naesung

이상, 김유정, 박태원 발표

2008-03-07T02:24:00.000-05:00

Kim Yu-Jǒng (The Camellias 1936, Spring 1935), Pak T’ae-Wǒn (Kubo 1934), Yi Sang (Wings 1936, Meetings and Farewells 1937) Presentation

The readings for today represent both a stylistic and a large temporal disconnect from the texts we have read to this point. They are published following the Japanese bombing of Shanghai, and the escalation of military tensions leading to the Pacific and Second World War when the Korean press was put under renewed scrutiny and once again heavily censored. These political events had wide-sweeping effects on writers and intellectuals, who were often forced to either collaborate with the Colonial Government, lose their livelihoods, or face jail time. In this light, the works for this week are impressive most of all in the fact that they were allowed to publish despite the censors. More than our other readings in this course, they focus on the doldrums of modern life — “modernology,” as per Kubo (143). The traumatic immediacy of the colonial environment has been discarded and is replaced by a situation that, without direct accusation, is mired in the anxieties of everyday life; in this case those are the fundamentals of humanity, love and money, in no particular order.

One recurring character in several of the works is that of the dispossessed intellectual. This character is all the more important because in many ways he represents the writer himself, a relationship that Yi Sang makes clearly explicit in Meetings and Farewells: “I, Yi Sang, the faithless son, had caused the ruin of this already declining home” (80). Similarly, the “stuffed genius” in Wings (140) is a perfect example of how the plight of the intellectual is characterized within these novels. Some have suggested that he is “decrepit” (Tyler) and that “society views him as a sort of animal” (Linda), he is “dim-witted” (Dan) or possibly “mentally retarded” (Lokchi), but the lucid feeling of his pathetic nature is constant. I would argue that although he suffers some defect, nevertheless it has little to do with his intrinsic mental state. The fact that he is the narrator, and his discussions of Russian and French literature (141) as well as his constant interiority and investigation lead us to identify with him strongly as a rational man, comparable maybe to the protagonist from “Letters from the Underground.” Kubo (in Kubo) and Yi Sang (in Meetings and Farewells) are similarly handicapped, although not as drastically. Kubo’s very senses, his eyesight and his hearing, are weak, and these physical weaknesses are directly related to his life as a literati: “the storybooks he used to read. The novels he spent his nights with. Kubo’s health must have suffered irreparable damage in his boyhood…” (144). Yi Sang depicts himself as an ailing writer in Meetings and Farewells, where already at the age of twenty-six, “writing several novels and a few lines of poetry aggravated [his] poor health” (80). But if it is not his, or Kubo’s, individual weakness that cripples them, is it the strength of women? Or the state of society?

On the one hand, the subjectivity of women has come to the forefront, with the complete control exercised by the wife in Wings, the constant back-and-forth made by Kum-hong in Meetings and Farewells, and the blatant shows of power in Kim Yu-Jǒng’s texts. Woman has come into her own, but at the same time she figures less as a central character when compared to the novels of Yi Kwang-Su. Women do not possess interiority in these texts, but are portrayed as a relatively constant base for the protagonists, missing is the development of modern consciousness — there is no process of enlightment delivered in these texts. Instead, we are treated with the fully modern man and his anxieties surrounded by fully modern women.

Kisaeng are not new characters in our experience of Korean literature, but the unvirtuous woman has, to this point, been of passing interest. In Mujǒng the loss of chastity is made up for through devotion to the nation. In this case, it is practically assumed; Kubo’s anxiety about the placement of the umbrella and the husband’s ignorance of his wife’s life as a kisaeng pre-suppose a world where such things are commonplace. At once, the sexual liberation of women is viewed as a threat (Stephen suggests this with the “cock fighting”) but at the same time, the imperturbability of women, and their sexual promiscuity also accesses alternate anxieties about women as the last bastion of traditional culture. Here, the male writers are powerless in the face of Japanese colonialism, and they suffer from intellectual ennui as a result of being stifled by the colonial government, but the hope for nation renewal also becomes lost with the “loss” of the motherly ideal. It is worth molding Dan’s point that women may represent the oppression of Japan over the Korean male, in this case. It may also be that the Japanese oppression of women, their conquering of the motherly ideal, becomes a direct oppression of the Korean male. Intentional ignorance is the result, as with a traumatic experience — the trauma of colonialism.

The position of love within these texts is also intriguing. Yi Sang’s love for Kum-Hong, which seems to temporarily cure him of his (colonial?) ailments. Kubo’s constant search for “happiness,” and the monetary associations that comes to hold, may be directly relatable to the characters in Wings, and the nihilism where selling her body leads to the wife’s comfortable relationship with her husband, how that money provides the basis for happiness in Wings.

Money: pleasure in giving money (wings) money buying happiness (kubo) monetary exchange with son-in-law (Spring, Spring) and the role of monetary sponsorship in Camellias.

Hoodwinked

2007-12-29T23:52:00.001-05:00

What a wonderful movie... I'm on a youtube kick right now, but I do really like this song.

Born Invincible

2007-12-29T00:12:00.000-05:00

I finally figured out the name of a movie that's been haunting me for several years. It is undoubtedly the best shameless kung-fu flick I've ever seen (along with the one where the guy's thumb makes a loud swish noise in his motions). I remember watching Born Invincible at the Annex as a kid and one scene would always make me (figuratively) cream, where the Tai Chi master (the bad guy) is in the middle of fighting and still manages to draw a Tai Chi Ying/Yang symbol in the ground with his feet. OMG OMG OMG.

Here's the fight scene in all of it's glory while I go off searching for the full movie.

New Organization

2007-12-28T16:07:00.000-05:00

I know it gets old... I'm moving away from using HTML, towards using one or two templates and plugging into Web 2.0 applications for the rest.

I'm keeping current things under "frequency," audio-visual things under "sight and sound," and old blog material under "facades."

This will remain my blog for the forseeable future. Wordpress is great and open source, but the hosting just doesn't give me enough control over the presentation. So, I'll try to make Blogger tags work, but if it doesn't work, I'm gonna have to come to terms with it.

me2day is the Korean equivalent of twitter, blogging single-line comments. Really, it's sort of more like facebook-statuses than anything else.

I'm going to try and keep up with del.icio.us, but it's never been very convenient... not that I bookmark many things anyway...

New Location

2007-06-10T15:29:00.000-04:00

First of all, I'd like to call everyone's attention to the new domain for my site: www.naesung.com. It was taken for several years by the naeseong school in Korea, but now I've requisitioned it and it points here. I like that there's a little ambiguity between 내숭 and 내성... it appeals to the pun-meister in me.

As for this blog... Again I'm switching to another blog for my BA Thesis research trip in Korea this summer, but also switching to a new blog interface. It's not being hosted at http://blog.naesung.com through DotClear, French blog software which is really big in Europe right now. Unfortunately, it doesn't let me customize as much as I'd like too, but I've done a number on it using CSS and I'll be posting to it while I edit some of the kinks out.

Enjoy.

Drinking with superiors a "violation of human dignity"

2007-06-10T11:11:00.000-04:00

Here's an article I picked up from The Marmot's Hole on women in the Korean workplace dealing with force liquor consumption. I'm not sure I agree with his (tongue in cheek) equation of this with feminine development, since I know my fair share of guys who aren't big fans of this practice too. In any case, it's an interesting sort of development, and it will be interesting to see what sort of direct impact this court case has on drinking practices.

Corporate Korea Corks the Bottle as Women Rise - New York Times:

In May, in the first ruling of its kind, the Seoul High Court said that forcing a subordinate to drink alcohol was illegal, and it pronounced the manager guilty of a “violation of human dignity.” The court awarded the woman $32,000 in damages for the incidents, which occurred in 2004.

The ruling was as much a testament to women’s growing presence in corporate life here as a confirmation of changes already under way. As an increasing number of women have joined companies as professionals in the past half decade, corporate South Korea has struggled to change the country’s thoroughly male-centered corporate culture, starting with alcohol.

Graduate School

2007-06-08T13:08:00.000-04:00

I changed my background picture to a comic from Married to the Sea. I expect some of my professors would really appreciate this one.

Original source: http://www.marriedtothesea.com/052607/graduate-school.gif

Fusion Food

2007-05-28T05:34:00.000-04:00

I'm somewhat uncomfortable with the terminology fusion/hybrid and authentic/original. I think it's important to avoid reducing the debate to "is hybrid/fusion food authentic or are they mutually exclusive?" That is, it's an important thing to consider, but it's also a false choice.

Specifically it jumps to mind that a non-valued abstract idea of progress can have all sorts of things attached to it — such as development, hybridization, hegemonic change or growth — all of which have their own implications for the way we think about the issue.

In this case, I think there's been a lot of energy and effort expended to nationalize (attach concretely to national identity) these food industries, and a result of that is our conceptualization of food change/evolution in terms of a "clash of culture" or "hybridization" rather than natural growth or development from within a single culture, and this naturally carries all sorts of negative values associated with creolization (of language, skin color, culture, etc.).

This is very useful politically of course, both economically in building a nationalist economic function for diasporic communities and promoting nationalism at home in general.

Another idea I had during class came from our discussion of sushi identified as a luxury good and how increase in price can increase demand to a certain extent and in the right conditions. I can't recall who said it (Sean?) but someone suggested that the exotic/far-removed nature of Japan from US experience might have been instrumental in creating this valuation of Japanese food products. But it seems to me that this sort of "value of exoticism" alone can't explain why Japanese food in particular, and not Korean, Chinese, Cambodian or Laotian food, became so high-class.

Certainly, I don't want to downplay the historical element; that is, businessmen on airplanes and the Washington's "special" relationship with Tokyo after the war militarily and economically, but I wonder if this can't be rolled into the sense of security that comes from our popular recognition of Japan as a developed and modern society. This, of course, dating back to the late 19th century when the West was entrusting the rest of Asia to Japan's careful Westernized care. And if this is what gives sushi such high-class appeal (exoticism paired with development and a popular recognition of modern character), how ironic is it that development (cum Westernization) becomes paired with traditionalism in food. I think it points to the inherent "falseness" of both tradition and authenticity as categories meaningful in any way but instrumentally politically (in this particular discourse).

From my notes:

food-elasticity
-> exoticism
(_asian_? or specifically japanese? = development, modernism vs. tradition in food = authenticity?)

What's in a Name: Conventional Oddity

2007-05-24T03:45:00.000-04:00

Names have representative and constitutive power, and the name of the convention tells it all: “Anime Central: the Midwest Anime and Manga Convention.” At once, it recognizes the regional significance this event has for anime and manga fans in the Midwest United States; at the same time, it embeds itself in a national and, by extension, global nation of fandom through explicit “glocalization.” Anime and manga are transnational commodities now, both in their material commercial manifestation and as a social consumer lifestyle that includes all sorts of standards of behavior. These behaviors are mediated and recycled through the convention, a word stressing the normalization of action, or an interface through which normalized individuals can reaffirm their homogenous normalcy. To this extent, a convention of anime fans (“otaku,” to use a purposefully othering term) seems like a contradiction, but the continuity of ordered society, however far it may fall from the beaten path, calls for the maintenance of conventions of normalcy.

