Day: October 15, 2019

I think that some of the arguments that Cheng makes in her “Ornamentalism” article about perceptions of East Asian women align with the views of Wada Ayaka, a Japanese pop idol who recently graduated from the group she was in for 15 years, Angerme (originally called S/mileage). Ayaka has a reputation for being a feminist, and she doesn’t hesitate to express her views on this subject, which isn’t very common among idols in her agency. She also graduated from college with a degree in art history while being an idol, and she loves talking about these subjects, which bothers some of her fans who don’t want an idol to be too “intellectual.” Last week, she released a solo song addressing the way some of her male fans perceive her and other idols, which almost dehumanizes female idols as if they exist solely for the gaze of their fans. Here are some of the lyrics translated into English:

“I’m an idol, and not just anyone.
I don’t live my life for you”

“I’m an idol, but I don’t need idolatry.”

“Where are you? You’re really lost.”

“However, from time to time, I think that I love you as if you were my son.”

 

Also, someone just translated an interview with her where she discusses feminism and art history: https://twitter.com/queenAgonna/status/1184257904033095680?s=20

Cheng, Anne Anlin. “Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 44, no. 3, Feb. 2018, pp. 415–46.

In her 2018 article “Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman,” Dr. Anne Anlin Cheng, a professor of English and director of American Studies at Princeton University, pushes for a new way to understand representations of “the yellow woman” as presented historically and currently in media. She argues that much of Western art that is inspired by East Asian femininity actually dehumanizes East Asian women (or “the yellow woman,” in Cheng’s words) by reducing them to objects that “can be possessed and dominated” (435). The fetishization of these objects, such as china vases, reflects the fetishization of and expectations for East Asian women, and this fetishization becomes repeated in the work of white male artists who create pieces inspired by their exotic ideas of China (which Cheng argues is a stand-in for East Asian cultures more broadly) that further perpetuate harmful, dehumanizing ideas of East Asian femininity.

Cheng frames her writing through the idea of ornamentalism, which sounds very similar to orientalism. She uses this word to mean “a conceptual lens through which to attend to the afterlife of a racialized and aestheticized object that remains very much an object, even as the human stakes remain chillingly high” (429). Ornamentalism is meant to reference the intersections of orientalism, (mis)representation of the feminine, and highly decorative work. She explains orientalism as the Western gaze interpreting Asia as being excessive, opulent, exotic, ancient, and possessable.

“Ontology” is a critical word to understand when reading this piece. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “ontology” means “the science or study of being; that branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature or essence of being or existence” (Oxford English Dictionary). Cheng is investigating how representations of East Asia in art affect the understanding and perception of East Asian women.

Cheng states that her work is “not a project about retrieving human agency, because the subject under discussion here (the yellow woman) is a seriously compromised subject and, in many instances, not a subject at all” (429). This statement is difficult to understand without reading the rest of her piece. Essentially, Cheng argues that unhuman objects and materials are used to stand in as representations of “the yellow woman” in ways that are dehumanizing. Rather than trying to grant these objects human agency, Cheng wants to deny their use as symbols of East Asian womanhood and femininity altogether. For example, china and the forms it takes should not represent the bodies, lives, and movement of Chinese women, and yet historically, this is what Western society implied.

The style of writing that Cheng uses is an interesting choice. Cheng uses a highly academic voice that is almost frustrating to read. Is this because Cheng feels that to present a valid critique of Western society, she must present herself in a way that aligns with the pretentiousness and inaccessibility of the academy, which was designed for white male academics? Is it because to gain legitimacy in the field of feminism and art studies, one must demonstrate prowess in their knowledge of Western frameworks of thinking and interpretation in order to demonstrate that feminist studies and art studies are highly academic and philosophical fields worthy of study?

This article also raises questions of for whom the article is accessible and what Cheng’s intentions are. Is she trying to empower East Asian women, particularly those living in Western societies? If so, the language is inaccessible to the general public. Is she trying to influence those with power within the academy? If so, why frame her work within the context of Western thought? Doing so seems to imply that there is stronger legitimacy in Western academic thought than in other epistemologies.

Additional work cited:

Oxford English Dictionary. “Ontology.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, 2019. Oxford English Dictionary, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/131551

Our Lives by Minnie Riperton

“Any day now can’t you see

You’ll be coming back to me

Comin’ back to where you wanna be

And the time that you’ve been gone

Will vanish like the song

Sung by the rain when we were fast asleep

And our days will be filled by the light of children’s laughter

All our nights will be touched by the glow of lover’s songs

Side by side in the sun we will build the world we’re after

Side by side we will lie when the day’s good work is done

Any day now can’t you see

You’ll be sitin’ here by me

Laughing at the fools we used to be

And the things that we’ve done wrong

Will be now dead and gone

Buried out beneath our apple tree….”

