Just a little something to make you smile! (and maybe make you adopt a Korean kid!)

"There are no ugly Asian children", right?

DarkMatter Rage YouTube Channel

If any of you are interested in hearing more material from DarkMatter, here is their YouTube channel. I would highly recommend it!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuqPtkmeFr7I9RTr7Q72WIg

Discussion Prompts for Tomorrow's Meeting

I thought it would be a good idea for me to post the discussion questions I hope to bring up at our meeting tomorrow, so you can take a look at them and maybe brainstorm some thoughts beforehand. I also realize that I'm posting this quite late, so don't worry about it if you can't get to these questions in time!

I’d like to focus on Anh Hua’s “Homing Desire, Cultural Citizenship, and Diasporic Imaginings,” Gayatri Gopinath’s “Nostalgia, Desire, Diaspora: South Asian Sexualities in Motion,” and Happy Together. And I think it is also important to talk about Sara Dorow’s “Racialized Choices,” particularly in what she calls “racism unsettled by the triangulation in which blackness becomes the constitutive Other to the white imaginary of Asia and Asian America.”

In Anh Hua’s argument, how do diasporic subjects perform citizenship to “reclaim belonging”? And external to the academic context, how can we as self-identified diasporic subjects navigate this reclamation? Can we go as far as to contextualize our participation in this course as a way to seek this reclamation?

As for Gopinath’s article, I wanted to discuss the ways in which nostalgia and desire are molded as survival strategies for the queer diasporic subject. Isabelle mentioned in her blog post that Gopinath outlines the impossibility of the queer subjectivity to even be imagined in the home, so I think this would be a great place to start our discussion.

Finally, I would like to talk about the film’s presentation of possibilities for a queer utopia (multiple queer utopias?). After all, as we learn in Chow’s article, the Chinese title of Happy Together actually translates to “unexpected revelation at scenes of spring.” Additionally, what does the ending of the film signify in terms of the queer diasporic subjectivity?

We’ve talked quite a bit about the white vs. Black binary that often exists in race politics. I remember Dana Takagi pointing out in his article that Asian Americans have been characterized as belonging “more” on either side of the binary, depending on the intentions of white supremacist intentions. Of course, the model minority myth fits into part of this narrative.

I’m not sure if any of you are familiar with the spoken word group DarkMatter. They (Janani Balasubramanian and Alok Vaid-Menon) self-describe as “a trans south asian art and activist collaboration” and are currently based in New York. I’d like for us to watch one of Alok’s pieces titled “Bring in Brown to Keep Black Down.” It’s a very short video (around 5 minutes) and I think it’d add to our discussion of the Sara Dorow reading.

I'm looking forward to our discussion! I'm also looking forward to hearing about how reading this made you feel: "Today, for many individuals, it is no longer that simple to say: 'there is no place like home', for there is sometimes no place called home. There are sometimes multiple homes, or transits between homes, or routes as home, or longing for homes, in physicality and in the symbolic imaginary" (Hua 55).

Queerness and Bodies in Space

Okay. I’m going to try and find a way to put what I’m thinking into words, but again, I’d like to put a small disclaimer to say that I fear that I do not have the proper vocabulary to give the topic of sexuality justice.

I think in the conversation of race in relation to queer theory… I do not think that it’s ever crossed my mind.  Again, it’s not a topic that I tend to discuss or research in my personal life, or even in my studies. But I never thought to situate my personal history, or the fact that I am non-white in relation to sexuality. I’ve come to realize that I focus race as a whole when it comes to racial tensions, rather than thinking about the differences that exist within race in comparison to other races in power struggles. So I was definitely caught off-guard when Viola was talking about how she was able to situate her history in the context of the film.

(Can I say that these readings were such a struggle for me. I had a hard time just jumping right into them without much general knowledge about terms and stuff like that, so I’m using what I learned in other classes to grasp what I could understand from this class’ readings)

Since my last blog post and this one I learned more about the lesbian/queer movement in India and how women struggled to find a place for themselves as a political body but also how the lesbian movement needed to latch onto what was known through the women’s movement in order to gain some legitimacy, while opposing other aspects of the movement.

