FURMANEK (REVISED) CONCEPT MAP

BODY

PSYCHE

SPACE

Cheng Orientalism...relies on a decorative grammar a phantasmic corporeal syntax that is artificial and layered.

London: "What they failed to take into account was this: that between them and China was no common psychological speech. Their thought-processes were radically dissimilar."

Bow "Racist Cute"---when people enjoy cute things, they are relishing in a power imbalance, in which the object of adoration is perceived as helpless to the voyeur

Management of space in This is Your Life the Tanimoto's are asked to sit whilst the host stands above them

"Rev. Tanimoto, you on the ground and Capt. Lewis, you in the air both call upon a higher power"

TIME

Eng: Freud defines "primitive" races as those "stuck in time", whereas the "civilized" West is developed,

Techno-orientalism in the Western imagination plants the East into a menacing future, rather than an uncivilized past.

Palumbo-Liu: To gain a sense of the appearance and function of Asian America historically, I follow the formation of the Body, the Psyche, and Space.

Chiang "and do the women that you meet in hushed settings with child-/ like innocence attract the protectiveness from your manly/ chest, and do you long to stroke the little kitten?" --> the "aww' factor of the "helpless"

Serlin Mrs. Tanimoto asked to wear a kimono instead of modern garb on this is your life "for the sake of transofrming her and the maidens into Oriental Spectacles with which to elicit compassion"

Compassion as 'positive affect"

Like cuteness, this manufactured "compassion" in dictated by a fantasy of power imbalance. The fact that grounds for compassion are made through the fabrication of spectacle is also worth considering.


This American audience is actually feeling shame, as they are confronted with the realities of Hiroshima. This making of a "spectacle" deflects feelings of shame and places it onto the Hiroshima maidens

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Bow racist cute as positive affect, grounded in imagined power imbalance

Might compare the stereotypes of "lotus blossom" and "dragon lady" to the duality of a "frozen" undeveloped East and a hyperfuturistic, threatening East

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"lotus blossom" soft, fragile. etc, is a trope that infantalizes the Orient. This infantalization frames the idea of a "frozen" East, being stuck in time is like being stuck developmentally, casting the Orient into the past characterizes the imagined Eastern entity as childlike, "innocent"

Said 'the Orient' as a surrogate self to 'Occident'

"dragon lady" cold, militaristic, threatening ---> trope resembles the dystopia of a techno-oriental world

Said 'Orient' as surrogate self to 'Occident', being the first to use nuclear weapons, the American West resembles a world in which technology has expanded beyond reasonable control, these charges are projected onto the Orient

TIME and PSYCHE linked by MEMORY

Cheng: "the yellow woman emerges as a 'body ornament' whose perihumanity demands that we approach ontology, fleshliness, and aliveness differently."

Cheng the yellow woman as a figure whose fleshiliness survives through abstract and synthetic rather than organic means , whose personhood is animated through, rather than eviscerated by, aesthetic congealment

parahumanity as a "condition of fragmentation between the human and the animal"

Lai's character Kora puts on her cat coat to become invisible. Though externally, Kora is enveloped by the cat, she is the cat...internally they are separate, coexisting beings. That which has been used to degrade and dismiss Asian Americans is therefore reworked into a tool of survival, invisibility/erasure is no longer negating but preservative

Foucault and taxonimaization of sexualities in "Implantation of the Perverse"

Cheng the yellow woman as "the life of a subject who lives as an object"

denial of subjectivity plays out in Western treatment of the Eastern psyche ("those are white tears," tidying up history)


rejection of/ control over affective expressions involved in the objectification of subject

Cheng symbolizes perihumanity as a "thick crust" reminiscent of makeup in Fox Girl?

The Yellow Woman as "carnal and delicate, hot and cold, corporeal and abstract, empty and full"
Cheng describes an ambivalence in this racial iconography, Orientalism is marked by this sort of splitting, as the Orient is simultaneously cast into the past and future by Occidental narratives

"we must consider the synthetic Asiatic woman as a ghost in the machine"

Racial taxonimization/Foucault'a taxonomies of sexuality both exist as artificial constructs in language meant to contain ("encrust")**and displace from inside "normativity"

Cheng "the ornament animates major strains of modernist thinking about gender, nationhood, the human, and the inhuman, in the senses of racial difference as well as synthetic fabrication.

