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Existential surplus: affect and labor in Asian diasporic video cultures
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Existential surplus: affect and labor in Asian diasporic video cultures
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EXISTENTIAL SURPLUS: AFFECT AND LABOR IN ASIAN DIASPORIC
VIDEO CULTURES
by
Feng-Mei Heberer
August 2015
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CRITICAL STUDIES)
i
Acknowledgments
Existential Surplus is written. But I am even more grateful for the community that has inspired,
nourished, distracted, and commiserated with me throughout the often arduous process of staying
engaged with, committed to, and growing confident about this very project. Some of you have
entered my life years, even decades, ago; others I have just come to know this year. The
following list is by far exhaustive, it is but a small window into the world I have been offered
and never want to leave again.
Let me start by thanking my committee members: Akira Lippit, whose brilliance and
intuition seem just inhuman. Thank you for not only trusting I would get there but for having the
patience to let me learn this by myself. Anikó Imre, a guiding mentor so dear to my heart; I will
forever be indebted to you. Kara Keeling, who turns around worldviews in a single sentence.
And who asks the most difficult questions. Does she know how many of us fall in love with her?
Grace Hong for her unique gift of making me see the value in and of my work; you are such an
exceptional reader. You all rock.
My research has further benefited from generous feedback and support from Rhacel
Parreñas and the Center for Feminist Research group she led from 2013-2014 as well as from the
co-directors of the Center for Transpacific Studies, Viet Nguyen and Janet Hoskins. The Asian
Video Cultures Conference in 2013, co-organized by Bhaskar Sarkar and Joshua Neves, provided
lots of stimulation for reconsidering my work from different angles. All of you surely know how
to make work feel like fun, with and without the booze. Robin Curtis, a loud shout-out to you,
too, for inciting my interest in self-recordings in my first college semester, and for believing in
my scholarship from early on. My gratefulness further extends to the Visual Studies Dissertation
Group organized by the amazing Laura Serna. And how could I not thank the artists, who have
ii
responded to my repeated inquiries so patiently: Kristina Wong, Wayne Yung, Ming Wong, your
artwork has done something to my brain. I want to believe it was a good thing.
Los Angeles has been a place of marvel mostly. Really, you have turned it into such:
Fiona Ng and Jia Tan – my warriors. My first LA community and the last ones to leave my side. I
know you got me, and I got you. Crystal Baik, Jih-Fei Cheng – my local dream team. You have
pushed my thinking into new dimensions, you bring rigor and beauty into academic work and
life and, dare I say, even the job market. Debbie Cho and Kelly Kawar, thank you for enduring
my moods and getting me out of the house to dance and replenish and remember that life is more
than a paper to be filled with words. Your presence is gold. Erica Cho and Hoang Tan Nguyen,
my special Aquarius fellows, you are LA community for me. Fred Harig, Iris Ouyang, Margaret
Rhee, Inkoo Kang, Dredge Kang, there is no way for me to map this space without you, too.
With relocations come more good people in other cities and on other continents. See how
lucky I am? Jeannie Simms, so full of energy and strength, I almost wish you were a protein bar.
On second thought, I prefer you as my very dear friend, thrilled at the prospect of spending more
time with you. Michelle Cho, in the language of food, you would be a one-time chocolate truffle.
The same goes for Arnika Fuhrmann. I admire the horizon of both of your thinking and your
generosity of sharing it with me and others. Never once did you shy away from hands-on help
and advise, either. Sometimes a helping hand is all you need to keep on going. Anne McKnight,
thank you, too, for that.
My gratefulness further extends to Prithi, my dating babe. To Kimiko Suda, let me tell
you, your lived radicality puts me in awe every time again. And Jane, liebste Jane. My soul mate
and bridge to other continents. Apfelschorle only with you. Trung, don’t think I’d leave you out.
Seeing you finding your ground after all that partying with me is surprisingly comforting. Thank
you for welcoming me back. Finally, Shangning, my first Asian German friend ever – the ties
iii
that bind.
The ties that bind. My mother Jing Wang, my father Thomas Heberer, and my brother
Linlin – I don’t know how there is so much room for other people in my heart with all the love I
feel for you. I wish there was more I could offer. This work is for you.
iv
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments i
Dissertation Abstract v
Asia On The Horizon. An Introduction 1
CHAPTER ONE
The Asianization Of Heimat: Experimental Videos From Asian Germany 15
CHAPTER TWO
Asian American Disabilities: Precious Bodies, Precarious Minds 58
CHAPTER THREE
Me llamo Peng: Can The Chinese Working Body Be Creative, Too? 93
CHAPTER FOUR
A Labor Of Love: Sentimental Activism And Figures Of Liberation In
Lesbian Factory 121
Conclusion. On Existential Surplus 152
Bibliography 156
v
Dissertation Abstract
Existential Surplus: Affect and Labor in Asian Diasporic Video Cultures investigates contemporary
identity discourses in Asian diasporic film and video. As the first substantial study of Asian diasporic
media in North America, Western Europe, and East Asia, this project analyzes the media works as
worldmaking tools that reimagine dominant fictions of belonging. Specifically, at a time when ethnic
and racial diversity are transforming into social capital and symbolizing the “good” nation-state, I
examine how Asian diasporic media makers reformulate notions of minoritarian personhood by
staging subjects and affinities that are foreclosed by and, indeed, unsettle established identity
narratives. Within this context, my research investigates the emergence of negative affect as a
political strategy across personal documentaries, experimental videos, and recorded performances
from the last decade. With a focus on the visual work of queer Asian German filmmakers (Ming
Wong, Wayne Y ung), female Asian American performance artists (Kristina Wong), and Southeast
Asian migrant workers in Taiwan, I analyze how these diasporic agents mobilize affective registers
of queer desire, depression, cruel optimism, and sentimentality to defy their social invisibility. At the
same time, I explore how these artists and migrant workers deploy these emotional investments to
offer narratives of political grievance, everyday survival, and intimate social worlds that move
notions of belonging beyond the frameworks of national inclusion and ethnic kinship. Ultimately, I
argue that this body of works collectively combines into what I call existential surplus – a repertoire
of diasporic subjectivities that allows alliances that might not be legible in existing terms to come to
the surface as objects of representation. Combining close reading with discourse analysis and social
critique, the dissertation approaches affect thus not only as carrier of omitted Asian diasporic
histories. I conceptualize affect as an analytic that allows for a new reading practice of transnational
vi
affinities.
Asia On the Horizon. An Introduction
In the short video Confessions of an Asian tourist (2009), filmmaker Wayne Yung gathers images
of Asian tourists in Berlin – those transitory figures that have become a common sight in the
German capital today. As a Chinese Canadian filmmaker who came to Germany in 2001,
graduated from the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, married his German boyfriend, and
holds permanent residence in Berlin, Yung does not identify with the tourists he films and is, as
the English subtitle tells us, rather anxious to be differentiated from them. Their physical
proximity feels indeed almost contagious: “It makes me nervous, as if I might be mistaken for
one of them.” Yung’s fear of being identified with those he regards with shame (“When I travel,
people always think I’m Japanese.”) and his effort to be distinct from them (“If I put on a
Canadian flag pin, it just looks like a souvenir.”) are reflected in the physical distance and the
focal length Yung chooses to follow the Asian tourists. The slow pace of his editing, the insertion
of shots devoid of any human beings, and the absence of any explanatory voice-over enhance the
filmmaker’s attempt to avoid any further intimacy. The Asian tourist is an other, Yung’s attitude
seems to say, an Asian other that he is not.
I begin with a reference to Confessions of an Asian tourist because it so aptly captures how
dominant ideas and values, in this case of the “Asian other,” define the way we conceive of, act,
and feel toward the world surrounding us. More specifically, Yung’s video is part of a larger body
of media works I explore in order to analyze the relation between aesthetics and the social, or the
normative expectations of which bodies, feelings, and identities belong together, which are
deemed incompatible, and why that might be so. I am especially concerned to understand the
implications of transnational migration on such common perceptions and its relation to new forms of
governance and subject formation. How does the migration of people affect the kinds of relationships
1
and lives we have, how does it change the way we know and come together? Conversely, how does
our common sense, a particular arrangement of sensory experience into social meaning, determine
the way we imagine and build into social worlds?
1
Finally, what is and can the role of video be in
intervening into hegemonic conceptions of subjecthood? With these guiding questions in mind, I
investigate media representations of belonging that exceed frameworks of national inclusion and
ethnic kinship, and that gesture to the existence of social worlds outside the domain of dominant
identity categories.
Existential Surplus: Affect and Labor in Asian Diasporic Video Cultures is one of the first
substantial studies on Asian diasporic media across Europe, Asia, and North America. Its aim is to
elucidate contemporary conditions of globalization as they are registered by the videos, including
new diasporic flows, emerging forms of minority governance, and the cultural traffic of images.
Broadly conceived, this project is about value regimes and the subjects they make. More specifically,
how value is created and circulated through Asian diasporic populations. My analysis targets the
mechanisms by which certain Asian minorities are simultaneously devalued and exploited for the
projects of nation-building and global capital. At the same time, I want to know how Asian
diasporans mold themselves in response to dominant value systems, and how they introduce
moments of stagnation and reorientation into those very systems. Instead of tracking down a dialectic
between oppression and resistance, however, this project lifts out a form of governance that works its
power by elevating subjects into social visibility and recognition. At the heart of this dissertation is
then the violence of inclusion, or the paradox whereby the assignment of positive value
simultaneously dehumanizes those newly deemed worthy of social membership.
1 My use of common sense is informed by Kara Keeling’s framing of it as a hegemonic perception of the world.
Keeling discusses common sense with specific reference to Antonio Gramsci. See her The Witch’ s Flight: The
Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
2
It is here where I bring in the creative work – specifically documentaries, experimental films,
and recorded performances – of queer Asian German filmmakers, female Asian American artists,
Chinese migrant laborers in Spain, and Filipina factory workers in Taiwan. I argue these media
productions merit further exploration precisely because they engender living archives of omitted
Asian diasporic histories that depict this very paradox. While the eclectic selection of performance
videos, narrative shorts, self-recordings, and political documentary might seem random at first, it is
based on common themes and aesthetic features among the various films. All of the productions
depict the lives of Asian diasporans under the reigning of global capital and of liberalism as good
politics today. They highlight underexamined diasporic groups, including Asian Germans and
Filipina migrants in Taiwan, at the same time that they offer an intersectional lens to investigate how
those populations that appear well represented in public culture continue to be silenced; for instance,
in the case of Asian American women with mental illnesses as discussed in the second chapter. My
aim is then not only to make a case for the artistic and political importance of a body of work that
often sits uncomfortably with major analytic paradigms – such as the national, even the diasporic as
it is commonly conceived within the boundaries of a single nation-state or ethnic group, and also the
category of the avantgarde.
2
By drawing on a multi-site, multi-ethnic, and multi-lingual corpus of
video works, this study is above all about finding ways by which those who are continuously being
forgotten can possibly be in the here and now, and can be so together.
The selected media productions model ways to imagine other lives. They do so not in
describing separate social worlds, but in carving out emerging socialities in the midst of messy
interweavings between the desire for legibility and the physical, linguistic, and affective labor it takes
to navigate the tensions around such legibility. This is at times done in a humorous manner, as in
2 As Dorothy Wang states in her discussion of poetry, “avant-garde writing is still very much coded as ‘white.’”
Dorothy Wang, Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 44.
3
Wayne Yung’s play with cultural stereotypes or Ming Wong’s German drag performance (Chapter 1).
Other times, the labor to belong emerges through despair and depression (Chapter 2) or a form of
self-injuring optimism (Chapter 3). Finally, I discuss the affect of sentimentality (Chapter 4) as a way
to maneuver the multiple economies – global, visual, moral – that shape the intimate life of Asian
diasporans. Rather than offering a linear emotional trajectory toward a final resolution, then, the
videos employ a set of ambivalent feelings and reactions that reflect the troublesome attempt to
narrate Asian diasporic subjecthood in the present-day. That is, at a time when “diversity” and
“liberation” have become buzzwords signifying the good nation-state, and when the visibility of
certain forms of minority subjecthood – through exceptionality, suffering, and even protest –
transform into neoliberal forms of capital.
3
Against this backdrop, I am less interested in claiming a
representative minoritarian movement or else a radical alternative to the majority rule (although it
does seem more alluring and convenient at times, to have just that). Rather, my project looks to
widen and reimagine through contemporary Asian diasporic media projects the “horizon” – or the not
yet – of encounters and ways of being in the present to make more lives livable.
The trope of the horizon has been frequently evoked by cultural critics calling for a world in
which minoritarian lives matter.
4
In Cruising Utopia, José Muñoz engages the horizon to expand the
reigning fantasies of social worlds. For him, the horizon is “imbued with potentiality,” a “then and
there” that creatively bends the confines of being in the present and, in so doing, provides a residue
of hope, survival, and pleasure for those who have no place in the dominant imaginary.
5
Take
Confessions of an Asian tourist. As a Chinese Canadian living in Germany, Yung begs to differ
3 See Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1995).
4 See Karma R. Chávez, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2013), 7. Chávez herself distinguishes her approach of queer migration politics from
Muñoz’ much more “ephemeral” (6) agenda; yet she also argues for the importance of understanding the “powerful
imaginaries” (15) by which political actions come into being.