I begin by approaching a woman who appears to be out of place — maybe out of a sense of fraternity. She sits completely exhausted in a chair on the second floor of the hotel, tired from the “visually rich” convention atmosphere playing itself out around her. All over, teenagers dressed in costumes handmade from fabric and cardboard mill about snapping photographs and posing with new found friends. Julia is the mother of a sixteen-year-old fan and although they live in Chicago, she has come to stay at the hotel with her husband in order to give their daughter better access to this Mecca of Midwest fandom.

Julia suggests that the anime style, although derivative, in “imitating” what has already been done allows young people a certain “liberty in interpretation” by playing a sort of pastiche with the characters. “Some people on the fringe in other situations can ‘adorn’ themselves here to be unique.”

Julia is a painter and her husband is a photographer. She has seen some of the anime her daughter watches, in order to “stay in touch with what she’s watching.” Although Julia does not dislike it, she becomes physically tired of watching it after a while. But she is interested in how anime fits into a longer Japanese film tradition. Having seen Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai only a week before, she notes that anime engages many of the same themes and uses many of the same basic characters — Toshiro Mifune’s buffoon character, for instance. Themes of protecting villages, fighting demons, and always the use of an epic hero on a quest for redemption are very popular.

Entering the convention as an outsider for the first time, although disconcerting, provides some sense of relief and security. The people here seem transparent. From the grown men wearing girls’ school uniforms, to the women walking around with yaoi bull paddles [for spanking], the labels “otaku,” nerd, weirdo and fanatic seem uniquely applicable. Behaviors of consumption, sale, obsession, love, frustration and transgression — all familiar actions — seem to play themselves out in a community of individuals who have been given a place to “be themselves” away from an overly critical society.

The sales floor is separated into two vendor areas, the vendors’ area proper and a smaller place called Artists’ Alley. Although these areas are, ostensibly, divided by function — retailers go to the vendors’ area and independent artists go to Artists’ Alley — effectively, it is divided through economic production. Jessica, a girl minding her friend’s stand in Artists’ Alley says he usually makes his money on the convention floor selling comics but this year was not able to get a booth and was stuck selling his books where “less people pass by.” The artists on the convention floor are generally published through self-publishing companies like ComiXpress or Lulu and have relationships with the publishing industry.

In Artists’ Alley, some people have printed large signs for their booth and enjoy some measure of fame, but most of the artists are either publishing their first productions or selling smaller, hobbyist, artistic creations. Even in Artists’ Alley, work is clearly separated by the economic bases of the artists. Dirk, an artist of eight years who publishes a popular and widely read web-comic about Chicago, Paradigm Shift, draws sketches signs his books which are available on Amazon and though his self-styled company DynaManga. A few stalls over, a young man Robbie sits in front of a wall of InkJet-printed hobbyist artwork stuck in plastic covers selling art at his first convention, obviously hurting for business but enjoying every minute of it. For one artist, the convention is one of a series through which he gains commissions and earns a livelihood, for the other, it is an opportunity to show off the artwork he creates as homage and to make a quick buck or two. Some artists come to the conventions to get the word out about newly completed projects and network with other artists. In a way, the Artists’ Alley avoids all sorts of classification that the convention structure attempts to impose.

Speaking with the artists, one theme emerges: “manga” is a relative term. Older artists such as Dirk, although they recognize the visual preferences of their fans, are hesitant using the term to describe their artwork. The influences they cite for their art style are Battle of the Planets, Stargazers and Speedracer, but while they were watching those programs as kids they were not even aware that those were Japanese programs. Their styles meld these Japanese influences with influences from American realist comic styles such as X-Men or Excalibur (in the case of Dirk). Both Dirk and his friend Brian explain they are American authors writing a comic book story in Chicago — manga may not be the best term. And yet, we call convention goers “otaku,” consumers of Japanese pop culture. Are the labels of manga and anime applied by fans, following an aesthetic association, or are they instrumentally used by authors in order to create demand? To some extent, it seems like both may be true at the same time — on one hand, the willingness of manga fans to consume “inauthentic” goods points to a loose affiliation with the Japanese national character of the art form, and on the other hand the physical presence of the artists proves that they see an anime and manga convention as a relevant opportunity. How can we reconcile the consumer of Japanese culture and the producer of American comic books at a “manga and anime convention”?

On the floor, too, things are not quite as they seem. First impressions lead many of us to call it a complete orgy of consumerism — the victory of American market capitalism over the romantic image of fan involvement in Genshiken. While the act of sale and purchase certainly characterize much of the social interaction here, I feel like it is also important to highlight the ways in which this consumptive action fits into other forms of sociality. Firstly, consumption on the floor is not homogenous; some stores, such as the Sasuga Japanese Bookstore and Hendane (a Yaoi doujinshi shop), sell import items to fans, who would otherwise have to buy them online with shipping and handling fees. Others are American outlets that bring large collections of comics, domestic and foreign collectibles and American-release anime videos. Then, there are representatives of American production houses like Bandai and Geneon, seeking to promote their products to the seas of fans. And finally, fans who seek to fill a space in the American market for products relating to Japanese pop culture like Okashi Studios, a California-based Ren’Ai game programming start-up, or the multitude of costume designers and accessorizers. All these sellers interact with buyers in different ways for different goals — not always with the intention of making a quick buck.

For cosplay designers with their own studios, financial independence can be difficult and showing off your designs at conventions is the most direct and effective way to reach the market for their designs. But essentially, the goal is to keep living an artistic lifestyle that would otherwise be financially unsupportable. Large company representatives also come for the face time and in order to get fans into their products — profit is not central as evidenced by the way they slash DVD and game prices in order to entice fans. For domestic retailers, the convention is a mixed blessing; one man I spoke with, Stan, described how he needed to make a $4000 profit in order to break even with costs for travel and renting his stand at the convention. Coming here gives him a wider market in which to sell his products, but the presence of large companies like Bandai make it very difficult because they undercut their distributor prices at the convention, and small domestic retailers are forced to sell at a loss if they want to attract customers.

Julia’s husband takes out his new digital camera, through which he has been viewing the convention spectacle. As an artist, he has paid particular attention to the artistic creations of young cosplay costumers. He begins to flip through the pictures, including a couple of me biting my pen taking notes. He has taken some great pictures of the cosplayers and their outfits; one woman he composes in her kimono with the wooden frame of a red parasol taking up all of the background. In another picture, he has surreptitiously photographed an obese woman resting a few seats over from us; the photograph is composed from behind and above, avoiding her gaze. He quickly flips past that image, embarrassed the woman might catch sight of it. To me, she appears to be sleeping.

One thing painfully clear to me throughout the convention was the ever-present dichotomy of gaze subject and object, and the ways that the subjective identity of objects of gaze seemed to overpower and set the tone of the convention. The example of Julia’s husband, the photographer, shows how the gaze of the observer is not always (or ever) equal. That there is an implicit classification in his photographs — this much is clear — and by unpacking the valuations made by the gazer, we can explicate some of the assumptions made about the identity of gaze objects. He has made a separation between photographs taken as art and photographs that are not taken as art — photographs taken as part of a chronological visual record. These two types are accompanied by, respectively, pride and shame (on the part of the photographer), ‘surreal’ beauty and ‘realist’ ugliness (for the aesthetic of the photograph), as well as subjective power and objective victimization (on the part of the object of gaze).

The beautiful cosplayers who figure in Julia’s husband’s photography at the convention come with the subjective role of an object of gaze. They present themselves as objects of aesthetic beauty and the gazer responds to that. As outsiders, we think to ourselves, “there are a lot more beautiful normal people here than I expected,” and take this to support the hypothesis that “otaku” are more normal than we once thought. However, we are unable, then, to conceive of the convention crowd as a single social body. When we encounter people who are ‘strange’ by the normal conventions we have opened to this body, they become a counter-proof that the ‘wild otaku’ does exist in nature. This leads to the fetishization of the aesthetic spectacle of cosplay and the further devaluation of the abnormal otaku. Hence, the dichotomous relationship between objects of beauty that fits into normal constructs of aesthetic appreciation and objects of self-evidencing abnormality that we encounter at the convention — the objects that when we return home, we frame and admire (“she made a great costume and I took a great picture of it!”) and those we will show to our friends while declaring: “the people at that convention were so weird!” And this is most certainly a gendered gaze. The subjectivity of the object cannot be stressed enough however, as this subjective assumption of the role is the driving force behind the normalization of these relationships.

The convention cannot be read as a homogenous social structure of power and consumption. The convention is not a celebration of the ideas of manga and anime, but rather a subjective expression made by of the individual consumptive fans and producers that come and participate in building and reimagining a social body. That is not to say that everyone comes or leaves with the same goals or bounty, but the interactions that happen within the convention are governed by this separation. Normalcy is not effected across individuals, as an emancipatory force, but rather it becomes the method by which individual members of a disparate and wide-spread community reaffirm their social relationships with one another in a gendered and differentially powered way.

A question... Not a statement of truth

2007-05-18T00:05:00.000-04:00

Today I posed a question to Professor Tawara about the case of student who are “school refusers” or habitually truants, and then got into an argument with some friends about the nature of the question. Hopefully, this can clarify some of the reasons I had for asking such a question, and what the question was, in and of itself.

Tawara explained some views of the LDP in proposing educational reforms, and the ways that state (LDP) goals intersected with proposed/enacted education policy. To me, it seems that there were two trajectories to his argument. One, that the state was trying to implement a nationalistic (aigoku? I wonder why Norma was translating this as patriotic; maybe my Korean/Chinese is influencing my interpretation too much) curriculum as a way to change consciousness and awareness of the population towards the history and future of the state and war. On the other hand, he discussed shortly (and I think most of us filled in the blanks) how the state, with its educational reforms, was working towards segregating the student community into “winners” and “losers” — those with bright futures and the intrinsically ‘stupid’ riff-raff who’s only recourse was to feel ‘optimistic’ or ‘happy’ in their lives. He also spoke about the need for a population of unemployed poor who would provide the manpower for the hypothetical military force in the future.

If we are to look at the American situation, the military draws people who are economically disadvantaged, structurally, by the way the American education system is set up. Poor, minority, or underachieving (drop-out/school refusing) kids are presented with the army as the only way to make a viable financial future for themselves, and whether or not they are nationalistic, the only economic option for them is to enlist — this works out for us very well (except when we “stretch our forces too thin”). However, in Japan, where the nationalistic curriculum in presented as instrumental in producing army-ready citizenry, I think there is an obvious assumption made on the part of the LDP that these students will stay in school and receive this nationalistic knowledge unproblematically. He suggested, but didn’t say explicitly, that students who don’t fit nto the nationalistic model might be dealt with through embarrassment (nationalistic report cards), corporal punishment or other methods of state enforcement (the Youth Law, which brings police enforcement into the schools and gives the state authority to intern youth who have the potential to be problematic).

Now, the problem I see is that the educational system systematically disadvantages youth who might fall into the class of potential army recruits — the poor, basically — in order to make them sign up for the country. But these students are also the ones that will more than likely drop out of the education system as a result of that oppression. If this were the American system, it would look very familiar — dropouts would then enter the army as their only economic recourse. But based on his declaration that the new education system is built to train Japanese to be nationalistic in order that they choose to join the army (based on their lack of opportunity elsewhere), it seems to me that the very people who are the target of this education voluntarily removing themselves from the nationalistic education system might pose a problem to the designers of this program.