I think Fox Girl and The Tiger Flu are both interesting texts to analyze through this lense, both are seated in settings in which modernity is confronted explicitly, in the case of Fox Girl, we are asked to contend with colonial war in a Nuclear Age, and in Tiger Flu we confront questions of humanity in a dystopian future

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR and the ambivalence of myth

de Beauvoir argues that the "fantasy of woman" is created by men as a source of indefinite validation...the fantasy is necessarily ambivalent because It is meant to act as an "other" to every iteration of individual manhood

Like the myth of "woman" as an opposite of 'man' the myth of 'yellow woman' bears similar ambivalences because it is serving similar purposes to the "unhappy consciousness" of the West, ie dichotomy of "dragon lady'" and "lotus blossom"

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This innocence is reclaimed in Fox Girl when MiuMiu is born, where a child of refugees becomes a symbol of hope and new beginnings. The infant, the vulnerable being, is not a cite of violence but of hope, her innocence is a treasure for Hyun Jin but not a commodity for others

de Beauvoir on patriarchy-- man posits himself as subject and creates a fantasy of woman as other as a means of affirming his own subjectivity---in the Western world, the individual's subject hood is validated by frameworks which deprive others of this same subjectivity

This framework points to the toxicity of Western notions of individuality---In being of a shared body, do Lai's Grist sisters escape this violent dichotomy of 'subject' and 'other' ?

Butler and citation, note the power of utterances which are recurrent in a given society, every word is a citation and its usage helps to set precedents that can determine meaning

Shmizu: "Love her or leave her, the hyper sexual Asian woman in representation haunts the experiences and perceptions of Asian women across different contexts." 16

Simmons' love doll is an object that lives as a subject

Rather, it is the performance of subjecthood, imposed upon an Asiatic figure by a white woman

Said's idea of the Orient as a "surrogate self" for the Occident becomes relevant again

Can this 'encrusting' phenomenon be reclaimed as a sort of armor?

in Fox Girl makeup is a sort of armor, makeup has an objectifying quality which erases the person behind it from the Western gaze, this invisibility can be used for self-preservation

I am reminded of Shmizu's reworking of the bind of hypersexuality

Cheng Perihumanity as a state of being both 'peripheral' and 'proximate' to ideals of humanity and femininity, spacializing normativity

An inversion of 'perihumanity' that is later reinforced when the humanized love doll is rendered an object again when it is brought into the fold of the Geisha stereotype

authority of language

Chen: "Language's status among creatures" used "as a register of intelligence, judgement, and subjectvity"

Can this 'unknowability' be likened to 'emptiness'

the "other' as a hollow vessel, filled by the needs of fantasy

What happens when usual scripts are made to appear in new contexts?
M Butterfly:
"her mouth says no, but her eyes say yes. the West believes the East, deep down, wants to be dominated--because a woman can't think for herself" (83) Later, Song weaponizes a script meant to bind her as a means of seizing power from Gallimard: "You know something, Rene? Your mouth says no, but your eyes say yes"(87)

Daughter of the Dragon: Ling Moy tells Petri that "The Chinese heart is constant" citing a preexisting fantasy of unconditional affection that exists in Western depictions of Asian feminitiy, ie. Madame Butterfly's unending love for Pinkerton

positive affect used to feed a fantasy of control for the Occident. to mitigate perceived threat of the Orient


It seems Daughter of the Dragon expresses anxiety over this positive affect, meant to offer warning of the 'dragon lady' lurking behind the 'lotus blossom'

beings who have language are granted humanity, but those who don't have the '"right" kind of language are denied humanity
ie. Ong "Oral Whitening Rinse" which "noticeably whitens speech"

Lai's Grist sisters, scales, uploads, and the like all refuse to be contained in categories of 'fleshliness' and 'aliveness'

Colonizing Time

denial of subjectivity

Pan is told that her tears are "white" in Sui Sin Far's "Its Wavering Image

Ong's "mutable" bottle with image of Ong's mother dressed as a non-existent son, the connection between 'mute' and 'mutant' speaks to the ways in which the silencing of another is meant to serve someone else, erasure enacted in order to make 'space' for some other purpose or form

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Laying Claims to the Future

Controlling Historical Narratives

the white, heterosexual couple as an image of continuity for Western empire, as well as an emblem of normativity

The Cheat Final court scene closes with a reaffirmation of the marriage, Edith + husband walk out hand-in-hand

Daughter of the Dragon Jane and Petri are reunified in the end

This is Your Life the shampoo commercial, flirtatious exchange between white host and hostess to 'close out' the show

This is Your Life takes control of the narrative time and again; the Hiroshima maidens are asked to speak behind a curtain and the host "translates"

Ong's "meniscus" bottle with the tail of a plane, follows "pilgrimage" bottle. The meniscus is a shock-absorbing cartilage, it occupies a space between shinbone and thighbone. "meniscus" followed by word "memory" as if memory of the place the family must depart from obsorbs the "shock" of the departure, mitigates the pain created by the making of the distance or space betwen

