Tag: women

A Typology of Filipino Women

Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Transpacific Feminities: The Making of the Modern Filipina, Denise Cruz, Duke University Press, 2012.

Transpacific feminitiesOrientalism grew out of a fascination with Asian women. From the scantily dressed harem recluse to the romantic Madame Butterfly figure, from the mousmé to the congaï, or from houri to geisha, the Western male gaze was literally obsessed by Asian female bodies, and constructed its vision of the Orient around figures of stereotyped female characters. Philippines’ women or Filipinas stood in a peculiar position with regard to these Orientalist wet dreams. They never fully fit the category of the Oriental woman as popularly conceived. Neither black nor yellow, the term used to describe her racial identity is “brown”. When traveling abroad, she is often taken for a Chinese, a Vietnamese, an Indonesian, an Indian, a Mexican, or a South American. Even now, mentioning Filipinas in a Western context brings to mind images of overseas care workers, domestic helpers, mail-order brides, or leading politicians such as the flamboyant Imelda Marcos or the stubborn Cory Aquino. Filipinas never coalesce around one single category. They escape the attempt to hold them as representative exhibits of an Asian feminity that would define a distinct type of Orientalist fantasy. As domestic workers, they cultivate invisibility and diligence. As politicians and heads of state, they embody leadership and prominence. As mail-order brides, what is conspicuous about them is not their sex-appeal but their subservient attitude and willingness to do household chores or sustain a family in depleted rural areas. There seems to be no middle ground or common features between these polarized figures. None evokes the sexual desires, eroticism, and male fantasies that otherwise characterize Orientalist visions of Asian bodies.

Racial constructions

Unsuccessful attempts to reduce Filipinas to a single stereotype are not new. Categories to designate them were always plural. In the Spanish colonial era filipino had referred to Spanish creoles, those of Spanish ancestry born in the colony, while indios were the locals of Malay ancestry. The term mestizo could refer to someone of Spanish and indio birth but more often meant a racial mixture with indio and chino or Chinese elements. Non-Christian peoples like the Negritos and Igorots, who lived in the highlands, were considered as infieles, that is, animists or infidels, and their hunter-gatherer societies were held as most backward and primitive. Muslim peoples in the South were grouped under the category Moros or Moors, and were in perpetual conflict with the Spaniards. These ethnic categories gave rise to enduring types of Filipino women: the Spanish mestiza, the pure-blood morena, the Sinicized chinita, the dark-skinned negrita… Americans who took over from Spain after 1898 added their own racial constructions to this imperial mix. The “Filipino savage” who went bare-breasted and wore a banana-leaf skirt was seen as a nonwhite other whose alterity incorporated imaginaries cast from the conquest of the New World, the annihilation of Indian native cultures, and the legacy of African slavery in America. The Spanish-speaking Doña was perceived as aristocratic, virtuous, dutiful, and subservient, forever in the thrall of the Catholic Church. The modern Filipino girl was the most amenable to the rule of empire: she benefited from access to enlightened education, transatlantic mobility, and emancipatory sisterhood with white women. She was the young lady waiting for a chivalric savior, and cultural salvation was what Americans intended to procure under their policy of benevolent assimilation.

Denise Cruz’s Transpacific Feminities explores many topics and episodes: the typologies that were made by Filipinos and Filipinas themselves in the context of the discussions leading to female suffrage in 1937; the exclusion of women from the national debates about proper language for literary expression; the emergence of the urban, transpacific college girl who flouted traditional forms of proper feminine behavior; the challenge posed by Japanese occupation that cast women as victims or, in the case of ‘Colonel Yay’, as freedom fighters; and the role of transpacific Filipinas in the Cold War context. The figure of Maria Clara, the heroin of José Rizal’s novel Noli Me Tangere, casts a long shadow over the place of women in Philippine society. Recognized by many literary scholars as the first novel by a Filipino, this satire of Spanish imperialism was written in Spanish and published in Germany in 1887 to avoid censorship. It tells the story of a failed romance between Maria Clara and Crisóstomo Ibarra, a mestizo who returns to the Philippines after years abroad with a European education and a desire to spread reform by establishing a new school in his hometown. Ibarra’s school never materializes, for he becomes implicated in both familial and revolutionary plots that interrupt his ambitious plans and end his engagement to Maria Clara. After more twists and turns, the heroin enters a convent, where nuns are subjected to medieval treatment. This female character has become a classic figure in Filipino culture. For some, she represented everything a Filipina should be: modest and chaste, homebound and subservient. For others, she was the epitome of a dying tradition, symbolic of the shackles of Spanish catholic rule. Her mestiza status is unsettled by a horrible secret: she is the illegitimate daughter of a Spanish friar who abused his mother and then became the girl’s godfather. Noli Me Tangere (“touch me not” in Latin) has become part of the national curriculum, and in its English or Tagalog versions it is still compulsory reading for high school students.

Desiring subjects of empire

Filipinas were thought to be more amenable to the civilizing influence of the United States than men. American women in particular cast themselves as saviors and emancipators of their oppressed “little sisters” and described them as symbols of oppressed women in need of rescue. Domestic authors developed a critique of the American-produced constructs of Filipino feminity as desiring subjects of empire. As an alternative, they promoted a version of elite transpacific feminity that drew from the best of multiple worlds. Commentators took great care to distinguish their fellow countrywomen from Orientalized notions of Asian women as either mysterious and exotic damsels or as uncivilized savages in need of salvation by the West. In their view, model Filipinas maintained an ideal balance between the modern and the traditional, between East and West, and between Anglo-saxon, Latin, and native cultures. They resisted the imperial project of assimilation and maintained a kind a counter-narrative to rising American hegemony. But justifying resistance and autonomy by using the English language came dangerously close to accepting the legitimacy of U.S. rule. The role of English in an independent Philippines republic was vehemently debated in the 1930s and 1940s. Colonial languages were hegemonic, as English was seen as the new lingua franca of the intelligentsia and Spanish was still used in legal proceedings and worldly conversations.  In 1937, Tagalog was instituted as the national language but still had to compete with many vernacular languages and dialects regularly used by the Philippines population. For writers, using English was a means to join a transpacific commonwealth of educated readers and writers; but they could not escape a nagging sense that the literature they were producing was disconnected from the socioeconomic realities of life in the Philippines. As in other national contexts, a separation emerged between ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature, between ‘popular’ and ‘artistic’ writing that tended to overlap the distinction between English and Tagalog. But even though women were early producers of literature in English, male authors tended to sideline them in their debates about language and literature, and they portrayed women’s literary efforts as inferior and unremarkable. To the misogynist essay “What Is Wrong With Our Women Writers?”, two feminist authors responded in 1941 with an article titled “Our Men Writers Are Not So Hot.” The emerging canon of literature in English that emerged from these early years comprises mostly male authors: Manuel Arguilla, Bienvenido N. Santos, Nick Joaquin, Carlos Bulosan, N.V.M. Gonzales… But women writers were nowhere to be found in this roster of national literature in English.

The rise of the university-educated, Western-influenced, transpacific Filipino coed ushered a debate what it meant to be Filipina in an independent Philippines and how it related to the new constitution and universal suffrage. Three decades of occupation by the United States had provided educational and professional opportunities for many Filipinas, who fell under the spell of American culture’s influence. Young Filipina coeds imitated what they read in magazine pages and saw on movie screens: bobbed hair, short skirts, plucked eyebrows, painted lips. Modern girls were by this time a global regularity, appearing almost simultaneously in China, Japan, India, the United States, Great Britain, and other countries. Like her counterparts, the transpacific Filipina coed elicited both admiration and anxiety. Transgressive expressions of sexuality—going out without the supervision of a chaperone, dancing cheek-to-cheek and kissing in public—gave rise to attempts to stop the influx of popular culture from the United States and delineate women’s proper role. Scathing articles blamed the coed for the disintegration of Philippine morality. By reply, Filipina feminists called for recognition of educated women’s contribution to families, to communities and to society as a whole. Novels and short stories were used to negotiate unclear and indeterminate national fates and recalibrate a class hierarchy that was continuously fluctuating because of imperial shifts. Romance was the genre of choice to disseminate imperial narratives of benevolent assimilation and imagine the subversion of hegemonic formations. It was linked both to empire building and to its undoing by nationalist forces and individual aspirations.

Creating a national archive in English

Denise Cruz’s approach to her topic is very much dependent on the material she selects as her archive. She draws from a wide variety of sources—novels, memoirs, essays, newspaper articles, magazine illustrations—but, with the exception of José Rizal’s Spanish language novel Noli Me Tangere, she only uses texts written in English. She notes that authors were publishing in English only two decades after the U.S. occupation began, and that women were particularly active in this field because of the educational opportunities that were created by the American occupation. What defines the transpacific Filipino is, more than any social or psychological trait, the use of English in a cosmopolitan setting. The writers examined in this book were part of a privileged group, those who lived in Manila, who had access to a university education, who travelled abroad, and who spoke and read English. Promoting the use of English was an integral part of the American imperial project. The Japanese were highly conscious of this point, and severely restricted publications in English during their short-lived occupation. Philippines literature in English was the product of a deliberate design to spread liberal values and democratic mores through education and assimilation. Instruction in English, the establishment of English as the national language, and opportunities to study in the United States were part of this imperial design. The use of language itself as a strategy for rule was closely tied with the packaging of the American presence in the Philippines as a magnanimous civilizing enterprise. By choosing English to couch on paper their dreams, hopes and aspirations, these Filipino women examined in Transpacific Feminities transformed themselves willingly into the desiring subjects that the American empire was attempting to mold.

