women – The Duke Reader

Anatomy of a Feminist Diplomacy Campaign

2 Jan 2026 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of The Banality of Good : The UN’s Global Fight against Human Trafficking, Lieba Faier, Duke University Press, 2024.**

On the face of it, fighting human trafficking has all the banality of a good deed. The adoption in 2000 of a UN Protocol on human trafficking, with a heavy focus on the sexual exploitation and abuse of migrant women, was a positive act of feminist diplomacy and was lauded as such by feminist groups in the West and in developing countries. The UN template set the stage for the development of a new international regime of norms and guidelines for how national governments, NGOs, and international organizations should actively work together in this fight. With the Trafficking in Persons Report published yearly, the US Department of State must be praised for having given teeth to the UN Protocol, allowing a carrot-and-stick approach to ensure compliance while naming and shaming bad performers. The US government was bold enough to point finger at one of its closest allies, Japan, whose treatment of migrant women brought under an entertainer visa scheme was clearly violating basic human rights. Japan did a good thing by applying international best practices and diminishing abuse: within two years, the number of Filipino women entering Japan on entertainment visas dropped by nearly 90 percent. All stakeholders can take pride on this result: women’s groups, feminist leaders, UN diplomats, American Embassy staff, Japanese case workers, law enforcement officers, and the victims themselves. This may not sound like a big deal, but they all did well. Hence, the banality of good.

Turning Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil on its Head

Under this narrative, the banality of good denotes step-by-step progress in the advancement of human rights and the fight against human exploitation. But let us pause. All of the above is not the story that Lieba Faier tells, and her expression “the banality of good” in fact has the opposite meaning. She uses it “to refer to the perils of this campaign’s globalized institutional approach, which ultimately privileges technical prescription and bureaucratic compliance over the needs and perspectives of those it means to assist” (p. 11). All stakeholders aiming to do good and alleviate the plight of victims of human trafficking missed their original goal or had to compromise on their principles. By bringing a global solution to local problems, the international community only made things worse. Foreign women working in the sex industry were forcibly deported on criminal charges of visa overstay; grassroot NGO workers became complicit in the expulsion of those they were supposed to protect; while police raids pushed the sex industry further underground. In titling her book The Banality of Good, Lieba Faier of course has in mind the expression “the banality of evil” coined by Hannah Arendt to denote the fact that evil can be perpetuated when immoral principles become normalized over time by people who do not think about things from the perspective of others. Evil becomes banal when people don’t feel bad when they do evil. Here, the banality of good reflects the opposite attitude: people don’t feel good when they are supposed to do good. They know something is wrong, but they can only attribute it to “the system” or hope that their action contributes to the realization of a greater good.

Over and over in Lieba Faier’s narrative, individuals and groups committed to the betterment of foreign women’s plight had to compromise on their strategic goals and core values. The original impetus to fight against traffic in women came from Asian feminist organizations and grassroot human rights groups in Japan, Korea, and South-East Asia. Beginning in the early 1970s, they built a regional coalition to respond to a rising tide of Japanese sex tourism in the region. They also had a broader agenda that was anti-capitalist and anti-colonial at its core, seeing sex tourism as the reflect of structural inequities among nations and between genders and classes. But the US feminist groups who picked up their fight obscured the structural factors foregrounded by the earlier efforts of women’s groups in Asia and framed human trafficking as a uniform global issue that warranted a single global response. This global feminist movement coined the expression “sexual slavery” to articulate a singular, abstract, deterritorialized global practice, overlooking racial, national, and class inequalities among women. They formed an alliance with the human rights movement to launch a campaign for the abolition of “violence against women,” with human trafficking as a key instance of this violence. Lieba Faier describes how a globalist feminist project then became a UN-centered global human rights initiative: the drafting and adoption of the Trafficking Protocol was based on compromise by both Asian grassroot organizations and US feminist groups, who were themselves divided between prostitution abolitionists and sex worker rights’ advocates. By establishing a formal definition of human trafficking and then collecting data on it, the protocol promised to recognize human trafficking as a global phenomenon for states to measure and institutionally address.

Reframing Sexual Violence

But when national governments decided to act, they did not focus on human trafficking as a matter of violence against women. Rather, they reframed the issue once again, this time as a matter of transnational organized crime warranting a punitive solution. What US-based feminism had identified as violence against women would be reframed as a generalizable problem of criminal violation enacted by individual private citizens against other private citizens. A model of redistributive justice was discarded in favor of a carceral model. Of the three Ps framework—preventing trafficking, protecting victims and prosecuting traffickers–, the third P was prioritized and the two previous ones were sidelined. In Japan, grassroot NGO workers produced “trauma portfolios” of victims, collecting personal accounts of suffering to argue that foreign sex workers deserved protection and assistance, not treatment as criminals. NGO caseworkers’ accounts were so moving that American diplomats made the controversial decision of placing Japan on the Tier 2 Watch List of the 2004 Trafficking in Persons Report. For Japanese bureaucrats, this was a huge blow to national pride: most of the advanced countries were on the so-called Tier 1 list, but only Japan was ranked Tier 2. Something had to be done to restore Japan’s standing in the international community. The same narratives that had moved NGO activists and US diplomats into action were now perceived as a matter of national shame.

As Lieba Faier remarks, “People care about others for different reasons and thus to various ends” (p. 95). For NGO workers, reporting on victims’ stories of abuse to US embassy officials was a way of using gaiatsu, or foreign pressure, to induce reforms in domestic policies. But the Action Plan that the Japanese government enacted in 2005 was a bureaucratic exercise, devoid of compassion or concern for social justice. The “Roadmap to Tier 1” was rich in international best practices and indicators, but disconnected from facts on the ground. As a result of the screening process, migrants that were denied the status of victim were forcibly repatriated to their home countries or held liable for illegal residence (fuhō taizai). Only those officially recognized as victims of human trafficking received protected status, with a residency permit allowing them to remain in Japan or assistance to go back home. As one NGO caseworker confided to the author, “Sometimes I don’t feel good about the work I’m doing. These migrants have nothing back home” (p. xiv). Or as another worker put it, “They don’t have anywhere to go. For many, their life of extreme poverty in the home country is much worse than what they have now” (p. 15). These NGO caseworkers didn’t feel that justice was being served by those international protocols, but if they refused to participate in them, they worried that the situation would be worse. So they complied with the “bureaucratic glue and strings” (p. 171) attached to being part of an international campaign against trafficking in women.

Support Comes with Strings Attached

Lieba Faier complements her fieldwork with archival work and interviews with UN officials and government representatives in Japan and in the United States. She dissects the various frames and translations that a social issue has to go through in order to become a legal provision in an international protocol; and how a UN template in turn translates into reality and alters the lives of women who may or may not be designated as victims of international trafficking. She brings an ethnographic eye to practices of helping migrant workers, campaigning for women’s rights, drafting UN templates, and translating legal texts into policy options. She reads “against the grain of bureaucratic documents to see the contradictions, aporias, and impasses embedded in them” (p. 101). As she describes it, the United Nations acts as a clearinghouse for such efforts, erasing history and geographical differences in the interest of establishing a standardized international practice. As she points out, “the rote adherence to an institutional protocol comes to stand for necessary structural change” (p. 13). Well-intentioned humanitarian campaigns produce unintended harm through bureaucratic routines and institutional priorities. These efforts prioritize protocol compliance over survivors’ needs, perspectives, and lived realities, leading to repatriation, compromised quality of life, and even criminalization of those they aim to help. The Japanese government offers assistance to only a small portion of those foreign workers suffering abuse and exploitation: “In 2018, only seven trafficking victims received repatriation assistance, and this number dropped to five in 2019” (p. 211). These “lilliputian pockets of improvement” (p. 213) mask egregious failure to put an end to human trafficking. Even those who benefit from repatriation programs fall victim of “cruel empowerment” (p. 185): humanitarian programs designed to empower them through financial literacy or other neoliberal models of development fail to address the structural inequalities of the status quo.

Lieba Faier’s scholarship is informed by the years she spent as a volunteer in Japan, the Philippines and the United States working alongside NGO workers assisting migrant women and lobbying the UN and governments to address the mistreatment of foreign women working in the sex industry and other exploitative sectors. As she writes, “Doing multi-sided research involving multiple organizations in three different countries over many years had advantages insofar as I sometimes heard part of a story in one organization or country and the rest of the story in others” (p. 19). Her findings were also buttressed by the availability of US diplomatic cables disclosed by WikiLeaks, which documented internal processes and political motivations. Grassroot perspectives allowed her to question the way these migrant women’s plight was addressed in international policy forums. As she notes, “the global approach to this issue was sidelining, if not displacing, the expertise and guidance of the experienced NGO caseworkers whose labor was central to it” (p. xii). While these NGO workers were sometimes themselves former labor migrants and had a deep understanding of the situation they tried to alleviate, the organizations that brought the issue to an international public stage were headed mostly by academics, journalists, or lawyers with little direct knowledge of facts on the ground or contacts with grassroot organizations. She also questions the exclusive focus of the international campaign on the sex industry and the lack of attention awarded to other forms of exploitative labor, such as the conditions faced by Asian workers who come to Japan under the Technical Intern Training Program (Ginō Jisshū Seido), which she describes as a cover-up for cheap and disposable labor acquisition. Her advocacy for migrant rights doesn’t stop at one particular category, but is informed by “a vision of justice that asks national governments and their citizenries to see foreign workers as part of their imagined community” (p. 140).

