Author Archives: Jude

Containment

con·tain·ment
 noun \kən-ˈtān-mənt\

:  the policy, process, or result of preventing the expansion of a hostile power or ideology

Jimi Hendrix and Bruce Lee experienced the corporate mediation of their image. Kung Fu films and Hendrix’s music have revolutionary potential that was “contained” by Hollywood’s repackaging and production. The rebelliousness inherent to youth culture was endorsed only on a symbolic level within a contained framework.  Similarly, the idealogical threat of Third World resistance present in Kung Fu films was contained by processing the films with Hollywood Orientalism, essentially producing a simulacrum of actual liberatory media.

The “containment” model that Kato references is not limited to the sphere of Hollywood.  ”Containment” is also the term used to describe the strategic foreign policy the United States adopted during the 1950s-60s to stop the perceived spread of communism. The communist threat of USSR was to be contained and isolated, lest it spread to neighboring nations. The containment policy eventually lead to the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. The foreign policy version of containment sounds eerily similar to Kato’s model presented in From Kung Fu To Hip Hop.

Fatherhood (Pop-osition)

Pop-osition 3) The meaning and authority invested in the word “father” or “pappy” comes from a globalized legacy of European imperialism. 

Father. That word is so huge. Immediately I think of my father, who is endemic of a particular brand of Ashkenazi Jewish masculinity. Over the past few years I’ve watched my mother and father clash over gendered roles in their relationship. Since becoming disabled, my father can no longer play the part of strong, stoic caretaker. This has lead to an upheaval in their connection to the normative roles presented by the heterosexual nuclear family. I think a lot about the way that fatherhood, motherhood, and family as an institution have been colonized. “Father” is just a word, a box that contains meaning, yet it carries so much weight in our increasingly globalized culture. The way we invoke fatherhood is not separate from my father, “Our Father who art in heaven…”, or the histories of colonialism and manifest destiny.

“My Gender Is For Mothers” – Nicole Masangkay

Click here to view the embedded video.

“My Gender Is for Mothers”

(My gender is for mothers)

My mother refuses my gender in 2 different languages
I cannot comprehend the weight of both
So when I first tell you, “I love you”
It will be the first time I can tell someone in a way that is understood

My mother was born in a U.S. Naval base in the Philippines
She has grown up with
Old bruises,
Little wars and defeats that cannot be drowned across oceans,
I understand that to survive
She cannot keep losing
So everyday, I let my mother refuse my beauty in
Two different languages
And I understand both

So when you lay beside me and whisper,
“You are beautiful”
Letting my brown skin blend into the cradle of your arm around me
And the shoreline of my waist washes into the fit of your other palm
My sobs will soak your forearm salty with my shame
How dare I give you this
And take myself away from my own mother
She gave me everything
She has burned so much of what she was meant to become
Trying to keep me safe

So when I learn of bruises from your past lover
That stay clinging to the places I will catch you
Sometimes with my hands
Open and gentle
When the world wants my body to only learn fists
And for yours to apologize for
Long hair and thick hips
My masculinity is for unlearning
All of the violence taught to my gender
I will honor the women whom we are taught are
“Too difficult” to love

This masculinity is for my mother
And she doesn’t even know
Between you and her
I am choosing whose heart to break

“With the body I have”
And the gender she thinks I don’t
My short hair and contradicting breasts
I just want to be good
I just want to be good
I wanna tell her that on the days I feel like my body will never let me
Sometimes I wanna give myself back to her

So when you tell me that you love me,
Remind me that the best thing that anyone’s ever said to me was that
I am “whom every mother would want their daughter to date”

When you remember that
This world was built against this gender on this body
And that the odds are against love and safety
I will trace the big dipper onto the soft canvas of your back
Watch constellations wrinkle gravity at the brimming outstretch of your smile
Catch curves folding under covers with my earthbound hands
And crumple the sky’s hemline to custom-fit your palms
When this world will not fit our safety
I will give you the universe with my fingertips
And the most gentle bends of my body

This is all I have to give
When gender is imperfect
When I wish they would let us love perfect
I will love you with all my gender

Bio – Nicole Masangkay is a genderqueer, Filipin@ American poet and student organizer, currently in Seattle