Isn’t there a similar work at play in today’s world? As the author notes, the recognition of the United States as an empire has now become a regular feature of academic discourse. But the notion of cultural imperialism still faces much resistance or denial, and the fact that the English language constitutes the main tool for this imperial hegemony is often overlooked. By choosing to restrict her archive to texts written in English and by examining the case of English-speaking Filipina authors, Denise Cruz partakes in in a new kind of imperial project that does not bear its name. Transpacific feminities are reduced to those forms of women’s expression that are directly accessible to an English language reader. These women may have spoken multiple languages, from the old colonial Spanish to the new national Tagalog, or from French and German to Cantonese, Japanese, as well as other domestic dialects, but they are only considered within the limitation of one single parameter: their use of English as a mean of written expression. Other idioms indigenous to the Philippines or used in worldly conversations are silenced and relegated to the margins. The United States considered themselves as the gatekeeper of women’s liberation in their empire; in a way, Anglo-American academics still play this role by deciding which texts should be worthy of archival consideration and which should be left in perpetual oblivion.

Literary value

The author of Transpacific Feminities boasts of having recovered an untapped archive of Philippines literature in English that has remained hitherto forgotten and understudied. Merging archive recovery with feminist analysis, she advocates additions to an Asia Pacific literary cannon that, at least for the period under consideration, is (in her opinion) too often limited to male nationalist authors. But one could object that these texts written in English were not abundant and sophisticate enough to sustain a national literary tradition. Readership in English was reduced to a small segment of the elite. This may explain why Filipino authors often tried to reach out beyond their country’s shores. Many publications were edited by expatriates and geared in part toward the American community. The goal was to convince the American public to share the benefits of empire, or to grant the Philippines the independence and individual rights for which its people craved. Including new archives into a cannon or a reading list should include considerations of literary value and intrinsic quality. But as far as I can judge from the few excerpts and plot summaries, the literary fictions that are surveyed in this book seem to me of appalling mediocrity. I subscribe to the judgment of a critic who characterized a novel by Felicidad Ocampo as “an entertaining little tale, providing he does not read it with too critical an attitude.” Besides, Daniele Cruz is the first to point out that the language used in these stories was often deficient. By inserting the editing term “sic” in bracketed form in many direct quotes from the texts, she underscores the misusage of English and improper spelling or grammar in a way that can only be read as patronizing. Filipino and Filipina authors who tried their best to use the language of empire didn’t need to be exposed to such ignominy. As a non-native speaker, I sympathize with their plight.

Nationalists, Feminists, and Neoliberals Converging Against Islam

Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of In the Name of Women′s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism, Sara R. Farris, Duke University Press, 2017.

Farris.jpgWhat happens in the name of women’s right is, according to Italian scholar Sara Farris, the denial of the rights of certain women and men to live a life with dignity in Western European countries where they have migrated. More specifically, an anti-Islam and anti-migrant rhetoric is increasingly articulated in terms of gender equality and women’s emancipation. The misuse of liberal discourse for illiberal ends is not new: the invasion of Afghanistan that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11 was presented to the international community as a mission to liberate Afghan women from their oppression under Taliban rule just as much as an act of defense and retaliation against the perpetrators of the attacks. The French fixation with the “Islamic” veil finds its origins in the Algerian war and the effort to present the fight against the FLN as a crusade for modernity on behalf of “Arab” women against their male oppressors. Closer to us, Marine Le Pen is known for courting France’s female voters and for endorsing women’s rights within the framework of her anti-migrant platform. What is distinctive about Sara Farris’s book are three things. First, she anchors her discussion on what she calls “femonationalism” (read: feminism+nationalism) within the context of ideological debates taking place in France, Italy, and the Netherlands during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Second, she shows that the instrumentalization of women’s rights for anti-migrant and anti-Islam purposes is not limited to political parties from the far right: rather, it is the result of a convergence between right-wing nationalists, some feminists and femocrats (by which she means bureaucrats and social workers promoting gender equality policies in state agencies), and neoliberal economic policies targeting participation in the labor market. Third, Farris claims that only a political economy analysis inspired by the critique of neoliberalism can explain why, at this particular juncture, “Muslim” men are being targeted as surplus workers “stealing jobs” and “oppressing women”, while “Muslim” and non-European migrant women are construed as redeemable agents to be rescued by integrating them into low-skilled, low-paid activities of the “social reproduction sector.”

The femonationalist ideological formation

The first argument on the ideology of right-wing parties is well-known. Politicians such as Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Marine Le Pen in France, or Matteo Salvini in Italy have expressed support for the cause of gender equality (with occasional mentions to gay rights) within a xenophobic and anti-migrant framework. As the book title reflects, they are advancing their anti-Islam agenda in the name of women’s rights. Their attacks on migrant men, especially Muslims, are more strident than their position on non-Western migrant women. They consider the first ones as a direct threat to Western Europe society due, above all, to their oppressive treatment of women at home and their unrestrained, violent sexuality toward women outside the home. The second ones are considered as redeemable: provided certain conditions are met, women can “assimilate” into the host society (through work and often through marriage) and raise their children the “right” way, but they are to be protected from the pervasive influence of “their” men. As the title “in the name of women’s rights” suggests, this appropriation of a feminist agenda is only an excuse, a deception or a fraud by nationalist parties who are otherwise described as misogynist in essence and masculinist in style. Hence the message to European feminists: the accession of the nationalist right to power, as is the case in several European countries, would constitute a regression for women’s rights and would end in a backlash against women. This assumption, however, should be put to empirical testing: it might be the case that illiberal policies would, in the end, benefit the situation of (certain) women at the national level, although migrant women would certainly be the first victims of a tightening of immigration policies. Likewise, as we mentioned, liberal means can serve illiberal ends. We have no reason to assume that the defense of (certain) women’s rights in nationalist platforms is not sincere and that there is only instrumentalization at play. It is true that nationalist parties have shown concern about gender inequality mostly in the case of Muslim and ethnic minority communities. But the history of political ideas provides us with many cases in which ideologies have shifted from the left to the right and sometimes to the far right. Behind the declarations of populist leaders in favor of women’s empowerment and gender equality, there may be a kind of “alt-feminism” in the making. The relation between this alternative feminism and more traditional forms of feminism will have to be defined. But these fine points are not discussed by Sara Farris, who obviously has no sympathy at all for nationalist points of view: for her, femonationalism is no feminism at all.

The second thesis on “femonationalism” as convergence between different agendas and positions is less familiar to the general public and itself needs to be unpacked. The most evident manifestation of this convergence between nationalism and feminism is the fact that some well-known and outspoken feminists such as Elisabeth Badinter in France have joined the ranks of those who see Islam as a threat to European societies. Accordingly, they have endorsed legal proposals such as veil bans while portraying “Muslim” women as passive victims who needed to be rescued and emancipated. They have also described men originating from non-western, economically underdeveloped countries are misogynist and prone to sexual violence, as in the cases of rape and sexual aggressions committed by North Africans and Middle East migrants in Germany. Again, Islam is singled out by these intellectuals as a religion associated with unequal gender relations and violence (with an emphasis on honor killings, domestic violence, forced veiling, and arranged marriages). They see the veil as a form of symbolic violence exerted by Muslim men forcing women to wear it and by Muslim women singling themselves out from the rest of society. Many have turned against multiculturalism as promoting a kind of value relativism and failing to defend “western” values of emancipation, individual rights, and secularism. These arguments define what Farris call the “femonationalist ideological formation,” bringing together public figures who otherwise disagree on many issues. Sara Farris claims that feminists can only lose by espousing the anti-Islam agenda. They are diverting attention away from the many forms of inequality that still affect Western European women. They transform women’s rights into a “civilizational”, ideological issue, as opposed to a social and economic one grounded on material interests. They also contribute to the diffusion of an ethnicized vision of society. Their endorsement of the agenda promoted by the nationalist right is a “divine surprise” for the latter: right-wing politicians can claim the support of high-visibility intellectuals, who have a strong legitimacy on issues of gender inequality and women’s rights. Some self-declared feminists, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the Netherlands, have lend themselves to political collaboration with right-wing forces. Most feminists however, have insisted on their distance with the nationalist right, claiming instead that their new fight against Islam’s oppression of women stands in continuity with their progressive engagement.

Migrant men and migrant women

Closely related to these Islam-bashing feminists, Farris also points to the role of “femocrats.” This term, slightly dismissive, refers to the (not necessarily female) bureaucrats who are institutionalizing feminism through state programs of gender equality and civic integration. Without giving any figures, Sara Farris claims that state funds are increasingly withdrawn from policies tackling gender inequality as a general problem and are redirected instead toward programs aimed at addressing gender inequality among “Muslim” and ethnic minority communities. These civic integration programs purport to teach migrant men what it means to respect women and gender diversity, and to instruct migrant women how to emancipate from their supposedly backward culture. Unwittingly, they are reproducing the prevalent image of migrant men as a sexual threat and migrant women as victims to be rescued. They are also positing the host country as a society where gender rights are respected and guaranteed by the state, as opposed to a domain of social gains and entitlements that need to be conquered and expanded. Of course, there is nothing wrong in telling people that men and women are equal and that women’s rights should be respected. But here again we may have the case of a liberal objective being pursued through illiberal and even repressive means. Civic integration policies have an obligatory character, and their nonobservance can be punished by either financial penalties or denial of a legal residence permit. Furthermore, the requirement that migrants possess the knowledge considered crucial to integration in the receiving country turns integration into an a priori condition rather than a process that occurs over time. From Sara Farris, the problem comes from the undiscussed assumption that these migrants need to be taught what gender equality is about as if they were ignorant of any notions about women’s rights. Besides, gender equality is mentioned mainly in reference to the private sphere, with an emphasis on traditional gender roles for women who need to develop good mothering skills. For Farris, emancipation cannot be taught, and certainly not in a condescending mode by Western feminists or state apparatuses. Nurturing freedom means first and foremost creating the material conditions for freedom and equality. That’s where the rubber hits the road: while social programs aimed at the integration of female migrants put forward values of emancipation and autonomy, they channel these women toward activities that are far from emancipating and that do not allow for their autonomization or empowerment. What they do is the opposite of what they preach.