Although I have structured my map around these distinctive categories, I am struck by the ways in which Body, Space and Psyche bleed together in many of the primary sources we have worked with. Treating these three categories separately has been a helpful organizing principle for me in the formation of this map, but I would argue that divisions between Body, Psyche and Space are somewhat arbitrary.

the struggle of being in between

throughout this semester, we've studied the violence wrapped up in drawing borders/making distinctions between people. Those caught between categories are sort of caught in the line of fire

Reproduction can signify the future, one's right to reproduce is an expression of one's right to a future, to continue

This is why Hyun Jin's decision to raise MiuMiu is so important, she is investing in a future for herself and the people she cares for, reclaiming a right to life which colonization has tried to take from them

London paints the fecundity of the political 'body' of China as a serious threat to the West. The Western impulse to combat this fertility is another attempt to colonize/take control of the future.

The 'soft' 'loving' or 'cute' Asiatic woman therefore stands as a cite of anxiety in the Western racial imaginary

Palumbo-Liu attempts to make this space more fluid and therefore inhabitable with the grammatical structure of Asian/American

Sui Sin-Far speaks to the challenge of being between in "From the Mental Leaves of a Eurasian"

The dancer in Carnal Orient stands as an example of "body ornament" the man beneath the costume animates the 'yellow woman' for white male consumption. The rigidity of the dancer's movement and "thick crust" of makeup on their face illuminates the puppetry behind this fantasy come-to-life

Consumption

An act of violence--to consume the thing is to degrade and eliminate it

A form of incorporation: taking something into oneself

Historically, non-white people have been dehumanized through associations with cannibalism. Historians have argued that the construction of the Orient began with Herotodus' Histories in which Greeks were taught to fear the man-eating people of 'elsewhere.'

The opposite of penetration: forcing something inside, rather than something forcing its way inside

Hyun Jin's eating of the hot dog as a simultaneously empowering and degrading moment. The phallic symbol of Western invasion is taken in in a manner that is reminiscent of the violence that is to come, but also signifies her ability to sustain herself and persevere

In Carnal Orient it is the white spectators who are cannibals, if we note the similarities between the preparation of the chicken and the peeling of the dancer's makeup, underneath which they find a man like themselves.

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notion of being 'peripheral' and 'proximate' might be compared with state of being 'between' (see lower on map)

Occidental constructions of hierarchy

Ong reconstructs notions of space in powerful ways in Silent Anatomies

Transposing a Map onto a Brain (again, we see how Body-Space-Psyche are one)

Transposing a Pelvis onto a Militarized Landscape, sites of birth and death are brought into one fold

Serlin notes that the Hiroshima maidens were assessed based on their agreeability as well as their ability to speak English, having the "right" kind of language makes one more apt to be granted personhood amongst hierarchies of animacy

But This Is Your Life makes the Hiroshima maidens into puppets: they are mere silhouettes on a screen, their words are "translated" by the host--the show actually puts words into their mouth

the puppetry of Carnal Orient whose dancer moves robotically and according to the "strings" of Orientalism

Laurie Simmon's Love Doll is also made into a puppet of human-ness

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(See 'puppetry' of Pscyhe thread)

successful texts contend with binding forces of the Oriental gaze and invert them

Inversion In:

Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous the power of the deer who stands still rather than taking flight

Lai's Grist sisters who take pride in their non-human status

Pride or Joy in being cast 'outside' an established normativity whose 'inside' demands violence and erasure

M Butterfly song 'animates' herself as a living fantasy for Western male gaze, but as the self-animating puppet, Song remains an agent and is able to invert the power of Oriental narratives to disempower the colonizer

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Combatting the colonization of history is its reclamation, Moraga's preface to This Bridge Called My Back cites a long history of struggle and activism

ancestry is as meaningful as fertility, claims to the past are an important part of community/wholeness

Lai's Grist sisters site the knowledge of their ancestors time and again. Auntie Radix is an especially interesting crux for the Grist sisters' claims to both future and past: she is the oldest member of the community AND the last Doubler

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Notion of of 'Political Body'--an imaginary entity that organizes political bodies (specially determined spheres) as human beings

Ahmed Cultural Politics of Emotion introduces concept of 'hard' and 'soft' nations. Nationalist perspectives oriented around a nation's 'hardness,' measured by their ability to 'penetrate' 'softer' nations (militarily, culturally, etc.)

London renders political entities as imaginary bodies, Japan is feminized in The Unparalleled Invasion to point to its supposed 'softness'

In M Butterfly Song's character manages to penetrate the Occident as a spy, they use softness to penetrate and therefore subvert this soft-hard paradigm