South Asian and Bollywood Science Fiction

I found a great interview with South Asian/American science fiction author Anil Menon, linked right here. He talks about the history and current state of science fiction in India. Really interesting stuff, and a well written article. There is a long history of Bengali sci fi, with J.C. Bose considered the founding father. The earliest Bengali science fiction was written in the 1800s (pre War of the Worlds). It’s important to note in Menon’s interview that there is a connection between science fiction and a history of British colonial rule. I’m constantly questioning the utility of the categorization of science fiction and fantasy. It’s easy to see how genres are gendered and raced. I.e. fantasy is written by women, fantastical writing by people of color is often grouped into magical realism. There are South Asian authors (including Salmon Rushdie), and South Asian/American authors who draw on Hindu mythology, and often portray elements of magic or the fantastic in their stories. It is usually only when these texts are “scientific” in nature or clearly inspired from the works of Western science fiction that they are classified as “sci fi”, so many authors are overlooked. It seems that many of the Bengali writers were inspired by the British, and Menon notes that science fiction has not been embraced by most of the population, but is gaining popularity.

This brings me to my next question, where is the science fiction in Bollywood? Bollywood is bigger than Hollywood, yet the first Bollywood science fiction movie only came out in 2003. Koi…Mil Gaya is a film that offers up a Bollywood version of the E.T. story, a nerdy student makes contact with an alien. The film has many references to Hindu mythology and gods, and plays with Western genre conventions. Koi Mil Gaya enjoyed immense popularity and seems to have sparked an emergence in science fiction troupes in Bollywood movies. Enjoy a scene from the film below!

Click here to view the embedded video.

 

Performing Kawaii – Fetishism and Yellow Fever

For my paper posts this week, I’m experimenting with new ways of synthesizing the reading. I just spent the morning falling very far down an internet rabbit hole. I’d like to present some of what I found, and how it relates to East Main Street. 

I began my inquiry with kawaii and Cibo Matto.  In her article, “Cibo Matto’s Stereotype A”, Jane C.H. Park describes kawaii as “gendered aesthetic style that melds the image of the underaged, sometimes coyly innocent nymphet with the pleasures of consumer capitalism” (295). The members of Cibo Matto, Miho Hatori and Yuka Honda, playfully critique this fetishism through their lyrics. Unfortunately, they are often still lumped into the kawaii category by critics and their fans. 

Click here to view the embedded video.

This 1997 performance of Birthday Cake clearly falls outside of the kawaii archetype of coy, shy, and innocent girlishness. Hitori and Honda are seen screaming, head-banging, and jumping around the stage. Cibo Matto’s persistent categorization as kawaii is deeply rooted in anti-Asian racism and fetishization of Asian women. There were many anime loving white students in my high school, self-proclaimed otakus  who would use the word kawaii to describe anything cute, often with the accompanying peace sign and giggle. The popularity of the kawaii aesthetic with white American youth contributes in part to the infantilization of Asian and Asian/American women. Japanese people are seen as “cute” objects, costumes, and props. This is only the latest evolution in the stereotypes of Asian women. As a consequence, it doesn’t matter how much screaming or head-banging Cibo Matto do, they will continue to be trivialized and infantilized as kawaii by Western viewers. 

While looking into kawaii and fetishization, I stumbled upon Donna Choi’s art project, “Does Your Man Suffer From Yellow Fever?”, which I copied over to my blog. Choi uses caricatures and parody to present “8 simple steps” to figure out whether your partner suffers from “yellow fever”. I would consider kawaii as being a part of “yellow fever”, as is instanced in Step #6 “[he relates to you through food...] And other Asian people”, where a man is hugging an elder Asian woman and baby while proclaiming, “so kawaii!”.

Does Your Man Suffer From Yellow Fever? (By Donna Choi)

An interview with the artist is up on Bitch Magazine

1) He is obsessed with authenticity
2)But nothing too authentic
3) He is disappointed that you were born in Texas
4) But he will forgive you because now he is the expert on your culture
5) He relates to you through food
6) And through other Asian people
7) Most importantly he doesn’t see race
8) In fact he is the most post-racial person he knows

for the islands i’ve lost // the islands i’ve never known (preview)

Click here to view the embedded video.


“the first preview for my senior thesis project, a multi-channel, multimedia installation exploring notions of home, family, and kinship within a postcolonial and queer diasporic pin@y context.”

Devyn Manibo is an internet acquaintance of mine who continues to end up in my real life circle of friends. They just got back from a trip to the Philippines where they were working on a really incredible project. More info here

 

Yijun Liao: Experimental Relationship

Experimental Relationship (2007 to now)

“As a woman brought up in China, I used to think I could only love someone who is older and more mature than me, who can be my protector and mentor. Then I met my current boyfriend, Moro, who is 5 years younger than me, I felt that whole concept of relationships changed, all the way around. I became the person who has more authority and power. One of my male friends even questioned how I could choose a boyfriend the way a man would choose a girlfriend. And I thought, “Damn right. That’s exactly what I’m doing, and why not!
I started exploring the alternative possibilities of man and woman relationship, these photos question what is the norm of a heterosexual relationships, what will happen if man and woman exchange their roles of sex and roles of power. And partly because my boyfriend is Japanese, and I am Chinese, this project also describes a love and hate relationship.”