Through civic integration programs and other policies, migrant women are directed toward what Sara Farris, in good Marxist fashion, calls the “social reproduction sector”: this refers to the care and domestic activities which are mostly located in the private sphere, such as babysitting, child rearing, housekeeping, apartment cleaning, and caregiving of the elderly. Farris sees a contradiction “when feminists and femocrats urge emancipation for Muslim and non-western migrant women while channeling them toward the very sphere (domestic, low-paying, and precarious jobs) from which the feminist movement had historically tried to liberate women.” While advocating women’s participation in the public sphere, they contribute to the confinement of migrant women in household services, the reinforcement of traditional gender roles and the perpetuation of the gender injustice they claim to be combating. Farris considers the jobs proposed to migrant women as lacking in dignity and not conducive to emancipation. Changing diapers, wiping floors, cleaning kitchens, attending sick bodies: these are occupations which are now overwhelmingly held by women of foreign origins and that European women do not want to take as a profession. Of course, one could argue that there is nothing demeaning in the work of care, in attending to children and the elderly, or in making hotel rooms and office space fit for productive use. These jobs can be held with dignity, the feeling that comes from working hard for a socially useful function. But this is not how society sees these jobs and occupations in western Europe. They are organized under conditions of precariousness, with minimal wages, job flexibility, part-time or casual contracts, and little access to welfare provisions. The inclusion of social reproduction into the market sphere of wage labor has not led to a rehabilitation of care and domestic work; on the contrary, it continues to be perceived as unskilled, low-status, isolated, servile, and dirty. And for Sara Farris, western feminists are largely to blame for this lack of consideration. They have deserted the issue of social reproduction as a matter for critical engagement, leaving the sector to the naturalizing forces of neoliberalism.

The regular army of domestic labor

Right-wing nationalists, intellectuals who identify themselves as feminists, state experts working on migrant women issues, and neoliberals favoring workfare programs: how can these very different and sometimes opposing parties come up with similar ideas when the migrant question is at stake? As Sara Farris insists, these opponents to Islam in the name of women’s rights should not be seen as partners in crime or ideological bedfellows. The fact that they sometimes converge on an anti-Islam platform doesn’t mean they are colluding, cooperating, or associating with each other in any way. Each party has specific reasons to frame Islam as posing a threat to gender equality in the west. Talking about instrumentalization to describe their relations would be patronizing, especially for the feminists who are very conscious of the political difference that separate them from the nationalist right. In true Marxist fashion, Sara Farris believes convergence at the ideological level comes from similar interests dictated by the material conditions of late capitalism. Neoliberalism isn’t simply the contextual ground on which the femonationalist convergence takes place: it is the constitutive plane of such a convergence. Neoliberal globalization is grounded on a sexual division of labor in which, to use Karl Marx’s categories, migrant women provide the “regular army of labor” and migrant men the “reserve army of labor” or relative surplus population. Unlike migrant men who work in the productive sector, migrant women who work in the domestic sector allow the social reproduction of labor to take place. They are spared from accusations of “stealing jobs” or “posing a threat to society” because they allow western families to form double income couples and to balance work with domestic life. Their employers maintain ownership and control over the social means of production and reproduction. Their labor cannot be substituted by machines and capital, as care and domestic work imply certain qualities that can only be provided by “live labor” and that are often associated with traditional feminine roles. The difference between the industrial sector afflicted with an oversupply of labor in western European countries and the social reproductive sector (cleaning, care domestic, and health care work) explains the double standard applied to male and female migrant workers, especially when religious values come into play.

Commenting the division of the working class in England between English proletarians and Irish proletarians, Karl Marx claimed he had found the secret of the maintenance of power by the capitalist class, as well as the secret of the English working class’s lack of revolutionary spirit. Similarly, Sara Farris believes she has solved the mystery of the unholy convergence between nationalists and feminist promoters of women’s rights: the femonationalist ideological formation takes places under the aegis of neoliberal exploitation of the Global South. “Just as the exploitation of non-western countries’ natural resources permits the West to keep its pattern of production and consumption, it is also migrant women’s socially reproductive work that permits western European women and men not only to have the ‘cheap’ care that enables them to be active in the labor market, but also to retain the illusion that gender inequality has been achieved—at least for ‘them’.” Migrant women are “needed” as workers, “tolerated” as migrants, and “encouraged” as women to conform to western values. Meanwhile, migrant men are needed only insofar as they form a “reserve army of labor,” pushing industrial wages down and antagonizing western workers who then tend to align with the nationalist agenda of the ruling class. Feminists who claim to act in the name of women’s rights are only idiot savants, contributing to the social reproduction of capital while protecting the interests of some women against others’. It is in this sense that they converge with the agenda of the nationalist right: both are complementary ways by which neoliberal globalization extends its conditions of uneven development and exploitation. This process is fraught with contradictions: historically, migrant women came to Western Europe only as the wives and relatives of male guest laborers who formed a first wave of labor migration. It is only when male workers became redundant that the demand for female migrant labor in social reproductive activities began to rise, leading to a mechanism of exclusion of male migrants and inclusion of female migrants. It is this dual process of inclusion and exclusion that femonationalism performs at the level of ideology.

Importing identity politics into Europe

In the Name of Women’s Rights offers a curious mix of European social critique and American multicultural advocacy. It was written while the author was in residence at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, with feminist author Joan W. Scott providing advice on how to frame intellectual debates about Islam and feminism in Western Europe. Through scholarly networks and academic contacts, the United States smuggles into Europe a vision of identity politics and multiculturalism that was developed in the context of the culture wars on university campuses and that reflects a very specific conception of social groups and ethnicities. Each individual is automatically affiliated to an ethnic or religious community, an exclusive group that is conceived as separated from mainstream culture and that is defined in opposition to other collectives: migrant vs. natives, foreigners vs. citizens, men vs. women, Muslims vs. secular individuals. Like the right-wing promoters of the fantasy notion of Eurabia, these leftist intellectuals see Islam and the integration of non-western Muslim communities as the main challenge facing European societies, overcoming all other forms of division and solidarity. Debates on citizenship, on gender parity, on secularism and on inequality are all overdetermined by this ethnic and religious context. As a European, Sara Farris should know better than to apply such simplistic notion to a situation that requires other tools of analysis and interpretation. But she finds it convenient to sugarcoat her hardcore Marxism with a layer of identity politics that provides catchy titles and attractive soundbites. Like the convergence between European nationalists and universalist feminists—a fringe phenomenon, that doesn’t reflect the history of both the nationalist right and of the feminist movement in Europe—, this alliance between radical economics and cultural warfare mixes elements that don’t fit together and that provide little explanatory power. This is a shallow and off-the-shelf book that attempts to ride the wave of sexual nationalisms by providing its own entry in the form of a catchy word—femonationalism is designed after the notion of homonationalism advanced by Jasbir Puar. But its cultural lenses are heavily biased, and its political economy antiquated. As a piece of transnational scholarship designed between Europe and the United States, it provides the worst of both worlds.

Queer Theory in Dark Times

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

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

Advancing a nationalist agenda in the name of sexual freedom

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

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

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

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

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

The West as an arbiter of civilizational standards

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

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

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

Finns Bearing Gifts

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A review of The Need to Help: The Domestic Arts of International Humanitarianism, Liisa H. Malkki, Duke University Press, 2015.

Kiisa MalkkiLiisa Malkki wrote her PhD and gained tenure at Stanford’s anthropology department based on her fieldwork among refugees from Burundi. She worked in a refugee camp in Tanzania in the mid-eighties, and presented the narratives she collected from Hutus fleeing political violence in a book, Purity and Exile. This book gained some public attention when it was criticized by Peter Gourevitch who argued, in the New York Review of Books, that her “mytho-history” was more myth than history, and later on when some of its testimonies of genocidal violence were echoed by the reports and stories coming out from the Rwandan genocide (this time with Hutus as perpetrators and Tutsis as victims). But Liisa Malkki didn’t want to be categorized into a box, much less be identified as a “refugee” scholar or a “genocide studies” specialist. This is why she turned to a terrain closer to her place of origin and less fraught with political disputes: Finnish Red Cross aid workers sent abroad on emergency relief missions, as well as other persons gravitating around the Red Cross movement in Finland. Although she spent her childhood in East Africa, and most of her professional career in the United States, she apparently remained close to her home country of Finland. This is where she conducted the fieldwork for this book, putting into use her intimacy with the people and their language as well as her knowledge of the domestic scene.

Act like a Finn

Who are the Finns? How can one hail from Finland? This is a question to which Finnish aid workers, and Finnish nationals in general, are often confronted. They have developed a response in action: to be a Finn is to act like a Finn, and to embody the virtues and proclivities that they associate with their homeland. Finns often speak of “having to prove themselves” on the international scene. For them, and therefore for their foreign interlocutors, Finnishness (suomalaisuus) involves calmness, discretion, honesty, social reserve (häveliäsyys), and hard work. Some people feel at ease with these national characteristics, and work hard to prove they deserve their reputation of hard workers. Other experience it as a constraint to their lives and try to escape from it—by going out to the “world out there” (olla maailmalla), or by developing other sensibilities not associated with the national character. In particular, in a society that prides itself on self-reliance, grit (sisa), and a fierce love of privacy and individualism, solitude and the repression of public emotions can be felt as a heavy burden. Finnishness is also sometimes associated with small-mindedness, provincialism, conventionality, and the rejection of foreigners. Hailing from a small and isolated country, Finns want to connect to the outside world, and be part of something “larger than themselves”. The ICRC provides them the opportunity to do just that.