A Plea for the UN

The Banality of Good is informed by the vision that “other worlds are possible,” as stated in the book’s opening dedication. But what are the alternatives? As a French diplomat committed to a feminist diplomacy agenda, I would not easily dismiss the United Nations’ approach to human trafficking or the work done by American diplomats to document Japan’s insufficient efforts in applying human rights standards. I agree with the author when she states that “if international guidelines are themselves problematic, little will be achieved by compliance with them” (p. 120). But this should serve as a rallying cry to devote more attention and resources to UN multilateralism and human rights campaigning. The Trafficking Protocol, with its lack of a credible enforcement mechanism and its emphasis on criminalization and border protection, is an easy target for attack. But internal debates show that the work was perfectible and that other policy options were put on the negotiation table. Mary Robinson, then UN high commissioner for human rights, pushed hard to have a human rights perspective embedded in the text. She proposed the addition of specific references, provisions, and language to acknowledge the rights of migrant workers, not just sex workers or those recognized as victims of trafficking; and she argued for strengthening the “victim protection and assistance” provisions in the draft protocol to allow for financial resources being devoted to helping victims of human trafficking. The fact is, we don’t have an alternative to the UN, and bottom-up approaches are compatible with international summitry or legal text draft-making. Concepts such as “responsibility to protect,” “rights-based approach” or “human security” are not just abstract notions devoid of any content; they alter facts on the ground and induce real changes for people in need of international protection. Misperformance is no reason for inaction.

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.

Critical Fashion Studies

29 Dec 2023 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Social Media’s Influence on Fashion, Ethics, and Property, Minh-Ha T. Pham, Duke University Press, 2022.**

Minh-Ha Pham The fashion world has always espoused the latest trends in society and kept up with the times. It should therefore come as no surprise that fashion producers and commentators now speak of “ethical fashion,” “sustainable fashion,” or “fashion for good.” But what do these terms exactly mean? Who has the power to declare fashion worthy of these labels? What lies behind the glamour and glitter of fashion shows and catwalk fame? Unsurprisingly, there is also a radical wing of fashion critique (or critical fashion studies) that scrutinizes those corporate objectives and tries to hold the fashion industry accountable. Minh-Ha T. Pham is one of those critics that read fashion in relation to race, class hierarchies, labor, indigenous knowledge, creativity, and intellectual property rights (IPR). In Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, she examines the way social media users monitor the fashion market for the appearance of knockoff fashion, design theft, and plagiarism. Through what she calls “crowdsourced IP regulation,” she envisages the online activities of bloggers and Instagram users as a form of free labor mobilized in the service of fashion capital accumulation. Network vigilantes who are policing the border between authentic and fake fashion are engaged in racial work: copycat producers and consumers are always portrayed as Asians and reviled as morally defective, while creativity is defined as a property of whiteness, which gives Western fashion designers the privilege to engage in racial extractivism and legitimate cultural theft.

The sociology of fashion

Although this book is grounded in media studies, it also uses standard tools and concepts of sociological analysis. Its sociological value is limited by the fact that the author didn’t engage in fieldwork or participant observation: she only observed fashion blogging netizens from a distance and through the media impact of their activities. Nor did she collect quantitative data about fashion imitation and IPR policing activities. Her terrain is digital, and she gathered most of her observations online. But her critical perspective on the fashion industry places her in a long tradition of the sociology of fashion, from George Simmel and Thorsten Veblen to Pierre Bourdieu and Nancy Green. According to Simmel, fashion derives from a tension between, on the one hand, the tendency of each of us to imitate somebody else, and on the other hand, the tendency of each of us to distinguish oneself from others. Veblen coined the word “conspicuous consumption” to characterize the acquiring of luxury commodities by the “leisure class” as a public display of economic power. Bourdieu conceptualized fashion innovation as a field of values, norms, and power hierarchies structured around the opposition between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, mainstream élégance and avant-garde. Nancy Green gave a historical description of the working conditions of immigrants in the women’s garment industry in New York’s Seventh Avenue and the Parisian Sentier, showing how labor organization builds on gender and ethnic differences. Minh-Ha Pham’s perspective is thoroughly global: her examples and case studies originate from the heart of the fashion industry in Paris or New York as well as from the periphery of indigenous communities in Mexico or from ordinary social media users in Thailand. Call it multi-sited ethnography without direct engagement, or doing fieldwork from a distance.

Imitation is supposed to be the sincerest form of flattery, but that is not how most fashion brands see it. For years, the luxury industry has been battling counterfeiters, investing heavily in technology, the internet, and AI to authenticate products. Brands have lobbied governments to seize and destroy fake goods, prosecute buyers and dealers, and managing online traffic to counterfeit platforms. However, legal action does not seem to be enough. For a start, in the fashion industry, intellectual property is not enforced as it is within the film industry and music industry. To take inspiration from others’ designs contributes to the fashion industry’s ability to establish clothing trends. Fashion copycat disputes rarely involve original designs: fashion is, after all, a copy culture, in which innovation feeds on imitation. With few legal basis to protect original works of authorship, fashion leaders turn to the public to defend them against imitators. In the early twentieth century, powerful fashion companies used the trade and popular press to create a popular sense of fashion legality. Today, social media users and environments do this work. For Minh-Ha Pham, crowdsourced IP regulation is extralegal work: rather than pay legal experts, fashion brands depend on social media users to stamp on knockoffs and copycats. The fashion industry reproduces downstream a practice that it uses at every step of its value chain: mobilizing unpaid or grossly underpaid labor, from the garment factory workers to the unpaid fashion interns and the models that are compensated in kind with the luxury goods they have to wear.

Crowdsourced IP regulation

In crowdsourced IP regulation, social media users are naming, shaming, and demanding boycotts against fashion copycats while defending and promoting alleged copycat victims. They are playing this digital vigilante role in good faith and with good intentions: most of them sincerely believe that they contribute to a more ethical fashion world in which creativity gets rewarded and copying is sanctiond. But according to Minh-Ha Pham, the denunciation of the copycat culture follows racial and colonial patterns. The copynorms that inform them are freighted with cultural assumptions and biases, whereby copiers are always construed as Asians and innovators as Western. Authentic and fake fashion, creativity and copying are racialized categories, not neutral facts. The Asian fashion copycat is ethical fashion’s quintessential racial other. It derives from deeply rooted ideas about, on one hand, Asians’ technical superiority and, on the other hand, their cultural and ethical inferiority. According to standard stereotype, Asians are incapable of creativity, they are condemned to rote learning and mechanical repetition. The premise of the Asian copycat is routinely accepted without question or qualification: fashion knockoffs are immediately perceived as made in Asia, as the products of cheap ethics and shoddy manufacturing. Google searches automatically associate copycat culture with China or South Korea. These countries are accused of having achieved development by imitation rather than innovation. Accusations of “bottom-up copying” bristle with moral indignation about the theft of creative property, hard work, and sales that should have benefited their rightful owners. Words like “copying,” “knockoff,” “piracy,” and “counterfeit” are laden with value judgements and potentially legal implications. Meanwhile, “top-down copying” receives much less attention, and “lateral copying” is mostly a concern within the industry that feeds on imitation and trend-making. Popular euphemisms for top-down copying include “creative inspiration,” “homage,” and “cultural appreciation.”

Several case studies in the book concentrate on this top-down copying and contrast the lack of sanction associated with it to the moral indignation and media campaigns raised by bottom-up imitation. In the exceptional cases where “top-down copying” is publicly acknowledged, the copying is often excused as an isolated lapse in judgement rather than a reflection of a broader cultural or racial pattern. In particular, indigenous knowledge and ethnic designs are considered as part of the public domain, constituting a “free bin” that Western designers can mine for their creations. For Minh-Ha Pham, cultural appropriation and cultural inspiration are two faces of the same coin. They rely on what she calls “copy rights,” the power to copy without being branded a copycat. Copy rights include the right to use and enjoyment and the right to exclude others. They provide some with the right to copy, to benefit from copying, and to exclude others from the same privileges. They constitute a “racial license to copy” that is part of the privilege of being white. Examples of such racial extractivim are numerous. Isabel Marant’s copycat version of the Mixe blouse, a traditional design from the Tlahuitoltpec people in Oaxaca, Mexico, led to a legal battle that classified the indigenous design as belonging to the public domain. The Maasai people of northern Tanzania and southern Kenya have experienced a similar pattern of legally sanctioned exclusion and extraction, being used in many media campaigns without receiving any share of the proceeds. The racial license to copy also protected the designers who launched “Navajo-inspired” collections, giving rise to a Navajo chic trend that didn’t benefit the Navajo people in any regard. In fashion’s parlance, “traditional clothing”, “folk costumes,” and “ethnic garb” are racially coded terms that de-skill non-Western designs as cultural and natural rather than artistic and intellectual.