A few articles were floating around my facebook feed yesterday about Yijun Liao. A photographer whoss project, Experimental Relationship has recently gained popularity. Here’s a couple images:

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07Liao_START-YOUR-DAY-WITH-A-GOOD-BREAKFAST-TOGETHER

Faultlines

“Sometimes I feel like I was born out of a faultline, where two tectonic plates meet.”

You say it like it’s a joke. We’re standing in line at the Post Office, my second (failed) attempt at getting a passport. I scribble frantically, a pile of documents spilling out of an old manilla envelope. Fragments, highschool yearbook photos, newspaper clippings, anything to prove the existence of a body in motion. I keep thinking about the movements of bodies, of our bodies. Of barriers. Fences, blockades. From the French word barriere, a fortification defending an entrance.

What does it mean to be born out of a faultline? A faultline is a fracture deep in the rock of the earth  that splits it in two. Scientists are able to trace the displacement of the halves by identifying the piercing point, finding the two halves and following the geological trail back in time to when they were whole. You were born out of shattering rock and shifting plates.
Your father was an American soldier, your mother grew up in a rural village in the Philippines. You tell me that they were starving, surviving on only rice. It’s not a coincidence that all the Filipina women in your family are married to white American GIs. How much choice is there in the movement of bodies? In the movement of our bodies?

Barriers. Blockades. Boundaries. Like scars, like the fissures of stone.

A fault is responsibility for an accident, as in “It’s all my fault”. I can trace the fault line, the words of apology in the way we hold our bodies. How many times have you told me that I don’t need to apologize? I pronounce it the way my daddy does, the way his daddy does. This is what it’s like loving across diaspora. Voices thick with cities we’ve only been to once.

Questions of Authenticity in East Main Street

Notions of authenticity are a running theme in the chapters I’ve read so far in East Main Street. In this post, I’ll be looking at authenticity in the three chapters for this week’s reading.
What does it mean to be Asian or Asian American? Where do the borders between race, ethnicity and nationality lie? Who is “authentically” Asian, and what right do they have to engage with Asian cultures outside of their ethnicity/nationality?

In the chapter “Model Minorities Can Cook”, Anita Mannur focuses on dissecting Asian fusion cuisine. She uses two celebrity chefs as focal points for her argument, Padma Lakshmi and Ming Tsai. Questions of authenticity arise when looking at the way that both chefs present (and subsequently commodify) a wide range of Asian cooking styles outside of their respective cultures or training. They claim all of Asian cuisine as their own, with no regard for establishing a pan-Asian culture, instead, ”Asianness, as it filters into their respective culinary styles, emerges as something that they instinctively understand because they are Asian American” (85).

In ” ‘Alllooksame’? Mediating Asian American Visual Cultures of Race on the Web” the website alllooksame.com  is put under scrutiny. The website has a series of quizzes to test the user in identifying Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans. Lisa Nakamura purposes that alllooksame challenges notions of authenticity by putting the user in the role of racial profiler. Who is Japanese? Who is Korean? The inevitable failure of the user in correctly categorizing “Asian” faces leads to the questioning and eventual discarding of essentializing notions of race. Alllooksame.com disconnects race from the realm of the visual, and reveals the role of the user in participating in the construction of race, “By calling into question what “Asian” is, at least in visual terms, Suematsue is interrogating the basis upon which racial taxonomies like ‘asian’ are built” (267).

Like Nakamura, Shilpa Dave locates race outsides of the body in “Apu’s Brown Voice”. Dave interrogates the role of accents in relation to power and cultural citizenship. Using the character of Apu from The Simpsons, Dave introduces the concept of “brown voice” to describe the particular Indian English accent that is mimicked by a white voice actor for the character of Apu. Brown voice homogenizes South Asian immigrant cultures, and because of the history of British colonialism, it aligns itself more closely with whiteness than with Asian American identity. Dave questions the authenticity of accent in performing Indianness. By performing brown voice, the user gains control over how they are going to be culturally received because of the accents association with class privilege. Examining the legacy of “mimicry” and the creation of the colonial subject, one is lead to question notions of authenticity in regards to voice and accent.