If Liisa Malkki reports such traits, it is not to engage in an outmoded sociology of the national character, but to describe how Finnishness is perceived both as a resource and as a constraint by the people she interviewed. Talk of what Finnishness means, and self-stereotyping, are extremely common among Finns. Little is known from their country abroad, especially in the countries where Finnish aid workers are dispatched. Finland is a country remote from the Global South, by its latitude and its climate as well as by its national history. It never engaged in colonial expansion, and itself experienced imperial rule for most of its history, as a province of Sweden and then of Russia before gaining its independence in 1917. Just as the Finns want to appear as thrifty and hard-working, the Finnish state is characterized by its generous aid policy toward Third World nations but also, at the same time, by its stern condemnation of the profligacy of Greece and other southern members of the European Union. Finland wants to appear generous to strangers and willing to share its riches with those who really deserve it, yet according to media reports it treats foreign immigrants from developing nations as social outcasts, and admits very few refugees. It is in many ways a closed society. As the author argues, “refugees, immigrants and minorities from around the world (and especially their children) might be ‘Finns’ both culturally and in terms of citizenship—but they are still often the object of xenophobic slurs and attacks.”

Peace, neutrality, and humanitarianism

The fact that Finland is a small internationalist state committed to world peace and United Nations principles is also an important factor for the ICRC, an organization that has elevated the notion of neutrality, along with impartiality and humanity, to the status of a founding principle. Neutrality has long been a key part of Finland’s foreign policy and international image, and this helps to explain the heavy representation of Finns on ICRC missions in politically difficult conflicts elsewhere around the world, especially in Africa and the Middle East. Of course, as Liisa Malkki reminds us, neutrality (neutraalius) is a kind of politics, both for Finland and for humanitarian aid. For most of its modern history, Finland’s neutrality has been a strategic defense issue of great significance, although some people now see it as a relic of the Cold War that should be jettisoned. Similarly, neutrality is a policy tool that allows the ICRC to “talk to anyone” in an armed conflict or during a humanitarian crisis. Neutrality and the attempt to steer clear of politics has often been reproached to the Red Cross (was it right to stay “neutral” during the rise of Nazism in Hitler’s Germany?), and it can also lead to ethical dilemma and impossible situations. The author shows that neutrality is not only a code of conduct, but also a state of mind for aid workers who need to preserve “affective neutrality” in the face of human suffering. Like a surgeon in the middle of an operation, the aid worker (who often operates in the medical field) needs to concentrate on her work and shun out emotions, at least temporarily. Again, this attitude conforms to the Finnish national character of emotional restraint and hard work.

Like neutrality, humanity is part of the Red Cross ethos—it is a core value that Red Cross workers are supposed to serve. Humanity is here conceived in terms of “basic human needs” and of abstract “human rights” that have to be supplied and guaranteed by the “international community.” In the worst case, such views can lead the “needy African” to be imagined as a sort of specimen of “basic humanity” more biological than political—“bare life,” as Agamben and others have argued, more zoë than bios. Engagements with humanity understood in such generic terms can turn into political disempowerment. Paradoxically, it also can lead to dehumanization, as when the public’s compassion focuses on children and on animals, which is a way to deny human subjects their agency. Images of children in need are everywhere in humanitarian appeals to generosity in print and digital media. No wonder that this kind of sentimental humanitarianism has been the target of attacks by social critics, from Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx to Hannah Arendt and Roland Barthes. Even politicians have joined in their critiques: Jean Kirkpatrick, a former US ambassador to the United Nations, once dismissed the category of “economic, social and cultural rights” enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as “a letter to Santa Claus.” To the lofty scene of humanitarian ideals, they oppose the hard reality of conflicting interests, geopolitics, and war.

A letter to Santa Claus

As she confesses, Liisa Malkki started her research ready to see a dangerous kind of antipolitics in invocations of an unsituated “humanity” such as those found in the guiding principles of the ICRC. But the competing view, the misogynistic denunciation of the human herd by Nietzsche or the cynical realpolitik of politicians, does not get her favor either. She notes with some regret that the appeals to world peace, disarmament, and global social justice, which were once the preserve of powerful spirits such as Albert Einstein or Eleanor Roosevelt, have been trivialized and infantilized to the point of losing all political potency. Her chapter on Children, Humanity, and the Infantilization of Peace demonstrate how children have been invested with various ideals within a “transnational ritual sphere” that constitutes the figure of the child as the bearer of humanity. Again, it is easy to deride the lachrymose exploitation of children’s image by humanitarian marketing campaigns and peace education programs. But humanitarian appeal is not just the negation of politics: it is also, in itself, a form of politics. Liisa Malkki shows how an unblinking, absolute commitment to humanity (as to neutrality) involves its own kind of zealotry. Zealous humanism, she suggests, is no less extreme than religious fundamentalism. It is indeed rooted in religious values and Christian doctrines, although most of the Finns she interviewed denied any form of religious affiliation and were wholly secular.

There is a commonplace popular view that the humanitarian worker is moved by powerful ideals and feelings of compassion. But the people sent on humanitarian mission by the Red Cross refuted this image. For them, the “Mother Theresa-type” of people bent on self-sacrifice were clearly not wanted: they could put a mission at risk, and were at best a disturbance from a more efficient work ethos. The persons interviewed by Liisa Malkki took issue with their definition as humanitarian actors. They preferred to design themselves as “aid workers”, or to emphasize their professional affiliation—as doctors, nurses or engineers. Professional solidarity with their fellow team members and with their national counterparts in the field took precedence over abstract humanitarianism. They acknowledged several reasons for going on mission abroad, some mundane—to escape from the cold of Finland’s long winter and to find “warmer” places, meteorologicallly and socially—, others more practical—as a way of personal and professional development, to acquire new skills and exercise them in more demanding conditions. Going overseas made it possible for them to be part of something other and bigger than themselves. To be “out in the world” (olla maailmalla) was a powerful object of imagination for them. Many talked in terms of an international obligation and a “need to help” (tarve auttaa). But they were professionals before they were humanitarians.

Humanitarian aid always begins at home

Importantly, for Malkki, acknowledging the needs of aid workers does not diminish them or the work that they do. Nowhere does she suggest that they serve their own needs at the expense of the needs of others. On the contrary, recognizing needs on both sides of the aid relationship calls for a more reciprocal view of North-South relations. It complicates the dichotomy between the aid giver—perceived as generous, selfless, compassionate—, and the aid recipient who is identified solely by her needs. Malkki provides a case study of a kind of help for which there is no real recipient: the Finnish Red Cross Aid Bunny campaign, that had old ladies hand-knit toy-like figures that are then supposedly sent to children in need as part of emergency relief missions. The Aid Bunnies and their siblings—the Trauma Teddies, the Mother Theresa blankets, and so on—are easy to dismiss as silly sentimentalism and useless gift-giving: even Red Cross employees feel embarrassed by the accumulation of cardboards full of animal toys that they are mandated to send to the field. But again, Liisa Malkki eschews from taking an easy target at these forms of wasteful generosity. Instead, she concentrates on the social activities and inner lives of the Finnish ladies who contribute to these campaigns, showing again a powerful need to donate their time and attention to causes that pull them upward.

One shouldn’t beware of Finns bearing gifts. Their intentions are sincere, their feelings are true, and their hard work speaks louder than their words. The conduct of Red Cross aid workers may appear as self-serving and parochial, the sentimentalism of old ladies knitting teddy bears for imaginary victims may generate scorn and indifference. But consider the alternative. Cynicism and hard-nosed interest breed conflict and isolation. Without proper stimulus, the faculty to empathize with one’s fellow human wanes and dwindles. Imagining children in need and longing to help them may be considered as a calisthenics for the enhancement of empathy. Compassion needs training. Viewed from this perspective, the cultivation of humanitarian sentiments, encouraged by the state and various social institutions, is closely linked to the generous aid policies of Nordic countries. Manufacturing consent to ODA policies involves not only rational arguments about aid effectiveness and geopolitical payoffs, but also a sentimental education of the imagination, a cultivation of the “need to help.” This is especially true in a country like Finland, where smallness and isolation breed a desire to be connected to something other and greater than oneself. There is something in the home society of Finland that creates a specific “need to help.” Humanitarian aid always begins at home.

How Happy is the Person Who Says I am a Turk

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A review of Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey, Esra Özyürek, Duke University Press, 2006.

Ezra OzyurekThere is one country in Europe where people feel nostalgic for the 1930s, and where they almost unanimously cherish the memory of a one-party state which multiplied statues of its great leader on every street corner. The country is Turkey and the golden age that Turks remember with nostalgia is the first two decades of the republic founded in 1923 by Mustapha Kemal, the father of all Turks. The climax of this era of bliss and hope occurred with the tenth anniversary celebrations of the declaration of the Turkish Republic, when Atatürk famously declared: “How happy is the person who says I am a Turk!”

Nostalgia is a thoroughly modern sentiment. Or maybe a postmodern one: it is fair to say that modernity ended with the end of hope for tomorrow. Since then, people have looked for their utopias in the past rather than in the future. As Esra Özyürek notes, quoting another author, the twentieth century began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia. A belief in the future is now only a relic of the past. What people look for in the past is the kind of pride and hope in the future that seems to have disappeared from our present.

The twentieth century began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia

By locating their modernity in the past, rather than in the present or future, and by cultivating a vivid memory of the 1930s as a modern past utopia in which the citizens united around their state, many Turks with a nationalist-secular worldview tend to reject the visions, revisions and divisions that characterize the present situation. They are discontent with the new definition of modernity that the European Union imposes on Turkey, becoming resistant to criticisms of the way Turkey has handled the Kurdish issue and human rights violations. They firmly oppose the rise of political Islam and what they perceive as attacks to the foundations of the secular state.

For nostalgic Republicans, the end of the single-party regime and the transition to democracy formed the starting point of selfishness and factionalism in Turkey. They agree that the golden age came to an end with the first fair general elections of 1950, when the Democrat Party replaced the Republican People’s Party. Everything apparently got worse afterwards. Suddenly, there was more than one vision for the future of the country, and citizens were divided along the lines of gender, class, ethnicity, and religion. People started putting their private interest above the common good embodied by the state.