Ppl knocking each other off lol

Whereas most websites dedicated to exposing fashion copycats “punch down” on cheap imitators and align with the interests of the luxury business, Diet Prada, an Instagram account with a massive followership, doesn’t hesitate to “punch up” or “punch laterally.” It plays the role of a whistleblower or an online watchdog exposing the structural problems that pervade the global fashion industry, particularly racism, misogyny, sexual predation, and labor exploitation. Diet Prada dares to name, shame, and, in some cases, flame industry giants. Its posts typically involve side-by-side comparison photos of two or more lookalike fashion garments or accessories. It also imitates the headlines of fashion magazines or uses internet memes to expose wrongdoings and express outrage. According to Minh-Ha Pham, Diet Prada is “a fashion insider that uses insider branding strategies and forms to articulate an outsider cultural political discourse about the inequalities sustaining the global industry of which it’s now a significant part.” Its refusal to consent to hegemonic ways also finds expression in absurd posts that poke fun at fashion, fashion policing copycat, and fashion copycatting itself by juxtaposing high fashion objects with mundane things, like a ham sausage adjacent to a Bottega Veneta shoe or a dog’s snout and a Saint Laurent dress. Its derisive one-line description, “Ppl knocking each other off lol,” has remained unaltered since its first post. Its status as an industry watchdog is now so established that fashion companies have instituted channels to communicate with it, eschewing the conventional language of corporate communication to publish off-the-cuff comments and candid reactions.

Apart from naming and shaming, another response to counterfeits is moving upscale. This makes perfect economic sense: according to market signaling theory, when counterfeits enter the market, authentic brands have incentives to upgrade their quality and innovate. A higher price signals a higher quality, while pervasive counterfeiting with low production cost could drive authentic products with lower prices out of the market (as in the “market for lemons” theorized by George Akerlof.) Chanel, Gucci, and Prada don’t really need to crack down on counterfeits: they control their own distribution outlets and have developed among their customer base a sensitivity to detail that allows them to distinguish between the authentic and the fake. Fashion is linked to elitism and fueled by the increasing wealth gap in society. This is why the notions of “democratic fashion,” or “affordable luxury,” are contradictions in terms. They were promoted at the turn of the century by television shows and feature films that made the rarefied world of high fashion relatable. With Sex and the City or The Devil Wears Prada, people who might never shop for luxury fashion were encouraged to become conversant in its language. Fashion imposed its brands and values upon a society that learned to distinguish between authentic taste and fake products, between high and low market positioning. This period also saw the rapid expansion of European “fast fashion” brands into US markets. After the 2008 financial crisis, terms like “cheap chic,” “recession chic,” and “credit crunch chic” were widely used to describe budget versions of designer fashions sold at stores like Zara, Target, and H&M. Cheap chic was as much a political fashion statement then as sustainable fashion is today. It promised to make fashion (the clothes and the industry) accessible to more consumers. More recently, fast fashion came to be associated with China and rejected as unethical: it became synonymous with cheap labor, shoddy quality, and environmental degradation.

Fast fashion

Minh-Ha Pham’s book encourages readers to take a broader view of the value chain in the fashion industry. It should include all actors who create value, including the “free labor” mobilized downstream to expose counterfeits and reinforce IPR protection. Could critical fashion studies be included in this broader industry environment? Does Minh-Ha Pham participate in the regulation of a sector she so vehemently criticizes? Like fashion bloggers, academic critics believe in the importance of fashion as a social phenomenon. They treat their activity as work and dedicate an important part of their time to monitoring the industry’s latest developments. By holding fashion accountable, they demonstrate that the fashion world cannot stand outside broader societal concerns pertaining to racial justice, gender equality, labor rights, and sustainable development. The fashion world is very sensitive about these issues, not because it is particularly virtuous (it was late to follow the #MeToo bandwagon), but because its business has always been to keep abreast of latest cultural trends and to align with the changing times. Corporations in the luxury business are very careful about the language they use and what is told about them. Any blemish in their corporate image translates into massive revenue loss and need for reputation repair. The Asia Pacific region has become one of the brightest spots in the global fashion economy: as the economic status of Asian women is growing globally, racial stereotyping of Asian groups is no longer acceptable, as any blunder can lead to devastating boycott campaigns. Reading Minh-Ha Pham’s book might help corporate executives in the sector become more aware of concerns about race, gender, and global justice.

Love Can Be Racist

3 Dec 2023 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy, Leslie Bow, Duke University Press, 2022.**

Racist Love starts from the position that love can be racist. This is an idea that many people may find difficult to admit. Of course, most people will acknowledge that racism can be at work in the sexual fantasies of old white men attracted to young Asian women. In the same vein, the way Asian American communities are praised as a “model minority” can also be called racist. But can the sincere love of a white person to his or her Asian partner be called racist? What about the unconditional love of a mother to her child in the case of interracial adoption? And even if racist love exists, is the fact that some white people, male or female, prefer Asian sexual partners different from the attraction other people feel for blondes or redheads? Where do you draw the line between a preference for physical attributes in a partner and racism? If transracial love is systematically tainted by racism, what about the love or attraction one may feel towards people of one’s own ethnic group? Can people of color be suspected of racist inclinations because they are attracted to persons outside their ethnic group, or is racist love the preserve of white people? How to deal with the case of non-Asian persons (say, Gwen Stefani) who are so attracted by everything Asian that they themselves identify as Asian? There are no easy answers to these questions and, especially in the French context, it is hard to engage a conversation on these issues. Speaking of racism usually elicits the topical response “I am not a racist!”, while using the expression “structural racism” tends to deprive people of their agency. Racism, like religious beliefs or political affiliations, are topics that are best kept out of conversations at the dinner table.

Asian fetishism

The value of Leslie Bow’s book is is not to raise the issue of racist love in the abstract, but through the exploration of cultural artifacts, children’s books, collectibles, and artworks. These material objects act as substitutes for Asian people, displaying some of the traits Americans associate with Asian cultures. These ethnic signs can take the form of artifacts (fans, chopsticks, rice bowls, dress style, and textile patterns) or body parts (slanted eyes and other facial features, black hair, petite silhouette) that are detachable from the whole body to convey attributes of gender, youth, and ethnicity. Together, they express a racial imaginary infused with desire, longing, and intimate connection. They show that “race can be a source of pleasure” and not just rejection or apprehension. Racism can be made cute and charming, as in the Hello Kitty series or the geisha car in Pixar’s animated movie Cars 2. These inanimate objects “spark joy”, to use the terms of Marie Kondo, the Japanese lifestyle guru. They also reinforce racial stereotyping as a process of abstraction in which a quality ascribed to one member of a group then applies to all. One such Asian stereotype is the notion of inscrutability: Hello Kitty’s lack of mouth and facial expression offers a blank slate for the feelings of the viewer. Another prejudice is the association of Asian women with submissiveness and passivity. This stereotype affects Asian American women in their career, causing many to plateau, but also in their affective life. Asian female bodies are fetishized, oversexualized, and objectified in the fantasies of white males. Asian women deal with a very specific type of racialized sexism that makes them especially vulnerable. For Leslie Bow, attraction is the very form of anti-Asian bias, and translates into a specific desiring structure characterized by equivocation. Racist love can easily turn into racist hate: they are the two sides of the same coin.

Portraying differences among peoples using animal surrogates has always been a standard approach in children’s literature. It has also always been controversial: from the “fairy tale wars” of the 1920s to the Great Society programs in the 1960s and to more recent initiatives to expunge public libraries from allegedly controversial or inappropriate material, adults have always invested children’s literature with a great deal of phantasies and anxieties. Once thought as a tool for celebrating human variation and diversity, the practice of enlisting animal as racial proxies for child audiences is now seen by some as fraught with stereotypes and latent racism. As a critic notes, “we expect a white child to find it easy to identify with an animal but not with a Black character. Is the child further removed from a person of another race than another species?” More specifically, why are Asian characters always depicted as panda bears, ninja turtles, or karate chicken? Can biodiversity act as a metaphor for racial diversity? Do narratives about overcoming species bias encourage ethnic tolerance among children? For Leslie Bow, children’s literature mostly reflects adult concerns. Taking D.W. Winnicott’s definition of the teddy bear as an exemplary transitional object for the child, she asks: “by the same token, how do picture books represent transitional phenomena for adults, a site where racial fears and desires also find expression if not also release?” Illustrated books depicting animal characters and how they can get along across species are “racial transitional objects” for adults. Much like stories can help the child work through unconscious pressures, race-as-species characters reveal unconscious adult pressures to promote both color blindness and diversity. Whereas young children may relate more to human characters than anthropomorphized animals, adults prefer to envision democratic inclusion without the messy divisiveness of American racial history.

Transracial adoption

Nowhere is this urge to reassure parents more apparent than in the vast literature that has developed over the past twenty years around transracial adoption. Leslie Bow lists dozens of illustrated books addressing the experience of transnational adoption as transpecies parenthood, from the Ugly Duckling story to mama polar bear and the grizzly cub. Such books aim to reassure the reader of the adoptee’s integration into a loving family despite biological differences. But according to many adult adoptees, such books do not mirror the experiences of transracial adoptees. They present transspecies adoption as the happy resolution of a mother-quest narrative, whereas the reality of intercountry adoption more often reflects a parental quest for a child. They assume a complex chain of inferential reasoning, from visual difference to species, from species to race, from race to different human features, and then require the child to discount the importance of these differences that may not have been perceived in the first place. Adoptive animal parents are very often single and female, leaving the adult companion largely absent. Books emphasize maternal love and caring as the solution to all personal or societal concerns regarding family resemblance or discrimination. They reinforce adoptive parents’ refusal to acknowledge racial difference and racial tensions within the family. The authors of these books are almost exclusively adoptive parents, although a young generation of adopted persons is starting to produce graphic novels reflecting their experience of intercountry adoption for adolescents and young adults. One such book reviewed by Leslie Bow was written by an American-Born Chinese who takes the character of the monkey-king in the classic novel Journey to the West to express his feeling of inadequacy and physical difference.