I want to know, how does the LDP instrumentally view students who refuse school — as social problems or as a resource to be mined? Because it seems like, although they might successfully, they don’t see those with an alternative education as good prospects for national service.

How do state goals intersect/deal with individual student reactions that are not, necessarily, based on resistance or revolution, but rather on personal circumstance?

Ethnography Draft/Longest Post

2007-05-17T06:54:00.000-04:00

[I haven’t decided what to cut out of my ethnography or how to organize it quite yet, so it may not be as narratively interesting as Tomomi might hope.]

I came across Julia lounging in a chair on the second floor of the hotel. She interested me as a subject because she was obviously out of place and completely exhausted. Julia is the mother of a convention attendee. She was at the convention with her husband as well. She is a painter, and her husband is a University of Illinois trained photographer, who attended the University of Chicago for graduate school. Although they live in Chicago, they decided to stay at the Hyatt for a few days in order to be closer to the convention. Their daughter is sixteen. Julia’s initial impression of the convention is that it is “visually rich” with lots of colors and costumes to look at. From the interview: “A lot, no, some people on the fringe in other situations can “adorn” themselves here to be unique.”

I asked her what she thought of the anime/manga style as an artist, suggesting that it might be a little derivative. She responded that she sees where it’s kind of “imitating” what has already been done, but that they find “liberty in interpretation.”

Julia’s husband joined us at this point. We spoke about the class I am taking, and his history at the University of Chicago and he mentioned one class in anime/manga being taught at Georgetown (?) and that he thought it was an interesting concept (classes on anime/manga), I had the feeling that he saw it as a sort of pop culture revolution. Julia mentioned that she had watched some of the anime her daughter watches, just “to stay in touch with what she’s watching.” Although she doesn’t dislike it, she becomes tired watching it, after a while. A week before, they had watched Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, and she compared that to the way anime is constructed around some basic character types. She said that some of the characters from Seven Samurai appear in anime, such as the buffoon character, etc. Also, they use themes of protecting villages, fighting demons, and the use of an epic hero on a quest for redemption (Rouroni Kenshin?).

Julia’s husband was wandering around taking pictures of cosplayers at the convention, trying out a new camera he bought. From what I saw, he made some interesting compositions, even snapping a few pictures of me writing notes. He also had a picture from overhead of an obese woman sitting in the chair across from us. I did not ask him about that picture, but I wonder if he wasn’t trying to capture the image of a “real otaku” as someone who doesn’t take care of their bodies and is obsessive, maybe anime being their only outlet. I had similar notions seeing the large amount of disabled people at the convention (unfortunately, I didn’t have the presence of mind to interview them, either), but then to contrast that by taking pictures of beautiful women in tight outfits brings up questions about the tension between sexual power and gaze power in the convention.

The next person I interviewed was manning a booth selling Shojo Ai manga. Two men ran the booth, which primarily sold Yaoi comics, separated by series, and merchandise that their company produces. One item that they sold, which I saw around the convention several times, was a bull paddle with “Yaoi” written on each side. The man said that the paddle design was originally theirs, although some other companies have copied the design. When asked about the customer base for their Yaoi comics, he said that about ninety-eight percent of customers were women. He suggested that if you were to try and sell Yaoi comics at a gay pride parade, you wouldn’t make any sales. The reason women made the majority of the customer base is that the stories put more emphasis on relationships and love than they do on gay sex, he said, comparing them to Harlequin romance novels. I thought this was indicative of what they thought of how women relate to such stories, without much critical consideration of the same-sex desire in the story. This might relate somewhat to the comics IS and the other intersex comic Emi brought. [Hendane.com]

Next, me and Lauren spoke to a couple of young women representing a gaming company in California, Okashi Studios. They produce Ren’Ai games, which are interactive visual novels with romantic elements. They developed their in CE-GUI using C++, and led a panel on Ren’Ai games later that day. [okashistudios.com]

Then we spoke to a woman representing Yaoi Press, an American company that publishes yaoi doujinshi for an English speaking audience. Some work is original that gets published in America and licensed to similar companies in Europe. A lot of their doujinshi is written by international authors and translated into English, a theme that recurred in conversations throughout the convention. Their authors come from Germany, Spain, Italy, the Philippines, and many other countries with the notable exception of Great Britain (which they didn’t mention). [yaoipress.com / everythingyaoi.com]

PMBQ is an artist from California who was putting out her first self-published book. In the past, she has been a comic editor and coordinated with other artists as a chief editor to create compilation publications for their group. She is working to get her book accepted by the Diamond distribution company [a company that distributes all the major comic labels], who she mentions has recently been trying to open up more access to distribution for independent authors and artists. Therefore, they have a number of editorial representatives who screen new work, and PMBQ says it’s sort of luck-of-the-draw whether you’ll have a receptive representative. Other sources for self-publishing, she says, are comixpress.com and lulu.com. Some companies don’t require authors to order print runs, because they print on-demand and sell at the author’s set price directly to customers. [shop.pmbq.com]

Among the vendors, a number of people were selling accessories to cosplay. Sword shops abounded, and waiting in the line to the ATM, one kid behind us said on the phone, “Yeah, I’m just gonna buy a sword real quick.” At many of the retail booths, they were selling Naruto headbands, the most memorable of which was at the Sasuga Japanese Bookstore, where it was accompanied with a sign to the effect of: “REAL authentic Naruto Headbands directly from Japan!! — supplies limited, first come first served.” Although I didn’t see any kimonos for sale, there were certainly Chinese-style tops and jackets for women.

At one booth, a man stood in front of a table covered only in different colors of accessory cat ears. I’ve seen stores like this at medieval fairs with demon horns, but the work that went into the cat ears was really incredible. They each were dyed different colors, with different color hair placed in each one. The man who ran the booth, Ryan, said they were all handmade and dyed using a special process of powdering with non-liquid dye. He’s been making costumes for upward of eight years out of Las Vegas, mostly for independent films. When asked, he expressed an intense distaste for anime and manga, and said he wasn’t particularly into this sort of cosplay, but his girlfriend Yaya was, and he saw it as an opportunity to sell ears to schoolgirls. He said that he was mainly a science fiction fan, and that the difference between science fiction costumes and anime cosplay outfits was that the science fiction fans tried to replicate the uniforms from movies exactly as an artistic piece rather than a performance piece. He said he had at least five to ten thousand dollars in single costumes at home, and that was normal for science fiction costumers. Ryan was very blunt and obviously not having a great time at this convention. [bountyhardware.com / angelicstar.net (girlfriend’s site)]

Ryan also pointed me to ask his friend Barb about cosplay, since she runs a sewing workshop in Chicago specializing in commissioned cosplay outfits. At the time, she was posing with her friend for a multitude of cameras in matching Asuka and Rei outfits, but I pulled her aside for a moment (feeling kind of guilty) to ask her some questions regarding her work. She said she started cosplaying in high school, where she was “intrigued” by the costumes. She had some interest in fashion, but it was mostly making costumes that interested her. [limebarb.com / limebarbcosplay.com]

I moved on from the vendor area into the “Artists’ Alley” section of the convention floor, where single artists were drawing portraits and selling their self-published work. There was an obvious divide between the Artists’ alley artists and those with enough money to put their work into a vendor stall. One woman selling books for her friend [Jessica] mentioned that he made most of his money by selling in the vendor area, but this year he couldn’t make it in (for money reasons, maybe?) and was stuck selling his books in Artists’ Alley where “less people pass by.”

The first girl I spoke to was selling comics for a friend of hers she met at another convention. She was a sociology student from a Tennessee university, and was very happy when I introduced myself as an anthropology student studying the convention. Jessica (her name) and I had a long discussion about observations I had made at the convention, and it helped me to order some of my thoughts. We also shortly discussed the curious perspectives on yaoi and yuri manga and some of the topics covered by our class articles on shojo ai manga. Jessica, a lesbian, expressed frustration with the way that yuri and yaoi are too-often written by heterosexual men using the themes to “spice up” what is eventually just a heteronormative romance story. She was very happy to hear the word “intersex” and I introduced her to the address of Emi Koyama’s website, telling her about the intersex manga that Emi spoke about in class. Speaking of fiction genres we liked, she mentioned that she didn’t really enjoy most manga, preferring “dark themes” and historical fiction. She recommended the book “The Teahouse Five” before I left, centering on the historical fiction Japanese-oriented theme as the main reason for her recommendation.

Next I met a guy called Robbie who was selling his artwork printed and placed in plastic page sleeves. This was another thing I noticed about Artists’ Alley, the resources of the artists were wide and varying. Some authors had professionally self-published comics for sale, others were drawing art on the spot and selling sketches, and some people, like Robbie, were printing out their CAD art on inkjet printers and selling them straight up. This was his second convention selling artwork, most of which he never drew with the intention to sell. He said he was an active member of the deviantart web community, and shared most of his artwork there. We spoke for some time about his methods and inspiration. He uses a Wacom tablet and draws directly into photoshop to do his artwork. The inspiration he draws directly from the animes he likes and his favorite characters. Although he shares a lot of fan art with other artists on deviantart, he isn’t interested in looking at other fan art and thinking of the characters from that perspective. He thinks that a lot of fan art becomes derivative and ends up looking the same, so he’d like to create something more original without looking at the ways other people are drawing the same subjects. I wondered about his choice of aesthetic design for the scenes he drew, which was to draw the characters on melodramatic, softly colored and romanticized backdrops (e.g. Rouroni Kenshin with a moon and waterfall behind him), but he didn’t have a clear answer for that question.

Next, I met Brian a.k.a. BMAN. He was selling his original work with his girlfriend (?). He had recently self-published the first volume of his comic, which he started writing years ago. When he began writing, he was writing it with the intention to publish but released it as a web comic until fall 2004 through the website [graphicsmash.com] in order to get feedback and gain a fan base. He now works for a video game company designing game structures, events, logistics and scripts. His original education was in art, and he entered the video game industry as an artistic designer, but seems to have a lot of fun as a game designer as well. He took some time from employment to start a game company with friends and produce a game that has been critically acclaimed for story and game play, but failed financially after their publisher fired the entire marketing department. He draws his inspiration mainly from old anime brought to the states: Speedrace, Stargazer, Battle of the Planets, etc. before they were markedly Japanese. He started reading manga when it first started coming out in the states and has been coming to Anime Central since it started. Although he says his style has been highly influenced by manga, he also notes how his style fluxes between a more western realist perspective and the anime style he’s appropriated. [twilighttangents.com]

Brian recommended me to go speak with his friend Dirk at Paradigm Shift, a Chicago-based webcomic that has gained some notoriety. He’s been drawing comics for seven or eight years, playing with subscription services online for a bit, but he found that it hurt his fan base too much and currently lives off freelance illustration work and sales of merchandise. Dirk says his favorite web comics are Narbonic, Templar Arizona and Gunner Crate Court but that he often doesn’t have time to read them because he falls behind in his own work. I could feel that he feels a strong loyalty to readers of his work online, and tries very hard to meet self-imposed production deadlines. One person was buying a sketch and two books while I was there, and he took the time to draw an illustration, message and signature in each book he sold, saying he does it at every convention for all customers. He sees his work as a half way point between American comic style and Japanese manga style, and was very happy when I decided to use the word “comic” rather than “manga.” The most influential series for him, like Brian were early imports into the American market: Battle of the Planets and especially RoboTech. Jim Lee’s X-Men and Ella Davis’ Excalibur were his favorite American influences, and he would “skim milk money” as a kid to buy the issues. He’s been attending the convention for seven to eight years. [www.webcomicsnation.com/dirktiede]

Stan retailer

Ssagan2@mac.com from Tolido, Ohio. His store carries American comic books too, but only graphic novels with start and finish, not single issues.