Of course, paradise is always and forever lost, and nobody in Turkey really wants to turn back the clock backward to the 1930s. The militaristic and patriarchal feelings associated with the early Republican era no longer match the contemporary ideals of European modernism, which promotes voluntarism, spontaneity, and free will in state-citizen relations. The nationalist march songs with lyrics glorifying the construction of railroad tracks and the devotion to the leader are revisited today with a new aesthetic of postmodern kitsch and disco rhythm. Nostalgia is also used to silence the opposition, as when the remix of nationalist songs blasted by discotheques compete with the calls to prayer of the muezzin.

In Nostalgia for the Modern, Esra Özyürek explores how nostalgia for the single-party era is indicative of a new kind of relationship citizens have established with the founding principles of the Turkish Republic, one that manifests itself in affective, domestic, and otherwise private realms generally considered outside the traditional field of politics. She takes as the sites of her ethnography the seventy-fifth anniversary Republic Day celebrations arranged by civil society organizations; the popular life histories of first-generation Republicans who transformed their lives as a result of the Kemalist reforms; the commercial pictures of Atatürk that privatize and commodify a state icon; the pop music albums that remixed the tenth-anniversary march originally made in 1933; and museum exhibits about the family lives of citizens that articulate metaphors of national intimacy.

Metaphors of national intimacy

Özyürek sees a parallel between the neoliberal policies of market reforms and structural adjustment and what she describes as the privatization of state ideology. Both are characterized by a symbolism of privatization, market choice, and voluntarism that contrasts with the statist, nationalist and authoritarian ideology of Kemalism in the former period. With neo-Kemalism, a secular state ideology, politics, and imaginary finds a new life and legitimacy in the private realms of the market, the home, civil society, life history, and emotional attachment, transforming the intimate sphere along the way.

This shift of secular ideology from the public to the private, which (just like neoliberal economic reforms) involves processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, occurred just at the same time as, and in reaction to, the growing importance in the public sphere of religious beliefs and practices that were once confined in the private realm. Secularism went private just when Islam went public, as both had to face the shift produced by market reforms and liberalization. This exploration of cultural imaginaries associated with the neoliberal ideology opens up new possibilities for political anthropology: according to the author, “anthropologists are uniquely equipped to understand the newly hegemonic culture of neoliberalism in the fields of economy, society and politics.”

Fieldwork and family work

There is also an autobiographical aspect to this ethnography. For Esra Özyürek, fieldwork was intimately linked to family work. As she confesses, “I am the granddaughter of a parliamentarian of the single-party regime and the daughter of two staunch Kemalist and social democrat activists affiliated with the Republican People’s Party.” Raised as an orthodox Kemalist, her mother is a firm believer in Westernization, secularism, and Turkish nationalism. She doesn’t hesitate to chastise her daughter for her sympathy with the cause of veiled university students. Her father is also a stalwart Republican who was elected to Parliament in the course of her research. Analyzing further her motivations for undertaking this project, the author notes that “this study became a tool for me to negotiate daughter-parent relations and establish myself as an adult in some ways.” Coming of age as an anthropologist also involves dealing with the father-figure of Atatürk, whose towering presence makes itself felt in every chapters of the book.

Written as a scholarly essay with a rich theoretical apparatus, Nostalgia for the Modern can also be read as a very personal rendition of the author’s effort to come to terms with her Turkish identity.

The Master Narrative of the New Korean Cinema

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A review of The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema, Kyung Hyun Kim, Duke University Press, 2004.

RemasculinizationThe thesis of this book is quite simple. Korea in the 1980s and the 1990s was a post-traumatic society. The figure of the father had been shattered by its authoritarian leaders, who ended in a grotesque finale (see The President’s Last Bang, 2005, about the assassination of Park Chung-hee) or, in the case of Chun Doo-hwan, lacked hair (The President’s Barber, 2004). The double trauma of colonization by Japan and fratricide murder during the Korean War had deprived the Korean people of its identity. The sins of the fathers were visited upon the sons, and the Memories of Murder (2003) still lingered. The ritual murder of the father could not unite the community of brothers as they stood divided between North and South (Taegukgi: The Brotherhood of War, 2004), between sons of patriots and sons of collaborationists (Thomas Ahn Jung-geun, 2004). The films quoted above, all produced in the 2000s, could resolve the tensions and dilemma of overcoming trauma by representing them on screen. By contrast, films produced in the 1980s and 1990s could only repress the representation of the primal scene, generating frustration and anger. In psychoanalytic terms, this is the difference between “working through”, the positive engagement with trauma that can lead to its ultimate resolution, and “acting out” or compulsively repeating the past.

Working through or acting out past trauma

Failure to come to terms with the representation of trauma transformed men into hysteric subjects. Simply put, men were deprived of their manhood. They were constantly alienated and emasculated by the political and economic forces of the day. In order to recover their potency, they resorted to violence: hence the brutality and violent acts ubiquitous in many Korean films. Here the author of The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema sees a sharp distinction between films produced in the 1980s and in the following decade. If the 1980s was a period of male masochism for Korean cinema, by the 1990s men freed themselves from anxiety and trauma by resorting to sadism. The two forms of violence must be clearly distinguished. Both the masochist and the sadist find pleasure in pain—pain of the self, pain of the other. But the sadist aims at subverting the law; the masochist wants to emphasize its extreme severity. The common thread that unites them is their misogynistic tendency towards women: very often, the victim of men’s effort to regain their manhood is the woman. The films from the period were solely centered on male characters. They were depicted as pathetic losers or as dumb brutes, and the movies acted out their masculinity crisis without any regard for the opposite sex. Women only functioned as passive objects oscillating between the twin images of the mother and the whore. What is absent in these movies from these two decades is a positive female character, let alone a feminist plot.

The thesis of remasculinization as a way to recover from trauma is not new. It has been advanced by American cultural critics in the context of the post-Vietnam war. The trauma of defeat, changing gender roles, and economic uncertainties generated a masculinity crisis that led to alienation, retrenchment, and gynophobia. In America, the renegotiation of masculinity took the form of the lone warrior culture, illustrated in blockbuster films of the 1980s such as Rambo, Die Hard, or Dirty Harry. What is specific about South Korea’s post trauma recovery is the political and economic context. It must be remembered that the end of authoritarian dictatorship and the inception of democracy in Korea occurred only in 1987. Before that date, films still had to deal with heavy censorship, and protest against the military government was disallowed. Unlike General Park Chung-hee however, General Chun Doo-hwan, his successor, recognized the importance of leisure and consumer spending as a way to assuage the masses and compensate the dispossession of their voting rights. He authorized the production of a wave of sleazy movies that found their way into theaters, while political expressions were strictly censored. The hope was that consumerism and pornography would make people forget about democracy and postpone their hope for a more representative government.

Korea bumped into modernity at full speed

But economic development wasn’t enough to ease the pain: in fact, it generated more ailments and frustrations. That Korea’s compressed economic development was traumatic is often overlooked. The “miracle of the Han river” left aside many victims and outcasts. Korea bumped into modernity at full speed, and without security belts or social safety nets. Urban alienation and economic marginalization is the theme from many Korean films from the 1980s and 1990s. In Chilsu and Mansu (1988), two billboard painters living on day jobs climb to a high-rise building in downtown Seoul to privately demonstrate their pent-up frustration. The public from the street below mistakes their aimless private rant for a public demonstration, and the police intervenes to arrest them. In Whale Hunting (1984), the disheartened protagonist, rejected by his college girlfriend, wanders the streets where he befriends a beggar and hangs out with a mute prostitute looking for a home. His sexual anxiety is displayed through farcical situations as in the opening scene where he dreams he is standing naked before a laughing public, or when he hugs the bare breasts of a naked statue in a museum gallery. In all the movies covered in the book, the wanderings of the male character invoke the traumatic losses of pastoral communities (urban dramas), homes (road movies), faithful wives and asexual mothers (sex scenes), and memory and sanity (social problem films).

Some artist moviemakers attempted to allude to the political by way of the sexual. One chapter is dedicated to Jang Sun-woo’s movies (The Age of Success, To You From Me, Bad Movie) which have generated far more controversy than works of any other director of the New Korea Cinema. Jang Sun-woo’s characters are self-loathing, pathetic men described as sexually frustrated, impotent, and castrated. Crude sex scenes are ubiquitous and are meant to disturb and to unsettle more than to titillate or sexually arouse. For Jang, these frail masculinities are reflective of the unresolved social crisis in South Korea that began with the elimination of the political dictatorship, when he longtime president was abruptly assassinated in 1979, and the ensuing period of political unrest. The sexual and the political are closely intertwined: in To You, From Me, Jang Sun-woo portrays an underground enterprise that releases pornographic books under the disguise of subversive North Korean communist manifestos—both are banned materials and therefore fetishized. But his anarchist, nihilistic streak is perhaps best exemplified by Bad Movie, described as “one of the most daring and experimental feature films produced in Korea,” shot without set direction, script, or production plan. The movie shows raw, crude images of sex and violence, loosely motivated by a chronicle of young runaway teenagers engaging in street motorcycle races, extortion, rape, and murder. As Kyung Hyun Kim comments, “it is as close to the real as it can get, disorienting and discomforting even the contemporary art-film viewers who are familiar with violence aestheticized in cinemas of Wong Kar-wai, Quentin Tarantino, and Kitano Takeshi.”

Men turn to violence and to sadism to reclaim their masculinity

Other directors were more overtly political. Films about the Korean War (Chang Kil-su’s Silver Stallion, Yi Kwang-mo’s Spring is My Hometown, and Im Kwon-Taek’s The Taebaek Mountains) present a different way of remembering the war, one that doesn’t rest on the diabolization of the North Korean enemy but rather insists on cracks within the South-Korean-American alliance: partisan guerrilla in the Cholla Province, yanggongju prostitutes serving US soldiers, internal conflicts within a community or a family, absent fathers and raped women. Here again attention focuses on men who have lost their virility and authority during the war, and who turn to violence and to sadism—especially against women—to reclaim their masculinity. Other episodes of Korea’s postwar political history are also revisited. A Single Spark concerns the life and death of labor union martyr Chon T’ae-il, while A Petal depicts the 1980 Kwangju uprising. These are sites that resist both remembrance and representation, components of a post-traumatic identity that can only act out what is still too painful to work through. It is also noticeable that these two movies targeted primarily foreign audiences at international film festivals. Their directors, Park Kwang-su and Jang Sun-woo, could take political and financial risks because they had already built international reputations. The years the two films were released, 1995 and 1996, also had democracy firmly entrenched since the transition of the end-1980s and the election of the first civilian president in 30 years in 1992.