I kind of think that that tension is what’s sort of being described by Leung. Leung showed that her personal reading of a film was not aligned with groups who are supposed to identify sexually with the characters. She showed that the two groups (lesbian and transgender) were at odds with what was being represented as their identities, and that these identities were not true representations (184). Either way, legitimacy of being a group or concept, as opposed to political legitimacy, is being presented as being at odds to something else already in existence. So in the lesbian women’s movement in India it would be that the lesbian women’s movement was at odds with the women’s movement in their sexuality, and wanted proper legitimization through a channel of feminism. In the case of the lesbian and trans representation in film, its about being at odds with what is represented through film versus what is represented through reality. There really is no point in labeling something as something that it isn’t, especially if it’s about political bodies.

In Happy Together, I noticed that it was so… Normal. Kind of what Isabelle was discussing. I noticed that it was two partners (and one other man) who identified as queer but that was basically the beginning (the sex scene). It was kind of a jolt like HEY! THIS IS A MOVIE ABOUT TWO GAY GUYS. But the rest of the movie you kind of forget that being ‘gay’ is a thing that’s different to being straight. I don’t mean to say that the gay identity is erased, but it’s just… Like it was always the same, being gay or straight. They go through the same relationship struggles that a lot of couples – no matter the sexual identity.

As I sit here and think about queer films that I’ve seen, a lot has to do with making sure that they are not radical in their events, just radical to those who oppose or don’t understand what is means to be queer and how being queer does not equate to threatening. I guess that is my biggest takeaway from this section so far. Taking into consideration how the arguments of the authors are worded, their vocabulary, the movie, other readings I’ve done for other classes, none of them are confrontational the way that the mainstream North American media and activists seem to present queerness, the in your face kind of way. I also don’t mean to say that that is wrong either – if that’s how a person wants to present themselves then why is that wrong? But there are clearly two ways to go about presenting queer bodies in the mainstream.

Again sorry if I said something that wasn't correct - I'm still learning! And sorry about the discussion at the end I was trying to be as openly worded as possible. 

Diaspora, Others, Citizenship, Queer identity

(**Sorry for this long and single post.)

Sara Dorow’s article on the adoption of Chinese babies into ‘white household’ also brings up the importance of American binary racism we talked about during the first week of our class. It is interesting how she seems to suggest that this ‘preference’ for those Chinese little girls was their young age, health, status as ‘not-wanted orphan’ but also her physique. Appearance did have something to do with the selection of the child. Like it is mentioned in the article, the beauty of Asian babies is admired and object of desire. The exotic traits of the babies do not fit the ‘normative white middle class society’, but fit their ‘taste’ (or was considered malleable enough to fit their taste). This emphasis on physique made me think of the Orientalist art movement in Europe; when the European artists began to wanting to own Chinese ceramics or textiles and started to depict Chinese-influenced themes. Chinese art, like the Chinese adopted child, was object of desire and object of “assimilation” (or transformation? I am not sure which term would fit the best). However, there is a certain objectification of the human being (the child), as 'something' you can pick among other beings available. This selection and preference of Chinese babies over domestic babies or other babies in the world become somehow racial too. Like Dorow explains, race matters. The identity of those Chinese babies is somewhat more malleable and, thus, those babies are considered to be more ‘adoptable’ kids than older kids.

Something I would like to mention also for this article is that Dorow relates that both the child and the parents filled some kind of need to each other. It is interesting how she relates this relation as double-sided since I have the impression that the discourse of fulfilling the affective need (and not desire) of the parents is not so popular.