History repeating itself, while people try to become more different, they become more and more the same (e.g. Screaming kids for the beatles screaming kids for InuYasha)

Anime = visual book

The people saying “anime porn promotes sex” are the same people who worshiped Elvis on the Ed Sullivan show and were castigated by their parents.

Need $4000 to break even with rent for a stand. But there’s lots of competition and “vendors” (distributors/producers) show up and undercut the prices.

Some of the best anime “will never see the light of [American] TV” because:

1) strong female leads

2) visual dramas — don’t merchandise well

3) intelligently written and made

e.g. Slayers! Is like MASH, in Slayers they save the earth from chaos, in MASH they save the US from war.

Somedays dreaming is one of his favorite anime

Bandai: too busy to talk

Patty and Yuricon

Patty is “the wife”

55% women at Yuricon

try to be regular convention

but other events as well

vendor sales up to them, but depends on the people who go to such a con

Yuri promotion as main purpose. Not “hentai” more “yuri,” want to remove that stereotype of Yuri as Porn

Yaoi also gets sold.

Some artists they publish:

Eriko Tadeno

Rika Takashima

They promote books by women for women

Yuri Hime = Women + Men

Masquerade

3 people left from first year

off color jokes:

“they involve leashes, I’m sure”

about sexual jokes: “this is a family show”

“she blinged out?”

“note to self: order future volumes of Amagami-Sama”

Vash got a big response…. But so old… is this cause of cartoon network? People chanting “LOVE AND PEACE”

“after all if you’re gonna play the part, look the part”

big response for Naruto

“Lot of men going around beltless tonight… not like that!”

“you… later” Yaoi chant. “Do it!”

Lots of lil’ Jon jokes thgis convention: Yeah! What? Okay!

Inuyasha popular “I like a lady in uniform”

Kingdom hearts Sora dark form really popular…. REALLY

Cloud and Eris are huge too.

Anti-Semitism, Nazi fetishism linked to masquerade

“Masturbation” / “Mel Gibson is a closet Jew”

“Did you get the amber alert? We changed the description to camouflage pants.”

[Said by a two security guards in conversation; first of all, with all these cosplayers, how do you spot a pair of camouflage pants? It points out sort of the ridiculous nature of the cosplay at the convention. Secondly, it’s interesting to note how many people were dressed in military clothing, and not just cosplayers.

Heard in passing:

Passing a woman with cat ears: “here, kitty kitty” as he pats her head. Characters become entry point for social interaction.

Attend to consumption in the convention: money is the route to all activity… what are we measuring money versus? Desire for material.

Smoking is bad for you. It’s bad for you too. You should just eat pocky. You can’t smoke pocky… or…

Regarding the radical heart of protest

2007-05-10T19:00:00.000-04:00

I think it’s interesting to consider how these two personalities of activism work together to create a movement and work together to bring change. Certainly, I can see the basis of her critique of the “destructive” nature of such movements, but I think it’s too easy to dismiss these movements on account of their “destructiveness” (is there a better word to use?).

I think that when we look at Emi Koyama’s discussion of modern medicine and her support of the transition from “Intersex” to “DSD” there are two things we can draw from it. First, we might say that she is working within the realist social order of change, moving away from violent radicalism but maintaining an activist desire to “make things better.” To this extent, we might classify her with Nakajima-san’s primary respect for process and restraint. On the other hand, we can easily recognize how Emi-san’s activism is, at it’s most fundamental level, seeking to radically change society in all the fundamental ways we interact with each other. Remove pathologization? How? Can we even relate in the same way when something like that is accomplished? And what is war or article nine in a world like that?

I guess what I would say is: if we want to change the world, however we choose to interact with other people in society who may be opposed to us, with a dismissive/destructive gaze or with a nurturing/constructive/contemptuous one, ultimately, the original incipient act in activism is the radical production of change in ourselves, and the destruction of some social beliefs. How you choose to present this to others may differ, but don’t ever lose this radicalism.

Regarding the preference for women in adoption

2007-05-10T00:21:00.000-04:00

Someone raised the interesting question after Koyama's lecture about the preference for girls in international (Asian) adoption. To be honest, while I think this is a very relevant and interesting topic and the people who responded had respectable and nuanced opinions to share on the topic, I was anxious when it was raised. This is because I think some of the issues attached to this preference are not easily traversed, especially when your words are being recorded.

The thoughts that were running through my head at the time were first of all that the way that Emi framed the issue in her presentation suggested the primacy of aesthetic fetishism in the choice of girls over boys — not in an explicitly sexual vein, although that might be arguable, but to the same extent that pretty women have been used as "office flowers," the extent that women are fetishized as aesthetically pleasing (by both men and women) and considered well-behaved or more emotionally stable. I think the commenters covered this point rather well.

On the other hand, what I saw as a possibly more controversial or touchy subject, I think there are also psychosexual racial politics attached to this preference as well, particular in that the preference is inseparable from a relationship of developmental responsibility that is uniquely inherent to raising children. That is, I feel like adopting parents may be influenced by a subconscious anxiety that parents (with socially specific "parental love") share in wanting to raise their children to be the best they can be. If we were to explicate this desire, I think it might be expressed as a desire to raise strong, courageous, responsible men (not boys) and respectful, beautiful, talented women (not girls). Which is where psychosexual racism comes in; we've discussed how Asian women are fetishized by Americans as almost "more feminine than females," and the use of the adjective "beautiful" to refer specifically to adopted asian daughters. Subjecting Asian males to the same psychosexual racist gaze, I think there is a strong Euroamerican characterization of Asian men as sexually impotent, smart (=nerdy/otaku) but not strong, loyal but not courageous, high-achieving but not necessarily responsible in the same way that men in America are expect to become pillars of strength and responsibility in the nuclear family. I wonder, therefore, whether or not there is an anxiety among adopting parents that somehow an Asian male child would represent some kind of failure on the European parents' part. Certainly, this idea of optimal development is central to eugenics debates on "edited" biological birth, and it seems to me that sexist, racist issues are incredibly relevant to that discourse.

Again, I was anxious to say this in class, because I think there are a lot of missteps to be made in expressing or wording these sorts of issues. I'm also not a big fan of Freudian psychosocial analysis, so it seems to me like there should be a better answer. Please be flexible in reading it, I don't want to offend anyone.

Regarding the Projection of Desire

2007-05-09T22:05:00.000-04:00

To summarize: why is it that we need to assign sex to objects of desire and identify relationships as either same-sex or cross-sex (homo and hetero) in order to legitimize desire?

I wish I hadn't taken so long to write about the Welker article... Reading other peoples' responses has really colored my thinking about this, but I'll try my best to add something to the discussion.

I think Welker would have written a better article if he left out every paragraph containing the word "lesbian." It seems like his research, at every turn, is leading him away from gender binarism, and yet he seems to hold on with all his might to the binary pairs of two-person sexed desire: male-male, female-female, female-male. He never even entertains the idea of a third observer/participant position for the readers of shojo ai, conveniently circumventing the most prominent of photographic gazes, that of the artist. He also goes through great lengths to use lesbian theories in order to prove that shojo ai manga conforms to ideas about what constitutes lesbian literature... I found this all utterly unconvincing, and I think this is a perfect place to start sharpening Occam's Razor: if everything points to it being homosexual male love, it doesn't make much sense to interpret it as homosexual female love. Not that I think gender construction in these comics is uncomplicated, but it seems like Welker arbitrarily associates the comics with lesbian desire without any real rigorous persuasive arguments, other than his choice of theorists on which to draw.

As Lauren points out, lesbian desire needs to be clarified, but I think I would even take a step further back and start to question what any erotic desire is. Sure, we can talk about the birds and the bees until the sun goes down — incipient chemical processes and physical manifestations of desire — we can also talk about socially recognized methods for expressing desire, which may bring us closer to understanding how same-sex desire becomes stigmatized and heterosexuality normalized. But I think that this sort of partitioning-off of erotic desire from other social expressions of desire, want, loss, etc. and to some extent, i think it's worth eroticizing those "everyday" apppetites. But for me this raises an issue, which Welker strikes at the core of, which I'll put very bluntly: where is the line between same-sex desire and homosexuality? I think that different people in different situations have vested interests in expanding one or the other of those categories, but in Welker, he seems completely comfortable crossing between one and the other when it suits him, which is frustrating.

One of his lines to reasoning the lesbian-ness of shojo ai manga was presented on page 844. where he compares film gaze and shojo gaze. "Mulvey's theoretical assumption of male spectatorship and a male gaze inherently objectifying women inspired a wave of feminist film criticism, while in Japan shojo manga readers were being transported to a dreamy world of boys' love, with its at least superficial objectification of boys and its assumption of a wholly female readership." Of course, he conveniently avoids the fact that "male gaze" in society doesn't necessary have any relation to the number of male spectators. And simply because they become sexual creatures in the manga, doesn't mean that boys get objectified as sex objects in those manga, because they retain a sense of subjectivity. Rather, the huge lady with the petticoats seems more objectified.

Another thing, he seems so very anxious about the inability to find visual sexual discrimination. I think this is at the heart of the discussion of what constitutes sexual desire, because it points directly to a perceived need for physical interfacing in the most vivid way. When Welker writes on page 849, "In no case does the infantile penis represent a threat, or even sexual power; rather the representations of Gilbert tend to be nebulous enough to allow readers to see a vulva if they so desire," I think he's completely missing the point of desire, fantasy, transformation, and all those great things we've almost discussed. Especially considering anime as the object of sexual desire, why should people need to envision a set of anatomically "proper" and "opposite" sexual organs in order to express erotic desire?

I did really like the Ueno Chizuko quotes he used, although they aren't direct quotation either apparently, so maybe they are suspect? He writes "Ueno contends that ultimately the beautiful boy is 'neither male nor female' but a 'third sex/gender'... She asserts that 'it is only a person's mind, which is bound by the gender dichotomy, that mistakes that which is not a girl for a boy'... I am inclined to believe that even reading 'him' as a 'boy' can be an active choice" (852). Where to start? When he talks about Ueno's quote, is he using 'he' to refer to "that which is not a girl"? Then he's obviously misinterpreting her intention behind that quote, and it's indicative of mis-steps made elsewhere in the article. She's arguing, I think, that we can't think of the 'beautiful boy' as part of a dichotomous gender system, but not arguing that sexual desire can't be expressed for them. And she doesn't say a word about that sexual desire being mapped onto a fantasized gender, which Welker starts arguing in the next paragraph.

He also cheapens the idea of de-gendered or newly gendered characters when he talks about "these romantic relationships are based on difference" (853) in "a matter of degree." The fact is, when there are two characters, dichotomized gender is being pulled out of it, and if nothing else, their relative positions on a "scale" become indicative of the extremities of that scale. For some reason, he thinks that this sort of "difference" can be indicative of breaking out of heteronormativity, I think that's bullshit.