5 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia. The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press,
2009), 1.
4
from those Asians a Western racial stereotype declares inferior. Yet his fear of being identified as a
despicable Asian does not stop him from somehow following them with his camera. We see images
of Asian couples contemplating their environment; a family filming each other; a group of female
students waiting in front of a museum; an Asian man standing seemingly lost in a crowd of other
tourists. Over the course of these shots of rather mundane activities, the filmmaker suddenly realizes
both with surprise and relief that “they’re not much different [from other tourists]: they’re also
wearing fanny packs and silly sun hats.”
6
Incrementally letting go of his fear and the shame of
“Asian” visibility, Yung experiences a subtle form of bonding, one that is even pleasurable. The
video concludes, “When I focus on Asian faces, white faces fade into the background. I’m
beginning to see the pleasures of being an Asian tourist.”
This shift from antagonism to playful affiliation marks for me an orientation toward the
horizon. That is also, a disorientation of the dominant trope of rising Asia, or the Yellow Peril,
whose eventual arrival designates the end of Western civilization.
7
Yung’s narrative designates a
way of inhabiting the world otherwise, of aligning distinct yet linked experiences of being
disprized to challenge a hegemonic order where “white faces” engender the most valuable lives,
and to bring to the fore other “faces” and forms of political “pleasures.” But Confessions
positions Asianness not simply as strategic essentialism against the so-called West. Rather, the
video gestures to the fractured composition, to parallel and overlapping histories of domination,
and to conflicting desires undergirding the “project” of being Asian. For instance, we might read
Yung’s reluctance to be identified as Japanese not only as the affective reiteration of a white
supremacist ideology but also as an act of disidentifying with Japan as a former colonial empire
whose legacies we see not least reflected in the mobility of Japanese tourists today. Yung’s
6 Wayne Yung, “Confessions of an Asian Tourist – Wayne Yung,” Nomorepotlucks 05 (2009),
http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/confessions -of-an-asian-tourist.
7 See John Kuo Wei Tchen and DylanYeats, eds., Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear (New York: Verso,
2014).
5
gesture might further speak of his allegiance with China, the home of his ancestors, in the
ongoing political disputes over the division of land between the Chinese and the Japanese nation-
states. As such, the protagonist’s affect is tied as well to the reality of East Asian hegemons
pushing nations especially in the Southeast of Asia to the margins of visibility.
8
With most of the
video works featuring ethnically Chinese protagonists, this project, too, reflects the uneven
power dynamics and how these shape a “knowing” of Asia. Yet rather than trying to be
comprehensive or representative, I hope my work inspires further endeavors to unpack the
complex and concrete materialities of transnational Asia, and to provide the tools for orienting us
toward an other Asia. An Asia that, as Confessions puts forth, is always already other than its
preceding image, and that opens itself up through rather surprising connections, entanglements, and
displacements.
For Sara Ahmed, the word orientation cannot be detached from the notion of “the Orient or
East, including ‘natives’ or inhabitants of the East.”
9
Ahmed theorizes the Orient (in orientation)
primarily as a site of colonial fantasies and the assertion of “Occidental” power. I suggest Yung’s
orientation toward the Asian tourists in the video speaks of a different “Orient” than the one Ahmed
draws out. Distinct from “the rest that is left over when the humanity of the West is strenuously
extracted from the world,”
10
“Asianness” in Confessions offers an other ground to hold and gather us
as human subjects. Indeed, if we understand “orientation” as the act of “be[ing] turned toward
certain objects” and not others,
11
then being oriented toward what I call here “Asia on the
8 For politico-economic power hierarchies in Asia and the uneven visibility of Asian nations in studies of Asia see
Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia As Method. Toward Deimperialization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Viet
Thanh Nguyen and Janet Hoskins, “Introduction. Transpacific Studies: Critical Perspectives on an Emerging
Field,” Transpacific Studies. Framing an Emerging Field, ed. Janet Hoskins and Viet Thanh Nguyen (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 2014), 21ff.
9 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology. Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 2006), 113ff.
10 Naoki Sakai, “‘You Asians’: On the Historical Role of the West and Asia Binary,” South Atlantic Quarterly 99,
no. 4 (2000): 790.
11 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 1.
6
horizon” means to let go of the familiar arrangement of space, people, movement, and attention.
In the words of Kuan-Hsing Chen, another critic drawn to the horizon, “a horizon through which
links can be made and new possibilities can be articulated.”
12
In a similar vein, my engagement
with “Asia” will be an ongoing exploration of the term’s multistable and volatile nature, its funky
temporality, affects, and spatialization. That is, I address the question of Asia to ask how rather
than what it means. Following scholars from postcolonial, inter-Asian, and the more recent
Transpacific studies, who have called for a provincializing of Euro-centric knowledge
hegemonies and a simultaneous pluralizing of Asia, my investment in Asianness asks about
political affinities that are transnational, diasporic, and in constant movement.
13
To avoid an
abstract generalization about Asian diasporic life, however, my analysis is deeply rooted in the
local articulations of histories of oppression, global capital, and the blossoming of liberal politics
at the contemporary moment. Concomitantly, I look to the ways in which the videos bring to the
surface the provisional homes, the volatile communities of love, and the subtle acts of collective and
individual self-care among particular Asian diasporans.
Within this context, I do not want to reduce the artworks to ephemeral cultural products that
depend on academic intervention to be made socially accessible and, in more crude terms, become
the stuff of multicultural knowledge. Rather, my goal is to treat them as documents of social injustice
and, moreover, as pieces of thought that interrogate the institutionalization of knowledge and the
limits of the social worlds we build around such knowledge culture. Moreover, I conceptualize the
media works as worldmaking tools or what Muñoz calls “performances with powerful
worldmaking capabilities” that mobilize alternative images to make us encounter and do social
12 Chen, Asia As Method, 282.
13 For further references see Gayatri Spivak, Other Asias (Malden etc.: Blackwell Publishing, 2008); Wang Hui,
The Politics of Imagining Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Rika Nakamura, “What Asian
American studies can learn from Asia? Towards a project of comparative minority studies,” Inter-Asia Cultural
Studies 13, no. 2 (2012); Lisa Yoneyama, “Asian American Studies in Travel,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 13,
no. 2 (2012); Nguyen and Hoskins, “Introduction.”
7
worlds otherwise.
14
Proposing that the repertoire for imagining and the actual enactment of ways
of being are inextricably intertwined, I further draw inspiration from Kara Keeling’s discussion
of “cinematic perception.” Similar to Keeling, I understand the work of meaning-making inherent in
watching films – the cinematic organization of the world – to be not only analog to but participating
in the construction of “social reality and sociality.”
15
She writes, “cinematic perception […] is
particular not to film spectatorship, but to the reception of images whenever they appear to a sensory-
motor schema capable of memory and affect. This includes watching a film, but it also includes, for
instance, interacting with one’s neighbor.”
16
As such, our engagement with images bears always
already the potential to recalibrate hegemonic common sense, including its categorization of people,
into other common senses.
AFFECT, LABOR, EXISTENTIAL SURPLUS
Here I want to explicate some of the terms that make the dissertation title, and how they arrange, dare
I say orient, my critique of Asian diasporic video. All three of them – affect, labor, and existential
surplus – serve to tackle contemporary forms of governance. My understanding of governance takes
as point of departure Foucault’s notion of governmentality as the working of power through consent,
or forms of power that appear productive and benign rather than merely oppressive.
17
This
14 José Esteban Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts,” Women & Performance 8, no.
2 (1996): 11.
15 Keeling, The Witch’ s Flight, 11. Keeling’s concept of “cinematic perception” is strongly reminiscent of Jacques
Rancière’s notion of the “distribution of the sensible” which designates the convergence of sensory experience and
knowledge with a particular political order. Such order further demarcates a social community. Rancière elaborates,
“the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in
common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it.” Jacques Rancière, “The
Distribution of the Sensible,” in The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London, New York:
Continuum, 2004), 12.
16 Keeling, The Witch’ s Flight, 19.
17 Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect. Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell,
Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991).
8
includes a person’s self-regulation as well as affective investment in dominant value economies.
Expanding the concept of governmentality to include the role of affect, which I use rather loosely
here to designate feelings and emotions in different intensities, much of my research is focused
on understanding the affective labor of Asian diasporic subjects to become legible as human
subjects.
18
I ask what kinds of investments these diasporans make in themselves (how to look, when
to speak, what to feel) and what forms of sociality they engage (inter-ethnic and cross-racial
coalitions, same-sex intimacy, isolation) to make their living in the present possible. While I pay
attention to the representation of work as paid profession – from making a performance video as a
multicultural creative, to standing at the assembly line as a migrant factory worker, and how this
representation tells us more about the measurement of people’s worthiness – the following analysis is
especially concerned to lay out the hidden labors of survival, such as the making of common
sense(s). As the media productions show, the price of visibility and recognition is high for Asian
diasporic subjects, and includes relentless self-monitoring, sometimes disguised as liberation, so as to
fit into a dominant regime.
19
Yet the individual chapters also elucidate how the promise of legibility
and inclusion might be just that – a promise with no safety net but death both literal and social
18 In this, I use affect, feelings, and emotions similar to Sianne Ngai’s definition of the terms as overlapping and
constantly transforming in intensity and consciousness. See Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge,
MA:.Harvard University Press, 2009), 27. At the same time, I employ the terms with an emphasis on political
potentiality that scholars have particularly assigned to affect. See Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual:
Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Teresa Brennan. The Transmission of
Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). Moreover, my understanding of affective labor is furthermore
informed by Lauren Berlant and her use of affect across her writing, including The Female Complaint: The
Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008) and
Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); as well as Kathi Weeks, “Life Within and Against
Work: Affective Labor, Feminist Critique, and Post-Fordist Politics,” ephemera. theory & politics in
organization 7, no. 1 (2007).
19 Keeling employs the notion of labor in relation to creating and maintaining a particular sensorium. She writes,
“the labor (affectivity) required to make sense of the images that cinematic machines select, cut, frame, and circulate is
the same kind of labor required to live in and make sense of the world organized by the cinematic.” The Witch’ s Flight,
42f. Anthropologist Joseph Hankins offers another intriguing take on labor in relation to social visibility. Specifically,
he discusses “the labor of multiculturalism,” (7) with which he describes “the labor of representation” as performed by
those striving toward recognition and those who do the work of recognizing (4). Joseph D. Hankins, Working Skin.
Making Leather , Making Multicultural Japan (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014).
9
lurking around the corner. The work required to enter into social visibility is thus not “merely”
aesthetic; it is a matter of existence.
Existential surplus takes up the matter of life or rather the latter’s foreclosed mattering.
Inspired by Grace Hong’s introduction of the phrase, I use it here in several ways, as the material
effect of human hierarchies; as a point of departure to dig into the twisted ways in which subjects are
rendered illegible through a politics of rights and recognition; and finally, as a means to come
together differently. In “Existentially Surplus,” Hong offers an intriguing overview of the ways in
which, in the context of the United States, shifts in economic and political regimes have
historically interlocked with the recalibration of human value. In particular, Hong locates the
deliberate production of surplus populations, or those whose life bears no social value in itself,
within a contemporary U.S. hegemonic order that upholds inclusion and diversity. Hong’s
specific example of the existentially surplus concerns an incarcerated black population whose
sheer existence embodies the constitutive outside to that which matters positively. Here, surplus is
not generated through labor exploitation anymore, but through the fact of being alive – alive as less
than human. The author writes, “being surplus means being extinguishable. To be surplus in this
moment is to be valueless, unprotectable, vulnerable, and dead.”
20
This project borrows Hong’s
concept of the systemic devaluation of certain populations in the midst of liberal politics to
interrogate the limiting imaginings of Asian diasporic life. It also expands the phrase “existentially
surplus” to designate not only the constitutive outside of the liberal imaginary, but to hack the
mechanisms by which this outside becomes increasingly incorporated into, and sometimes even the
momentary center of the dominant fictions of belonging. At the same time, my project investigates
the gaps, delays, and uncanny repetitions that the videos enact to exemplify how Asian diasporic
cultural producers strategize against and find alternatives to the violence of inclusion. Existential
20 Grace Hong, “Existentially Surplus. Women of Color Feminism and the New Crises of Capitalism,” GLQ: A
Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18, no. 1 (2011): 92.
10
surplus is then not least a means to both explore and claim alternative social worlds; I will flesh out
in the dissertation’s conclusion to what extent it gestures, in fact, to another articulation of the
horizon. Before I get ahead of myself, however, a quick overview of the ensuing discussion.
Chapters One and Two examine narratives of crisis as alternatives to official discourses of
inclusion. “The Asianization of Heimat: Experimental Video Works from Asian Germany” revolves
around the video works of Ming Wong and Wayne Yung to ask about the place of Asian Germans in
the German national imaginary. I elaborate how, in featuring Asian German men’s conflicting desire
for social recognition and transgression, the visual works open up a site of possibility for minoritarian
coalitions. “Asian American Disabilities: Precious Bodies, Precarious Minds” focuses on Kristina
Wong’s Wong Flew Over The Cuckoo’ s Nest (Michael Closson, 2011), a performance on the high
rates of depression and suicide among Asian American women.