Ahn Hua’s concept of ‘homing desire’ as security of destination really got to me. She explains Pico Iyer’s “Global soul” as migratory people who have multiple homes and feel more at his place in the liminal space between departure and arrival. The author also relates Ahmed’s concept of multiple homes which throw away the ideal of the singular happy home (household). However, the important point is that ‘home’ is not something understood as fixed and in the past, but more as a (impossible) feeling. Home is a place where you feel like home – but is somehow never reached. Home seems to be explained as ideal future. It really got me because I have never considered Montreal as home (even though I am born here) and especially after living in Korea and travelling a lot, I never feel like I am coming back 'home' when I come back here. In the contrary, I feel like when I am in Montreal, I am always looking for 'home'. Home is not a fixed place in the past where I try to go back to, but something I hope to find.

Lim's discussion about the movie Geisha and 'trans' is really interesting since it goes in the opposite way I was thinking about transnationalism and pan-asian identity. The Chinese actresses are being understood as '(de)territorialising' agents, by embodying with them their Chinese cultural identity and the nation. By accepting to play Japanese women, and therefore 'passing' from being Chinese bodies to represent Japanese bodies, there passing from being the embodiment of one nation to another.  By the reactions of some of the Chinese audience, this action of crossing nation does not reinforce a pan-Asian identity, but does the opposite. This action of trans-passing is contested and therefore reinforce the idea of distinct cultural identities. Like Lim explains, it is not because the bodies is geographically 'passing' that those bodies transgress the distinct and established ideologies of nation.

I am really excited to talk about the movie. Queer theory is quite new for me, so I am excited to share thoughts and get enlightened a little more on the movie. My experience of the movie was quite interesting. I watched the first scene and half of the second scene just before dinner. I had to pause it then go back to it. From the little that I saw at first, I remember thinking that the movie would be high in eroticism and queer sexuality; that the movie would be somehow considered 'shocking' to a certain audience. However, after seeing the movie, Audrey Yue's article's title is exactly the question I asked myself:  What it is so queer about this movie? The failure of love between two male characters? I personally think that the movie does a really good job on normalizing the queer - as queer I mean something that is considered to not be considered the 'norms'; here male-female love. I did not feel like I was watching a movie about a queer/homosexual relationship, but simply a love story (hoping that Fai would have made a move on Chang!! Ugh!!!). Yes, maybe this movie is queer because of their selections of characters, but the film does not marginalize them. Maybe it is due to the fact that all the characters (or main ones) are homosexual but I feel like not having a depiction of queer identities 'more provocative' or 'shocking', the characters are not depicted as "spectacle". In that sense, I really see the movie as the "unqueerness" of queer identity; or just framing queer love in a normal and banal setting; not 'otherizing' them.

I had difficulties understanding Yue's discussion of the waterfalls/lamp and their relation to diaspora. I will try to articulate what I understood and please let me know if I did understood wrong or not. So the ultimate destination, the waterfalls, is actually not the contact point between Brazil and Argentina but the contact point between the characters as diaspora and their homeland, Hong Kong. Therefore, Happy Together is about a re-connection to their homeland. I guess, the question of feeling 'at home' would be related, but I fail to see the link with between the waterfalls and queer identity. They left their home, because they felt othered by their sexuality (?). So going to the waterfalls would be relinking them to their 'home', but the problem of feeling as an 'other' would still be there even if they go back, no? Like Gopinath mentions, "home in the queer fantasy of the past is the space of violent disowning", something that can never be reached. So by returning to Hong Kong (or going to the waterfalls), does Fai really return home?

Gopinath's figure of the woman "acts as a primary marker of an essential, inviolable communal identity or tradition". The woman body as body of the nation is not only related to India, but to Korea too with the discussion of comfort women. The body is not individually owned and therefore need to conform to the 'national' idea of how it should be. Like Gopinath explains, that it is not that non-heterosexual women are excluded from home (household, nation, etc), but just cannot be imagined. There is an impossibility to imagine this identity. And here, I think it important to stress the difference between a process of 'othering' and a process of 'imagining' a non-heterosexual woman identity - or 'inventing' in the Indian context Gopinath explains. The movie Hum Aapke Hain Koun's queer scene is actually really interesting (I am currently writing a paper on it), and like Gopinath mentions. is not a scene going against the conventional idea of household. The scene happens with the presence of women only and one girl is cross-gender disguised; enabling them to 'explicitly' joke around as two lovers. Here, there is definitely something queer about cross-dressing, but this is really interesting how the viewers do not understood necessarily understand this interaction as a queer relation. Like Lim, this passing act of cross-dressing is not considered as transgression.