Moving from anthropomorphic characters to racist kitsch, Leslie Bow explores an archive of mundane household goods personifying East Asian iconography: Asianized chopstick holders and rice bowls, kitchen timers and coin banks, luxury handbags personifying “crazy rich Asians,” and a Mandarin citrus squeezer made by Italian designer Alessi. Given the legacy of white supremacy in the United States, these objects may well be seen as a form of hate speech. They parallel the infamous history of Black mammy cookie jars and Black lawn jockeys that now trade on eBay as collectibles, often bought by African Americans who “collect racism” as pedagogic tools to remind viewers of a repressed history that still produces deep affective responses. In the American context, stereotyping is now recognized as a microaggression that negatively affects the mental health and well-being of people of color. Hence the prohibition of the Indian American mascots of sports teams, ethnic Halloween costumes, brand commodities playing with racist clichés, and various instances of cultural appropriation. Household goods with Asian faces elicit different responses: they are both offensive and inoffensive, an ambivalence that the author experienced herself through her reaction to some items: “I thought it was adorable.” The racist love of cute things characterizes America’s reception of the Japanese aesthetic of kawaii or cute style. For Leslie Bow, cuteness is the aestheticization of powerlessness. The racial cute veils pleasure in domination; it allows for the enjoyment of unequal relations of power, and invokes asymmetries of power underlying racialization. Addressed to children and young women, the kawaii aesthetic marks an association with dependence and innocence. It conflates Orient and accessory, Asian as thing or commodity. It takes delight in the diminutive, the passive, the inscrutable. For the author, “the pleasure surrounding cute commodities, their enactment of complimentary racial stereotyping, masks a fetishistic anxiety surrounding East Asia writ large.”

Fetishistic anxiety

Fear and anxiety also characterize what the author defines as techno-Orientalism, the projection of an Asianized future fueled by perceptions of economic ascendency in Asia. She analyzes three examples of the embodiment of a posthumanist future centered on Asia: the field of social robotics dominated by Japanese companies and researchers; humanoid robots who disproportionately tend to be modeled as Asian and female; and fictions involving AI characters such as Alex Garland’s Ex Machina. According to Leslie Bow, “techno-Orientalism is tech feeling as anti-Asian bias.” It reproduces the fetishistic structure of feeling that she has identified as racist love: anxiety transformed into pleasure. Attitudes towards artificial intelligence and social robots are often depicted as different in East Asia, compared to western countries where growing dependency on automatons generates negative feelings. In particular, Japan has more robots than any other country with robots contributing to many areas of society, including manufacturing, healthcare, and entertainment. Humanoid robots commercialized by Japanese companies are built as companion machines that establish bonds of sympathy and trust with their owners. But superior research and manufacturing skills in East Asia do not explain why robotic technology is so often embodied as Asian and female. Asian female clones, robotic geishas, mecha women, and digital assistants are coming out of research labs and now populate the reception desks of department stores, the animated stands of gaming conventions, and the imaginaries of Hollywood movies. For Leslie Bow, these robotic dolls reproduce familiar tropes about Asian women: “innocent and passive yet willing to please; sexually desirable but curiously lacking sexual desire; marvelously enhanced yet emotionally fragile.” They reinforce the association between Asian women and modern slavery, sexual exploitation, and human trafficking. The attitude they encourage among their public is highly problematic: boys and adults are encouraged to touch the face, to poke the body, and to aggress verbally in order to elicit reaction. It is as if #MeToo and the obligation of consent never happened. “Our visions of the future are thus tethered to existing social categories and histories even at the moment we imagine transcending them.”

In her last chapter, Leslie Bow turns to contemporary visual art and media engaging fetishism. Asian fetishism is “the quintessential form of racist love”: race fetishism involves sexual objectification and the same processes of reduction and exaggeration bound to the stereotype. Asian women are reduced to hair, eyes, or skin; they are seen as a type in which one individual represents them all. For the author, “the Asian fetish represents a form of harm that reflects a presumably degrading fantasy of reduced personhood, an injurious affront to individuality.” Fetishism is pleasure that masks anxiety: this is the same structure of feeling that has been identified as racist love. Fetishism is not necessarily a bad thing: a case can be made for fetishism as a site of split identifications and queer desires. It can be turned into a productive site of artistic expression. Several such artworks are curated in the book: Laurie Simmons’s photographic series The Love Doll consisting of images of a life-size doll from Japan exposed in various locations and situations; Elisha Lim’s cake sculpture of high-heel boots; Hong Chun Zhang’s collective self-portrait Three Graces depicting Asian women as wholly hair; Japanese artist Mari Katayama creating self-portraits using her own disabled body as a living sculpture; and video artist Laurel Nakadate provocatively engaging lonely white men to convince them to be involved in her videos. In the same way she reacted to racist cute objects with a mix of attraction and repulsion (“I both hate it and love it”), Leslie Bow questions her fascination with fetishistic art, and her scholarly involvement in the field of Asian American studies more generally. Asian American as a category of political visibility is also a type, she remarks, and “my critical and pedagogical practice may inadvertently enforce taboos surrounding race.” What is the point of critique that offers us pleasurable images simultanenous with the message that it’s wrong to enjoy them? How to answer a student who, after a class discussion on race fetishism, requested: “Remind me again why that’s wrong?”

The Uncanny Valley

What’s wrong with racist love is that it can easily turn into racist hate. Hate and love are merely flip sides of the same coin of stereotyping. Roboticians talk about the “uncanny valley” phenomenon, the point at which our reaction to artificial human likeness veers from familiarity into repulsion. As the appearance of a robot is made more human, some observers’ emotional response to the robot becomes increasingly positive and empathetic, until it reaches a point beyond which the response quickly becomes strong revulsion. The tipping point on the continuum between racist love and racist hate is easily crossed. Witness the evolution of relations between the United States and Japan, or with China, over the course of the past century. America and Japan fought as bitter enemies during World War II; yet during the Cold War and beyond, Japan arguably became America’s closest and most reliable ally in the Asia-Pacific region. Sino-American relations show that the “responsible stakeholder” in the global economy can turn in less than a decade into a “strategic competitor” or an existential threat. Within the United States, the “model minority” will regularly transform into a target for envy and aggression. The slur can be indistinguishable from the compliment. This is why fetishistic love, racial scopophilia, and perverse spectatorship are suspect pleasures: they trigger profoundly ambivalent desires split between repulsion and attraction. Racist love is not located in vague and ineffable beliefs or in great conscious or unconscious prejudices—the sky of ideas—but it has a material, corporeal and organic reality. Throughout her book, Leslie Bow approaches it in the series of objects that surround people most closely: children’s picture books, home décor and kitchen tchotchkes, dolls and machines. She cannot hide her own attraction to this Asian paraphernalia; likewise, she suspects that her own investment in Asian American studies may itself be fetishistic. The structure of the fetish (“a story masquerading as an object”) is similar to the structure of feeling that characterizes racist love: anxiety transformed into pleasure, positive attraction as anti-Asian bias. It pursues a satisfaction that is impossible. As Leslie Bow reminds us, “desire is not democratic”: sexual attraction cannot be legislated in the same context as rights violations. Likewise, you cannot judge Hello Kitty figures and children’s books based solely on the criteria of adult critics and scholars: it would be missing the way they “spark joy” and elicit simple pleasures.

Chinese Women Students in Australia

24 Aug 20228 Sep 2022 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Dreams of Flight: The Lives of Chinese Women Students in the West, Fran Martin, Duke University Press, 2022.**

Reading Dreams of Flight made me reexamine my preconceptions about Australia, China, and university studies abroad. When I was a graduate student in France back in the early 1990s, I didn’t identify Australia as a land of opportunity for academic studies. In the disciplines that I have studied, Australia is (or was) a scientific backwater, an outlier when compared to North America or Western Europe. I don’t trust university rankings that much, but last time I checked Australian universities ranked quite low in terms of research output, number of Nobel Prizes, well-identified schools of thought, or emerging paradigms. I was under the impression that an academic career in an Australian institution was a second- or third-best choice for aspiring scholars who failed to land the position of their dreams in North America or in Europe. Spending more than a decade in East Asia made me revise that opinion. I have met many Asian scholars for whom Australia was definitely on the academic map. For a prospective graduate student in South Korea, in Taiwan, or in South-East Asia, pursuing a degree in Australia, applying for a faculty position, or doing research as a post-doctoral student in an Australian university are serious options to consider. Australia’s attractiveness is not only linked to geographical proximity. Language, lifestyle, natural environment, diasporic presence, and academic freedom in well-funded research universities also weigh in the decision for an academic destination. Besides, the international students who form the focus of Dreams of Flight—a cohort of about fifty young Chinese women that the author follows across the full cycle of international study between 2012 and 2020—did not wish to pursue an academic career in science or in the humanities. Their ambition was to acquire a degree in a practical field such as accounting, finance, or communication and media studies, to broaden their horizon by getting an experience of living and studying abroad, and to follow a career marked by international mobility and promotion opportunities. Australian universities could build on these expectations to attract a growing number of students from China: in December 2019, just before Covid, there were over 212,000 Chinese students studying in Australia. Students from China represented the largest proportion of international students, while Australia was the third foreign destination for Chinese students after the United States and the United Kingdom.