21
By looking at the character’s failure
to provide a narrative of progress and cure, I show how the pressure of an Asian American model
minority to move into a stable category of “healthy” is complicit with racial and gender hierarchies.
In contrast, Wong’s show offers an alternate take on the claim to protection and care, shifting a
critical inquiry away from individualized pathology toward the ways in which histories of social
injustice and racial violence have limited a liberal right discourse to begin with. The following two
chapters continue to articulate Asian diasporic socialities that cannot or do not want to be understood
in existing terms. “Me llamo Peng: Can The Chinese Working Body Be Creative, Too?” examines
personal video-recordings by Chinese migrant worker Peng on his trajectory through France and
Spain. Focusing on the tensions that arise in watching these works – specifically, in trying to locate
the filmmakers along the common divide between exploited labor force and cultural producer – this
chapter reconsiders dominant understandings of violence and discipline and intersects them with
their seeming corollaries, empowerment and liberation. The final chapter, “A Labor Of Love:
21 Wong Flew is written and performed by Kristina Wong and usually marketed as her show. The film, however, is
directed, produced, and co-edited by Michael Closson.
11
Sentimental Activism and Figures of Liberation in Lesbian Factory,” looks at a documentary film
that foregrounds the emergence of same-sex desire among Filipina factory workers in Taiwan. Here,
I ask what happens when the affective structures that define institutionalized forms of being – such as
compassion for the socially marginalized – conjoin with the unexpected and, indeed, unruly sociality
of Asian diasporic subjects. Ultimately, my analysis shows that, while the Asian diasporic subjects in
and behind the video works retain desires for social recognition and approval, their senses of
belonging are not conditioned by nationalist ideologies, nor are their affiliations fully circumscribed
by the project of global capital that propels these agents’ transnational movements. Within this
context, I argue that the selected video works collectively combine into a recalibration of existential
surplus, turning a pool of diasporic subjectivities with no or little value into a repertoire of
transnational alliances that remain illegible in the dominant imaginary. Furthermore, I maintain that
only by following the circulation of affect in the media productions, can we track these other kinds of
sociality. Combining close reading with discourse analysis and social critique, the dissertation
approaches affect thus not only as carrier of omitted Asian diasporic histories. I conceptualize affect
as an analytic that allows for a new reading practice of transnational affinities.
In dialog with an interdisciplinary body of affect studies, this project argues that feelings do
not simply “reside in” or “belong to” particular people.
22
Instead, I use Sara Ahmed’s concept of
“affective economies” which argues that emotions are carriers of social hierarchies. In Ahmed’s
words, “My economic model of emotions suggests that while emotions do not positively reside in a
subject or figure, they still work to bind subjects together. Indeed, to put it more strongly, the
nonresidence of emotions is what makes them ʻbinding.’”
23
Affective economies determine the
feelings that emerge in and between particular people, objects, and ideas, as well as the relationships
22 My wording is informed by Sara Ahmed’s definition of affect or emotions – terms she uses rather
interchangeably, too: “while emotions do not positively reside in a subject or figure, they still work to bind
subjects together.” “Affective Economies,” Social Text 79 (2004): 119.
23 Ibid.
12
we build around such feelings. Therefore, a study of affect as “interface” between the intimate, the
social, and the economic allows us to see how value circulates and is distributed, how it renders
certain bodies sticky and invisible and keeps others mobile, public, and alive.
24
While the visual has
been at the forefront in cultural critiques of social discrimination, especially in investigations of
racializing and racist practices, the dissertation makes a case for the importance of affect in
understanding the “soft” and invisible forms of contemporary biopower.
25
I argue affect is
particularly apt to grasp the messy, interlocking dynamics in-between seemingly clear-cut divisions
of visibility and invisibility, domination and freedom, especially as these divisions constantly but
often imperceptibly morph under the geopolitical shifts of globalization. In a similar vein, affect
complements the visual as analytic by problematizing the latter’s role in liberal politics and the
making of surplus life as further solidified by the project of global governance.
26
Conversely, the
videos exemplify how an examination of the movement of affect brings out social formations that are
spread across multiple continents and political geographies. Indeed, the visual works both strain
extant cartographies and bring out forms of agency in lives that are not meant to be.
27
Subsequently,
the following chapters analyze how diasporic media makers mobilize affective registers of racial
24 Ranjana Khanna, “Touching, Unbelonging, and the Absence of Affect,” Feminist Theory 13, no. 2 (2012): 214.
25 For a strong advocate of the visual under contemporary global capitalism, see for example Shu-mei Shih,
Visuality and Identity. Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of
California Press, 2007).
26 Two rather new publications on Asian and Asian diasporic cultures respectively deserve mentioning here. Jie
Yang’s edited volume The Political Economy of Affect and Emotion in East Asia (Abingdon, New York:
Routledge, 2014) and Jeffrey Santa Ana’s forthcoming book Racial Feelings. Asian America in a Capitalist
Culture of Emotion (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015). While both of these works delve into
questions of governmentality and disciplining, my project differs from their focus on distinct national (U.S.) and
regional (East Asian) contexts in bringing together the works of diasporans across three continents to rethink
those “given” territories.
27 In this, the function of affect comes close to Raymond Williams’ “structures of feeling” as emerging social
formations before they have been fully institutionalized. See Raymond Williams, “Structures of Feeling,” in
Marxism and Literature (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). Yet I also maintain that existential
surplus as a way of coming together differently is necessarily entangled with but precisely not about hardening
into social structures.
13
hysteria, depression, queer desire, optimism, and sentimentality also as a political strategy to defy
their relegation to surplus human life.
Accordingly, the terms of inquiry I use hail from various analytical and disciplinary
discourses, among them women and queer of color theory, anthropology, biopolitics, and scholarship
on migration and diaspora. Similar to Hong, my analysis shows the historically distinct yet also
overlapping and at times converging systems of power, including supremacist, liberal, and neoliberal,
that inform the present age. My hope is that by making these theories travel into new “territories” and
speak to each other, my work will not only clarify the intrinsic linkages of governing technologies
but open up, and reorient, a common sense toward that which is already on the horizon.
14
CHAPTER ONE
The Asianization Of Heimat: Experimental Videos From Asian Germany
THE DEATH OF JONNY K.
In the early morning of October 14, 2012, a group of four Thai and Vietnamese German young
men were on their way home from a night of partying close to Berlin’s notorious Alexanderplatz.
Among them, 20 year old Jonny K. was trying to help out his drunk friend until the cab would
come to take him home, when he was attacked and deadly wounded on the street by another
group of young men.
28
As the newspapers described it, “Jonny K. was beaten against his head
until he fell unconscious. […] The seven offenders fled. The bashers of seemingly Turkish-Arab
descent are nowhere to be found. The reason remains unclear. Searchers speak of a pure desire to
kill.”
29
Jonny died from brain injuries in the hospital the next day. A storm of indignation
followed in the media, supported by local politicians’ condemnation of the violent act. “Some
people apparently have lost all of their civil standards,”
30
Berlin Interior Senator Frank Henkel
commented, and called on the German public to act: “We should not silently stand and watch as
brutalization and coldness enter into our midst and numb us to violence.”
31
While Henkel’s
28 For the protection of personality rights, family names by “normal” civilians are usually obscured in the German
press.
29 “Jonny K. wurde so lange gegen den Kopf getreten, bis er bewusstlos war. [...] Die sieben Täter flüchteten. V on
den Schlägern, die türkisch-arabischer Herkunft sein sollen, fehlt jede Spur. Das Motiv ist unklar. Fahnder
sprechen von „reiner Mordlust“.” Lutz, Schnedelbach, “Mord Am Alexanderplatz. 20-Jähriger stirbt nach
brutalem Angriff (Murder on Alexanderplatz. 20 year old dies after brutal attack,” Frankfurter Rundschau,
October 15, 2012, http://www.fr-online.de/politik/mord-am-alexanderplatz-20-jaehriger-stirbt-nach-brutalem-
angriff,1472596,20599544.html. All translations from German into English are mine unless otherwise stated.
30 “Bei einigen sind offenbar sämtliche zivilisatorischen Standards verloren gegangen.” Quote from Tanja
Buntrock, Tobias Reichelt, Sandra Dassler, “Mordkommission ermittelt. 20-Jähriger stirbt nach brutalem Angriff
am Alexanderplatz (Homicide division investigates. 20 year old dies after brutal attack at Alexanderplatz).” Der
Tagesspiegel, October 15, 2012, http://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/mordkommission-ermittelt-20-jaehriger-
stirbt-nach-brutalem-angriff-am-alexanderplatz/7253442.html.
31 “Wir dürfen aber nicht stillschweigend zusehen, wie sich Verrohung und Gefühlskälte in unserer Mitte
breitmachen und Hemmschwellen sinken.” Ibid.
15
reproach could have easily addressed the group of inactive bystanders that night (whose recorded
videos and cell phone pictures served as evidence for police investigations later on), his words
were solely targeted at the delinquents whom the media quickly defined as “bashers of seemingly
Turkish-Arab descent.” As such, the senator’s statement is strikingly reminiscent of the recent
debates on the decline of Germany’s Leitkultur (national core culture) and the public accusation
of an inherently Islamist and criminal Muslim minority population ostensibly unwilling to
integrate. By highlighting the violence of Jonny K.’s death as the product of outsiders who
attempt to “enter into our midst,” as Henkel did, I maintain that criminal acts, when visible, are
automatically racialized and transferred onto the bodies of non-white populations. After all, only
men of color were involved in the deadly fight, and (other than as passive witnesses) no white
German citizens. Such a perception simultaneously confirms a long-held belief about the
respective “nature” of racial others, particularly male: On the one hand, we see the violent
stereotyped trait of Middle Eastern masculinity, and on the other hand, the docile, effeminate
character of a Southeast Asian “model minority” male. Indeed, Jonny K. is retrospectively afforded
with the legible subjecthood of a likeable Asian young man who sought to support his drunk friend
and, in turn, fell victim to the “Turkish-Arab” intruders and their “pure desire to kill.” His victim
status supports the demand to remove those violent “non-model” populations in order to keep
Germany a safe space. All the while, whiteness, and that is those who “rightfully” inhabit German
subjecthood, remains unexamined.
32
32 I approach whiteness with Amanda Lewis here as hegemonic, that is a rather flexible assemblage of productive
and repressive forms of power that work to value certain lives and denigrate others. Lewis describes hegemonic
whiteness as “a shifting configuration of practices and meanings that occupy the empty space of ‘normality’ in
our culture. Collectively, this set of schema functions as that seemingly ‘neutral’ or ‘precultural’ yardstick against
which cultural behavior, norms, and values are measured. […] As part of a central force in the functioning of
white supremacy, hegemonic whiteness is not a quality inherent to individual whites but is a collective social
force that shapes their lives just as it shapes the lives of racial minorities.” Amanda Lewis, ‘‘‘What Group?’
Studying Whites and Whiteness in the Era of ‘Color-Blindness,’” Sociological Theory 22, no. 4 (2004): 634. In a
similar sense, Black German scholar Maureen Maisha Eggers defines whiteness as a position of social power
rather than a phenotypical matter. See “Ein Schwarzes Wissensarchiv [A Black Knowledge Archive],” in
Mythen, Masken und Subjekte. Kritische Weißseinsforschung in Deutschland [Myths, Masks, and Subjects.
Critical Whiteness Studies in Germany], ed. Susan Arndt, Maureen Maisha Eggers, Grada Kilomba, Peggy
Piesche (Münster: Unrast, 2009); and “Rassifizierte Machtdifferenz als Deutungsperspektive in der Kritischen
16
I have opened this chapter with the death of Jonny K. not to minimize the violence and
injustice of his death, nor to make any moral assumptions about his character. Rather, my wish is
to initiate a discussion of the death both social and literal of people of color in the German
environment. Specifically, I wish for an interrogation of the racialization of Asian Germans who,
I propose, have been rendered illegible in multiple ways. If racism describes “a hierarchy of
human and inhuman persons that in sum form the category of ʻhuman being,’”
33
how human can
the Asian German subject ever be? For it is only through Jonny K.’s abused, dead body – which
different media outlets variously and carelessly identified as Vietnamese, Thai, and half-Thai but
clearly never German – that his life becomes, in Judith Butler’s term, “grievable.”
34
Is an Asian
German’s death the necessary condition for public visibility? Does it matter whether Jonny is
alive or dead, as long as his subjecthood affirms the less than human nature of a so-called
Muslim minority and the humanism of a white German society?
I proceed from the claim that Asian Germans are subject to a particular form of racialization
which makes them disposable to yet indispensable for the maintenance of white liberal German
subjecthood. As the case of Jonny K. elucidates, Asian Germans serve as a site for humanist and
civic education, where the distinction between valuable and unvaluable life is taught through norms
of race, gender, and self-cultivation.
35
Their “model” presence, embraced by politicians and
Weißseinsforschung in Deutschland [Racialized power difference as analytic in Critical Whitness Studies in
Germany],” in the same volume. For a critique of and further differentiation of such critical whiteness concepts
from a German perspective see Ina Kerner, “Critical Whitness Studies: Potentiale und Grenzen eines
wissenspolitischen Projekts [Critical Whiteness Studies: Possibilities and Limitations of an epistemo-political
project],” Feministische Studien 2 (2013).
33 Ruth Wilson Gilmore quoted in Lisa Marie Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the
Criminalization of the Unprotected (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 7.