The reception of Korean movies was also conditioned by their conditions of production and distribution. Most movies covered in The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema are low-budget films directed by authors who aimed at a limited audience and assembled production teams based on personal acquaintances and on-the-job training. But they are also films that have stimulated local commercial interest in a country that valued cinephile club screening and intellectual consumption of movies that would have been commercially unviable in the West. It should also be noted that the renaissance of Korean cinema in the 1980s and 1990s occurred not because of, but rather in spite of the role of the government. Import quota restrictions diminished during the 1980s, and Korean filmmakers had to aim for the creation of art cinema without the aid of state subsidies. Not only were public funds denied for Korean films, but also were bank loans, forcing filmmakers to seek alternative financial resources and credit. No Korean filmmaker could therefore neglect the box office. For some of them, the international circuit of international film festivals and arthouse movie theaters provided a source of legitimacy and revenue. Despite adverse conditions, Korea is the only nation during recent history that has regained its domestic audience after losing them to Hollywood products. Art movies from the 1980s and 1990s paved the way to the Korean blockbusters of the end-1990s and 2000s that attracted massive domestic audiences and conquered foreign markets. They also made it sure that a market space for independent movies continued to exist in Korea, as evidenced by the career of director Kim Ki-duk whose productions closely complement the movies reviewed in the book.

Korea has yet to produce a movie with a female plot, let alone a feminist one

Kyung Hyun Kim mobilizes the categories of national cinema as a genre and of the director as auteur to develop his film criticism. He focuses on a segment of Korea’s filmic production in the 1980s and 1990s that was sometimes touted as the New Korean Cinema by film critics. This is in accordance with the conventions of cinema studies, which treats national cinemas as discrete entities and delineates periods or currents characterized by a particular style or narrative. The master narrative of the New Korean Cinema is the masculine recovery from trauma, a movement that Kyung Hyun Kim sees as problematic because it is based on the exclusion of women. As he argues, Korean cinema has yet to produce a movie with a female plot, let alone a feminist one. The representation of woman is still caught between the mother and the whore. Another characteristic of the New Korean Cinema is that it had to strictly play within the commercial rules of an open marketplace, which meant competing with Hollywood films distributed freely across the nation, and could not completely abandon the conventions of popular filmmaking. The author sees this commercial exposure both as a factor in the success of the New Korean Cinema and the reason of its demise: once aligned with Hollywood standards, Korean cinema lost its shine and became just a niche cultivating subgenres in a global marketplace.

The Anatomy of Akogare

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A review of Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams, Karen Kelsky, Duke University Press, 2001.

FKaren Kelskyorty years ago, Japanese psychiatrist Takeo Doi wrote The Anatomy of Dependence (or Amae no Kôzô, literally: “The Structure of Amae“). In this book, as in everyday Japanese language, amae refers to the feelings that all infants at the breast harbor for their mother–dependence, the desire to be passively loved, the unwillingness to be separated from the object of desire and cast into a world of “objective” reality. Takeo Doi’s basic premise was that Japanese men nurture these feelings well into their adult life, much more so than men raised in the West. For him, the concept of amae goes a long way in explaining the basic mentality of individuals and the organization of society in Japan.

What Takeo Doi did for amae, Karen Kelsky achieves it for akogare

What Takeo Doi did for amae, Karen Kelsky achieves it for another distinctly Japanese concept: the notion of akogare, translated variously as longing, desire, attraction, or idealization, in the context of Japanese women’s feelings toward the West. The approach is different: it is grounded in social anthropology, not popular psychology or essayism. Whereas Takeo Doi espoused the then dominant approach of nihonjinron, or theories of Japaneseness, Kelsky takes a critical perspective on broad categories such as “the Japanese.” Theoretically, Doi drew his inspiration from Freudian psychoanalysis and the Oedipus complex (as interpreted by American psychologists), whereas Kelsky builds upon the notion of Lacan’s desire that arises from a fundamental lack and finds expression in a partial object or fetish. Kelsky’s book is therefore more attuned to postmodern sensibilities and critical perspectives that today dominate cultural studies in academic departments. More fundamentally, whereas amae was centered on Japanese men and their relation to their mother, akogare revolves around Japanese women and their sentimental or sexual attraction toward white men.

This makes Women on the Verge a profoundly disturbing book. Kelsky means to upset and to unsettle, as she herself was put off balance in the course of her research project: “I was told, more than once, that this was not an appropriate topic of academic enquiry”. An early research paper on the topic of promiscuous young office ladies traveling abroad, and the wave of indignation they caused when the offending term designating them  (“yellow cabs”) was popularized by the tabloid press, particularly came back to haunt her, with American men tracking her on the internet to confess pathetic details of their own sexual experience. But what makes the book even more disturbing is that it addresses issues every Western foreigner in Japan has encountered in a way or another. Business executives have all been exposed to assertions about Japan’s egregious “sexism” that “forces talented women abroad.” The media and the advertising industry reinforce stereotypes about idealized mixed couples–invariably, a white man and a Japanese woman–whereas the other combination–Japanese men marrying Western women–has much less social visibility and even faces negative prejudices–or at least that is what the author surmises, based on her own experience.

The Japanese Woman and the Western gaze

What keeps this book from stereotype, and the reader from voyeurism, is the rich theoretical apparatus, itself backed by a firm feminist perspective. Desire, Karen Kelsky underscores, is always an expression of power. And power itself is unevenly distributed along gender, racial, and sexual lines. Focusing on figures such as Tsuda Umeko (founder of Tsuda College), Sugimoto Etsu (author of A Daughter of the Samurai) and Katô Shizue (a pioneer in the birth control movement and a strong supporter of labor reform), the author tracks the emergence of a women’s discourse about the West/United States as a site of salvation from what they characterized as a feudalistic and oppressive patriarchal Japanese family system. Therein dates the idea, still fervently accepted by some women today, that Japanese women’s independence and advancement lie in the command of the English language, and the image of America as home of women’s emancipation. But the fetishization of the figure of the other crystallized during what Kelsky calls the “sexual nexus of the occupation”: Japanese women were desired by American men, while Japanese men were rebuffed by both American men and Japanese (and American) women. As she notes, “Women were not only desired as exotic Madame Butterfly (although that image, of course, played a role); they were also quickly rehabilitated as the “good” Japanese who, in contrast to duplicitous and violent men, were imagined to be malleable and eager for democratic reform.”

Having covered the historical background, the author turns to fieldwork, and to a new version of women’s narrative of Western akogare. As she notes, “the turn to the West only emerged as a widespread and popular option for middle-class women with the growth of the Japanese bubble economy in the 1980.” Using the money generated by the Japanese economy to embark on a program of intensive consumption of foreign goods, food, and travel, young single women soon emerged as the most thoroughly “cosmopolitan” population in Japan. There was a broad and deep shift of allegiance (the author uses the word: “defection”) from what women described as insular and outdated Japanese values to what they characterized as an expansive, liberating, international space of free and unfettered self-expression, personal discovery, and romantic freedom. Language courses, studies abroad, work abroad, and employment at international organizations such as the United Nations or in foreign-affiliate (gaishikei) firms gave these new internationalist women a new set of options to resist the conventional tracks of the gendered economy and to enter into alternative systems of thought and value. But as Kelsky notes, this turn to the foreign occurred “within an overarching logic of capital”: women’s akogare is “anticipated and recuperated by commodity logic, a logic that operates in increasingly subtle registers.”

A profoundly disturbing essay

In a way, commodity logic, and the dialectics between desire and its object, can even affect the reception of a book such as Women on the Verge. The same happened to Takeo Doi’s Anatomy of Amae: rendered into popular discourse, it continues to feed the clichés that were served to the author by some of her informants (“Japanese men have their mothers take care of them and they expect their wives to do the same.”) There is a thin line between academic scholarship, with its conditions of production and reception, and popular consumption of cultural products, which responds to another logic. In writing about women’s akogare, Karen Kelsky has taken a great risk: her book could as well fall prey to the same shortcuts, and reinforce the very stereotypes she means to undermine. Maybe the advice the author received at the outset of her research was right after all: an anthropologist should not hang around in pickup bars and ask questions nobody wants to answer, let alone listen to…

Thinking Deep about Hello Kitty

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A review of Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek across the Pacific, by Christine R. Yano, Duke University Press, 2013

Jhello-kittyapanese pop culture is not just a consumer fad or a passing attraction. It has become a research topic worthy of academic lectures and scholarly publications. This interest for new things Japanese was demand-driven and linked to transformations in North American and European universities in the past twenty years. Students enrolling in Japanese language classes or Japanese studies departments grew up alongside anime figures and manga characters coming from Japan. Their early exposure to Japanese popular culture and commercial products led them to request teachings that would reflect their childhood experience and teenage interest. Anthropologists and cultural studies scholars were better equipped to address this new demand than the literature scholars and historians or political scientists that have traditionally dominated area studies departments. Rather than working on texts and archives, they use ethnographic fieldwork as the preferred means of data collection. They are interested in the production and circulation of cultural objects as bearers of meaning and values. They do not draw a sharp distinction between high and low culture, between marketized commodities and authentic creations. For these new scholars, observers of the contemporary should not reject the mundane, the commercial and the transient. Rather, they should pay attention to everyday objects and popular productions as “goods to think with.” By doing so, they are able to notice emerging trends and societal changes that have broader implications for the understanding of contemporary societies.