In Chang Rae Lee’s “On Such a Full Sea”, young diver Fan ventures beyond the security of B-Mor to seek out her disappeared boyfriend, Reg.

Throughout the first few chapters, the character of Fan is pieced together by scant memories, gossip, and speculations. The idea of Fan begins as the whispers of a legend, and Lee poses grand statements and observations that allow us to steadily question the reliability of the narrator’s knowledge. When Reg disappears, it occurs so quickly and delicately enough that Fan, and the reader themselves, come to rely on word of mouth / traces of Reg in the surveilled landscape/surroundings.

Fan retains strong hope for finding Reg throughout her journey— she keeps images close, reminding herself of her purpose to find a love that was lost. In a similar way, “Our Lives” feels like a self-reminder of sorts: using visualizations, memories, and reflections that haven’t happened yet. Fan regularly reminisces on her innocent past with Reg, but she also desperately longs for the late future, and the world around her also obsess over their fate — “and the time that you’ve been gone / will vanish like the song…Side by side in the sun we will build the world we’re after”

On Such a Full Sea starts off on the island B-Mor that is able to sustain itself.  The region draws upon water as a source of life and death and this motif is clear throughout the reading with agriculture, floods, fish tanks, etc.  It reminds me of this song that portrays an old man who occupies a lighthouse on a remote island and becomes fascinated by water.

Although some may call me basic for including this track, this stanza “I’m waking up to ash and dust / I wipe my brow and I sweat my rust / I’m breathing in the chemicals,” relates to B-Mor’s dystopic tragedy of a setting.

Here in B-Mor, along the runway-straight blocks, we can’t avoid enduring the same extremes as in the open counties, but it is a blessing to note that we have numerous places to go for respite, like our indoor gymnasiums and pools, and the subterranean mall busy with shops and game parlors and eateries, where people naturally spend most of their free time. Because it’s rarely pleasant out of doors, we’ve come to depend on the atmosphere of seasonally perfumed, filtered air and the honey-hued halo lighting and the constantly updated mood-enhancing music that all together are hardly noticeable anymore but would likely cause a pandemonium were they cut off for any substantial period. (On Such a Full Sea, 12)

In this early portion of the novel, Chang-Rae Lee defines B-Mor, placing the setting for On Such a Full Sea in context for the reader. Two strategic literary choices help describe B-Mor as a complex and dystopic location that only presents as utopic from the outside: Perspective and diction.

First, Lee chooses to explain B-Mor from the unnamed narrator’s view. This intentional choice indicates that B-Mor is not just a location separate from the Charter and Counties; rather, it is (or was) a home for Fan, Reg, and their families. Thus, the struggles that residents of B-Mor have are not divorced and not impersonal. Instead, their struggles with a government that controls their livelihoods, (lack of) access to healthcare, and economic uncertainty in the fisheries arouse an emotional reaction from the reader.

Second, the Lee’s diction adds variety to the setting while also providing descriptive power. The mall is characterized as “subterranean,” indicating B-Mor’s technological advancement but also the unnatural atmosphere of its surroundings. The outdoors are not described as “toxic,” “unusable,” or “unwelcome.” Instead, the narrator describes the outdoors as “rarely pleasant,” conveying residents’ choice to stay away from the outdoors. Finally, the adjectives attached to the lighting and music create a sanitized mood. The air is “seasonally perfumed” and “filtered,” the lighting “honey-hued” and “halo,” and the music “constantly updated” and “mood-enhancing.” These compound descriptions indicate the capability of the government to determine the mood and dependency of B-Mor residents on a controlled atmosphere.

In « Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman, Anne Anlin Cheng offers a third way to analyze racial embodiment, beyond Frantz Fanon’s “epidermal racial schema” and Hortense Spillers’s “hieroglyphics of the flesh.”

Far from rejecting these theories, she acknowledges their relevance, but she thinks they dismiss the specific reification operated on the Asian woman body, and therefore the revolutionary potential laying in reclaiming this reification to reshape « personhood ».