34 “There are ways of framing that will bring the human in its frailty and precariousness into view, allow us to stand
for the value and dignity of human life, to react with outrage when lives are degraded or eviscerated without
regard for their value as lives. And then there are frames that foreclose responsiveness, to be understood as the
negative action of existing frames.” Judith Butler, “Torture And The Ethics of Photography,” Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space 25, no. 6 (2007): 955.
35 Jin Haritaworn speaks of the neoliberal citizen-subject as one “whose autonomy, self-responsibility and emotional
intelligence are evidenced by hir capacity to constantly work on hirself.” As such, the self-cultivating, neoliberal
subject strongly resonates with ideals of the sovereign subject under European enlightenment/humanism. Jin
17
mainstream media, helps to justify exclusionary immigration policies and racist attitudes toward
racial and ethnic minorities in general. Indeed, the distinct markers of perfect assimilation, reflected
in “high educational achievement levels, high median family incomes, low crime rates, and the
absence of juvenile delinquency and mental health problems,” are proof that socioeconomic success
is a matter of personal investment alone.
36
Yet Asian Germans find themselves consistently ignored
as a constitutive part of the German nation and remain the eternal other. In fact, the seemingly
positive image of “Asian others” renders them illegible as targets of white racism and, as such,
ineligible as agents for political claims and actions for social change. As well, it makes difficult the
building of coalitions with other subjects of color both locally and globally that may allow for
minoritarian forms of belonging.
In what follows, I examine selected video works by Asian German artists to dig into the ways
in which the assignment of positive value to particular Asian minority subjects produces the norm of
their identity and restricts their access to social rights. My discussion investigates how the videos
theorize the contradictory governmental policies and public discourse toward Asian Germans that
create the conditions for their social death; at the same time, I explore the ways in which the artworks
mobilize an alternate historiography for minoritarian lives that are not yet canonized. Rather than
proposing an identitarian politics that inscribes an Asian Germany into national consciousness
through stable categories, however, I focus on the emergence of unruly and unpredictable Asian
German subjects in the videos. The filmmakers confront us with Asian German subjects whose
unexpected desires – social, political, and sexual – break with the docile Asian minority image and
Haritaworn, “Beyond ‘Hate’: Queer Metonymies of Crime, Pathology and Anti/Violence,” Jindal Global Law
Review 4, no. 2 (2013): 66.
36 David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American. Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1999), 174. Whereas Palumbo-Liu makes this characterization of the model minority narrative within a
US-context, it holds similarly true for Germany. For a comparison of the model minority narrative in the United
States and in Germany see Smaran Dayal, “‘Don’t Be Evil.’ Model Minorities in Colourblind ‘Schland,” 29
January 2014, Heinrich Böll Stiftung: Heimatkunde, http://heimatkunde.boell.de/2014/01/29/dont-be-evil-model-
minorities-colourblind-schland. More on the model minority discourse will follow throughout this and in
particular the next chapter.
18
leave us with no other representative identity. Instead, they offer us subject positions that constantly
shift, and morph, and draw on various, at times seemingly incommensurate, histories for self-
articulation. Yet this chapter also interrogates the artists’ own position as so-called cosmopolitan
subjects whose physical and social mobility necessarily interlocks with exploitative market logics
and multicultural branding. Asking how those interlockings reinforce uneven hierarchies among
Asian transnational subjects and simultaneously create loopholes and crevices that allow for the
emergence of minoritarian subjects and alliances beyond immediate capitalization. In so doing, this
chapter engages the visual productions in response to the striking absence of Asian Germany in
public debates on national identity and racism, including much of anti-racist discourse, while it also
and continuously grapples with the contingent nature of visibility and institutionalization. To
continue my discussion, I will first offer a brief overview over the meaning of Asians and Asian
Germans in Germany and explain my choice of the material and the methods I use, before then
delving into an analysis of the video works.
WHO IS ASIAN, GOOD, OR BAD?
Distinct from ever-present depictions of rising Asia as the culturally exotic, politically backward, and
economically threatening continent, Asian Germans are hardly acknowledged as a specific
population. As current statistics show, out of 7 million foreign citizens living in Germany, about 850
000 are from Asia, including the Middle East (270 000), East and Central Asia (280 000), as well as
South and Southeast Asia (300 000). However, there is no historical overview of their migration, nor
are the numbers of those naturalized and born in Germany officially documented.
37
In fact, the
37 Statistisches Bundesamt (Federal Bureau of Statistics). Bevölkerung und Erwerbstätigkeit. Ausländische
Bevölkerung. Ergebnisse des Ausländerzentralregisters [Population and occupation. Foreign population. Results
from the foreigner central registry] (Wiesbaden, 2012), 41,
https://www.destatis.de/DE/Publikationen/Thematisch/Bevoelkerung/Migration
Integration/AuslaendBevoelkerung2010200117004.pdf?__blob=publicationFile. For problems of the
microcensus see Tobias Jochheim, “Niemand weiss wie viele Migranten es in Deutschland gibt (Nobody knows
how many migrants are in Germany),” Zeit Online, May 24, 2012, http://blog.zeit.de/open-
data/2012/05/24/migranten-statistik-bundeslaender.
19
German state is rather reluctant to engage what Dayal and Ha describe as its “complex history of
colonialism, World War, and nation-building,” of which the current presence of so-called
“foreigners” is certainly a consequence.
38
Perhaps unsurprisingly, a more thorough examination of
Germany’s diverse migrant and people of color histories did not gain academic foothold until the late
1990s.
39
Unfortunately, up to this day Asian Germans continue to be skipped over in scholarly
research. Only a handful of studies mostly published outside academia offer further insight into the
histories of Asian immigration. They focus on the neglected history of West Germany’s migrant labor
regime post World War II, which brought not only hundreds of thousands of workers from the
Mediterranean area, but also a substantial number of East Asian workers to boost the German
economy and stabilize the newly found democratic system.
40
For instance, Choi and Lee point out
that about 20,000 Korean citizens came during the 1960s and 70s to Germany, with the majority of
women working as nurses in German hospitals and the men working mainly in the mining industry.
41
In a similar vein, Kien Nghi Ha elucidates how the German Democratic Public (GDR) recruited
numerous students and so-called “contract workers” from its international allies, including North
38 Smaran Dayal and Noa Ha, “Erinnerungsorte der asiatischen Diaspora (Sites of memory of the Asian diaspora),”
Lernen aus der Geschichte (Learning from history), March 25, 2015, http://lernen-aus-der-geschichte.de/Lernen-
und-Lehren/content/12327.
39 See V ojin Saša Vukadinović, “Über drei neue Arbeiten in der Migrations- und Rassismusforschung (On three new
works in migration and racism scholarship),” Texte zur Kunst 77 (2010), http://www.textezurkunst.de/77/uber-drei-
neue-arbeiten-der-migrations-und-rassism. In contrast, area studies was never invested in the study of diasporic
flows to Germany. The discipline developed as part of Germany’s colonial endeavor for natural resources. After the
experience of World War II, area studies directed their attention to “apolitical” fields of study, focusing more on
historical, linguistic, and cultural aspects. The rise in economic interest and questions of cultural conflict fostered new
scholarly emphases on politics, society, and economy.
40 To quote a few data, “in 1973, the number of employed foreigners reached its highest level to date at 2.6 million.
The largest groups at that time were from Turkey (605,000), Yugoslavia (535,000), Italy (450,000), Greece
(250,000) and Spain (190,000).” Veysel Özcan, “Germany,” focus Migration, accessed March 1, 2015, http://focus-
migration.hwwi.de/ Germany.1509.0.html?&L=1.
41 Sun-Ju Choi and You Jae Lee, “Umgekehrte Entwicklungshilfe – Die koreanische Arbeitsmigration in
Deutschland (Reverse development aid – The Korean labor migration in Germany),” Goethe Institut Seoul,
accessed March 15, 2013, http://www.goethe.de/ins/kr/seo/pro/redigiert.pdf. See also Detlef Garz, “The
Acculturation Experiences of Children of Korean ‘Migrant Workers’ in Germany and ‘Foreign Migrant Workers’
in Korea: A Qualitative Investigation,” Uni Mainz, accessed March 1, 2014, http://www.zis.uni-
mainz.de/eng/619.php.
20
Korean and Vietnam. As Ha writes, by 1989, around 100,000 Vietnamese resided in East
Germany.
42
Besides these important inquiries, explorations on Asian immigration and, likewise, on
the diverse composition of the present Asian German community remain sparse. To add to such
neglect, the little attention given to “Asians” in Germany is commonly restricted to people with
East and Southeast Asian background. In fact, “Asianness” in Germany has become quite
intermingled with a disciplining model minority narrative that explicitly, and among many others,
excludes Turkish Germans as the largest Asian minority in Germany.
43
For instance, Vietnamese
Germans are publicly celebrated as “Asia’s Prussians”; that is, hard-working, non-complaining, and
high achievers in school.
44
As the popular liberal weekly Die ZEIT puts it: “The Vietnamese hold up
a mirror to the Germans. Their virtues once used to be ours.”
45
In contrast, Turkish Germans embody
a major obstacle to the nation-state’s socioeconomic prosperity. In the critical words of German
chancellor Angela Merkel, “It is not OK that twice as many of them do not graduate from high
school, it is not OK that twice as many of them do not have any professional qualification. This
will cause the social problems of our future.”
46
42 Kien Nghi Ha, “The Vietnamese in Germany (Part 1 of 2),” March 25, 2013, diaCRITICS,
http://diacritics.org/2013/the-vietnamese-in-germany-part-i. Ha further elaborates on the differing Vietnamese
communities in the former East and West, as the latter was largely defined by war refugees or so-called boat
people who fled the Vietnam War. Both groups, however, face the same stereotypes in Germany.
43 Because Turkey embodies the precarious position of belonging to, yet also exceeding Fortress Europe with its
proximity to the dangerous Middle East. The recent protests on Istanbul’s Taksim Square, which quickly spread
throughout the country and towards Turkish minority populations worldwide to oppose the government’s
conservative religious turn under Prime Minister Erdoğan, and which were violently beaten down, only seem to
justify the West’s continual mistrust against the Turkish neighbor. Comp. Kerem Oktem, “Turkey, From Tahrir to
Taksim,” Open Democracy, June 7, 2013, http://www.opendemocracy.net/kerem-oktem/turkey-from-tahrir-to-
taksim.
44 Compare Martin Spiewak, “Das Vietnamesische Wunder” (The Vietnamese Wonder), Zeit Online, August 3,
2009, http://www.zeit.de/2009/05/B-Vietnamesen.
45 The comment was made by Saxony’s integration and immigration official and quoted in Jana Hensel,
“Vietnamesen in Sachsen. Werben um Khanh” (Vietnamese in Saxony. Courting for Khanh), Zeit Online, March
27, 2011, http://www.zeit.de/2011/13/S-Vietnamesen/seite-1.
46 “Angela Merkel und die Muslime und Türken Multi Kulti is Tot (Angela Merkel and thu Muslims and Turks
Multiculturalism is Dead),” YouTube video, 1:50, from kabeleins news, posted by “pommescurry1,” October 16,
2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xuq0Bnw1DzQ. Translation provided by the author.
21
This chapter aims to rectify the conflicted politics of visibility around Asian Germans while it
simultaneously seeks to challenge Asianness and, by default, Asian Germanness as a homogenizing
identity assignment of “geographical proximity and cultural-racial sameness.”
47
To this end, I employ
the identity label Asian German with particular reference to people who are identified as an Asian
“model minority.” I do so not to reproduce a problematic stereotype that collapses “Asianness” into a
moralizing tale of docility and diligence in supposedly postracist times, but to interrogate how it
serves to discipline people of color in Germany. I am less interested in the model minority narrative
per se – other scholars especially from the field of Asian American Studies have done excellent work
here.
48
Rather, I want to highlight the quiet persistence of a seemingly positive image – whether in
the form of economic diligence, political obedience, sexual submission, or complete desexualization
– that circulates as “truth” and coincides with the social, and at times very literal, death of Asian
Germans. Put otherwise, the model minority norm corresponds to an image that is highly mobile in
itself yet also that which arrests or, more starkly put, mortifies Asian minority life.
49
Given the dearth
of institutional records on Asian German sociality and the absence of an Asian German archive
proper, what histories, methods, and practices can we draw from to turn what otherwise remains
47 Rhacel S. Parreñas and Lok C. D. Siu, “Introduction: Asian Diasporas – New Conceptions, New Frameworks,” in
Asian Diasporas. New Formations, New Conceptions, ed. Rhacel S. Parreñas and Lok C. D. Siu (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2007), 8.
48 There is a vast amount of Asian American literature elaborating on and criticizing the model minority identity.
Among them, in chronological order, Claire Jean Kim, “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans,” Politics
& Society 27 (1999); Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American; Eric Tang, “Collateral Damage: Southeast Asian Poverty in
the United States,” Social Text 18, no. 1 (2000); Viet Thanh Nguyen, Race and Resistance: Literature and
Politics in Asian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Nadia Kim, “Critical Thoughts on Asian
American Assimilation in the Whitening Literature,” in Racism in Post-Racism America: New Theories, New
Directions, ed. Charles A. Gallagher (Chapel Hill, NC: Social Forces, 2008); Helen Heran Jun, Race for
Citizenship. Black Orientalism and Asian Uplift from Pre-Emancipation to Neoliberal America (New York: New York
University Press, 2011).
