, or hungrier past. Historians rediscovered the Great Famine that took place at the end of the 1950s, and tales of hunger and oppression resurfaced in people’s conversation and literary works. Writers evoked the image of bands of children roaming the countryside, eating the bark from trees and the roots of the grass. As novelist Gu Hua writes, “After eating fernroot sweetcakes, your stools would be as hard as iron, jam up in the rectum and make it bleed; you’d have to poke with a little stick or dig it out with a finger—life really sucked!” But writer Mo Yan also remembers his childhood days during the great famine with nostalgia: “When you’re hungry, every pleasure has to do with food. In those days, children were demons for foraging, we were like the legendary Shen Nong [founder of herbal medicine], we tasted a hundred grasses ad a hundred bugs, making our own contribution to broadening the diet of the human race.” There is a subtle irony in finding the same grasses and insects, then eaten out of necessity, now finding their way back into new Chinese cuisine as elaborate dishes and rare treats. The Chinese banquet, with all its abundance and extravaganza, has at its backstory the memory of privation, hardship, and empty larders.

Chinese culture charges food with collective values far beyond the nutritional. The techniques of Chinese medicine provide a language of embodiment that brings together body and mind, matter and energy, solids and fluids. Chinese medicine takes account of states of repletion (shi) and depletion (xu) and operates an “economic” rectification in the form of therapies for the imbalances afflicting individual sufferers. Chinese medicine is particularly good at identifying areas of deficiency, which it figures as functional debility or depletion. Diagnosis traces depletions to their systematic roots, and therapy intervenes to nourish these roots and gradually eliminate the state of depletion. States of repletion, in contrast, tend to be static and localized, leading to the stagnation and corruption of crucial substances that should, by their nature, circulate. Excess is more often found outside bodies than in them. Excessive heat, wind, or humidity, especially at unseasonable times, can easily act as a pathogen for people who are already suffering some kind of debility. Too much rich food and drink, overwork, and sexual overindulgence should be avoided in order to lead a healthy life. The Chinese medical language of depletion and repletion applies just as well to economic and social states of excess and deficiency. The coexistence of uneven productivity and widespread shortages with pockets of wealth and privilege is understood by policymakers as a problem of deficiency and excess affecting the national body. The resolution of these tensions is not necessarily equalitarian, nor is it inherently progressive. But economic policies are in harmony with the categories of Chinese medicine, which provides powerful tropes and allegories.

When everything becomes sexual, erotism disappears

China after Mao has undergone a sexual revolution. The story is familiar by now: gender-neutral Maoist clothing and boyish haircuts for girls gave way to cosmopolitan fashion and cosmetics; sex became a topic for online discussions and medical counseling; prostitution and sleaze reappeared in the red-light districts of big cities; and homosexuality was dropped from the list of crimes and mental illnesses. As with the development of banquets and gourmet restaurants, the indulgence of sexual appetites is a highly visible, even flamboyant, aspect of a growing consumer culture. For Judith Farquhar, the shift toward the personal and the private is not conducive to a form of depoliticization: food and sex remain political in China, and the political field is being reconfigured to include the domestic and the sexual as new domains of political action. Except, perhaps, for the youngest consumers, relatively new forms of self-indulgence have a political and transgressive edge: enjoyment of capitalist luxuries is a personal revenge taken on the Maoist past and its regimen of asceticism and chastity. But as with revenge, it has a bitter taste: when sex is found everywhere, it tends to lose its alluring sweetness and emotive appeal. The focus on sexual intercourse leading to orgasm as the only legitimate sexual act leaves out many other forms of intense erotic experiences, such as touching hands, sharing gifts, writing love letters, and engaging in verbal badinage and flirtation. Hence the success of romantic love stories and family dramas that are so prevalent in popular novel and television series.

Changes in intimacies and consumption patterns often resulted from changes in material conditions. Maoist China imposed severe constraints on the intimacy of couples. A single living-eating-sleeping room often accommodated a whole family, including children and an elderly parent; cooking and washing facilities were shared by groups of apartments; and walls and doors were paper thin. Many married couples lived apart for years while struggling for permission for one or the other to shift to their spouse’s work unit. Romance during university years was discouraged, as student couples could be sent thousands of miles apart after graduation. These political constraints on privacy and intimacy did not disappear in post-Maoist China. The hukou system of registration is still in place, and so is the one-child policy that gives the state and party official direct control over the intimate lives of couples. Many married couples still live apart in remote work units, and those who are living together are often crammed into tiny apartments. Busy work schedules and long commutes leave little time for private exchanges and intimacy. Sex education is still lacking, and sex surveys reveal large “fuzzy spots” of ignorance and inhibition. Reviewing the ideological postulates of these surveys, Judith Farquhar reads the Chinese sex education literature as “a form of cultural imperialism.” Rather than rehashed versions of Masters and Johnson, she prefers to immerse herself in recent publications on ancient Chinese sex lore, with their “odd familiarity and quirky charm (that) are apparent even for a reader like me.” Finding “strong evidence that Chinese medicine and sex lore have a common origin,” she documents the reemergence of “life-nurturing techniques” (yang sheng) that also include the traditions of the martial arts, meditation disciplines associated with religious movements, and self-help books.

Anthropology’s new frontier

This book review is part of a series taking stock of recent books on China written by cultural anthropologists. Modern anthropology is especially well attuned to describing China’s modernity. China has emerged as the discipline’s new frontier or its favorite terrain, a place once occupied by Japan in the postwar period. Studying Japan allowed classical anthropologists to describe how one could be modern without being Western. Beyond the usual tropes of East vs. West, tradition vs. modernity, the group vs. the individual, social order vs. economic change, anthropologists writing about Japan were able to explore moral categories such as guilt and shame, face and honor, true feelings and public displays (honne and tatemae), or the need for dependence and care known as amae. They were also able to make the transition from the exotic to the familiar. As social scientists turned into business consultants, Japanese ethnographies provided the background for studies about industrial organization, corporate strategies, and management techniques. China as observed by modern anthropologists raises different issues, and provides different answers. Modern anthropologists come to the field equipped with a different toolkit that their forefathers used to carry with. Exit the focus on rites, kinship, hierarchies, and social structure. Social scientists are now more interested in the individual, the intimate, and the private, while being cognizant of the political nature of these categories in the Chinese context. They put their own experience on the line: Judith Farquhar alludes to the many banquets she attended, refers to her intimate conversations with close friends, and cannot refrain her feeling of nostalgia for the simple pleasures and moral virtues that were to be found in everyday life under socialism. Her solution is not to advocate a return to the past, but to experiment with new collective visions and values compatible with global neoliberal capitalism. If anthropology can help identify and shape these visions, its social role and public contribution as an academic discipline will be very well justified.