He continually returns to this trope of liberating women's sexual desire from patriarchal power, but this isn't entirely convincing either. I'm sure he's referencing some other theorists, but breaking from heteronormativity doesn't immediately entail the deconstruction of patriarchy, it seems to me. Especially in shojo ai manga, where the beautiful boy, however 'he' is interpreted by the reader through fantasy, is still identified with the masculine. If this is the only way that sexual autonomy through fantasy can acceptably be presented to women (well, this and the violent rape of women in other shojo manga) then I think it points more to an argument for the subject position of the male in sexual intercourse. Why should women need to identify with a male subject in order to fantasize about sex? On page 865: "Regardless of whether boys' love manga were created merely to offer heterosexual readers a temporary respite from patriarchal restrictions on their desire, some readers found in identifying with the beautiful boy a way through the looking glass to a world outside the patriarchy" Is EVERYWHERE and EVERYTHING the patriarchy for this guy?

One thing that's particularly interesting to me — mainly because it's photography week in ethnography class — is the gaze, and the subject position of characters in the manga as well as producers and readers... and the characters' gaze and how that's interpreted by readers.

Physical Configuration of the Body

2007-05-08T23:24:00.000-04:00

I think what Koyama is ideally trying to do by turning to the discourse of disability is to separate medically identifiable physical condition (as a static identity) from socially constructed forms of identification. That is, there are seveal different discourses at work in her writing: disability, pathology, medicine, normality and identity (any more?). As much as possible, she's trying to keep these ideas separate in our minds.

Especially disability is a difficult thing for us to divorce from pathology and medicine. It's not an ideal example of common notions of disability, but for instance when we say that a person has a "broken leg" we are inadvertantly accessing the rhetoric of pathology and abnormality. Broken-ness immediately references ideas of "fixing" and "unbroken" as a normative category. I think that she sees the physical configuration of bodies as something that is pathologized, not through medicine as such, but through these broader social processes (inclusive of linguistics). The fact that we use medicine to identify conditions or physical configurations is not problematic, insofar as it is explicitly divorced from pathology — the construction of a normative category through discourses of normality and abnormality.

Intersex, then, as a physical configuration that has medically measurable and definable causes/traits, is unproblematic in its relationship to medicine. Medicine can be applied to achieve disparate goals with success or failure. But the goals that are realized in the medical industrial complex, in specific instances of doctors, HMOs, patients and conditions, and the relation between these instances, is highly problematic because it is primarily a social construction of relationship, nothing medical about it. If society is the site of the pathologization of physical configuration, then that is where we need to turn our attention.

This comes out in her discussion of GID and gender association, as well. I recommend people read her discussion of drivers' licenses at http://eminism.org/interchange/2005/20050611-intersexedsociety.html, because she more explicitly discusses intersex's relationship to trans/queer issues. If we look at the desire to identify with one sex or another, extant in society, we can see how this, too, works to pathologize intersex in a different way from the abstracted medical treatment of it as a condition or physical configuration. However this pathologization is achieved, it is our binary normative understanding of gender that raises the question of "which way will we perform the surgery?" or "should surgery be performed at birth?" These questions themselves are indicative of the social pathologization of intersex conditions.

Because intersex has been pathologized with reference to sex binarism, then, and because disability has become a stand-in for abnormailty, people may take offense or exception to being labeled "diabled" with an intersex condition. But I totally agree with her that a move away from the label of intersex, which supports binarism, and towards (hopefully, eventually)unpathologized medical identifications of the physical configuration of bodies (DSD) is a good thing. With this end in mind, we can also work towards divorcing the concept of personal gender identity from issues of creating community and support networks for people who are (medically) intersex. As a society, we have a lot of issues to work out around gender identification and the "authenticity" (again, that word!) of gender identities, but for the intersex community, it seems, these can't be handled in addition to the personal immediate needs of individuals. This is where the instrumental use of "intersex" as a battlefield for gender politics by other groups becomes problematic, it seems to me.

I earlier wrote: "The fact that we use medicine to identify conditions or physical configurations is not problematic," but I also have something to say about that which is not directly related to Koyama's article. Fall quarter I read Shigehisa Kuriyama's book "The Expressiveness of the Body" in class (highly highly recommended book), where he talks about the different historical development of European and Chinese medicine. It's interesting because he draws into question a lot of the notions about medical "identification" and how they are the result of a particular (European) medical tradition of discourse. The direct association of the body with muscles, organs, and anotomically separable bodies within the body is not something that can be taken for granted. He contrasts this European discourse with Chinese medicine's understanding of the body as A) made up of interrlated functional groupings and B) as dialectically embedded in world processes of change. I think in Koyama's articles, we are interacting with a Eurocentric medical practice, which she represents in an abstracted, ideal form for a variety of reasons, but it might be interesting to also question how, when we (I) say "physical configuration," it introduces an entirely different discourse on the nature of physicality and how that discourse itself is embedded in a socially specific history of pathology. So, yeah, everything is problematic afterall.

Cont. More gun control

2007-05-07T05:08:00.000-04:00

In response to Patrick's comeback in the comment section:

Patrick, sorry about the muddy nature of my post overall. Obviously there were some parts that could have been better stated, and some other places where I misunderstood your meaning completely. Let me see if I can clarify a little.

First, about the free market. I actually took your meaning to be the exact opposite of what you were saying. Obviously, I know that you weren't trying to generalize China through racist logic, but I did believe that you were accidentally applying such logic with the best of intentions. I was mistaken, thinking you were arguing for further market protections, worried about China's entry into the market because it poses a threat to American production jobs. Now that I reread your post, that's obviously not the point you were trying to make and I apologize for misinterpreting it.

On the other hand, I think the language of exploitation is perfectly applicable. Whether or not exploitation provides living wages for workers in those countries, the truth of the matter is that "trickle down" economics is always accompanied by an increasingly polarized inequality of wealth distribution. And as long as this is the case, I can't see global capitalism as global philanthropy... maybe exploitation with certain system-wide positive effects. On the other hand, I have great respect for economists; they know exactly how capitalism works and have generally made a decision given damages that they feel accomplishes other worthwhile goals — just don't ask me to share those goals.

I'm not trying to be unfair to workers by saying we're exploiting them. I'm not suggesting we're pulling the wool over their eyes, but that we're engaging them with, maybe offering good wage earning opportunities, at their maximum expense, and our maximum benefit — it's the laws of the market.

I think market principles can help, but the application of economics does not need to mean the opening of all markets. An example from the recent Korean FTA talks: Korean rice farmers want the government to protect their market. You might consider this from the free market perspective and say, "rice will be cheaper if they are forced to compete with foreign rice growers," but the situation is more complicated than that. Korea is a small country, and familial networks are pretty big. There's probably a rice farmer in half of the extended families in the country, and plenty of towns where rice growing is the only meaningful product. To destroy that rice economy, therefore, while it may lower the price of rice in Korea, may not be in the interest of the local economy or the majority of Koreans. Protections in markets have measurable effects, and I don't think that those are always necessarily bad. You're talking about US protectionism, however, and I think in general you're right on the money... we don't have any place being protectionist about our economy as the economically most powerful country in the world.

I realize you don't really want to go into the market issue, so I don't want anyone to interpret this response as negatively representative of Patrick's views. I'm just thinking through the issue for myself.

About which: sorry again for my use of the word "parade." I was making a general statement, and didn't mean to characterize you like that. I think it's great that you are honest and vocal about your views on this blog. I admit I wince, sometimes, at the points you make, but I don't think there's any call to be embarrassed. I know you're not Republican, although I would probably call you conservative or slightly nationalistic, if pressured... But that's fine because it's certainly not knee-jerk party line — I think you really add to the debate (would there be a debate without your posts?). However, I think it's also unfair to generalize the discussion in our classes, on the blogs or boards as "far-left or in conformity with the liberal mainstream media." We are certainly a pretty liberal group of people, but I think you should give people the same intellectual respect everyone deserves. We're all thinking through the same stuff, and learning as we go. On the other hand, devising plans to take others down is indefensible...... unless they're being really stupid, and I'lll be the judge of that (just kidding). I think it's most important that we be flexible with our thoughts, rather than absolutist.

The thing about the Bill of Rights that I'm trying to say, is that the right to bear arms has been attached to the right of free speech and practice of religion, not necessarily by you, and that the gun lobby has worked very hard to keep them inseparable. Therefore, the right to free speech, which I freely recognize as a right that it is important to protect in all free societies on the globe (to some extent), is represented in the Bill of Rights. But the "right to bear arms," which I largely disagree constitutes a real human right (any more than the right to "own anything I want inclusive of weapons, drugs and other people" should be a right), is also represented in that document. Instead of pointing at the "rights" the document represents, people look at those representations and declare them sacrosanct. And the logic usually goes in this order: the right to speech is inalienable, the right to speech is in the Bill of Rights, the right to bear arms is also in the Bill of Rights, therefore the right to bear arms must also be inalienable. Again, I'm not saying that's your choice of legitimizing logic, but it's been used often enough that I'd like to hear more about your view on why the right to bear arms should be inalienable.

Enough with bathtubs. Do you really want to argue that bathtubs should be regulated to whatever extent guns are? Nor does anyone else. Do you want to say that bathtubs purchasers should be subject to a background check? Then, do you want gun buyers not to be subject to one?

Since you ask, in a nutshell I believe (for reasons I won't be able to fully explain here) that even with a right to bear arms, there should be a ban on all small arms and assault rifles from the get-go; that there is a huge problem with gun violence above and beyond other kinds of violence in American society; and I would very much like to see all gun ownership restricted to military and public safety personnel. So, all three really. I think when saying "leisurely violence" isn't a particularly good way of putting it, on my part. "Unprecedented ease with which the modern American can kill is completely unacceptable" is basically what I mean by "leisurely violence." The point about alcohol is well taken; my uncle was killed by a drunk driver, so I know how socially destructive that can be. But the point is that as a society, we try to regulate that kind of activity as well. Do I expect gun deaths to drop to zero in the US if we ban guns? Probably not, but regulation will be effective is reducing them.

If my characterization was inaccurate, please put it down to my misinterpretation of your post. It really didn't come across to me that you believe the right to bear arms is inalienable, and as I said before, I'd love to hear more about your logic behind that. The right to abortion I can get behind, because I happen to agree with you, but I haven't gone through the mental steps to lead me to believe in the inalienable nature of the right to bear arms yet, so it's sort of new to me in a way. As for Katrina, I think that's a prime example of why people shouldn't have guns, although that seems to be a point that we'll disagree on. Personally, I don't worry too much about complete social collapse, since I'd be pretty much fucked if that happened in any case (I'm no Mad Max), but it's also a good example of why small arms make no sense in the self-defense logic. Is having a pistol going to help someone defending their house in the boonies any more than a rifle would (actually, a rifle would be more powerful and accurate)? Pistols are only useful to be portable, concealed and to fire quickly. And if you can't fire a rifle straight, then the chances are you can't fire a pistol when push comes to shove either.

I'm behind Nakajima about allowing the police to monopolize gun violence. I don't apologize for it, nor do I consider it to be hypocritical. Society is a complicated place, and if we're really arguing about what people without government have the "inalienable right" to do, yeah, we can all get guns and set up little compounds. But the nature of our social relationship in a government is that we set up privileges and rights that may be unequal in some respects in the interest of stability. The key is to empower people in different ways, through law, judicial oversight, citizen oversight, etc. And I think all those systems can work without the need for a threat of violence from citizen militias.