49 I am drawing here on two authors who theorize visual media as forms of governance: First, on Kara Keeling’s
notion of the cliché as “an arrested movement” that allows for immediate classification while it also maintains a
discriminating social order. Kara Keeling, The Witch’ s Flight, 23. Second, and relatedly, on Jonathan Beller’s
discussion of photographing as an act of violence or what he calls “mortification of the flesh before the lens and
the mortification of the flesh under a white gaze.” Jonathan Beller, “Camera Obscura After All: The Racist
Writing With Light,” The Scholar and Feminist Online 10, no. 3 (2012), http://sfonline.barnard.edu/feminist-
media-theory/camera-obscura-after-all-the-racist-writing-with-light.
22
mere silence into a mattering of Asian German life? How can we reverse the belatedness of Asian
German subjecthood to unbury forgotten histories, attend to the underappreciated realities of the here
and now, and, further, to imagine what other lives are possible beyond the very present?
THE LA TENESS OF ASIAN GERMAN SUBJECTHOOD
There is something black about waiting. And there is something queer, Latino, and transgender about
waiting. Furthermore, there is something disabled, Indigenous, Asian, poor, and so forth about waiting.
[…] It seems like the other’s time is always off. Often we are the first ones there and the last to leave.
50
Vojin Saša Vukadinović explains the delay of German migration studies and, concomitantly, of a
critical engagement with structures and practices of racism to academia with the ideological
proximity between state and academic institutions. Given Germany’s continuing reluctance to call
itself an immigrant country, “it is not surprising,” Vukadinović writes, “that a more precise
historiography of migration […] has long been an extra-academic task.”
51
Indeed, not only has the
project of an anti-racist historiography in Germany, with the exception of the Shoah, developed
outside mainstream perception and state-informed knowledge discourses. Much of this work is also
indebted to the relentless effort of women of color whose political interventions remain notoriously
underexplored in higher education.
For instance, in the early 1980s a group of Black German women pushed for a wider debate
on the experience of structural racism and its replication in everyday life. Two major Black German
associations resulted out of this movement: Adefra, the Association of Black Women in Germany and
ISD, the Black Germans Initiative. While the latter consisted of men and women of color, Adefra
stresses “that women and lesbians in particular were the ones who initiated the Black German
movement in Germany.”
52
They also published several noticeable books combining autobiographical
50 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 182f.
51 Vukadinović, “Über drei neue Arbeiten.”
52 From the original, “festzuhalten ist, dass es Frauen und insbesondere Lesben waren, die die Schwarze Bewegung
in Deutschland in Gang brachten.” Ekpenyong Ani, “Die Frau, die Mut zeigt: Der Verein Adefra e.V . – Schwarze
23
writing and critical race scholarship from an African American and postcolonial context to speak
about socially invisible lives.
53
While only a handful of especially female Black German scholars
have begun the work of documenting this important history, the activism of Korean German women
emerging just a few years before the Black German initiative has not gained further academic
attention.
In the late 1970s, a group of Korean migrant women workers united to fight against their
forced return to “the motherland.” After being recruited by the German government to work as
nurses and build a stable German care industry, these women were told to go “home.”
54
Fortunately,
their organized protests and mass signature collection against being dismissed as unwanted
immigrant subjects proved successful, and the women acquired permanent residence.
55
Based on
their shared activist experience, they founded the cultural organization Koreanische Frauengruppe
(Korean Women’s Group), a group for local support and critical discussions of women’s
discrimination worldwide. With their activist agenda and community-based focus, Koreanische
Frauen in Deutschland,” Bundeszentrale Für Politische Bildung (The woman who shows courage: Adefra –
Black women in Germany), August 10, 2004, http://www.bpb.de/gesellschaft/migration/afrikanische-
diaspora/59487/adefra?p=all.
53 For a more thorough overview and discussion of the Black German feminist movement see May Opitz,
Katharina Oguntoye & Dagmar Schultz, eds., Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1992); Mythen, Masken und Subjekte; and Fatima El-Tayeb, European Others.
Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Another important
anti-racist network founded by people of color and white activists in 1998 is Kanak Attack. See Nanna
Heidenreich and V ojin Saša Vukadinović, “In Your Face. Kanak Attak and Visual Activism,” in After the Avant-
garde. Contemporary German and Austrian Experimental Film, ed. Randal Halle, Reinhild Steingröver
(Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2008).
54 For more details on Germany’s guest worker regime see Serhat Karakayali, Gespenster der Migration. Zur
Genealogie illegaler Einwanderung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland [Ghosts of migration. On the genealogy of
illegal immigration in the Federal Republic of Germany] (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2008); Manuela Bojadzijev, Die
windige Internationale. Rassismus und Kämpfe der Migration [The windy Internationale. Racism and Struggles
of Migration) (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2008]. Monika Mattes provides a unique discussion of the
role of women in Germany’s migrant worker recruitment policies in her book “Gastarbeiterinnen” in der
Bundesrepublik. Anwerbepolitik, Migration und Geschlecht in den 50er bis 70er Jahren [“Female Migrant
Workers” in the Federal Republic. Recruitment policies, migration and gender in the 1950s to 1970s] (Frankfurt:
Campus, 2005).
55 For more historical background on the events from the perspective of Korean German women see Heike Berner
and Sun-ju Choi, eds., Zuhause - Erzählungen von deutschen Koreanerinnen [At Home – Stories from German
Korean women] (Berlin: Assoziation A, 2006).
24
Frauengruppe inspired the formation of several other Asian German cultural initiatives in the
following years.
56
While these two political movements took place separately from each other, I bring them
together over their shared effort to provide a language for social grievance that an institutional
discourse failed to offer. Both communities have pointed to the interlocking oppression of racism,
sexism, and classism in emphasizing women’s experiences of discrimination, calling attention as
well to the uneven distribution of empowerment and suffering within minoritized populations. In so
doing, these agents anticipated what Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw would, in 1989, introduce into the
academic discipline of US critical race theory as “the concept of intersectionality.”
57
Not to mention,
they preceded German academia by at least two decades.
My discussion of selected videos by Asian German filmmakers seeks to honor and continue
the legacy of these women and their tireless, albeit largely overlooked, anti-racist work. Rather than
lamenting the “death” of social movements that never made it into wider recognition, the videos
56 For further selected publications by and on Asian Germans see Kien Nghi Ha, ed., Asiatische Deutsche –
Vietnamesische Diaspora and Beyond [Asian Germans – Vietnamese Diaspora and Beyond](Berlin: Assoziation
A, 2012); Urmila Goel, Jose Punnamparambil und Nisa Punnamparambil-Wolf, eds., InderKinder. Über das
Aufwachsen und Leben in Deutschland [IndianKids. On growing Up and Living in Germany] (Heidelberg:
Draupadi, 2012). Three more edited volumes deserve special mention for bringing together writings by various
people of color including Asian Germans and Black Germans, namely Hito Steyler and Encarnación Gutiérrez
Rodríguez, eds., Spricht die Subalterne deutsch? Migration und postkoloniale Kritik [Can the subaltern speak
German? Migration and postcolonial critique] (Münster: Unrast, 2003); Kien Nghi Ha, Nicola Lauré al-Samarai,
Sheila Mysorekar, eds., re/visionen. Postkoloniale Perspektiven von People of Color auf Rassismus,
Kulturpolitik und Widerstand in Deutschland [re/visions. Postcolonial perspectives of people of color on racism,
cultural politics, and resistance in Germany] (Berlin: Unrast, 2007); and Mythen, Masken und Subjekte. For me,
these volumes specifically reflect the possibility of a coalitional politics between German people of color.
57 Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against
Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (July 1991): 1244. It would be interesting to compare the
dominance of US-informed critical race theories and the dearth of German critical race discourses at the
intersection of histories of racism, civil rights movements, capital, and knowledge production. For some exciting
discussions, albeit mainly within a US-context, see Grace Kyungwon Hong, The Ruptures of American Capital:
Women of Color Feminism and The Culture of Immigrant Labor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2006); Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in
Institutional Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); Roderick A. Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The
University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012);
Stefano Harvey and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe, New York,
Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 2013).
25
allow us to inquire about the historical conditions that produce the peculiar temporality of Asian
German subjectivity as both too early and too late to enter into German commonsense. Perhaps less
surprisingly, the Korean German women’s political organizing led to the creation of korientation e.V .,
a cultural association that founded the Asian Women’s Film Festival Berlin and, later on, the Asian
Film Festival Berlin.
58
My proposition is that where official discourse falls short, the circulation of
images takes over and carries out the necessary task of affirming the presence of Asian diasporics.
Against this backdrop, I read the videos against a unifying, and potentially hegemonic knowledge
discourse. I suggest the visual works resist the tendency of trying to “catch up” with an ever-
expanding regime of recognizability, and instead confront us with the kinds of incompatibility such
linear thrust produces.
59
In this, my approach follows the inspiring intervention of queer of color
critics such as Muñoz, who argues for the necessity of queer temporalities – the peculiar coupling of
the not yet/belatedness – for minoritarian pleasures and survival.
In Cruising Utopia, Muñoz defines “Queerness [a]s that thing that lets us feel that this world
is not enough, that indeed something is missing.”
60
For him, queerness describes a striving that is
both necessary and political in that it wants to make minoritized lives (more) livable. “[I]t is not
simply a being but a doing for and toward the future.”
61
If we understand queerness with Muñoz to
designate forms of being – intimate and social – that both extend and extend beyond the possibilities
of the here and now within a dominant order of life, then I think it is possible to describe Asian
German subjectivity as inherently queer. The cultural works I examine model possible dwellings for
58 See Kimiko Suda and Sun-ju Choi, “Asian Film Festival Berlin: ‘Imagine(d) Kinships and Communities,’” in
Asiatische Deutsche. For full disclosure, I have been a curator for both festivals.
59 In “The Lateness of Asian Canadian Studies,” Christopher Lee argues for a conscious inhabiting of Asian Canadian
history’s particular temporality. Lee problematizes the field’s inherent urge to “catch up” (2) and proposes to resist easy
absorption into the politics of an academic market and institutional identity politics: “not by suturing temporal gaps
with a premature definition to its object of study, but rather by coming to terms with the ethical and political issues
raised by those gaps.” (12) Christopher Lee, “The Lateness of Asian Canadian Studies,” Amerasia Journal 33, no.
2 (2007).
60 Muñoz. Cruising Utopia, 1.
61 Ibid.
26
subjects who are relegated to the nation’s spatiotemporal margin. Those who occupy a space of
liminality – being too early yet too late, being outright visible yet never really there – and exist out of
synch with the narrative order of national identity.
62
Where state and public means fail to recognize
the mattering of Asian German subjecthood, I turn to the videos to show both how it matters and that
it matters. Let me propose, against this backdrop, to understand the creative works not least as echoes
of the social death of Asian Germans; echoes that, in hindsight, resound and mourn the death of
Jonny K. from years in advance to claim an other social world.
THE ARTISTS
Ming Wong and Wayne Y ung are both ethnically Chinese, gay out artists living in Berlin. Both of
them were born abroad in 1971, Wong in Singapore and Yung in Canada, where they obtained their
respective citizenship. As of today, neither of the filmmakers holds, or aspires to gain, German
citizenship. Yet I approach the subjectivities that Wong and Y ung embody both within and outside
their artworks as Asian German, while simultaneously contending with the implications of such an
approach.
63
I do so for several reasons: First, the artists’ background gestures to the inherently diverse
62 Multiple queer scholars offer intriguing discussions of queer temporality. Among them are Lee Edelman, No
Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Judith Halberstam, In a
Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005);
Keeling, The Witch’ s Flight; Bliss Cua Lim, Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). Moreover, Balibar and El-Tayeb have elaborated on the relation
between temporality and one’s racial and national status in Western Europe. In “The Genealogical Scheme: Race
or Culture?” Étienne Balibar speaks of a “double-bind in which immigrants and children of migrants are taken
with, on one side, a prohibited genealogy, and, on the other side, a stigma of origin or ‘ethnic-cultural descent’
that is imposed on them.” See Balibar, “The Genealogical Scheme: Race or Culture?” Trans-Scripts: An
Interdisciplinary Journal in the Humanities and Social Sciences 1 (2011): 3,
http://www.humanities.uci.edu/collective/hctr/trans-scripts/2011_01_launch.pdf. In other words, the eradication
of racialized others from national history goes along with their timeless identification as foreigners. Fatima El-
Tayeb offers a similar approach to the “the concept of the (im)migrant.” She writes, “Key to the ability to define
minority populations as nonmembers of the nation is the racialized European understanding of the concept of
‘(im)migrant,’ which contrary to the U.S. use of the term implies a strictly temporary presence […] but at the same
time indicates a permanent state across generations. That is, whoever is identified as racial or religious Other is
necessarily conceptualized as a migrant, that is, as originating outside of Europe.” El-Tayeb, European Others, 180n4.
63 Albeit the artists act in their own videos, and I will use the notions of the artist and the protagonist alternately, I
will draw the distinction where necessary: While the former designates an empirical and individual position of a
professional Asian German subject, the latter serves as a figure of Asian German subjectivity more general. This
27
composition of an Asian German population. Their transnationality speaks to the numerous ethnic,
national, and citizenship statuses of Asian Germans, while Wong and Yung’s sexual self-
identification also points to differing intimate subject positions and relationships within Asian
Germany.