This third way stands in the reappropriation of Ornamentalism, which sounds so closed to « Orientalism ». First, the author highlights the considerable distinction in the making of the Black woman and the Yellow woman by the White male gaze, using the difference between primitivism and orientalism : « While Primitivism rehearses the rhetoric of ineluctable flesh, Orientalism, by contrast, relies on a decorative grammar, a fantasmatic corporeal syntax that is artificial and layered. Where black femininity is “vestibular”/bare flesh/weighted, Asiatic femininity is ornamental/surface/portable ».
If Black women are resumed by their flesh and hypersexualized through it, Asian women’s flesh is absolutely denied. As if this body couldn’t produce itself one ounce of erotic, but was only dedicated to White male projection : « While Orientalism is about turning persons into things that can be possessed and dominated, ornamentalism is about a fantasy of turning things into persons through the conduit of racial meaning in order, paradoxically, to allow us to abandon our humanness. »

If that shaping of the Asian woman through ornament began during the 18th century with the US interest for Chinese Porcelain, Cheng shows how it is still tragically relevant nowadays, premise illustrated by an exhibition in 2015 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art entitled China: Through the Looking Glas, where « Instead of objects that function as appendages to the human (as one would expect fashion and furnishing to do), what we find here instead are objects that reference other objects. »
Objects and represented bodies operate at the very same level, as accommodations for White desire or at least curiosity. Indeed, she pursues saying that « Of the many “enigmatic objects” (a term used by the exhibition) displayed in this extensive exhibition, the most mesmerizing and confounding one is surely the specter of the yellow woman ».
Not only her body, but also her specter. Let’s say, not only her materiality is shaping, but her entire integrity :
« Dare we say it? Ornament becomes—is—flesh for Asian American female personhood. Commodification and fetishization, the dominant critical paradigms we have for understanding representations of racialized femininity, simply do not ask the harder question of what being is at the interface of ontology and objectness. Here Chinese femininity is not only more and less than human but also man-made; not only assembled but also reassembled. »

Ornament is then a tool for shaping a body, a culture, and finally, a race. « Porcelain is flesh, and flesh is porcelain ». Chinese men are brave disposable laborers, Chinese women are elegant disposable fragile porcelain on which White men can project all their fantasies, and Chinese culture is at the same time admired and suspected of inauthenticity.
And what can we say about this excerpt from the New York Times, about the Chinese women’s gymnastics team at the Summer Olympics in 1996 : “The Chinese remain the world’s most erratic top gymnasts, and today, like many a Ming vase, their routines looked lovely but had cracks in several places.”
From the « White Gold » to the « Yellow (non)flesh, the « model minority » is perfectly reified, yet surrounded by suspicion.

Cheng describes « a fusion between thingness and personhood », and wants to think about « that intractable intimacy between being a person and being a thing ».
Here is the moment when can start the Reclaim process : if people are denied as subjects, furthermore as human, how can they still exercise an agency ? One way some shaped-as-subalterns people choose to recover it is by embracing the monstrosity or strangeness in which the dominant reified them, to dismantle it better (« Queer » is a perfect example).

Then, « The dream of the yellow woman is thus really a dream about the inorganic. The yellow woman is an, if not the, original cyborg ». Yet, as feminist scholars such as Donna Haraway or Anna Tsing, who also work on interspecies kinship and the critics of Anthropocene, have shown, even it if the Cyborg is a creation of the neoliberal surveillance system, absolutely destructive for the environment, this figure can be reclaimed by minorities as the paroxysm of Hybridity and Fluidity, and in a way trap the dominant into their own game. According to this point of view, interspecies kinship could also embrace inorganic technologies.

This is the point where Cheng sees Ornamentalism, if reclaimed by people who were dehumanized by its process, as a way to embrace Otherness to redesign « personhood » and « Humanity » beyond White Modernity definition : « ornamental personhood of Asiatic femininity as a rare and valuable opportunity to consider alternative forms of being, not at the site of the free, natural, modern subject and his or her celebrated autonomy, but, contrarily, at the edges and crevices of a non-European, synthetic, aggregated, and feminine body ».
And the end, « taking seriously what it means to live as an object, as aesthetic supplement » to achieve a more powerful agency, while keeping in mind that « At the same time, if recent critical discourse about the posthuman or what has come to be known as object-oriented ontology can at times feel politically disconnected even as its intention has been to unsettle a tradition of insular humanism and anthropocentrism, it is because it has forgotten that the crisis between persons and things has its origins in and remains haunted by the material, legal, and imaginative history of persons made into things. »

Referring to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Cheng claims that « the dehumanized body might actually require objectness in order to subsist. ». Interestingly, we can find this idea in Herbert Marcuse’s thinking, who shaped it as a queer man : How can we find agency from the position of a reified object of desire ? How this very reified position can be more powerful than our desperate attempts to be recognized as subjects in a world that denies it for us ?

For this week I have selected the opening theme song for Wizards of Waverly Place. Throughout the first 100 pages of this book the reader is constantly thrown for a loop. And the fantastical elements introduced to us on page 25 when Quig uses a wand to subdue Loreen adds to the mystery and intrigue for someone reading this book for the first time. In this utopian (perhaps dystopian?) future where hierarchy and caste reign we learn very quickly that everything is in fact, not what it seems.