Study in France, Study in Australia

Reading that higher education in Australia is also a commercial venture wasn’t really a surprise for me. In my previous posting as cultural counsellor at the French Embassy in Hanoi, I was involved in managing a Study in France programme and in attracting Vietnamese students to French educational institutions. Australian universities were clearly our direct competitors. La Trobe University had an admission office and a partnership program within Hanoi University, while RMIT was the first completely foreign-owned university granted permission to operate in Vietnam, delivering Australian degrees for a hefty tuition fee. But even with this experience in mind, I personally don’t like to think of academic studies abroad as a field ruled by competition and marketization. For France, attracting foreign students is a matter of public policy, not market development: it is a way to promote our model and our values, to uphold the position of French as an international language, to train potential recruits for French multinational firms or research labs, and to build long-lasting influence through a network of alumni who will keep a close connection to France. This assumes, of course, that foreign students will adhere to the values conveyed through education and living abroad, that they will practice French in the classroom (where courses are increasingly taught in English) and in everyday life, and that they will keep a positive attitude toward France after their study period (remember that Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot both worked and studied in France.) Unlike many universities in Australia, in the US or in the UK, French universities and Grandes Écoles offer high-quality training without imposing unaffordable tuition and fees. In fact, the French government offers many foreign students a benefits programme that reduces tuition fees to almost nothing. Although this is not the case for every institution of higher education, these fee structures are still lower than other universities in Europe, let alone Australia or North America. This is not always the best selling point among prospective students and their families: especially in Asia, quality comes at a price, and what is low-priced tends to be perceived as low-quality. But in countries like Vietnam, the affordability of studies in France, coupled with the known quality of French curricula, was clearly a strong argument to attract students to France and to persuade them to study French in our cultural institutes located in Vietnam’s four main cities.

Australia has a different approach to attracting foreign students. Australia has been recognized as having “the most organized and aggressive international recruitment and marketing strategy” for its universities abroad, and yet the central government has little involvement in higher education promotion. Universities, and in some respects provinces, are in charge of attracting foreign students to Australia and building an image of academic excellence and cosmopolitanism. They compete among themselves and against foreign education institutions for private income from international students, with the students themselves conceptualized essentially as consumers. To attract new students and maximize revenue, they maintain a network of commercial education agents abroad, organize student fairs and promotion events, open offices on the campus of partner universities, and sign agreements with local institutions. They use marketing strategies to target the public and divide the market into various segments: the cohort of young students studied by the author, who belong to the “post-90” (jiuling hou) generation, were more likely than the previous generation to be female, to study business and management as opposed to sciences or engineering, to start studying at the bachelor’s level, and to apply for permanent resident permit after their studies. The selling points for studying in Australia increasingly focus on urban lifestyle, natural scenery, food and beverage, and opportunities for tourism. International student offices at Australian universities emphasize the quality of students’ live & learn experience. They offer a range of support, advice and information about housing, daily life, and job opportunities. The objective is to create value and maximize consumer experience, not to promote a particular model of democracy and use education as a policy instrument. If exposure to daily life in Australia makes student acquire a taste for freedom and democratic ideals, so much the better. But studying in Australia is responding to economic rationality, not to the logic of a sovereign state. The education sector is Australia’s third export market after agriculture and mining. It generates indirect revenues by contributing to nation branding, tourism, and export promotion. If anything, dependence on Chinese student income was construed as a problem, especially at the end of the period studied by Fran Martin. Excessive market concentration affects product quality and exposes producers to increased political risk.

Preconceived ideas

As Fran Martin writes in her preface, “the young Chinese women whose stories are told in this book represent the human face of this marketization of education.” I was surprised by the description of their social background as middle class: they were the (often only) daughters of middle-rank party cadres, local officials, small business entrepreneurs, or corporate executives, who could afford to pay tuition fees and living expenses abroad. By comparison, in Vietnam, studying abroad remains the preserve of the elite or the upper middle class, and parents are making huge sacrifices to send their children abroad. Even in France, where secondary education is mostly state-led and university tuition fees are very low, sending one’s child to study abroad is a tough financial decision, and most French students content themselves with a one-year mobility in a different European country under the Erasmus student exchange program. Getting a degree in the United States, in Australia, or even in post-Brexit United Kingdom is out of the financial reach of most French families. The huge number of Chinese students abroad (over 700 000 in 2019) made me realize how rich China has become, and how devoted Chinese parents are to the education of their children. A related surprise was to read that for these young urban Chinese women, Melbourne and other Australian cities felt provincial and underdeveloped. Words like Mocun (“Melvillage”) and TuAo (“native Oz”) disparage the cultural and economic backwardness of Australia as a whole, while complaints about the nation’s backward infrastructure and early shop closing times were frequent among Chinese students. For some students, the village-like living conditions in Melbourne felt safe and friendly, while other complained against the unfriendliness of the locals, the unavailability of jobs in non-Chinese-run businesses, the ethnic concentration of Chinese students and migrants in clustered urban areas and housing, and racism and violence in public places. The dream of immersing oneself in the local culture and to get to know local people often ended in disillusion and fear. Indeed, many respondents in the study found that they had left China only to arrive in a subworld populated by Chinese friends, Chinese landlords, Chinese classmates, Chinese flatmates, Chinese bosses, Chinese media, and Chinese businesses. Everyday verbal interactions were held mostly in Mandarin, and the city was experienced as a sociospatial network of connected clusters.

Another preconceived idea I had about China was that increased openness through foreign travel and studies abroad might change Chinese society for the better and steer its citizens toward more liberal attitudes on the political and social fronts. This is a delusion I share with many people in the West: the notion that exposing young Chinese people to our ideas and values will make them think and behave more like us and will turn China as a whole into a responsible stakeholder on the global scene. In France, international education is recognized as a significant tool of soft power, a mechanism of attraction and persuasion. Through student exchange programs and cultural institutions such as Alliance française and Campus France, countries convey particular cultural, social, educational and political images of themselves abroad. These not only enhances their global visibility and influence but also their ultimate goal to reach and win the hearts and minds of people worldwide. It seems hard to deny the fact that internationalized higher education, with its cross-cultural and multi-national exchange activities, lays the ground for an intensified cross-border dialogue, contributes to a greater understanding between countries as well as enhances international cooperation. Education as a global phenomenon attracts people, and generates interest in the languages and cultures of other places. But Australia doesn’t seem to make such assumptions. For Australians, education is a lucrative business, not a policy tool, and promotion efforts focus on short rather than long term objectives. If anything, the increased number of Chinese students in Australian universities, and their dependence on partnership agreements with China, are perceived as a threat to academic freedom and domestic sovereignty. After Fran Martin completed her study, it was announced that Australia’s federal government was to shut down Chinese learning centers, known as Confucius Institutes, after the latter has been suspected of functioning as a plank of the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda. In 2021, Human Rights Watch published a report entitled How China’s Long Reach of Repression Undermines Academic Freedom at Australia’s Universities, giving voice to students and academics who felt forced to self-censor their views about the human rights abuses of the communist regime in China. Cases of nationalist outbursts and peer harassment have been reported among Chinese students abroad, making true the Chinese regime’s assertion that “leaving the country is more effective than a hundred patriotic education classes.”

Competing models of identity

This is not to say that international education had no effect on the Chinese students who responded to Fran Martin’s questions or discussed together on their WeChat group. The author identifies two competing models of identity among the young Chinese women from the post-90 generation: neoliberal-style enterprising selfhood, and neotraditionalist familial feminity. The first one values mobility, individual freedom, cosmopolitanism, professional orientation, gender equality, and consumerism. The second one prefers stability, family orientation, filial piety, collective discipline, job security, and traditional gender roles. Studying abroad accompanied a shift from the second to the first model. Contacted a few years after the study, women in the focus group were more likely to be unmarried, independent, focused on their professional career, following a flexible life course, and geographically mobile. They valued professional ambition, cultural reflexivity, and leisure consumption. All were not able to translate international studies into higher-status jobs in the private sector, in China or in Australia, and a significant number experienced downward social mobility. Some remained in Australia, navigating the state immigration regime and accumulating points in pursuit of permanent resident status while doing odd jobs in precarious conditions. Other graduates returned to China and faced gender-based discrimination in their job searches, competing with a large number of haigui returnees and having less guanxi than those who had stayed behind. Most of them delayed marriage and childbearing, with the risk of falling behind the gendered life script of marrying before their late twenties and becoming shengnü, or “leftover women.” The other model of gender neotraditionalism also retained its influence, in alliance with family structures and the modern apparatus of the socialist state. Pressures to marry and have children on a fixed schedule were difficult to escape, and heteronormativity weighed on some women who had developed same-sex leanings while in Australia. In political terms, Chinese students abroad tended to manifest expressions of “long-distance nationalism” and “patriotism from afar.” Faced with “insults to China”, the ethics of national representation demands that one make counterclaims to defend the national honor against hostile outsiders: “A son never complains that his mother is ugly; a dog never complains that its household is poor.” But nationalist feelings were also complicated by time spent abroad: the author observes a growing tendency to distinguish patriotism (aiguo) from attachment to the party or government, as well as a growing appreciation of the heterogeneity of Chinese identity. As she observes, “national feelings on the move are characterized by multiplicity, mutability, and ambivalence.”