64
As such, the filmmakers allow me to provocatively reimagine being Asian German
without relying on dominant minority self-narratives and, perhaps most importantly, trace the
possibility of political affiliations and coalitions that go beyond national and ethnic ties and are much
more contingent, volatile, and constantly on the move.
65
Second, I contend the artists’ simultaneous
displacement and mobility between various cultural contexts and communities gives them privileged
access to interrogating the conditions under which certain Asian German subjects enter into social
legibility, and how this particular configuration reflects a hegemonic commonsense perception of
national belonging.
66
In other words, their work highlights and challenges those practices of racism
and racialization that are barely registered within “multikulti” Germany and have no other
mentioning. Third, as ethnically Chinese gay men living in Berlin, Wong and Yung continuously face
does not mean, however, that my reading of the artist implies a necessarily authentic person behind the work
versus a fictional character in the work, nor that the two positionalities are always distinct. For a complication of
the claim of authenticity and truth see Robin Curtis, Conscientious Viscerality. The Autobiographical Stance in
German Film and Video (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann Verlag/Edition Imorde, 2006).
64 As mentioned in the introduction, I am aware of the heightened social visibility of East Asian and specifically
Chinese (minority) populations in many national, migrant, and also academic contexts, and the discrimination
this brings for other Asian and Asian minority populations. Yet, and as I will explain in the following, my goal is
not to represent Asian Germany through these two filmmakers but to critique the racial hierarchies a normative
identity assignment produces.
65 For a critique of minority nationalism see Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black. Toward A Queer of Color
Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). R.S. Coloma complicates the strategic self-
positioning of Asian Canadians as national citizens in “‘Too Asian?’ On racism, paradox and ethno-nationalism,”
Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 34, no. 4 (2013).
66 The racial politics of Singapore and Canada respectively have certainly influenced the filmmakers’ experience of
racialization in Germany and their artistic rendering of it. Indeed, his study proceeds from the assumption that
racisms, anti-racist theories and practices, and people’s histories and experiences necessarily travel, cross
boundaries, inform and transform each other. Yet this chapter focuses on a discussion of Asian Germans in the
context of Germany. For more background information on Singapore’s politics of neoliberal multiculturalism, I
recommend Angelia Poon, “Pick and Mix for a Global City: Race and Cosmopolitanism in Singapore,” Race
and Multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore, ed. D. Goh, P. Holden, M. Gabrielpillai, G.K. Khoo (London,
New York: Routledge); and Eng-Beng Lim, Brown Boys and Rice Queens. Spellbinding Performance in the
Asias (New York and London: New York University Press, 2014). For a discussion of Asian Canadians and their
grappling with the model minority norm, see R.S. Coloma, “Too Asian?”
28
the stereotype of the model minority, and how it intersects with norms of gender and sexuality. Their
work explicitly addresses the experience of being racialized as an Asian minority man – into the
submissive and inferior position of “Asian bottomhood” that serves to satisfy the pleasure and the
power of the white man.
67
The videos respond to this reality by staging Asian German men’s
unthought-of pleasures and intimacies. They feature protagonists in drag, on the verge of breakdown,
pairing up with unexpected partners, and protesting their social death. They show us Asian Germans
who are sometimes explicitly marked as gay, at other times evade further categorization. Thus,
without wanting to collapse the differences and tensions undergirding representations of Asian
masculinity in straight and gay contexts, I focus on the videos’ shared rejection of prevalent “model”
imaginings of Asian German men as inherently effeminate, powerless, and dependent in their
pleasure on dominating subjects. Moreover, I contend, because these images work against the
totalizing and homogenizing strategies of racialization, they can help us reimagine Asian German
subjectivities more broadly.
68
Indeed, by offering us images of Asian German men who not only sit
uncomfortably with the dominant matrix of racial, gender, and sexual identity-making but who are
missing from this very matrix, I maintain the videos of Wong and Y ung attend to the original
queerness of Asian German subjecthood. Clearly, they refuse to buy into the norm of white and
patriarchal manhood. Yet what is queer about Asian German subjectivity as discussed here is not the
mere articulation of non-normative sexualities, but its desire of and for the abandoned, the
unimagined, the not yet articulated, and the already dead.
67 Hoang Tan Nguyen, A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2014), x. For Nguyen, the “Asian bottom” designates both “a sexual practice and a
worldview” (2) that asserts a dominant racial and gender hierarchy automatically devaluing Asians, women, and
queers are automatically. While Nguyen offers a compelling rereading of Asian gay bottomhood as pregnant with
empowerment and pleasure by examining visual representations of gay sex and sexuality specifically, my focus lies
more broadly on the possibility of Asian German subjectivity, and how it problematize the white, heterosexist regime
that maintains such hierarchy.
68 I am not trying to mesh the differing discourses of Asian minority populations – gay, straight, female – together
here. Rather, I want to work out what they have in common, namely the silencing of Asian Germans through
particular images conveying positive value. Conversely, I ask how the subjectivities that emerge in dialog with
the videos offer us insights into new forms of Asian German being.
29
LERNE DEUTSCH MIT PETRA VON KANT
The two videos by Ming Wong I discuss here, Lerne Deutsch mit Petra von Kant (Learning German
with Petra von Kant, 2007) and Angst Essen/Eat Fears (2008), are both references to German
director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s films.
69
They comprise part of Wong’s larger project of
reenacting iconic film melodramas from different countries, or “world cinema,”
70
as the artist
describes it, to play with and critique normative expectations of which bodies, feelings, and identities
belong together and which are deemed incompatible.
71
As such, his reenactments – or what I describe
as drag – intervene into the ways the genre of melodrama acts as a “sense-making machine” that, as
E. Ann Kaplan and Lauren Berlant have convincingly elaborated, both addresses and rehearses the
intimate life of the viewer as normative citizen.
72
Specifically, the two videos offer a means to
articulate the difficult place of Asian Germans by turning the representation of their suffering into a
form of protest. Wong’s racial, gender, and sexual drag does not aim at reproducing an identical
scenario, then. Instead, the artist uses his gender identity and his racially and ethnically marked body
to ventriloquize recognizable film roles, and to occupy a subject position he seems originally and
naturally excluded from.
Born shortly after the independence of Singapore as a former British colony, Japanese
occupied territory, and part of Malaysia, Wong studied art in London and has made Berlin his
main home since completing a one-year artist residency there in 2007.
73
Informed by his own
69 Künstlerhaus Bethanien subsidized Angst Essen whereas the costs for Lerne Deutsch mit Petra Von Kant were
born by the artist himself.
70 See Ming Wong, “Ming Wong: Part II. Interview,” ART iT, August 1, 2010, http://www.art-
it.asia/u/admin_ed_feature_e/xdWkvyHUJupNbYZQE1LM.
71 Other works of reference include Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959), Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti,
1971), and Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974).
72 See E. Ann Kaplan, “Theories of Melodrama. A Feminist Perspective,” Women and Performance 1, no. 1 (1983):
43, and Lauren Berlant’s approach to the same genre and its contribution to affective citizenship in The Female
Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press,
2008), 3.
73 Wong was hosted by Künstlerhaus Bethanien, a major art institution in Berlin.
30
upbringing in a postcolonial, multicultural, and multiracial society, and his subsequent move to
Britain and then Germany, the artist’s engagement with the performativity and hybridity of
identities has gained approbation not only from those representing Singapore’s national interests
but from critics and connoisseurs of the global art market alike.
74
Wong is frequently featured at
art biennials, where he represents his country of origin, and even garnered a Special Mention at
the Venice Biennale by a jury that included Homi Bhabha.
75
In Lerne Deutsch mit Petra von Kant, a reference to Fassbinder’s Die Bitteren Tränen der
Petra von Kant (1972), Ming Wong takes on the role of the German female protagonist. Specifically,
he reenacts the original key scene of von Kant’s nervous breakdown as she declares her love for
another woman and turns against the women supposedly closest to her – her mother, daughter, and
cousin – to insist on the legitimacy of her feeling. As her words clarify, “Crazy? I’m not crazy,
Sidonie. I love her.” Wong’s video opens with a split image that enables us to see side by side the
original and the staged version of Petra von Kant’s “coming out” scene. Against the background of a
white screen, the artist appears in a blond curly wig and is dressed in a similar emerald green dress as
the main character. He downs the Gin like von Kant, turns around when she does, smashes a
porcelain set with his silver-glowing high heels, throws himself onto the floor, and raises and lowers
the volume of his voice in concert with the original. Without any prior knowledge of German, and in
deliberately using his thick accent when repeating von Kant’s lines, Wong plays with his foreignness
74 The country’s inherently immigrant and multicultural nature is not least reflected in Wong’s own family history.
As he recounts, “My paternal grandparents migrated to Singapore from Guangdong in Southern China, and they
and their children went through the Japanese Occupation during WWII. My mother was born in Malaysia, and
came to Singapore to work where she met my father. I was born in the 70s, a few years after Singapore became
independent in 1965. I went to a catholic missionary primary school, then later to a ‘good’ state school where a
lot of the alumni would go on to work for the government. My parents learnt Malay in school, the national
language at the time, whereas I learnt Mandarin as a second language.” Selina Ting and Ming Wong, “Ming
Wong: Interview,” initiart Magazine, November 1, 2010, http://www.initiartmagazine.com/interview.php?
IVarchive=12.
75 Bhabha describes Wong’s work aptly as “both very clever in artistic terms and also very socially perceptive.”
Adele Tan, “The Scene is Elsewhere: Tracking Ming Wong,” ART iT, August 1, 2010, http://www.art-
it.asia/u/admin_ed_feature_ e/zoJ9KmD2WbsCuPreEwj1.
31
to disturb familiar narratives of national identity that are based on racial and ethnic purity, patriarchal
gender roles, and heterosexual desire. The protagonist takes in a foreign language to speak what the
language itself will not give away: Focusing on the crude and oftentimes obscene parts of the dialog
– from “Was ich sehe, das läßt mich kotzen” (what I see makes me sick) to “eine dreckige, elende,
miese Hure” (a dirty, miserable, lousy whore) – Wong exposes the abusive power of a German logic
that continues to reject a large part of the population by identifying them as forever foreign.
76
I situate Ming Wong’s appropriation of a by now canonical work of German film culture vis
à vis the open hostility of German politicians and a large part of the population against so-called
“immigrants” at the time of the video’s production. In fact, Wong made the video right before his
move from London to Berlin, when national declarations of the failure of multiculturalism pervaded
Western Europe and culminated in the advent of the so-called Eurozone crisis in 2008. Merkel’s
infamous announcement that the attempt to “live side by side and be happy about each other – this
attempt has failed, utterly failed,”
77
was followed shortly by similar statements in Britain and France
(and was also preceded by the Netherlands). Until today, however, Fortress Europe neglects the
structural discrimination minority populations face in the workforce and daily life. Like most
European countries, Germany avoids any deeper critical engagement with its racist histories,
including its colonial past. Instead, migration and diversity are identified as one-sided (“They are
invading our home and taking our jobs.”) and more recent phenomena of a historically and politically
neutral globalization, which threaten to undermine traditional European democracy.
78
76 One can understand the artist’s play with language also as a reference to the compulsory language tests, which
were introduced around the time of the video’s making and stipulate that foreign nationals have to successfully
pass them in order to attain German citizenship.
77 “Angela Merkel and die Muslime und Türken Multi Kulti is Tot.”
78 See Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley, “The Crises of Multiculturalism,” Open Democracy, July 18, 2011,
http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/alana-lentin-gavan-titley/crises-of-multiculturalism.
32
Against this backdrop, the staging of a hysterical episode in Lerne Deutsch emerges as a way
to counter the pervasive silence around the country’s systemic practices of racialization.
79
Specifically, I read Wong’s performance as the articulation of a social grievance that refutes the
narrative of a pseudo-moralistic postwar German society, where structural discrimination is
successfully overcome and minority subjects have no reason to complain. Specifically, in
featuring an Asian German subject who borrows from a fictional character the means to
articulate his own reality, the video makes a case for the particular silencing of Asian German
subjectivity.
The last two decades have seen a growing body of critical race scholarship that equally
interrogates the problematic self-consciousness of Western Europe and Germany in particular. In the
following section, I will offer a quick overview of several incisive works.
EUROPEAN CRITICAL RACE STUDIES: THE STRA TEGIC PRODUCTION OF SILENCE
In “Racial Europeanization,” David Theo Goldberg describes European self-conception as
simultaneously “white and Christian” while in denial of its racist foundation.
80
In European
commonsense view, Goldberg maintains, “race is only America’s problem.”
81
While the author’s
approach tends to favor a homogenous notion of (dominant) Europe rather than acknowledge the
79 I say “institutional” here to refer to habituated forms of seeing, thinking, feeling, and acting that are further
sanctioned by state institutions – for instance the law – and social institutions such as language. Sara Ahmed’s
definition, not unlike Keeling’s notion of commonsense, is helpful in this context, too. For Ahmed, “The very
idea of institutionalization might even denote those tendencies or habitual forms of action that are not named or
made explicit. We can thus think of institutions in terms of how some actions become automatic at a collective
level; […] An institution takes shape as an effect of what has become automatic.” Ahmed, On Being Included,
25.