Saving Face: A Film About Two Queer East Asian Women

Here is the trailer for one of my favourite films (one of the only existing films?) about a queer relationship between two East Asian women, who are simultaneously navigating diaspora and family relationships.

Basic plot line: Girl meets another girl at a large Chinese family get-together (seriously, my ultimate dream). They fall in love. Girl #1's widowed mother gets pregnant out of wedlock and is kicked out of her family home. Mother moves in with daughter. They both try to navigate love. There are lots of feelings involved.

I couldn't find an online version of the film, but I'm sure it would be very easy to access through other means on the internet!

When Queerness Can Exist Within the Home

I have watched Happy Together many times before, and each time, I have taken something different from the film. I distinctly remember the first time I watched the film, when I realized that Lai Yiu-Fai looked a bit like my uncle, and that Ho Po-Wing reminded me of the young man who lived downstairs in my childhood home (the one that my mother had ironically said was “not very straight in character”…). 

With that realization, somehow, the very idea of “queerness” significantly shifted for me. For a long time, queerness had been associated with the white, “Western” Other: the muscular cisgender men who picked each other up in noisy bars and passionately fucked in the sanitized privacy of their condos. The nice white men in the nice white beds. 

Seemingly in significant details in Happy Together allowed me to envision queerness in a subjectivity that I identified with. Instead of seeing two white bodies taking a romantic bubble bath with candles and wine, I saw Fai cleaning Po-Wing’s body with a damp towel. Instead of seeing the consumption of steak under forks, I saw the sharing of rice shoved happily into mouths with chopsticks. And in these ways, “queer” did not seem so queer to me anymore - the film allowed me to imagine possibilities for such relationships to be accommodated by my history. 

Like Audrey Yue observes at the Melbourne screening of Happy Together, queerness in non-white communities is often not imagined through an alternative community but rather “through time, through shared networks and connections between places, people and stories” (252). Instead of escaping the natal home in search of an alternative community (such is common of the "Western" coming-out narrative), perhaps it is possible to negotiate a space for non-heteronormativity within the initial place of belonging and protection.

With that said, the film does not show that in order for such a relationship to survive, its eroticism and sexuality must be blanched. Like Rey Chow mentions, visually striking images exist amidst this seemingly mundaneness of daily life. The scenes in which Fai and Po-Wing tango dance and in which the visually alluring waterfall lamp are at the forefront create a space for heightened pleasure. Chow further argues that the film creates two different, yet complementary, emotional perspectives for the audience - one of mundaneness and one of spectacularity. The possibility of their integration, then, provides a site for queer utopia.

My own interpretation and selective reading of Happy Together definitely do not exist to discredit Yue’s very legitimate and very justified critique of the film. She points out that the film actually operates around the sexual containment of queerness. For example, Chang’s homoerotic desires are suggested due to his keen observations of Fai’s “nice voice”; however, he does not consummate these desires. When Fai and Chang bid goodbye, Fai tells Chang to close his eyes, and we expect that they will kiss, but they do not. Immediately after, the camera focuses in on the two men moving toward each other in slow motion, and again we expect a kiss, but again our expectation is not brought to fruition. 

Instead, Chang eventually reaches his destination at the lighthouse and returns to Taiwan. Fai, on the other hand, eventually returns to Hong Kong. It is only Po-Wing that is seemingly punished at the end of the film - is this because of the excess queerness that he had embodied throughout the film? Does his punishment (or perhaps inability to attain redemption) unveil an inherent oppressiveness in the film?

Something I wanted to add...