I'm sorry you won't share what you think about rights, because I think that's at the center of this argument — what is really an inalienable right and why? But I do want to say a word about being the devil's advocate, something I have a LOT of experience doing. In my opinion it's all well and good, as long as you're keeping another part of yourself off to the side that is growing and learning all the time from your experience. I decided to stop playing the devil's advocate because there was a point I realized that the only way I was growing as a person was that I knew more ways to come back at someone's arguments. That might not be you, or anyone else who decides to push the limit of people's thinking, but it was my experience, so I tend to be pretty disparaging of the practice.

You make a good point about my last paragraph... I actually started writing it and wasn't sure where to go. My first draft was something even more contradictory, and then I thought I caught it. You saw right through me, haha. What I mean is, policy is a socially contingent thing, and what it looks like (rhetoric) isn't always what it means/is (issues), because it is mutually dependent on a multitude of different factors which are not well-represented through that rhetoric.

I don't think anyone wants war, for which reason I don't think this argument is anything to get worked up over... but the issue is hardly ever the desired result, is it? Method is so much more controversial.

In response to gun control

2007-05-06T22:45:00.000-04:00

Written in response to a post on the Japanese Social Movements blog: Nakajima.

Where to start? I can’t possibly offer the same kind of detail as you’ve brought to the table, so anything I say will probably look myopic and one sided, but try and read into it.

What you say about the constitution and the bill of rights, I think it’s fair to say that they represent the sorts of values that have built our society and keep it on the (rocky, at times) straight and narrow. Simply to say that it was the product of a different time and situation isn’t to say that it’s worthless or represents a set of values that are no longer relevant. Nevertheless, although I wasn’t in the discussion so I don’t know how the comment was framed originally, it also seems valid to question the social contingency of those “truths we hold self evident.”

For one thing, it’s worth getting one thing down: it was NEVER “important for the framers that citizen militias were armed.” The Bill of Rights was put forward as a condition of federation to protect the rights of member states. It was never part of the original constitution. So any ideas we have of a bunch of enlightened philosophers in a room mapping a course for human society need to be thrown out the window. The Bill of Rights was, essentially, a political document and a compromise, manufactured in dialogue between groups of interests. Not that the political nature of its writing invalidate it, in fact I’m inclined to think that it makes a lot of it stronger and more convincing. So, no, it’s not irrelevant, but it’s not timeless either.

One clear temporal difference involving guns is how they have become increasingly more efficient at killing more people. If self-defense is the argument for a right to bear arms, it seems pretty clear to me that a rifle or full length shotgun will be quite sufficient for protecting your home, without the need for concealable small arms or AK-47’s. The fact is that weapons made to kill human beings efficiently are available and easy to use, and suddenly owning a gun is like owning a can of mace, except more expensive. But when you blind someone with mace for a week, you aren’t killing another human being. Premeditated murder can be accomplished in any case, that’s the nature of society as it stands, but the unprecedented ease with which the modern American can kill is completely unacceptable.

That brings me to the nature of violence with guns. I think however we think of violence or tools of violence — as substitutable or not — it’s pretty easy to draw a line between kitchen knives and bombs. The fact is that there’s a qualitative difference between the two as tools for violence. Ease of use, abstractedness from subjectivity, equality of access, and especially alternative use separate them. Yes, anything can be used for violence, and the banning of guns may not put a damper upon acts of violence (in Korea and Japan, where guns are highly illegal, knives are used quite often). But with a gun, leisurely violence becomes possible. And in the wrong hands, yes this is a huge problem. Obviously, monopoly of violence by the state is not acceptable if the state is not beholden to its citizens or the rule of law, but the answer to cases such as that of Amadou Diallo is not to put a gun in his right pocket, which wouldn’t have changed anything in the case. Rather, the answer is to hold the NYPD accountable to the rule of law and the citizenship of New York. The fact that police officers feel like it’s okay to shoot a man forty-one times (racism aside), I think, is indicative of the extent to which gun violence has been normalized in our society.

About abortion, I take it you’re arguing that any “right” in which a person dies is about as monstrous as any other. Why am I even arguing this point? The thing is, you seem to have more of a problem with hypocrisy than with the issues themselves. Even if we look at abortion as loss of life, combining the two issues still doesn’t make any sense. If you hate abortion, as loss of life, then why does that mean you have to be against gun control (you didn’t say that, I know) as a matter of principle? Because you see other people at hypocritical therefore you must be to even it out?

How can we argue about paying $5000 for a computer made in Silicon Valley when no consumer computer has been manufactured in Silicon Valley for years? I’m not exactly sure where you’re going with this… China’s entry to the market will not change a great deal, collectively we’ll find some other corner of the world to exploit. Suggesting that China capitalizing is going to rob the world of low cost labor is suggesting that Chinese are inherently exploitable, or better at mass labor. This sort of socially evolutionist logic I can’t stand.

To be honest, I don’t know a great deal about gun control issues, but it irritates me when people parade issues without considering the embedded nature of all government and policy. Gun control is lax at this point in history for a million reasons, none of which have anything to do with the constitution. Block-voting by the NRA and associated groups has a lot more to do with maintaining the status quo than historical legacy. If we’re going to have a debate about gun control issues, I think it’s important to divorce the issues from the rhetoric of policy.

I am concerned that you might take this as hateful or vicious, as well… I don’t intend any of it that way. But you’ve got some controversial views, I just hope you can recognize this as emotional disagreement on issues and not personal hate.

In which "Otaku Culture" is un-defined

2007-05-03T03:37:00.000-04:00

Since anime/manga week, and through our discussion on sexual politics last week, I feel like we've really been heading through the "uncharted territory" of Japanese popular culture. The frustrating and confusing thing is that it's also a part of social life that incomparably well documented and available for analysis. That is, if we wanted to chart traditional formations of motherhood through the war and into the modern period, it would require the analysis of some pretty spotty social records, consideration of self-censorship and heavy archival research of women's periodicals, circulation records, the socialization of state policy and different ways women in rural and urban areas relate to all those materials. It might also push us to consider how masculinity was constructed in transitions to an imperial system and through the "imperial/patriarchal crisis" catalyzed the end of the war when god-hood on Earth was shattered by the Military Rescript read by the Emperor on public radio. All these sorts of inquiries are complicated by our distance from the material. Popular culture in post-war Japan, on the other hand, is immediately accessible, well documented in the material and human record, and yet the scholarship is severely lacking — respectable methods of approaching modern, current history are practically non-existant. This untouchable nature of popular culture (which is, really, just "lived culture" in the modern period) is so fascinating! Even more so when we consider that Anthropology as a discipline is expertly tailored for just these sorts of lived problems.

When we consider "otaku culture" as a modern phenomenon, there are lots of issues inherent in that study, but not ones that can't be navigated, with difficulty, by good scholarship. "Takarazuka fans" is a relatively easy field to deal with, because it takes place in a site hierarchically managed by physical space and ritualized communication (love letters, presents for actors, and the highly structured acts of production and reception during productions). Otaku culture is more difficult, because by its very nature it avoids socialization (presumably) except in the widest possible settings — such as Comic Market or other large fan-based events. But neither can we draw a large circle around the Comic Market and declare: "Here be Otaku!" Nor can we begin a textual analysis of regular anime or manga and declare: "Here be Otaku values, taken to heart by companies that closely monitor fan action!" This is because "otaku" cannot be defined simply through consumption, just as mass consumption can never work to fully define the marketplace, irrespective of authorial, editorial or market powers. Finally, we cannot look at newspaper articles, social commentary, and market reports, such as that of the NRI, and declare: "This is the socially applied definition of Otaku, and linguistically, this is where true Otakudom must lie!"

The fact of the matter is, all we have to work with is the word/concept "otaku" — "your honored house" — with a set of meanings attached by various actors, that is applied in various ways throughout society. In this way, I feel like LaMarre makes a valid and worthy addition to the literature by designating otaku not as a population, but as a discourse. We can unpack the question "are you otaku?" in infinitely many ways based on the questioner, the interviewee, and the situation, and the answer will never be satisfactory or definitive: "yes, I am otaku," "no, I'm not otaku" — we simply don't have any basis on which to use the answers to this question to form a survey population, unless that population is "people who respond positively when asked whether they are otaku." Then we can talk about numbers: "people who self-identified as otaku tended to be..." or "people who self-identified as otaku thought that..." We can do the same thing by asking third parties: "people identified as otaku tended..." etc. etc. ad nauseam. But none of these definitions help us to generalize the label.

On the other hand, we can provide research into the ways high school research groups are constructed and ask: "based on what models do these youth organize their own activities? and what social factors draw people to join such groups?" I think this is really the question at the heart of fandom in general, and otaku-ism in particular. In this way, we recognize that everyone is a potential resource for researching such trends. What is so fascinating about Shojo comics or Takarazuka, for instance, is the fact that we get "normal people" interacting in ways that we see as "abnormal" and interacting with personal desires that depart from hetero-normative social mores. It's a ridiculous question to ask: "why do all Takarazuka fans love women dressed as men?" Takarazuka's audience is clearly an embodied expression of desires formed through social activity elsewhere. Similarly, to me, it seems ridiculous to ask: "how do otaku act?" Because "otaku culture" or "culture identified with otaku-ism" is socialized, in a large part, outside of fan circles. "Circles" become the embodied expression of social desires and activities that depart from hetero-normative social mores in a similar way that Takarazuka fan action does.

Studying fans with the object of monolithically studying social activity, therefore, seems to me regressive. It seems to harken back to the day of studying "the native" in order to understand how all human society works. This isn't to say that social structures of fandom don't exist, or that they aren't worth studying, but rather that it cannot be a science of discovery — instead, it should be considered a science of connections.

Does this make sense? Lots of holes again, but I'm sure it can be developed. I'd like to spend some more time thinking about how we've seen "deviant" sexuality expressed in these various social structures, but how it seems to hint at a broader social phenomenon than simply expression of binary or physically inherent gender/sex pairs.

On dignity and society

2007-04-24T04:06:00.000-04:00

Haejoang Chohan, a feminist scholar friend of mine at Yonsei University, gave me a copy of her book "Talking on the Edge" a couple of years ago that I still haven't read more than ten pages of. It's a collection of letters published in Japanese and English between her and Japanese feminist intellectual Chizuko Ueno. I tried translating some of it as an exercise, but never got very far.

Anyway, watching the movie last week, this one piece seemed to be very relevant. I'm including two paragraphs I translated last year (assuming she won't sue me — we're pretty good friends):

As before, my mother cannot get up from her bed and she looks like she would rather give up food. A blood pressure and sugar level check every hour, the morning's insulin injection, eight pills of medicine, my mother's condition is based upon these indignities. My mother who asks: "It's not death and it's not life, what is this?" In the middle of that, there's not much I can do. That there are old songs from my childhood we used to sing together joyfully at ancestor worship is fortunate. That those songs have been released as they were on CD is also lucky. Because of that, it's fortunate that we can listen to those songs as I massage my mother's hands and feet and tell old stories. Yesterday, on Child's Day [a Korean holiday], recalling how every year she would take us all to the bakery "New York Bread," she seems happy. When we share stories like this, her spirit seems to return to her.