Can Christine Yano prove she’s a real anthropologist?

Even so, choosing Hello Kitty as a research topic may have raised some eyebrows in Asian studies departments. Sanrio’s merchandising icon is the archetype of what scholars usually brush off as irrelevant for their studies. The commercially-driven, superficial and childish phenomenon of this kitten figure adorning various consumer products surely cannot be taken as the topic of a serious academic study. It can at best provide a case study for a business class on brand marketing, or an illustration in an introductory course on Japanese culture’s global reach. But certainly no book can be published on such a mundane topic. Or can it? Christine Yano is aware she took risks in choosing Hello Kitty’s reception in the US—what she calls “pink globalization”—as the focus of her study. As a nasty comment gleaned over Twitter puts it, “some years ago anthropologist Christine Yano proved #hellokitty wasn’t a real cat, which made many readers doubt she was a real anthropologist.” Such remarks may have been inspired by the jealousy of colleagues who saw Yano reach popular success, not really in terms of book sales, but through invitations to give lectures, attend fan conventions, and curate exhibitions—all activities that usually lie beyond the ambit of most anthropology professors. Critics may also point to some flaws in the methodology—this is a research-lite, easy-fieldwork book that is overly reliant on Internet sources—, lack of fact-checking—Yano takes at face value the anti-Hello Kitty rant found on a satirical parody website based around a fake fundamentalist Baptist church—and writing style that mixes professional jargon and journalistic catchwords.

How can the author prove she is a real anthropologist while at the same time remaining true to her chosen topic? Her first impulse is to take Hello Kitty very seriously. Her book won acceptance in a prestigious university press series by showing all the trappings of serious scholarship—the footnotes, the bibliography, the references to theory and drafting of new concepts. At the beginning of every chapter, Christine Yano raises theoretical issues by way of rhetorical questions, and then purports to answer them based on accumulated data and complex reasoning. She pays tribute to past scholarship and quotes from all anthropologists who have studied Japanese popular culture—Anne Allison, Laura Miller, Thomas LaMarre, Brian McVeigh, Jennifer Robertson, Marc Steinberg—as well as from many cultural critics and feminist scholars. She discusses key concepts in detail, presenting the genealogy of popular notions such as pink, cute, cool, and kitsch, as well as exotic words such as kawaii, asobi, fanshii guzzu, kogyaru, shôjo, and kyarakutâ. She offers her own theoretical constructs: “pink globalization”, “Japanese Cute-Cool”, “the wink”. She knows that in doing so, she loses some readers along the way—some Internet comments lambast her book as “a boatload of jargon”, and particularly resent her savant references to Adorno and to Marx. But this is the price to pay to gain admission in the exclusive circle of cultural critics and anthropology scholars.

A multi-sited ethnography

More specifically, Christine Yano, who is identified on the book’s back cover as Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa, anchors her research in the discipline of cultural anthropology. Her book is what scholars describe as a “multi-sited ethnography”: she didn’t do fieldwork in a single community or location, but collected data and observations in various places, mostly in Hawai’i and in San Francisco, but also in other cities where her professional assignments took her. As she describes it, “Hello Kitty became a research hobby: whenever I traveled to another city, I searched Sanrio stores and fans… Every year when I taught the course on Japanese popular culture, I surveyed students about their knowledge of Hello Kitty.” She also scanned the Internet for testimonies and contacts on her research topic. She conducted structured interviews (thirty-one in total) with various informants: Sanrio managers in Japan and in the US, shop salespersons, Kitty adult fans, goods collectors, and artists. She includes long excerpts of these interviews in her book. Again, this is standard practice in anthropology, where the notes and recordings of the ethnographer are often reproduced in extenso. But this may rebuff some readers, for various reasons that the author herself acknowledges in the following: “some readers may feel that the fan interviews I quote here represent an overload of sentiment, a barrage of capitalist frenzy, a besotted attachment to a commodity. Without apology, I agree, and suggest that these readers skip over the interviews themselves and head to the conclusions I draw from them at the end of the chapter.”

This curious self-denial points to another discursive strategy by which the author affirms her credentials as a serious scholar. At many junctures, she tries to distance herself from corporate lore, marketing ploys, and naive adherence to what Hello Kitty represents in order to offer her own critical interpretation. She responds to critics by incorporating their viewpoint and giving them a voice within her own analysis. For instance, she concludes her chapter on Sanrio’s corporate strategy with the following: “a company ethos of happiness tinged with pink sounds like a hugely naive, manipulative enterprise, and that, in fact, may be exactly what it is.” She devotes a whole chapter on “Kitty Backlash”, reflecting the views of Hello Kitty’s detractors which she mainly found on the Internet. This leads her to her enormous blunder when she takes at face value the discourse of a parody Baptist church that reads the word “Hell” in “Hello Kitty”. Although Sanrio’s cat is primarily a child’s character, Yano focuses exclusively on adult consumers of Kitty products—and even on adult products, such as the infamous Hello Kitty massage wand. She also devotes much place to cultural productions and artistic expressions that play with Hello Kitty in creative and imaginative ways. Art, like anthropology, has a complex and troublesome relationship with commerce and capitalism. In her way, her whole book structure reproduces her ambivalence with Hello Kitty as a scholarly pursuit—from finding Kitty at home in Japan, to following her through global marketing strategies across the Pacific, describing her ubiquity, giving voice to Kitty detractors, and then showing that subversion and, ultimately, art, essentially “get it.”

We find this mix of adherence and critical distance in the juxtaposition of fan testimonies and anti-Kitty hate speech, in the contrast between interviews and commentary, and even in the author’s own writing style, which mixes scholarly jargon and popular expressions. Christine Yano claims for herself the right to write at times like the editor of a girlie magazine, while in the next paragraph using difficult words and complex reasoning like a tenured professor. Like her character, she can be both cute and cool at the same time, and she writes with tongue-in-cheek humor. Her sentences often mix the serious and the playful, the elaborate and the obvious, the obtuse theorizing and the plain reasoning. Even her main theoretical concepts (cute, cool, kitsch, pink, kawaii, etc.) are borrowed from plain language and everyday expressions. This makes Pink Globalization an easier and more pleasant read than most anthropology books published in the same publisher’s series. This also makes it risky business: her theoretical apparatus and critical commentary may lose plain readers along the way, while scholars of a more classical bent may be put off by her choice of topic in the first place. But again, there is a market for critical analysis of Asian pop culture, as evidenced in the many publications that now address the topic, and cultural anthropologists are better placed to claim this market segment for their discipline.

The philosophy of “the wink”

Beyond Hello Kitty, is there anything that non-Kitty fans can take from this book? I mentioned the creative use of simple notions such as cute and cool, the way they relate to ordinary people’s lives, and the value added that theory brings. More than pink globalization, the key concept Christine Yano wants to offer as her personal contribution to social theory is the “wink”. This is, of course, a Kitty gesture: Hello Kitty, in some of her modern renderings, winks at her viewers, thereby complicating the blank stare and expressionless face she is so much remembered for. The wink defines the very fetishism of Hello Kitty. It is a symbol of friendship, playfulness, and intimacy. It creates the possibility of two-way interactions, of double meaning, and second degree. The wink resolves logical inconsistencies—between cute and cool, child and adult, kitsch and art, pink and black. It allows for subversive uses of Hello Kitty. The wink also includes the viewers into the circle of those who “get it” and assume what Kitty stands for. More importantly, “wink as play” holds the power to silence or incorporate Kitty’s critics. In turn, adult consumers wink back at her and use Kitty in minimalist acts of subversion, performing feminity or sexiness. For Christine Yano, the wink is also a theoretical gesture. It is her personal answer to those in faculty committees and scholarly associations who raise eyebrows at her research topic and question her credentials as an anthropologist.

Lost and Found in Translation

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A review of Nature in Translation: Japanese Tourism Encounters the Canadian Rockies, by Shiho Satsuka, Duke University Press, 2015.

nature-in-translationHow do you translate nature in Japanese? The obvious answer—the word “shizen” is the dictionary translation of “nature”—is not so obvious, at least for historians of Japanese thought. Shizen is a Japanese pronunciation of the Taoist concept of ziran, drawn from Laozi. It describes the condition of artlessness or a situation happening without human intention. Its opposite is the notion of “sakui”, or “invention”, the forces of human agency that intervene to create social order. The opposition between shizen and sakui, between the natural way of heaven and earth and the power of human creation, was revived after the Second World War by public intellectual Maruyama Masao when he tried to identify the responsibility for Japan’s wartime aggression. In order to exonerate the Emperor who remained in place as a symbol of the Japanese nation, the war was narrated as if it happened “naturally”, and ordinary Japanese people were framed as the victims of the war. For Maruyama, who chose to emphasize the forces of sakui as first conceptualized by Confucian scholar Ogyû Sorai, the ambiguity in the notion of shizen, and the difficulty to find a proper translation for human subjectivity, was precisely at stake. In order to reenter the international community as rational agents, the Japanese needed to establish a new spirit of individual autonomy, or shutaisei, and to overcome nature as shizen. Only so could they find a proper sense of freedom—another concept that was difficult to translate, as the word jiyû retains the meaning of its origin in the Buddhist expression of jiyû jizai, which designates liberation as self-detachment.

For Shiho Satsuka, translating nature takes a different meaning. Trained as an anthropologist in the intellectual hotbed of the University of California at Santa Cruz, she did her graduate fieldwork training as a travel guide in the Canadian National Park of Banff, a destination favored by Japanese tourists. Her book, drawn from her PhD thesis and published in 2015, analyzes the way Japanese tour guides translate ecological knowledge into lived experience. Translation of nature involves much more than finding proper Japanese equivalents of English notions. As Shiho Satsuka states, it “concerns what counts as human, what kind of society is envisioned, and who is included in the society as a legitimate subject.” The focus of the book is on the tour guides, not on the tourists they accompany. In classic anthropological fashion, the author elaborates from her field notes to describe how the guides left Japan and came to Canada to live in “magnificent nature”; what image they held from Canada and how it contrasted with the reality they found there; how they went through training and transformed themselves into service workers; and how they negotiated issues of gender, cultural difference, knowledge politics, and personal identity. The book mobilizes a vast array of authors and theories, Western and Japanese, while staying close to the lived experience and worldviews of the tour guides that the author befriended during her anthropological fieldwork.