80 David Theo Goldberg, “Racial Europeanization,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 29, no. 2 (2006): 352.
81 Ibid., 343. Likewise, Chin and Fehrenbach recognize a post-World War II shift in racial discourse away from
Germany itself and towards the US and the civil rights movement as well as other European countries facing the
consequences of decolonization. Rita Chin and Heike Fehrenbach, “Introduction: What’s Race Got to Do With
It? Postwar German History in Context,” in After the Nazi Racial State. Difference and Democracy in Germany
and Europe, ed. by Rita Chin, Heide Fehrenbach, Geoff Eley, Atina Grossmann (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2009), 18f.
33
continent’s internal hierarchies, I find it helpful to grasp the norm of whiteness as an invisible
distributor of European identity and belonging more generally.
82
In a similar gesture, albeit with a
focus on Black Europeans, Fatima El-Tayeb problematizes the obscured persistence of racism in
Europe. In European Others. Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe, El-Tayeb employs the term
“political racelessness” to designate “a form of racialization that can be defined as specifically
European both in its enforced silence and in its explicit categorization as not European of all those
who violate Europe’s implicit, but normative whiteness.”
83
In the specific context of Germany, Nanna Heidenreich discusses how the production of
minoritized populations depends on the erasure of the means to name and criticize this very
production. She shows how linguistic adjustments made after World War II, such as the shift from the
historically loaded term Rasse to the seemingly neutral Ausländer (foreigner) and, concomitantly,
from “racism” to “xenophobia,” suggest a change in attitude where there is no change.
84
For
Heidenreich the linguistic shift exacerbates a public denial of contemporary racism. Yet being
German is socially and legally still regulated via the belief in a veritable racial German body,
85
as
82 Goldberg does take into account “a European core around which (as Balibar suggests) are nucleated at least two
container rings of states conceived as less or incompletely or not fully European by nature or historical
formation.” “Racial Europeanization,” 354. However, his discussion does not follow up on this hierarchy and
rather focuses on a dominant Northwestern European “block” with France and the UK as exemplary case studies.
83 El-Tayeb, European Others, xxviii.
84 In Die windige Internationale, Manuela Bojadžijev discusses how the notion and perception of racism,
“Ausländerfeindlichkeit,” has been reorganized – and disguised – through the use of the term xenophobia,
“Fremdenfeindlichkeit,” (26). She elaborates, “Theories of xenophobia maintain the assumption of ‘prejudices’
against ‘foreigners’ within the German society. However, they fail to explain who, after all, is perceived as
‘foreign,’ how and when […] ‘The foreigner’ himself is the key to the practice of discrimination, which is taken
as an individual or collective reaction towards foreigners or others.” (Mit den Theorien der Xenophobie ist die
Annahme verbunden, es gehe um ‘V orurteile’ gegenüber ‘Fremden’ innerhalb der deutschen Gesellschaft. Es
gelingt ihnen aber nicht zu erklären, wer wie und wann überhaupt als ‘fremd’ wahrgenommen wird […] ‘Der
Fremde’ selbst ist hier Schlüssel zur Diskriminierungspraxis, die als eine individuelle oder kollektive
Reaktionsweise auf Fremde oder Andere gilt.) Ibid.
85 Despite reformed naturalization laws in 2000, which granted a restricted jus soli to people born in Germany for
the first time, critics argue that new professional, financial, and linguistic requirements make it more difficult to
acquire German citizenship. Yet, as Jacqueline S. Gehring notes, “a significant 1.3 million foreigners became
German citizens between 2000 and 2010.” “Race, Ethnicity and German Identity: A Media Analysis of the
Status of Germans with ‘Immigration Background’ on the 2010 World Cup Men’s National Soccer Team”
(unpublished Paper, Google Docs, accessed July 15, 2014), 9. https://docs.google.com/viewer?
a=v&pid=sites&srcid=YWxsZWdoZW55LmVkdXxq YWNraWVnZWhya
34
the persistence of the term Rasse in German Basic Law exemplifies.
86
Consequently, people of
color, those who do not meet the normative white appearance, fall automatically into the rubric of the
“other,” no matter what the reality of their birthplace, cultural upbringing, and language skills may
be.
87
Yet there are also distinct hierarchies of racial “otherness.”
Where “Muslims” become the public scapegoat for the social ills of a multicultural society
whose inhabitants would otherwise “be happy about each other,” (Merkel) Asian Germans serve as
the tabula rasa that yet allows for the public’s channeling of negative affect – fear, resentment,
disgust – towards the Turkish German minority. Asian Germans are devoid of the stigma of
social negativity. Instead, as I have proposed previously, their identity enables it. To quote from
Vijay Prashad’s critique of the model minority identity in the United States, it is both a
“solution” and a “weapon” for white supremacy.
88
Yet I argue, in this process Asian Germans
W5nfGd4OjNhYjUyMjdjOTM0MWM4NjM. For the German Nationality Act itself see http://www.gesetze-im-
internet.de/rustag/BJNR005830913.html.
86 See Heidenreich, “Ansichtssachen. Die V/Erkennungsdienste des deutschen Ausländerdiskurses und die
Perspektive der Migration [A Matter of perspective. The practices of mis/identification in German discourses on
foreignness and the perspective of migration]” (PhD dissertation, Humboldt-Universität Berlin, 2010), 21n34.
Heidenreich also refers to recent attempts to abolish the term from the Basic Law text, as for instance suggested
by the think tank the German Institute for Human Rights (ibid.). In the April 2010 proposal, Hendrik Cremer
argues for a replacement of the noun Rasse with the adjective “racist” and more concretely “racist
discrimination.” According to Cremer, whose attitude is representative of opponents to the use of the term, “The
employment of the term ‘Rasse’ in the prohibition of discrimination in Basic Law can promote racist thinking,
since it suggests that there are different human ‘Rassen’ (Der Gebrauch des Begriffs „Rasse“ im
Diskriminierungsverbot des Grundgesetzes kann rassistisches Denken fördern, da er suggeriert, dass es
unterschiedliche menschliche „Rassen“ gebe.).” See Hendrik Crember, “Ein Grundgesetz ohne ‘Rasse’ –
V orschlag für eine Änderung von Artikel 3 Grundgesetz,” Institut Fuer Menschenrechte, April 2010,
http://www.institut-fuer-menschenrechte.de/uploads/tx_commerce/policy_paper_16_ein_grundgesetz_ ohne_
rasse_ 01.pdf, 6. More recently, the notion of the foreigner has been replaced by yet another term, “person with
migrant background.” According to the official definition, it comprises anyone who immigrated to Germany after
1949, foreign citizens born in Germany, and German citizens with at least one immigrant parent. Statistisches
Bundesamt, “Personen mit Migrationshintergrund (Persons with migration background),” Destatis, accessed
May 15, 2012,
https://www.destatis.de/DE/ZahlenFakten/GesellschaftStaat/Bevoelkerung/MigrationIntegration/Migrationshinte
rgrund/Aktuell.html.
87 Heidenreich, “Ansichtssachen,” 37.
88 Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 6. Prashad
proposes a “model minority suicide” as counter-tactic, that is, “to re-create a form of Asian misbehavior” (179).
While I concur with this Prashad’s proposal, I also feel hesitant to embrace his rhetoric in view of the social and
actual deaths of people of color I am trying to write against here.
35
become disposable, too. As the posterchild for trouble-free minority life, the living proof of the good
nation-state, Asian Germans are deprived of alternative life paths, of the right to fail, to dream, and to
invent. Instead, they become illegible as embodied, affective, and cognitive subjects and that is, in
their own respective personhood.
89
A PROBLEM WITH SOLUTIONS
In what is perhaps the first academic article on Asian German studies, Mita Banerjee suggests that
Asian Germans do not gain much public attention because they do not pose a demographic
“problem.”
90
Their numbers are too small to worry. Therefore, an institutional discourse on Asian
German experience, such as the project of Asian German studies, proves difficult or, in the words of
Banerjee, “demographically impossible.”
91
“Yet,” she writes, “even if Asian Germans have no
political clout and, given their lack of demographic visibility, there seems to be no justification in
calling for a new paradigm through which their (small) presence could adequately be addressed or
described.”
92
While Banerjee does not further this thought, I want to take it up to propose that a
89 To be clear, my discussion does not claim Asian Germans as the exceptional subjects of racialization. As
Bojadžijev makes clear, “In Germany, the discrimination against Greeks, Italians, Portuguese and Spanish who are
assigned different ‘cultural identities’ and ‘mentalities,’ who were prohibited with signs from entering pubs and cafes,
to whom landlords did not want to rent their apartments or who were harassed by administrative agencies, are rarely
remembered.” (In Deutschland wird die Diskriminierung von Griechen, Italienern, Portugiesen und Spaniern, denen
andere ‘kulturelle Identitäten’ und ‘Mentalitäten’ zugeschrieben worden sind, denen mit Schildern zu Gaststätten und
Cafés Zugang verwehrt wurde, an die Hausbesitzer ihre Wohnungen nicht vermieten wollten oder die durch Behörden
schikaniert wurden, heute kaum noch erinnert.) Die Windige Internationale, 278. Rather, what I believe is unique to
the governance of an Asian minority population, and yet relational to forms of violence exacted upon other
racialized bodies, is how a politics of visibility, together with a demonstrated attitude of positivity, create a place
for precarity and elimination.
90 Mita Banerjee, “Travelling Theory, Reshaping Disciplines? Envisioning Asian Germany through Asian
Australian Studies,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 27, no. 1-2 (2006): 171. In 2010, German History featured a
special section on “Asia, Germany and the Transnational Turn.” While the various historians of Germany in this
dialogue pick up on the notion of “Asian German studies,” they do so to refer to “encounters” and “perceptions”
on the level of state politics, economy, and intellectual exchange rather than of people’s daily experience or the
sheer fact of Germans with Asian background. Jennifer L. Jenkins et al., “Asia, Germany and the Transnational
Turn,” German History 28, no. 4 (2010): 522.
91 Banerjee, “Travelling Theory,” 170.
92 Ibid.
36
dominant perception of Asian Germans as demographically meaningless coincides with their social
illegibility: If racialized others can only be perceived as a “problem,” that is, if the social recognition
of people of color in Germany depends on an original misconception of them as a “problem,” then
the “solution” (Prashad) and specifically Asian Germans automatically fall outside a national
commonsense perception.
93
In other words, Asian Germans inhabit a space of not only demographic
meaninglessness but epistemological impossibility. They are employed as a solution but remain
themselves unthought. Indeed, they can only figure as solution if unthought.
Lerne Deutsch demonstrates how the experience of social death, the experience of one’s
own impossibility, must lead to personal crisis. In aligning himself with the trope of the
melodramatic white German woman, Wong uses drag to speak of this experience of
unthoughtness. That is, drag becomes the much-needed vehicle to speak of repressed experience.
As David Eng similarly argues in his discussion of state-imposed amnesia and its effects on the
bodies and minds of racialized subjects, “It is because language fails the hysteric – fails, that is,
to give adequate expression to these reminiscences – that the body must speak instead.”
94
In Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America, David Eng theorizes
racial hysteria as a response to past and present wounds of social discrimination that are frequently
dismissed and, indeed, actively repressed by the state. Eng detaches his definition of hysteria from
its common perception as a female sexual pathology, and reframes it instead as the expression of
social trauma or, more precisely, as the response to the blocked possibility of addressing and
processing such trauma. For Eng, racial hysteria describes an act of social withdrawal that manifests
itself in the rejection of norms of social assimilation that persist in the notions of “model minorities
93 To support this claim, the estimated number of Black Germans (500,000) falls even below that of all Asian
Germans in the German environment, yet the discussion of Black German identity has gained more political and
academic visibility. How might this observation further complicate Banerjee’s argument on the numerical?
94 David Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (London, Durham: Duke University
Press, 2001),
172.
37
and exemplary citizens.”
95
Within this context, Eng proposes to understand racial hysteria not as an
individual’s failure to fit into society, but as an act of political protest, against the nation’s deliberate
forgetfulness.
Reading Lerne Deutsch through the lens of racial hysteria can help us frame Wong’s racial
and gender drag as an Asian German’s arduous attempt to come to terms with an environment that
perpetually dismisses his experience. Where the benign image of Asian Germans “as model
minorities and exemplary citizens” makes it especially difficult to detect ongoing racist practices and
“justify” bad feelings about them, Wong enacts a crisis of sovereign subjecthood to suggest the
gravity of historical eradication. Similar to Eng’s discussion of racial hysteria as the visceral reaction
to a social wrong, drag here takes on the role of both self-maintenance and social protest. On the one
hand, the video features an Asian German protagonist in drag who is stripped of the qualities of
physical strength, rationality, and emotional control that characterize white patriarchal manhood. He
appears, in the words of Eng, “hysterially impotent.” Yet Wong’s hysteric drag refuses to figure Asian
German masculinity as lack by calling into question what counts as natural identification and
acceptable sociality. Whereas the model minority norm equates Asian masculinity with effeminacy
and docility, and has not seldom led to Asian minority men’s “reactionary claim to male power and
privilege,” Wong orients himself towards the drunk, loud, and offensive character of von Kant.