Have you ever read Phillip Aries' book "L'homme Devant la Mort (Man in Front of Death)"? On the first page of that book the 15th century painting "The Last Supper" is reprinted with the caption: "Even until the beginning of the 19th century, at a person's last meal not only the family but even people with no acquaintance could enter the dying person's room. A person would die in the midst of so many people." Birth, love, and death were are jumbled together in such a way. "There was a time when there was another life after death. In modern times, people try to completely ignore death, and agency in matters of death rests not with the person concerned, but has rather been transferred to the authority of the hospital system and HMOs," writes Aries. 'The age of tubes sticking from bodies like hedgehog spines and waiting for death,' how difficult it is not to enter the circumstance of relinquishing one's control of one's own fate and to live with dignity……. When you wonder whether you might have escaped, again you find yourself sliding back into that elaborate net, that sort of system makes my desire to escape it grow all the greater. (초한혜정, 경계에서 말한다, pp. 12-13)

When I think of the reality we are living with today — in Rokkasho, Iraq, Washington, Utah, Hiroshima, and all over the world in terms of environmental contamination and diseases such as HIV/AIDS and cancer — I think of how life in the modern age has been sharply separated from any sense of human subjectivity. Just as Aries points out how agency has "been transferred to the authority of the hospital system and HMOs" in the case of disease, the agency of life in Rokkasho has been transferred to Nihon Gennen and the electric consumers in Tokyo high rises, whose agency has in turn been transferred to an economic system of human material exploitation. To live is no longer an option, only to "make the most" of what human society has constructed out of life. Society can no longer be romanticized and partitioned as a set of mutual obligations and promises, entered into or exited from. If nothing else, the nuclear issue has proven the contingency of life in society.

It is also important, however, as director Kamanaka points out, not to romanticize the individual as a subject of good or evil forces. The laundry owner and construction workers, whether or not they try to escape these systems, it is not possible to ignore these processes. The plant will be built... people with nothing will come and work on it, because society dictates inequalities. On Thursday in my ethnography class, one group was presenting an ethnography of the Ukraine post-Chernobyl. They mentions how people working within Chernobyl are paid easily thrice as much as normal workers, and that this, paired with a social imperative (based on social services) to be sick for recognition as a citizen of the state, will always bring workers to these sites of destruction and disease. When I think about Rokkasho, I think about how the plant will slowly deteriorate the population of the village, both inside and out, and when it's done with those workers, others will come. Rokkasho is the exhaust pipe of the social net that we all yearn to escape, but is becoming increasingly impossible to separate ourselves from.

Where do we cross from Aries' description of society as open doors at birth and death — embeddedness in a human mass — to the society of global capitalism — that "circumstance of relinquishing one's control of one's own fate"? I wonder what dignity is in the modern age.

Andrew Talks Hip-Hop in Consumer Culture

2007-04-18T19:10:00.000-04:00

I can't help but wonder where cultural production in the last fifty years can have taken place but within the market structure. Surely, there are other ways to think about cultural forms than through a cost/benefit model, but the image of the starving artist working all night to create his masterpiece and bring enlightenment to the world — this is really the most concrete example of "optimistic hyperbole" that I can imagine. If we are to separate culture (broadly shared habitus), habitus (individually internalized and performed culture) and society (the site where habitus is formed and culture is situated), then in a society such as ours, where interactions around culture are so strongly riddled with market imperatives, where is habitus formed but through a variety of market interactions? Education — both in the family and in school — certainly has a huge effect on this, but there is no evidence that structured education of this sort has ever been anything less problematic than another set of complex social interactions — no less complex, and no less influential than life in consumer society.

To say that monetary incentives on the part of artists and producers of hip-hop are the primary impetus for its production and dissemination, doesn't really seem so problematic. Social interactions governed by capital and market structure produce a cultural set of knowledge which is then adaptively internalized as habitus in youth. The veracity or "value" of this culture may be called into question, so far as its authenticity or artificiality is concerned, but when it becomes something that a wider social group, such as youth, has internalized, it seems to me that this cultural habitus is just as valid as historical knowledge produced in textbooks or classrooms (which are beholden to equally "problematic" processes of production).

I also want to pull a point out of Tina's post to exemplify a point. She writes: "the arbitrary trend to imitate the… pastimes (ex. graffiti)… of leading figures in American hip-hop…" This is interesting, because graffiti and break-dancing are hardly arbitrary aspects of hip-hop in the United States. The four plus one pillar conception of hip-hop (MC, DJ, BBoy, Graffiti + maybe style) is really central to lending authenticity to it as more than just a musical style. On some level, criticism may be leveled at those who listen to JZ, dress in wave-caps and baggy jeans and call themselves part of a hip-hop culture — these are all market transactions where capital moves upward toward market planners. But the existence of a wider artistic and behavioral culture exemplified by graffiti, break dancing, underground music, and self-expression through (personal) rap, points to a much wider conception of "culture" at work here, irreducible to simple market manipulation (by whom? the spray paint companies?).

Finally, to suggest that "political causes" for hip-hop become ignored in imitation or transposition of hip-hop culture begs the question: what are the "political causes" of hip-hop? As middle class students with a wealth of cultural capital, I think it's presumptive to suggest that the only "political" causes in the world are those specifically relating to our own interactions with the broader "public" sphere. Personal identification, sense of purpose, ethical/moral structure, all these things find their way into hip-hop culture even as they are expressed by different individuals, and this sort of personal meaning-making is equally as important to the people enacting it as impeaching Bush may be to someone with the time and cultural capital to be worried about gun control or abortion rights.

The Visual Language of Manga

2007-04-18T03:31:00.000-04:00

Quotes:

Schodt, Dreamland Japan p. 26: "In this context, manga are merely another 'language,' and the panels and pages are but another type of 'words' adhering to a unique grammar."

p. 31: "But once the new 'vocabulary' and 'grammar' have been learned, it soon becomes clear that manga represent an extremely unfiltered view of the inner workings of their creators' minds... Reading manga is like peering into the unvarnished, unretouched reality of the Japanese mind.

I think these quotes raise some interesting issues ("interesting" is my keyword for the day). Schodt describes manga both as a sort of rich visual language and as a window directly into the Japanese subconscious (see below for quotes). Add this to the list of things that irritate me about the book.

For the visual language bit, I think it's worth comparing this to the Murakami reading and his short discussion of timing in anime as an expression of superflat. As anyone who has seen anime explosions can attest, the physical laws governing time in explosions and human movement are seriously warped by animators in Japan. Another great example of this which reaches to other genres such as Japanese and American live action film is the image of the samurai fight, where the two swordsmen run past each other and after what seems like an eternity, one finally starts gushing blood a la Monty Python, or simply falls to the ground. It's not a new or misunderstood visual language, either; in the last scene of Akira Kurosawa's Sanjuro, for instance, the same thing is seen to happen, and in the final fight scene of Kill Bill 1, it has been appropriated as caricature. This sort of visual trope is especially important in understanding how a pop visual language might be constructed.

So, when we talk about translation issues, I think one of the central impediments to broad reception of anime and manga in the United States is the need to learn an entirely new visual and metaphorical language, rather than the direct translation of spoken language. What the hell does the burning candle or teardrop on the side of characters' heads mean, for instance? Why do explosions look like liquid muffins? And what's the difference between a smiling emoticon (^^), an embarrassed emoticon (^^;) and a crying emoticon (;;)? These are all part of a visual culture that must be learned before "translation" can be achieved.

I was talking to my roommate earlier about American anime/manga otaku — he's a bigger fan of American comics than I — and it occurred to me: part of the identity of American otakus, when compared to Japanese people reading manga, has to do, not with knowing, learning, or understanding the _medium_ on a subjective scale, but rather with knowing, learning and understanding the foreign, distant _Japanese cum manga expert_ understanding of the medium. This seems to me another one of the reasons why American otakuism is so exclusive of popular reception: because it's based so much on expert information whose flow is restricted by language barriers and cultural access. Hardcore American otakus — who see fansubbed series before wide release, or read mangas in Japanese — can be seen as controlling a certain type of cultural capital that effectively blocks amateur entry into appreciation of the art and certainly is actively used to delegitimize "unsanctioned" American interpretations of anime or manga releases. Enter authenticity, stage left.

I wonder how this will change as American releases of major anime films become more concurrent with Japanese releases, such as Sony's simultaneous release of Katsuhiro Otomo's Steamboy on both ends of the Atlantic — something that Studio Ghibbli seems very close to working out with their American distributor Disney.

As for manga as a window directly into the Japanese subconscious! Most of my disagreements with Schodt center on his generalizations of the American comic industry to provide unproblematic contrast to his knowledgable, if unquestioning, analysis of the Japanese manga industry, but in attempt to support the necessity of his writing, he here turns to further generalizing and unproblematizing Japanese and American interactions with even the Japanese productions. Japanese people are expressed through manga; American people understand Japanese people by reading Manga. This sort of thinking was supposed to go out with Edward Said. Nevertheless, it raises questions about the literal translatability of culture (whether it's a small subculture or generalized to the whole population), which I've spent several paragraphs not talking about.

Defense of American Comics

2007-04-18T03:26:00.000-04:00

Having just read excerpts from Frederik Schodt's book "Dreamland Japan" for class, I want to go into more about my arguments against Dreamland Japan's characterization of American comic books while the topic is on my mind. It doesn't really have much relevance to the class, maybe, but may offer some more balanced ideas about American comics. I started this with my response to Brian's post, and I'll mention again that I'm a big fan of American comics, so maybe "counter-balanced" is a better word to use; there's definitely bias at work.

Main points about American comics:

- Collectors of American comics are often avid readers as well

- American comic books are always made available through "trade paperback" collections chronicling story-arcs and author runs. Recently there's been a move to start collecting early comic books from the 50s in large, monochrome, affordable paperback editions, as well as on DVD-ROM to make them available to new audiences.

- In superhero comic books published by the big houses (Marvel, DC and Image), the characters are generally the sole property of the company, not the artist. This has led to some high-profile lawsuits about copyrights; Todd McFarlane, Neil Gaiman and Image Comics had recently finished litigation surrounding certain characters appearing in Spawn.

- Writers, artists, inkers and letterers are all replaceable and interchangable.

- Because of the temporal nature of writing staff and artists at the big companies, most superhero comics are character-based, with different authors and artists rotating in to continue what is, after all, a continuous story line.

- In this regard, American comic books tend to carry a sense of "history," in that events written by one author years earlier must be taken into account by contemporary authors and editors in penning new stories. Fans are also very invested in maintaining loyalty to historical continuity and new story lines are often criticized for breaking with reader expectations.

- As a result, it can be very difficult for new readers to become invested fans of long-running comic books. There's an inequality of information. In this way, American comic books can be seen as significantly more "novelistic" than Japanese ones.

- Recently (last twenty years) there has been an explosion of limited-run stories from the big comic houses in the US, usually appearing in the big company's genre sub-division publishing titles (i.e. Marvel's "Maxx" or "Wildstorm," DC's "Vertigo"). These are comic books with one author who takes them from the first issue to a conclusion (in which characters often die). "Watchmen" is a good example of one of these books. Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, and other British writers working in the US are partial to this style, it seems, although more independent American writers like Will Eisner do this too. These comics usually get the term "graphic novel" applied to them.

- Contrary to Schodt's claim on p. 27, comic companies have been trying to diversify their content for a while now, but public conceptions of acceptability limit their audience. Because of this, I feel like it's inappropriate to construct the American "comic industry" monolithically as somehow "responsible" to all genres and possible readership that the Japanese companies enjoy.