Now I understand that not everything on the internet is true... I thought that this reddit post went well with some discussions that we've been having. 

http://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/2km4et/tifu_by_making_a_stupid_assumption_about_my/

(sorry for potentially nasty comment section)

The followup was accidentally deleted but someone managed to grab a screen shot: 

http://i.imgur.com/jgWKwVx.png

A Bit of Last Week Plus Some of This Week (AKA two topics that aren't related)

***Disclaimer: This segment’s blog posts and discussions will be a little more difficult for me because I am not well versed in queer theory so I may not be able to effectively communicate my ideas. The readings I’ve done so far are shorter but far denser, complex, and theoretical than I am used to so forgive and correct me if I understand something incorrectly.

I honestly can’t feel anything but hatred for some of the comments made by the parents of Chinese adoptees in Sara Dorow’s article. I’m more of a positive person and I usually try to assume the best intentions of people but I can’t help but feel anger towards these people. When it comes to transracial adoption, I personally feel that the best intention is the White savior/rescue discourse (p. 363) because though it is built through racialized institutions its end goal minus all the other factors is promoting good. But Dorow makes it clear that the promotion of good is based upon the whitening of Asian subjects in comparison to Black Americans. One parent in particular described her reason as choosing a Chinese adoption was that it was “clean, pure.” It is so quick in someone’s mind to associate white with purity, making the ability for domestic adoption to be ‘black’ because of the ability for mothers to reclaim a baby (p. 368).

It also disgusts me that the babies are a fad, even called fitting a ‘taste’ as the baby was compared to decorations by one mother (p. 370). Another parent thought that, “having Asian children made her and her husband more interesting people, in comparison to bland white culture.” As we saw in the readings last week, there is always a fine line that parents should figure out when it comes to how much of the ethnic culture should be encouraged in the child, but using the child’s ethnicity as the basis of encouraging interest in oneself is a completely different issue! Children should not be considered accessories! (I’m having difficulties not reposting the ‘my emotions!’ GIF right now).

The article did bring up an interesting point that I would love to further investigate should I be offered any opportunity… Dorow briefly mentioned George who is fourth-generation Chinese American. I’d really be interested in knowing more about transnational adoption but within the same ethnicity, but even more in ethnicities who have been in countries where they do not ethnically originate. What if a non-white adoptive parent who did not associate with their ethnicity adopted from the country of their ethnicity? How would those children grow up? Would they feel like something was missing from their lives, such as the case of the Korean adoptees? *This does not mean that I think that George does not identify with Chinese culture.

            I wanted to briefly discuss Gopinath’s article about sexuality in Asia and how they create a space in which they can be acknowledged as citizens of a nation. Gopinath makes two great points that reinforce something I learned in another class. Gopinath states, “Fire then, like Funny Boy, refuses to subscribe to the notion that the proper manifestation of same-sex eroticism is within a “politics of visibility” in the public sphere.” I believe Gopinath is trying to say that unlike Euramerican lesbian portrayals in film, these two films demonstrate that sexuality does not have to appear in the public sphere in order to be political. (I think… Maybe…?) Gopinath continues with, “…the film makes explicit ways in which not all female same-sex desire culminates in an autonomous “lesbianism,” and not all “lesbianism” is at odds with domestic marital arrangements. I think by this Gopinath is trying to say that lesbianism is not as clearly defined and secured in the films, and it does not always try to be in opposition to the heteronormative couple. (Again... I’m a little unclear). But what I’m trying to get to is an article I read that described that there are women-only spas that women in India go to for erotic experiences (I use this word lightly because I don’t want it to come off as something they try once; it is a lifestyle? Ugh words are so tricky). The women who go asking for a massage are going there for a sexual experience with women. I find this interesting because I think that the closed off spa is an extension of the private space in which women are able to fulfill their same-sex desires, but are able to return to the domestic sphere with their husbands. (Another * is necessary to acknowledge that some women actually are struggling with their sexuality and they feel confined in a homophobic country)