Interestingly, the only institutions who really care about the subjectivities of Chinese students in Australia and who want to win their “hearts and minds” are proselytizing churches and religious sects. Among evangelical churches in the West (and in South Korea), China is seen as a new frontier for Christianity, a continent ripe for mass conversion and heavenly salvation. Some churches selectively target foreign students in evangelizing strategies: their personal alienation, disorientation, and insecurity resulting from their immersion into an unfamiliar environment make them easy targets for street preachers and door-to-door missionaries. The church to which there are drawn acts as a “service hub” for foreign students, providing spiritual comfort and material orientation as well as free language classes, outdoor excursion opportunities, and a quick way to meet new friends. In France, where secularism is part of the national identity, proselytizing has a bad image in the general public. It is perceived as undue influence and foreign meddling: evangelicals are routinely characterized as “Anglo-saxon,” and Seventh-Day Adventists or Latter-Day Saints are categorized as “cults.” By contrast, I was surprised to read that Chinese students had a rather positive image of proselytizing churches; despite being warned against “heterodox cults” (xie jiao) in their home country, they were curious about what they perceived as part of the cultural foundation of Western societies, and were favorably impressed by the selflessness and genuine sympathy of Christian missionaries. Some Chinese women used Bible-study classes and Pentecostal church sermons as a type of introspective self-cultivation and self-improvement, not necessarily leading to long-term religious engagement. For others, the church became the center of their social activities and spiritual life. For many Chinese students drawn to religious activities, churches were one of the few places where conversation and friendship with locals could occur. The LDS (Mormon) Church is not allowed to proselytize in China, but it trains its missionaries in Mandarin and tasks them with targeting Chinese citizens abroad in order to expand the faith into Chinese communities. For other churches as well, returnee converts may appear as an efficient means of spreading the faith in China while complying to the strict limitation imposed by the communist authorities on their activities. For the author, “churches’ provision of social services to international students raises some questions when considered in relation to ‘education export’ in Australia”: she sees it as “neoliberal privatization” and “outsourcing” of welfare services that ought to be provided by the secular state. She notes that the LDS Church and Pentecostal megachurches promote “deeply conservative positions on gender identity, (hetero)sexuality, and marriage.” But she also acknowledges the limitation of academic approaches when it comes to religious affects and expressions of faith: “the affective experience of immersion in religious scenes—even in the scholarly guise of ethnographic observation—tends to elude the clinical grasp of academic analysis.”

Market research

I wish I had with me a similar book about Vietnamese students abroad when I was posted at the French Embassy in Hanoi, covering the education sector. In our efforts to attract Vietnamese students to France, we were more or less walking in the dark. We had no market research reports, no focus group results, no customer satisfaction surveys, no communication strategy. When we organized a Study in France fair in a big hotel in Hanoi and in Ho Chi Minh City, we were overwhelmed by the number of young Vietnamese who showed up to gather information. We did invest resources to create and sustain a network of Vietnamese alumni: they were our best salespersons, and often took an active role in attracting their junior peers to the same institutions and programs from which they had graduated. A private philanthropist, who was particularly fond of elite institutions such as Ecole Polytechnique, played a tremendous role in attracting the best and the brightest Vietnamese students to France through a scholarship program. The “bourses de l’ambassade” (scholarships at the graduate level) were also very sought after, and a process was designed to guarantee the total independence of student selection. For many students, the French language was a barrier, as most courses in France were taught in French, but it was also an incentive to enroll in French language classes in Vietnam and develop a deeper engagement with French society. In our efforts to attract Vietnamese students to France, we stood halfway between economic rationality and the logic of a sovereign state. Higher education was not identified as a business sector that could generate revenue and contribute to economic growth, but as a tool of national influence and soft power. We were in competition with other foreign destinations or domestic programs, but we tended to present the Study in France experience as unique and special, not as a competitive option amongst many. Of course, a book like Dreams of Flight is not a market research report or an exhaustive survey of Chinese students in Australia. The insights it generates are, in my view, more relevant for public policy than for private sector development. In this way, it confirms my preconception that studies abroad should not be left to market forces and wealth considerations.

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.

Gay Dykes on Acid-Free Paper

12 Feb 20229 Jun 2022 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies, Cait McKinney, Duke University Press, 2020.**

Lesbian feminists invented the Internet, and they did it without the help of a computer. This is the surprising finding that comes out of the book Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies, published by Duke University Press in 2020. As the author Cait McKinney immediately makes it clear, the Internet that lesbians built was not composed of URL, HTML, and IP servers: it was an assemblage of print newsletters, paper index cards, telephone hotlines, paper-based community archives, and early digital technologies such as electronic mailing lists and computer databases. What made these early media technologies “lesbian” is that they formed the information infrastructure of a social movement that Cait McKinney describes as “information activism” and that was oriented toward the needs and aspirations of lesbian women in North America during the 1980s and 1990s. And what makes Cait McKinney’s book a “queer history” is that she brings feminism and queer studies to bear on a media history of US lesbian-feminist information activism based on archival research, oral interviews, and participant observation through volunteering in the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York. Information activism took many forms: sorting index cards, putting mailing labels on newsletters, answering the telephone every time it rings, converting old archives into digital format… All these activities may not sound glamorous, but they were part of the everyday politics of “being lesbian” and “doing feminism.”

The Internet that women built

Recently the role of women in the development of information technology and the Internet has attracted a great deal of attention. Thanks in part to the effort of popular author Walter Isaacson, the names of Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, Jean Jennings, and Jennifer Doudna have become more familiar to modern readers, and their enduring legacy may have contributed to attract more young women into computer science. Even so, computing remains a heavily male-dominated field, and the industry’s openness to “the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes” (to quote from a famous Apple commercial) is mostly limited to the masculine part of mankind. It therefore bears reminding that the Internet revolution was brought forth by information activists of all stripes and colors, not just white cis males from California. The “misfits” lauded by Steve Jobs may also have included dykes, stone butches, high femmes, riot grrrls, and lavender women as well as trans and nonbinary subjects. Besides, as feminist critique has pointed out, the concept of the “Internet revolution” or the “information superhighway” are masculinist notions that need to be reexamined. There is a gender bias in popular accounts of technology development and innovation that tends to exclude the contribution of certain agents, especially queer subjects and women of color. Technologies are gendered, and they also exhibit heteronormative and white biases. To fix this problem, much more is needed than writing more inclusive histories of innovation and exposing occupational sexism in the technology industry.

The lesbian volunteers whose activities are chronicled in Information Activism did not really invent the Internet. They did something much more purposeful: they set out to create a world bearable and a life worth living for lesbian women in North America. They did this work within conditions of exclusion from access to reliable information about lesbian life and from the margins of social structures and even mainstream feminism. Confronted with discrimination, isolation, and invisibility, they decided to build an information infrastructure of their own, one connection at a time. Creating alternative communication channels responded to conditions in which many women lacked access to other lesbians and were desperate to find connection. Sometimes, the sole purpose of maintaining this information infrastructure was to show lesbian women that they were not alone. There was another person to talk to at the other end of the help line at the New York Lesbian Switchboard ; other researchers subscribing to the newsletter Matrices were doing stuff in a field marginalized within academic studies ; documents stored at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York City bore the testimony of queer lives whose memorialization was a source of inspiration for modern generations. In some cases, just knowing the information was “out there” was enough to go on living with a renewed purpose. In other instances, women engaged in long “rap sessions” discussing feminist politics over the phone, started collaborative research projects that led to the emergence of a full-fledge discipline of queer studies, or found companionship and accomplishment in their volunteering projects. Information makes promises and fulfills aspirations that are much greater than “finding things out.”

A Chatroom of One’s Own

Networks have been critical to the construction of feminist histories. Cait McKinney examines several cases of networked communication initiatives that predate the emergence of online media: the publication of the newsletter Matrices designed for sharing information and resources with anyone doing research related to lesbian feminism; the New York Lesbian Switchboard connecting callers to a source of information and advice; the Lesbian Herstory Archives’ collection of print documents and audio tapes; the patient collection of indexes and bibliographies that made lesbian feminist essays and periodicals searchable and actionable. The technologies used in these pre-digital enterprises now seem antique: typewriters, photocopiers, landline telephones, letter mail, stacks of papers, cardboards, index cards, and face-to-face interactions. But the results were far-reaching and futuristic. They laid the ground on which a lesbian-feminist movement could expand and self-organize. Information and communication networks allowed dispersed researchers to connect with each other, share information, and do lesbian research within unsupportive and sometimes openly hostile research environments. Women living in rural areas or isolated places were encouraged to become active nodes of the network by taking pictures, gathering newspaper clips, and audio-recording interviews to document events taking place in their geographic area. The Matrices newsletter facilitated historical research through the creation of a supportive information infrastructure ; it also allowed for the nationwide expansion of a social movement originally concentrated in New York; and it convinced dispersed readers that lesbian lives mattered and were worth documenting. Key initiatives grew out of the network, such as the volume Black Lesbians: An Annotated Bibliography compiled by JR Roberts to counter the invisibility of women of color in mainstream lesbian feminism. In the 1990s, many print newsletters lost relevance a web browsing developed and academic listservs became key networks for sharing information. Matrices stopped publishing in 1996, replaced ostensibly by commercial enterprises such as Google, Amazon, and digital publishing tools. But online communication does not present as much of a turning point as a continuation of networked modes of organization for feminist social movements.