- p. 26 "Japanese manga offer far more visual diversity than mainstream American comics..." This is patently false. Considering the relative number of artists working at the three big comic houses on staff compared to those in Japan, their graphic styles differ much more. But since the American comic industry is so personality-dominated, specific artistic stars are better represented.

- p.28 About american comics becoming a caricature. Interestingly, the only category he covered is the one category of psychology slowly disappearing from American comics. More often than not, incredible people doing ordinary things (psychological insecurities, esp. as in Spiderman or the Hulk) or ordinary people doing incredible things (such as Y: The Last Man, Watchmen, Batman) have become the governing paradigms in recent American publications. I think this is indicative of a sort of humanism comparable to the "Tezuka humanism" discussed in Schodt (236). Although sanctity of all life, as such, isn't generalizable, it seems like there's a strong push in American comicbookdom to construct the superhero through Freudian objects of psychoanalysis: with strong or weak Egos, Superegos or Ids. And then it works to use that Freudian model to universalize Western archtypes of evil, good, etc. This seems a lot more complicated (maybe no less problematic) than caricature.

Music as Art and Music as Society

2007-04-12T04:54:00.000-04:00

I'm having a difficult day of communicating, no question. Here goes:

What I'm trying to do is recognize that when we talk about music in the context of authenticity, institutionalization and in its role as part of popular culture in general, (at least) two primary conceptions of music are at work: music “as art” and music “as society.” Music as art is seen as an artist's (or hegemonic productive force: producer, company, audience, etc.) expressive product; when we say, “music should be judged for its aesthetic value rather than who's producing it; music has no nationality,” that is music as art. Music as society highlights the aspect of music that serves as the center of certain social interactions for various groups; when Ryoji Ikeda says that his music is a reflection of the audience, he seems to be extolling the primacy of social consumption of music and the secondary nature of its “material” content.

It seems to me that there is a real heterogeneous push from many different sides of this discourse to confine music into the artistic mode, to the exclusion of the social. On one hand, this artistic conception of music “untethers” it from its original social or national context of origin — allowing us to escape questions of authenticity by positing that individual accomplishment in music (i.e. “talent”), rather than the social identity or conditions of the artist and production, should be the basis of musical valuation. Conversely, this step is also instrumental in producing reified and commodified culture that is identifiably “national”; working on the contestable assumption that artists anywhere have license to imitate or work in another's aesthetic (authentically or not) the artistic product can and has been separated from the processes of imitation and attempts may be made to identify the irreducible artistic product with irreducible artistic actors occupying a national space. In this way, a new sense of authenticity is constructed that similarly sidesteps accusations or inauthenticity by positing that plural and autheticities exist and that they are inherently exchangeable.

I would argue that both of these essentialized concepts of “music as art” do ideological violence to the lived reality of musical production and consumption — “music as society.” It seems to me that the transnational processes of borrowing, imitation, remixing, pastiche, as well as reinvention all have a relational connection to a static concept of “authenticity,” but it also seems obvious that “inauthentic” music exists and is consumed in complicated social settings by people for whom “authenticity” has little direct influence. That is to say, “music as art” infers the equatabilty of “authenticity” and “realness,” at the same time that direct observation proves the real nature of “inauthentic” music. On the one hand, we need to acknowledge that people actively appropriate foreign forms of music and construct unique relationships with that music; on the other, to deny social processes of exchange and their embeddedness in the resulting music is ludicrous.

This relates to the question of race in Hip-Hop Japan and the methodology of that particular ethnographic project. To say that the (approximate) application of black-face is only a expression of respect and solidarity, is to ignore the social and historical processes of which the “ganguro” phenomenon is part. It may seem like an obvious question (it shouldn't), but what works to build the abstract idea of “giving respect to African American culture” the direct representation of blackened faces, dread locks, and all the other forms of fashion that go along with it? And what are fetishizing or normative effects on Japanese perceptions of blacks in/out of Japan? How does it affect and how is it affected by domestic race and status relationships with people of darker and lighter skin (I'm specifically thinking of Ainu Japanese)? That is to say, in paying homage to an abstracted “black culture,” they reify a very real and applied conception of what “black culture” is. To lead back to the last paragraph, the relationships characterized by the transitive verb statements “pay homage to”, “imitate”, “perceive”, “reinterpret”, etc. constitute what ganguro is, not goals or any materially static identity assigned to the action.

Why can't music be appropriated, real, possessed, disdained, prideful, attacked, authentic, inauthentic, violent, cathartic, harmful, produced, consumed, ignored, interpreted nine ways to Sunday, artistic and social all at once? It seems foolish to delve too deeply into the question of what is “truth” in this situation without first defining what “truth” is (if that makes sense). We can identify divergent ideas of what makes up the “authentic,” their histories and social contexts, but that doesn't need to change the relational historical and social processes that go into making the music what it is constitutively.

If we view music in this way, as socially constructed, itself as a “genba” of social interaction, what is the relationship of music to social institutionalization and to the social construction of “Pop” Japan? Japanese Pop music has an equally long history of appropriation and social manipulation of the “artistic” side of the music to Jazz, Classical, and Hip-Hop styles — are the social interactions cheapened by the nature of the music (the artistic or aesthetic inferiority of it)? How does our answer to this question problematize our impending ethnographic project at the anime convention? That is, how does our valuative judgement of otaku influence our attempt to describe their community?

I'm going to stop writing here, but other ideas floating in my notes:

1) Sexual androgyny as a normative discourse (embracing the “feminine” reifies what constitutes the “feminine”)

2) Related: if in that case appropriation reifies a normative idea of the object, as in the case of reifying national culture, then what, if any, are the normative effects of remixing?

3) Supporting above “thesis”: Rain and BoA (the Korean artists) gained popularity directly as a result of social processes external to their music. Rain through acting in a hit TV Series reversed early perceptions of him as ugly and talentless. BoA (who first debuted in Korea and was critically panned for being too young) made it big in Japan before she was able to become popular in Korea (maybe because by building a good name for Korean culture in Japan she spoke to Korean nationalist sentiments — no joke!) These different social interactions, not exclusively artistic, were instrumental in their relationship to the mass — and became expressed in the mass' relationship to their music.

Responsibility in organizing online discourse

2007-04-06T02:01:00.000-04:00

I had difficulty at first during class and at the talk connecting with Nori’s discussion. It felt very spread and vague, oscillating between his internet activities in Beppoo, his experiences in Iraq, and the “festival” style attacks he was the subjected to. It also seems like Nori hasn’t quite yet come to terms with his experience to the point of providing some of the academic commentary that we were prepared to work with. On the other hand, I think this could also be because he does not want to essentialize his experience in what has become an immensely political issue; he brings up a lot of issues in his writing, but I feel like its the nature of these particular discourses that they can all too easily become polarized. In any case, sitting in the lecture, I couldn’t figure out how to approach him.

To say that the information he left us with was superficial — yes, that was certainly partly the case, but did I expect an authoritative Iraq analysis or a damning report on internet conditions in Japan? Those things become problematic as well. Rather, Nori is certainly a resource with incredible experiences, both as a young person, an internet producer and someone who has unique experiences of Iraq, but he had no definitive message to communicate to us. However, on reflection, I don’t think this was a bad thing. For me, at least, it really highlighted the challenge it is for social scientists to make use of others’ experiential knowledge.

I did get one question off my chest in the lecture, but it wasn’t very well stated. I wondered how Nori, as someone with first-hand experience of (maybe justifiable) violence in Iraq, and who has gone through internet castigation at home, brings his experience to bear when building his portal site. Obviously, he was very excited about creating a site that expressed the locality of Beppoo, but we didn’t get a very good idea from his lecture, I think, of what this site aims to accomplish or how. And that’s not something I expect him to know, either. The ways that internet communities work are especially difficult to understand for their creators, I think, and it is the nature of a portal site that one will be forced to work at supplying certain of the consumer’s expectations; that sort of design has a proven method, and content becomes the main differentiating factor. But still, it seems to me that his experience should find its expression in the way he chooses to build online community. I didn’t want to bring up the issue of “moderating” boards, because it seems to me that there should be better ways to address the issue. One may censor statements, and one may censor people, but it seems to me that neither of those things have an entirely good result. Certainly, Nori seems to believe, and I tend to agree that, the promise of internet freedom is one of free expression, I just wonder how community can be built to help people from feeling they need or want to be so critical and abusive online.

Rubber Tit

2007-04-04T00:10:00.000-04:00

This is a response to Rubber Tit, a performance art piece by Japanese lesbian Tari Ito and saxophonist MASA.

I was in a really thoughtful mood during the performance today, so maybe I'm overanalyzing it.

Another person commented at the end of the performance (I hesitate to use the term "audience member") that he liked how the tit grew out of the enclosing box and after a period of almost ominous musical build-up, became a fun, happy item that we were encouraged to touch and play with. These moods were cleanly delineated both by Tari's interactions with the tit, and MASA's music, which expressed an almost circus-like atmosphere as the tit was thrown around. I also found this a fascinating part of the performance, mainly because it utilized observers as subjective actors in the performance and drew out direct emotional feedback from the them, who in their role as observers held the detached academic position of critics for the first half of the performance. But this person also drew a contrast between the captivity of the tit-in-a-box and it's eventual release into freedom which lead me to question: how exactly did we see this freedom expressed? The performance seemed to embed observers through the manipulation of occupied space and the movement of the tit, but despite the absence (the abolition, even) of classical theatre rules for audience participation — so aptly represented by one observer's spontaneous attack on the tit — it was interesting to see how participation became structured by the spacial configurations of the participant observers in a "box" around the performer. Therefore, although we mirrored some of the affectionate playfulness that Tari emoted and that was embodied in MASA's music, nevertheless, while Tari lovingly enveloped herself in the tit, observer interactions were contrarily expressed through batting the tit away towards the center of the stage or back at others with no prior direction. In this way, just as when the tit was captured in a box at the beginning of the performance, even as the tit seemed to be attempting an escape from the delineated space of the stage, the role of the participant observer became that of the box, actively containing and constricting its action to the pre-determined stage space.

I thought for a while how this reaction came about. When the tit is first freed from the box, it is still attached to a fan and inflating. It is at this point that Tari and the participant observers begin to play with it, while it is still physically tethered to the stage (actually, I was worried someone was going to get hit with the fan motor for a while — ouch). After the tit is fully liberated from the stage, this play continues but expected action becomes based upon this initial interaction. Also, I wondered about how a singular person in an empty room might interact with the tit (connected to the performance or not); certainly, it seems like one would be more inclined to bat it against the wall, all the way to the door, to lie in the tit, to bury oneself in it, to interact with it more fully. Therefore, I'm convinced that our participant actions as observers was also tempered by membership to the mass, and cooperative action on our parts. How does belonging to a collective of observers (of "I's"/"eyes" as it were) affect our interactions with the performance?

From these musings, I wanted to ask Tari and/or MASA how audience interaction with the performance differed from place to place and time to time. Was the partitioning of performance space a constant reaction, or did other audiences more creatively choose to interact with the tit? And, although I didn't touch on it much in this response, how did audience vocal reaction to the tit change? Were there screams in addition or in place of laughter? Did the nature of the laughter express excitement, mockery, or giddy euphoria? I'll leave these questions for tomorrow.