Narratives of freedom

Japanese guides offer “narratives of freedom” to account for their departure from Japan and their adoption of a new lifestyle in the Canadian Rockies. Their decision to leave Japan coincided with a period of national angst and crisis. In a newly established neoliberal environment, the meaning of “freedom”—remember the ambiguity of the Japanese term—became a contentious issue. The furitâ—the free individual living on small jobs or arubaito—captured the imagination of a generation aspiring to detach itself from the secure but constrained environment of the corporation. Becoming a furitâ was often a choice born out of necessity, or necessity made virtue, in the context of widespread liberalization of corporate regulations and labor laws that resulted in growing youth unemployment and precariousness. In the midst of economic change, as the Japanese economy moved from bubble years to prolonged depression, a growing number of young adventurers “escaped” from Japan to go overseas for self-searching travel. In their pursuit for freedom, they chose to drop out of, or not participate in the Japanese corporate system. A number of them found in Canada and its national parks a convenient site to reinvent themselves and establish their new subjectivities. Some thought guiding was their dream job, while others only considered it as transitional work until they found what they really wanted to do with their lives.

Their aspirations were projected onto “magnificent nature”: Canadian natural environment offered the canvas on which they could reinvent themselves, unfettered by national boundaries, cultural norms, and social rules. Moving to Canada offered them what they couldn’t find in their home society: the opportunity to pursue freedom and the choice to live one’s own life as a self-standing individual. Japan was perceived as oppressing the true, authentic self with layers upon layers of social rules and obligations. Escaping to the West was a way to take back control of one’s life and to embrace the centrality of the individual. At the same time, Canada provided a version of Western subjectivity distinct from the American model, an alternative space in which nature played a significant part in the guides’ construction of subjectivities. Japanese candidates to Canadian immigration were often attracted by mere pictures, anecdotes, or TV shows depicting life in the wilderness. They embraced the image of the natural park’s guide as a figure of independence and freedom—a person who had a solid sense of her own subjectivity and the ability to move beyond national, social, and cultural boundaries. Shiho Satsuka tracks the construction of this imaginary space in the work of a value entrepreneur, former politician and popular television entertainer, Ohashi Kyôsen, who provided his readers with the dream vision of “living one’s own life” free from the company and nation, the two most important social contexts in shaping a sarariman’s life. Although Ohashi’s main target was more the young male retirees whose corporate alienation had left them bereft of any social ties, his vision was also influential among young office ladies and freeters who found that the corporate ladder was closed to them and chose to escape to a world of unbound possibilities.

Co-modification of the self

What they discovered in Canada was that work was still work, and that becoming a tour guide entailed what the author labels a “co-modification of the self”. As service workers, they were enjoined by their training manager to become a commodity, in the sense that their public expected to consume a commodified performance similar to the one offered by an artist or an entertainer. Co-modification also designates the modification and production of self through interactions with nature and with the public who came to see the guides as a reflect of their environment. Becoming a commodity therefore had a quite different meaning from that of the commodification of labor that Marx saw as a centerpiece of capitalist exploitation. If anything, the commodity or shôhin implicit in this process of self transformation retains the qualities of premodern craftsman’s production. There was a tension between the unique skills and personalities of each guide, their obligation to act with “sincerity” and “authenticity”, and the demands of mass tourism which asked for a standardized level of comfort and quality of service. Each trainee was therefore encouraged to build his or her unique narrative, while assimilating the rules and procedures listed in a hefty manual. There was a Zen-like quality in their apprenticeship, as the trainees had to guess what the managers and senior guides had in mind even though they did not spell out their intentions. They were invited to blend with nature and transform themselves into locals, while retaining some traits of “old-style” Japanese behavior. For their instructor, the perfect match between a person and his or her surrounding was the foundation for attaining “freedom”, in the sense that the Buddhist tradition gives to the term jiyû jizai. To achieve this notion of freedom, it is important to train one’s own body and mind, and let oneself detach from one’s self-interest in order to become one with nature.

The guides’s performance as “Japanese cosmopolitans” were the result of this co-modification of self and environment. For the Japanese tourists, the guides embodied the cosmopolitan dream of escaping the standard course of stable yet constraining lives of salaried workers in order to live a frugal yet fulfilling life in nature. Despite—or because of—the stereotypical association of outdoor activity and masculine culture, female outdoor guides played a particularly significant role. They performatively constructed their subjectivities as people who could transcend the dominant gendered norms. By doing so, they produced a charismatic aura and presented themselves as mediators with the special ability to go back and forth between the everyday world and an elsewhere, imaginarily staged on Canada’s vast natural landscape. Shiho Satsuka draws the portrait of three of these charisma guides, referring them to familiar gender figures in Japanese pop culture: the male-impersonating female found in girls’ high schools or Takarazuka plays; the tomboy who refuses to grow up and fall into assigned gender roles; and the girl medium fighting to save the world as in video games or anime movies. The ambiguous characteristics of female tour guides who straddled various sets of two worlds—male and female, adult and child, and human and nature—exemplifies the limits of standard binary frameworks used for categorizing human beings. It shows that being female is not a “natural fact” but a cultural performance: choosing a gender category for oneself or others is not necessarily based on a biological body, but on a person’s social role and position in everyday interactions. Here the author makes reference to the work of Judith Butler, but her “gender trouble in nature” is devoid of any militant charge, and gender ambiguity is presented as an everyday fact of life. If anything, the gender roles performed by female outdoor guides are more “natural” than the artificial roles assigned to young women in Japanese society.

A matchmaker between the tourists and the landscape

Japanese outdoor guides offer “nature in translation”: they are expected to tell the stories of nature as if they were national park interpreters. In the park managers’ view, ecological science is the basis of understanding nature’s language. Guides play a role of environmental stewardship as a result of a neoliberal privatization process that has outsourced nature’s protection to the commercial sector. But nature and science take on different meanings in English and in Japanese. The Japanese guides’ participation in an accreditation program revealed discrepancies of worldview that locate humans in relation to nature. Japanese participants asked more questions about plant and rocks as opposed to animals, they did not laugh when their instructor ironically hugged a tree, and they had trouble translating notions like “nature interpretation” or “stewardship” into Japanese. In their view, the guide was not a decoder of nature’s true message but more like a matchmaker between the tourists and the landscape. They let nature do the talk. This doesn’t mean that Japanese guides were not interested in environmental science and technical knowledge as dispensed in the training program: on the contrary, they were keen to update themselves with the latest research by the park scientists, and embraced the principles of environmental conservation. But they insisted that nature was much larger than any person’s ability to grasp it, and their questioning suggested that the dividing line between nature and society varies across cultures. The notion of stewardship, which implies that man is accountable for this world and has to answer to a higher authority about its management, is not easily translated into other religious and knowledge traditions.

Japanese outdoor guides offer “nature in translation”: they are expected to tell the stories of nature as if they were national park interpreters. In the park managers’ view, ecological science is the basis of understanding nature’s language. Guides play a role of environmental stewardship as a result of a neoliberal privatization process that has outsourced nature’s protection to the commercial sector. But nature and science take on different meanings in English and in Japanese. The Japanese guides’ participation in an accreditation program revealed discrepancies of worldview that locate humans in relation to nature. Japanese participants asked more questions about plant and rocks as opposed to animals, they did not laugh when their instructor ironically hugged a tree, and they had trouble translating notions like “nature interpretation” or “stewardship” into Japanese. In their view, the guide was not a decoder of nature’s true message but more like a matchmaker between the tourists and the landscape. They let nature do the talk. This doesn’t mean that Japanese guides were not interested in environmental science and technical knowledge as dispensed in the training program: on the contrary, they were keen to update themselves with the latest research by the park scientists, and embraced the principles of environmental conservation. But they insisted that nature was much larger than any person’s ability to grasp it, and their questioning suggested that the dividing line between nature and society varies across cultures. The notion of stewardship, which implies that man is accountable for this world and has to answer to a higher authority about its management, is not easily translated into other religious and knowledge traditions.

Nature as a constant process of translation

Multiculturalism and environmental protection are two key areas in which Canada has assumed a self-assigned leading role in the world. They have become pillars of Canadian national identity, a source of pride and attractiveness in a world where these two values are put under stress. But nature conservation is seldom seen with the prism of multiculturalism. Instead, ecology has adopted the language of science, with the underlying assumption that scientific knowledge is culturally neutral and universally applicable to people with diverse backgrounds. By following the trail of Japanese tour guides in Banff, Shiho Satsuka shows that nature needs to be understood as a constant process of translation. Ecology as a language is inseparable from the politics of knowledge translation: notions such as nature, freedom, work, or identity are constantly renegotiated in distinct social contexts. The Japanese guides portrayed by the author occupy a liminal space away from mainstream Japanese and Canadian societies. But these service workers have much to tell us about what it means to inhabit nature as cosmopolitan agents seeking freedom and independence in a globalizing world. This book, the first one published by the author, also demonstrates the proper value of a graduate education in anthropology. Anthropology is a discipline that adresses big issues—the relation between mankind and nature, the political economy of neoliberalism and flexible work, the definition of freedom and subjectivity—in a located and situated manner. Theory—and this is a theoretically rich book—always come as a tool to understand our present in concrete situations. Her graduate education has provided Shiho Satsuka with a rich toolbox of concepts and references, but more important to her was the patient learning and questioning accumulated during ethnographic fieldwork. This book marks the birth of a great anthropologist.