Another example of continuity between analog and digital modes of communication is the lesbian telephone hotline staffed by volunteers in New York City that answered to every call with a listening ear and a range of helpful tips and advice. Like newsletters, telephone hotlines connected lesbians at a distance using information. For the historian, they are harder to document: volunteers were anonymous and cannot be traced back, and all that remains of the long nights spent answering the phone are the call logs recording every conversations with a few notes and doodles scribbled in the margin. The logs suggest that many callers expressed despair, loneliness, or confusion; but others called for help finding something fun to do that night, for precise information about support groups or community resources, or just to talk and “rap” about gender issues. Even before the appearance of mailing lists and online forums, the need to have a chatroom of one’s own was clearly felt and answered. McKinney also uses the log archives as entries to thinking about feminist research methods, multimedia practices, care provision, and affective labor involved in lesbian telephone hotlines. She reminds readers that feminist activism involved less acknowledged dynamics such as boredom, repetition, isolation, and burnout. What makes a telephone hotline “lesbian feminist” is the self-definition and principles under which the switchboard operated. Volunteers were recruited from within the lesbian community and bisexual women were tacitly kept out, while the policy toward trans women and gender nonconforming persons was left undefined, although their needs were also addressed on an ad hoc basis. These remarks remind us that terminology, such as the moniker “gay and lesbian” as opposed to the more contemporary “LGBTQI+”, are historical constructions that cast aside or rigidify some categories as much as they include or deconstruct others.

A feminist mode of network thinking

Network thinking has been a feature of feminist activism and knowledge production since before the consumer Internet. “Improving (lesbian) lives with information” could be the motto of a behemoth social media company catering to a niche market; it was always the principle under which lesbian activists operated. The feminist movement produced original ideas about communication, access to information, capacity building, and the power of alternative structures for organizing people and ideas. Lesbian feminists also offered pre-digital feminist critiques of networks as egalitarian ideals that can conceal functional hierarchies and threaten the privacy of participants. Computer networks were dreamt and imagined before they were invented and built. The librarians and volunteers who collected the Lesbian Periodicals Index were imagining computer databases and electronic indexing while shuffling paper cards into shoeboxes ; the Lesbian Herstory Archives’ project leaders were figuring putting all their resources online before they had the equipment and manpower to convert documents into digital format. They were also early adopters of information technology, manifesting a can-do attitude and a hands-on sensibility familiar to feminist activism—and more generally to “women’s work.” McKinnon characterizes as “capable amateurism” a fearless approach to learning and implementing new media technologies; a gendered belief in the capacity of amateurs to work hard and acquire new skills; and a willingness to experiment, improvize, and figure things out on the fly. Lesbian feminism is also informed by values of non-hierarchy, direct participation by members, and an investment in decentralized processes.

Today these values are reflected in many internet communities. A good-enough approach (“rough consensus”), a culture of sharing (“copyleft”), and collectively organized work (“open source”) as well as political militancy (“Anonymous”) characterize segments of the computer industry as much as they are part of the lesbian-feminist heritage. One may even see in the Slow Web movement echoes of the politics of nonadoption and digital hesitancy that was developed by some activist groups surveyed by the author. Beyond lesbian history, these activists have much to teach all of us about why, when, and for whom information comes to matter. The lesbian feminist imagination allows us to envisage a world brought together by connection, care, and “sisterhood” that earlier feminist networks originally articulated and that worldwide Internet connectivity now makes potentially real. A lesbian-feminist approach also reminds us that networks make equalitarian promises that conceal the power structures, protocols, and control mechanisms they actually exert. Computer databases and search engines are not neutral; they determine what is thinkable and sayable through filtering access to information and indexing resources into categories and keywords. These are deeply political choices, and the way decision-making processes and governance bodies are structured matters a great deal. If we want to keep a free and open Internet and uphold the principle of net neutrality, perhaps we should learn from a history of information networks written through older forms of feminist print culture.

Lesbianism is so twentieth century

But does the lesbian past still talk to our queer age? As a self-described “masculine, nonbinary person,” Cait McKinney is ambivalent about the category of lesbianism. She originally assumed that “lesbian” as a specific term of self-identification was historically dated and situated in a period of late twentieth-century militancy, and she was surprised to learn that the term was still popular among a younger generation of queer-identified activists. Young volunteers at the Lesbian Herstory Archives articulate deep attachment to lesbian history and subcultures, and the snippets of information and pictures that the center posts on Instagram are instantly popular. Some business ventures exploit the revival in lesbian-feminist militancy heritage, selling T-shirts, collectable items, and other paraphernalia bearing slogans and pictures from the seventies and eighties. McKinney also thinks lesbianism, while providing a big tent for women with nonconforming gender identities, also had exclusionary effects as many lesbian-feminists were historically hostile to trans women and indifferent to women of color. As a matter of fact, lesbianism meant much more than women having sex with women. Likewise, the erotic exceeds what is commonly understood as sensuous, sexually appealing, and emotionally gratifying acts. Eroticism can be described as a communication practice, and information activism is definitely part of it. Reading archives against the grain (or along the archival grain, as Laura Stoller invites us to do) also refers to the grain of one’s skin, and the archival touch implies an embodied experience laden with sensory perceptions and affects. Libriarianship and archivism are professions that have been historically attractive to women, including persons attracted to same-sex relations, and they have often served as erotic projections of male—and sometimes female—desire. There is something queer about manipulating acid-free paper, and Information Activism consciously addresses how librarians and archivists cope with the affective and intimate impacts of accumulated print media.

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.

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?”

TV-Glotzer

28 Nov 20202 Dec 2020 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of TV Socialism, Anikó Imre, Duke University Press, 2016.**

TV Socialism In her 1978 hit song “TV-Glotzer,” Nina Hagen sings from the perspective of an East German unable to leave her country, who escapes by watching West German television. She switches channels from East to West and stares at the tube where “everything is so colorful.” As she puts it, TV is her drug while literature makes her puke and she keeps eating chocolate that makes her fatter and fatter. The song was written when Nina Hagen was still living in East Berlin but made a hit in Western Europe, where “white punks on dope” could identify with the lyrics and share the spirit of “no future” rebellion. Anikó Imre’s TV Socialism gives a different perspective on television in socialist Europe. For her, television isn’t a drug but a matter of scholarly enquiry, and her book is a dense academic text that comes fully equipped with historical references, textual analysis, and footnotes. The book is a seminal contribution to the field of “socialist television studies” and challenges many ideas by which we assess Eastern Europe’s socialist past. But first, what does she mean by TV socialism? What links TV to socialism, and what makes socialist TV different from the television programs that were produced at the same time in Western Europe, in the United States, or in the developing world? How did television in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia or the GDR shape the imaginaries of viewers, and what remains from this socialization through small-screen images in a post-socialist world? Or to repeat Anikó Imre’s introduction title, “Why do we need to talk about socialism and TV?”

TV as a propaganda tool

According to conventional opinion, TV in socialist Europe was a propaganda tool. Its goal was to educate and enlighten all social classes, giving access to culture and information while also providing a light form of entertainment for the masses. Educational TV had to demonstrate social commitment to the cause of the State and the Party, show solidarity with the Soviet Union, acknowledge the superiority of European high culture, and contribute to the building of socialism. Teaching viewers how to be good socialist citizens was a central mission of national broadcasters. Lenin famously called on good socialists “to study, to study, and again to study,” and television was one of the mass media that could bring the study guide to the living room. Of course, socialist workers were not to be treated as students, for they embodied the knowledge and values that the sphere of culture only reflected. TV programs had to be relevant to the workers and understandable to them. TV was meant to be watched collectively in offices, factory clubs, and cultural centers. Instead of depicting life as it was, reality-based programs shifted the emphasis to teaching citizens how to behave in an ideal socialist society. But this consciousness-raising documentary realism was always articulated with the privates pleasures of television’s emotional realism. The doctrine of socialist realism also acknowledged the role of emotional expression to promote Soviet ideals. The same Lenin distinguished between propaganda, a way to convince through rational argumentation, and agitation, which mobilized emotion and affect. Like the theater according to Bertold Brecht, television was a tool of agit-prop and, as such, could lead to the creation of new forms of cultural expression, distinct from the dull productions of bourgeois culture.

This description above summarizes the standard view of socialist television, as held by critics and sycophants alike and as it was sometimes expressed by the rulers of socialist republics. But Anikó Imre shows that it was a far cry from reality. Really-existing socialist TV was not so much different from television as it existed at the time in Western Europe, and indeed there were many linkages and influences that crossed the iron curtain. To dismiss (or to hail) socialist TV as mere propaganda widely misses the mark. In her introduction, Anikó Imre articulates three surprising facts that help readers see TV and socialism from a different angle. The first surprise is that television in Eastern Europe was much more exciting and entertaining than its status as propaganda tool would make us believe. Authorities had to reckon with television’s power as a mass medium, and mostly left professionals in charge of its development. TV managers used this autonomy to operate under the radar screen of censorship, to play catch-up with Western broadcasting programs, and to formulate a light critique of the regime through irony and self-derision. The second surprise is that TV broadcasters cared about their audience, their viewer ratings and their domestic market share. They were commercially oriented, and operated in a competitive field where they had to fight for available human brain time. A large part of their revenue came from advertising. As a result, they provided the public with what people most enjoyed: quiz shows, pop music, comedy, and drama serials. It is these forms of popular entertainment, and not the live broadcast of classical music concerts or didactic science programs, that came to define what socialist TV was all about. As a third surprise, Anikó Imre shows that socialist TV was not bounded by state borders and national identities. It was transnational even before the word was invented, with border-crossing signals and program exchanges that allow the author to provide an integrated picture of Eastern European TV as opposed to a juxtaposition of country studies.

National leaders are watching TV

The way national leaders engaged with TV had a heavy influence on program content. János Kádár never watched TV as his taste drew him to high culture and concert halls. Leonid Brezhnev had his appointed head of Soviet television design programs especially for him and his wife, while his children and other relatives had the house equipped with another TV set and a Japanese VCR to watch shows and movies from the West. In the 1970s, Nicolae Ceaușescu opened his country screens to US series and German quiz shows in order to demonstrate his independence from the Soviet Union and to gain favor with the West, then in the 1980s he turned increasingly dictatorial and reduced television broadcasting to a few hours a week with programs lauding his every words and actions. Josip Broz Tito encouraged TV channels to draw on advertising income and even had a Slovenian station broadcast commercials in Italian to audiences across the border to get additional revenue. Erich Honecker redirected the course of East German TV when he famously diagnosed “a certain boredom” around television and urged its managers to create “good entertainment” at the Eighth Party Congress in 1971. What all these leaders had in common is that they tried to mold the new medium to their own purposes, but failed to dictate their taste and preferences to the public. Television’s lower cultural status allowed it to escape the strictures of official culture and to develop free forms of popular entertainment. Socialist TV shared with Western European broadcasters the same commitment to realism and the ethos of public service. Tight state control and censorship also characterized periods of Western European TV programming. De Gaulle famously gave orders and directives to TV channel managers that he himself appointed, and it was rumored that news anchors on French TV had an earplug that linked them directly to the ministry of information. As for the feeling of boredom that Erich Honecker perceived in the East German public, French téléspectateurs could feel it as well: “La France s’ennuie,” titled Le Monde in a famous editorial on the cusp of the May 1968 movement.

It may come as a surprise to a generation raised on Japanese anime and American TV series that TV programs from the East once had a not-so-insignificant market share in Western European markets. This was especially the case for children’s television. Growing up in the 1970s in the United Kingdom or in France meant watching a lot of imported East European children’s programmes. There was the Singing Ringing Tree with scary dwarves hailing from East German studio DEFA, Taupek the Mole which came from Czechoslovakia and used giggles or non-verbal exclamations instead of words to communicate, and something quite bizarre called Ludwig which was an animated series about a machine that played Beethoven to his animal chums. Some animation feature films were drawn from Continental Europe’s tales and legends, like The Snow Queen produced at the Soyuzmultfilm studio in Moscow or The Pied Piper by Czech studio Kratky Film; other animations developed Slavic themes like Gallant Robber Rumsaïs or Tchessilco the Magician, which were broadcast in France by ORTF. Not only did people in the Soviet satellites love their children too: they watched along with them what was recognized at the time as the best TV animation in the world. These animated pictures’ influence over Western animation, and over Western audiences, cannot be overstated. Anikó Imre doesn’t cover children TV in her book, but its development is quite similar to the other genres she reviews. The socialist reality-based, educational TV programs she describes were a kind of prehistory to the much more excoriated and inflamed reality-TV shows that took European channels by storm in the 1990s. Aside from proper language and decency, a lot was lost in the move from socialist realism to reality TV.

Did women have better sex under socialism?

Women are said to have had it better under socialism: better labor market participation, better jobs, better maternity leave and child care, and even better sex. Whether this is true remains controversial. Anikó Imre paints a mixed picture of women’s reflection in the mirror of socialist TV. On the one hand, television addressed many topics conventionally considered as women’s issues: child rearing and education, cooking and housekeeping, romance and family issues, and even birth control and sex life. But on the other hand, the default national viewer addressed by socialist television was most often the white, male, abled and working heterosexual citizen. Women as a homogenized social group were identified with special needs and tasks such as reproduction, family care, and emotional labor, and with inferior skills for political participation and mastering of technology. The blond female host was often associated with the pretty face and decorative position of the program announcer, while men anchors were clearly in control. This gendered hierarchy was also reflected in the two-tier production structure: television remained a male-dominated industry, and women typically worked below the line as technicians, make-up teams, or secretaries. The occasional powerful woman in television often did everything to efface herself and masquerade as one of the boys. Over the years, socialist television turned more feminine, if one identifies feminity with melodrama and consumerism. The thaw period beginning in the late 1960s brought political and economic changes that required socialist parties to readjust their gender policies. Women were presented as key agents of the “socialist lifestyle” and featured prominently in the genre that Anikó Imre labels the “late socialism soap opera.” Unlike historical dramas from the previous period, which removed the narrative into the past and revolved around heroic male figures, these domestic serials took place in the present and evolved around key female characters who acted as problem solvers and natural caretakers. This idealist image of the socialist woman who is independent, desirable and capable, is reflected the stunning photo portraits of Júlia Kudlik and Irena Dziedzic, with their fashionable hairstyle and modish dress, eliciting from the reader the male gaze that the author’s feminist agenda precludes.

Anikó Imre’s description of socialist TV defies Cold War stereotypes of a gray, repressive, joyless and isolated Eastern Europe. Men and women beyond the Iron Curtain knew how to have fun: only they did it differently, infused with the traditions of Mitteleuropa and the contradictions raised by socialism. The ruling communist parties and the strictures of state socialism couldn’t be criticized upfront. But citizens could vote with their eyeballs by switching channels, turning to programs broadcasted from neighboring countries, or turning off TV altogether. The more elitist, austere, realistic, and educational television attempted to be, the more it was mocked and abandoned by viewers, who wanted fiction, humor, and entertainment. The public could also distance itself from really existing socialism through mockery and satire. The systemic deficiencies of socialism were treated with light humor: living conditions in housing blocks, queuing for acquiring consumer products, facing the maze of bureaucracy, and other absurdities of the era were addressed in a light and relaxing manner. Reality shows at once celebrated and poked gentle fun at socialist institutions and rituals. Some 1980s serials took subversion to surprising levels: as the author notes, humor “thrives on oppression and censorship, rather than being silenced by it.” Rather than a government-controlled soapbox that repelled humor, much of socialist TV programming was actually perceived by audiences as comic because socialism itself was absurdly comical. Television was an theater of the absurd: the distance between the utopian horizon of socialism and the existing conditions of life was too great to swallow without a heavy dose of humor. The comic absurdity of late socialism could also draw from older traditions of cabaret, farce and carnivalesque entertainment that echoed the “agit-hall” operetta from Weimar Germany or the monologues, dance numbers and songs from Viennese Kabarett. This tradition of political satire survived and in some contexts flourished in the late shows and New Year extravaganzas offered to TV viewers. Here again, as for reality TV, the author sees in this wave of derision a harbinger if not a direct influencer of the politically-charged entertainment programs that were later developed in Western Europe and the Unites States, from the Guignols de l’Info to The Daily Show.

The afterlife of TV Socialism

What remains of socialist TV in today’s Europe united by political integration and market consumerism? TV Socialism addresses the afterlife of socialist TV in three different guises: as postsocialist TV programming, as an archive steeped in nostalgia, and as an academic discipline. First, socialist TV continues to have an active social life in the countries that have made the transition from state socialism to market capitalism. There is much more continuity between late socialism and postsocialism than the narratives centered on Cold War and transition to market would make us believe. Many idiosyncratic genres, distribution patterns, and reception practices have perpetuated into the present day. Some shows and serials have continued into postsocialism; other contemporary programs have deliberately attempted to reproduce the mood and values of late socialist TV, giving it a nationalist twist; and there has also been some reruns of older TV shows, with specialized channels catering to a nostalgic public. New circulating formats, from DVD to on-demand catalogues and YouTube uploads, have brought a new lease of life to vintage programs that have acquired a cult-like status. Anikó Imre adopts a critical perspective on postsocialist nostalgia, known in Germany as Ostalgie, claiming that it is a naive and postimperial gaze on a mythified past. But her own attitude shows that there is pleasure and knowledge to be gained from delving into TV archives, and that the repertoire of antiquated shows and series should not be left to oblivion. Taking socialist TV seriously grants access to an image of life under socialism that stands in stark contrast to the clichés of Cold War stereotypes. Rather than scarcity, homogeneity, and brainwashing, TV Socialism conveys a mixture of familiarity and strangeness, which helps to defamiliarize some of the basic assumptions about Eastern Europe and socialism. As Anikó Imre notes, television has long been relegated to the status of a minor and inferior object for scholarly studies, both in the Slavic and Eastern European Studies departments of American universities and in the cultural studies programs that have burgeoned in Europe. By moving it centerstage, she deconstructs the opposition between high and low culture as well as the Cold War division between East and West and between socialism and postsocialism.