96
Specifically, he chooses as his primary reference a sassy, white German woman whose unruly desire
for another woman further complicates the definition of womanhood through traditional femininity.
By bringing together two subjects who refuse from the beginning to assimilate into the social role
they are assigned to, Wong clearly meddles with dominant racial and gender assignments – who
embodies white, of color, masculine and feminine “properties,” and what they mean in the first
95 Ibid., 170.
96 Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies (Stanford
University Press 2012), 2.
38
place.
97
I propose the artist uses von Kant’s expression of transgressive desire to demand the right to
subjecthood beyond the dominant imaginations of white German heteropatriarchy.
98
By staging a
subject’s multistable nature that explodes the dominant fiction of Asian Germanness, his drag
becomes an act of protest – of queer Asian German enunciation exposing how insufficient the social
constituencies of “proper” belonging are.
99
We can use the performance as well, I believe, to ask
about the epistemological constituencies of Asian German subjecthood in academic thinking.
ANOTHER SILENCE: ASIAN GERMANS IN EUROPEAN CRITICAL RACE DISCOURSE
Examining Asian German drag as an expression of racial hysteria, both a suffering from and a
protest against the dominant social order, I want to return to the question of silence and
justification around Asian German subjecthood. In particular, I want to use Wong’s embodiment
of a racial hysteric to expand the question back toward an academic European critical race
discourse, and ask: Who and what have moved to the center of its theorization? How does this
discourse make recognizable undetected forms of social violence, and where does it institutionalize
new absences? The authors I have referenced above provide crucial examinations of the production
of silence and neglect in the management of Continental European and German subjecthood. What I
97 For an excellent discussion of gay drag and its subversion of patriarchal norms, albeit one that largely skips over
issues of race, see Brett Farmer. Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, Gay Male Spectatorships (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2000). Kathrin Sieg’s book on ethnic drag, entitled Ethnic Drag. Performing Race,
Nation, Sexuality in West Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), offers another helpful take
on the subversive potential of drag performance in this context. While I discuss the multiple roles of drag in
relation to Asian German enunciation, I do not offer a deeper engagement with the literature on drag.
98 For further critiques on Asian American men’s strategic remasculinzation see King-kok Cheung, “The Woman
Warrior versus The Chinaman Pacific: Must a Chinese American Critic Choose between Feminism and
Heroism?” in Conflicts in Feminism, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (New York: Routledge, 1990);
Viet Thanh Nguyen, “The Remasculinization of Chinese America: Race, Violence, and the Novel,” American
Literary History 12, no. 1/2 (2000); and Jenn Fang, “Masculinity vs. ‘Misogylinity:’ What Asian Americans Can
Learn From #UCSB Shooting #YesAllWomen,” Reappropriate, May 28, 2014, http://reappropriate.co/?p=5755.
99 As Richard Fung puts it succinctly, “the Asian man is defined by a striking absence down there. And if Asian
men have no sexuality, how can we have homosexuality?” Richard Fung, “Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized
Asian in Gay Video Porn,” Asian American Studies: A Reader, ed. Jean Yu-wen Shen Wu, Min Song (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 340.
39
find undertheorized in much of this work, however, is the tricky relation between positivity, or the
assignment of worthy life, and social death as it concerns Asian Germans. In other words, the
hypervisibility of a model minority identity that promises social inclusion and seems to bestow
positive value upon those it simultaneously causes to disappear from social view. Against this
backdrop, I propose, European critical race studies needs to inquire as well into the dialectic
mechanisms that render minority subjects simultaneously disposable and indispensable. This means
to interrogate not only the relation between whiteness and its “other” but to pay attention to the
ongoing redistribution of difference among those “othered” to begin with. Such an inquiry, I would
hope, can hold the emerging discipline of European critical race studies accountable to reconsider
narrow understandings of oppression and resistance and, relatedly, the danger to foreclose certain
minoritized populations from partaking in anti-racist counter-discourse.
100
For instance, Goldberg defines “the black, the Jew, and the Muslim” as the bearers of
European racism.
101
The author grounds his argument in Western European histories of colonialism,
Christianity and Enlightenment, as well as World War II. I understand Goldberg’s discussion as an
effort to excavate the systemic discrimination of European minority populations. Yet his study leaves
out expressions and experiences of racism that are not encoded in “periods of high social drama or
destruction.”
102
That is, it presets the main subjects of European anti-racist discourse – whom and
what we talk about – as it makes difficult to “justify” (Banerjee) the inclusion of differently racialized
others.
Building on Vukadinović’s argument that the lateness of German migration studies and of
anti-racist scholarship more generally is a result of the epistemological alignment between the state
and its educational institutions, I want to ask how we can productively turn around this other delay –
100For an eye-opening discussion of a state politics of multicultural inclusion in a US-American context see Jodi
Melamed. Represent and Destroy and Roderick A. Ferguson, The Reorder of Things.
101Goldberg, “Racial Europeanization,” 331.
102Chin and Fehrenbach, “Introduction,” 19.
40
the temporal lag and the displacement of Asian German subjectivity in European critical race
studies? While I welcome Banerjee’s suggestion to “salvage” and build an institutional “record” of
Asian German life through the discipline of Asian German studies,
103
I also propose to strategically
make use of Asian Germany’s liminality to continuously challenge and interrogate the incorporation
of alternative discourses into recognized knowledge. While the latter gets taught at home, in schools,
and everyday media, holds special value and is paid for but also represents a shared “normality,” I
want to emphasize once more the need for resources of and references to Asian German experience
that are not yet institutionalized and may, indeed, resist their absorption into the “will to
institutionality.”
104
In dialog with such inspiring activist scholars as El-Tayeb, Heidenreich, and
Bojadžijev, all of which have engaged material outside established knowledge archives to ask
about the conditions under which we come to see and know in the first place, I too argue for the
ongoing need to mobilize multiple knowledge sources to both supplement and interrogate our
alignment with dominant identity and value assignments. I am, then, not saying to do away with
European critical race studies or the project of Asian German studies, quite the contrary. Rather, my
discussion of Wong’s drag videos seeks to show how cultural works like Lerne Deutsch shed light on
forms of resistance and anti-racist labor – here, for instance, in the form of racial drag or expressions
of hysteria – that otherwise remain undervalued but are indispensable to people’s daily struggle and
survival. One just needs to recall the investment of German women of color and other activists to
103Banerjee, “Travelling Theory,” 174. Banerjee proposes to do so through both an engagement with existing
discussions on the production of intranational difference and an Asian diasporic framework. More specifically, she
follows the trajectory of the more recently established Asian Australian studies as a discipline that has drawn on Asian
Canadian studies which, in turn, has developed in the shadow of a dominating Asian American discourse.
104Ferguson writes with regard to the incorporation of minorities and minority knowledge into U.S. higher
education, arguing that institutionalization always entails regulation and assimilation. “As power has negotiated
and incorporated difference, it has also developed and deployed a calculus by which to determine the specific
critical and ruptural capacities of those forms of difference. We may call this incorporation of modes of
difference and the calculus that seeks to determine the properties and and functions of those modes as a will to
institutionality. The will to institutionality not only absorbs institutions and modern subjects; it is itself a mode of
subjection as well.” (214) Relatedly, on the incorporation of minorities into academia, Ferguson writes,
“American colleges and universities would become the places that might educate minoritized subjects into the
political identities and protocols of the nation.” Roderick A. Ferguson, Reorder of Things, 189.
41
introduce minoritarian experiences into national view and build supportive networks. How come
they remain so often unmentioned not only in migration scholarship but even European critical race
studies itself? Whom and what are the subjects as well as the methods and audiences of such studies?
With these questions in mind, I want to turn to Ming Wong’s second video work, Angst
Essen/Eat Fear. In this video, Wong takes his drag performance to a further extreme. In fact, his drag
not only represents a form of racial hysteria; it becomes itself hysterical – both in the colloquial sense
of exaggeration and excess and also in the politicized sense that Eng discusses it, namely as social
withdrawal and protest. In this, drag performance here allows for certain forms of pleasure and
delight that interrupt and overlay the dominance of suffering and pain in the melodramatic narratives
the artist references. More than that, the affective excess Wong generates through his enactment
gestures to political affiliations and socialities unheard of before.
ANGST ESSEN/EAT FEAR
Man: “One could say for the American Negro to achieve the middle-class white American
standards is a revolution.”
Grace Lee Boggs: “I don’t think whites understand the degree to which Negroes do not want their
whiteness. I am trying to suggest that the negro is striving to become equal to a particular image of
himself that he has achieved; that he is not trying to become equal to whites.”
105
Angst Essen/Eat Fear is Wong’s remake of Fassbinder’s Angst Essen Seele Auf (1974), the tale of
a socially taboo romance between German female senior citizen Emmi and the much younger
Moroccan male guest worker Ali. Similar to Lerne Deutsch, Angst Essen consists of selected key
scenes from the original through which we follow Ali’s objectification as a man of color and
Emmi’s discrimination as a white woman desiring him. Except for a few cases, where two
characters appear in close physical proximity, Wong plays all the characters, women and men of
105The dialog is an excerpt from Grace Lee Boggs’s speech at The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions,
Santa Barbara, CA, a liberal think tank that closed in the 1980s. It is played in the documentary American
Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs (Grace Lee, 2014). The emphasis is audibly made by Lee
Boggs. According to library records, she held her speech on August 20, 1963, which explains the outdated and by
now offensive use of the term “negro.” http://digital.library.ucsb.edu/items/show/5250.
42
different age, race, citizenship, social backgrounds, and various body sizes.
106
In one scene, he
appears as Emmi presenting her newly wedded husband’s muscular body to her colleagues in an
attempt to overcome their hostile attitude towards him. “Mach mal! Fass ihn mal an!” (Go ahead!
Touch him!) she encourages the two women, who immediately begin to circle around the
“model” Ali, exclaiming “Toll. Und die Haut ist so zart” (Terrific! And the skin is so soft). While
Angst Essen Seele Auf shows Ali trapped in the liminal, violent space between racial abjection
and hypersexualization, Angst Essen/Eat Fear utilizes drag to enact an Asian German subject’s
subversive mobility. Here, it is not the person of color who fails to pass as German. Rather, it is
the white subject who fails to pass as authentically German. By highlighting his use of body
make-up and fake appendages to reenact the “veritable” German characters of Fassbinder’s film,
Wong makes whiteness the target of our laughter and disrupts its status as the invisible norm.
The performer’s failure to pass as white – after all, the comic relief of Wong’s drag relies
precisely on the fact that he never fully coincides with the original – becomes the questioning of
whiteness as the incontestable origin. Where critics lamented the weak representation of
“foreigners” in Fassbinder’s films and the persistent absence of an “alternative vision of social
justice,”
107
Wong’s drag subjects “real” Germans to a scrutiny of authenticity that is usually
reserved for so-called outsiders.
108
As such, his drag, or the enactment of the failure to pass,
mocks a racial hierarchy that determines people’s worth unevenly and severely restricts their
interaction and sociality. The goal is not to take on white identity; it is finding ways to bend and
challenge its presumed stability. As Cherise Smith puts it likewise in her definition of gender
drag,
106Doubles are rendered overtly obvious, for instance through non-fitting wigs, so as to enhance the comical
masquerade.
107Sieg, Ethnic Drag, 166.
108Sieg, for example, has criticized Fassbinder’s work for perpetuating practices of othering in its focus on the
subjective experience of German characters that “leave[s] the subjectivity of the foreigner blank.” Ibid., 160.
43
In contrast to the cross-dresser, the drag artist does not aim to pass as the assumed
identity. Rather, drag relies on the camp factor to amplify gender conventions in a
parodic way that calls attention to the ʻartifice, exaggeration’ and ʻstylization’ of
gender and other identities. Camp is characterized by incongruity and humor, and
it delights in ʻthings-being-what-they-are-not.’
109
While Smith’s statement focuses on drag’s relationship to the dominant gender binary, I want to
advance her suggestion of drag as a lingering on “things-being-what-they-are-not.” For me, the
value of Wong’s videos lies precisely in the unruly vision of what minoritized subjects can do if
they refuse to stay put. It lies not simply in parodying the norm but in striving “for radically
different ways of living and laboring with a body,” as David Geer further expands the meaning of
drag.
110
I am also reminded here of Grace Lee Boggs and her framing of the Black Movement as
a search for black subjecthood that does not want or need to mirror whiteness. In a speech to The
Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a think tank made up of white, liberal
intellectuals, held in 1963, Lee Boggs argues that the movement’s goal indeed lies in the creation
of its own “image.” In her own words, “I am trying to suggest that the negro is striving to
become equal to a particular image of himself that he has achieved; that he is not trying to
become equal to whites.” I am quoting Lee Boggs here, because her suggestion of a Black
commonsense that does not equate white supremacy resonates with my reading of Wong’s work.
In the video, the Asian German subject, too, strives toward a minoritarian self-positioning that
leaves behind white subjecthood. Unlike the racial hysteric of Eng’s account, the Asian German
subject we see distances himself from his supposed failure to assimilate into the dominant
fictions of white heteropatriarchy and from the suffering these fictions cause for him. Instead, he
turns them back onto themselves to reveal their inherent instability and the excessive sociality
109Cherise Smith, Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna
Deavere Smith (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 15.
110David Geer, “You Don’t Own Me,” The New Inquiry, June 20, 2014. http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/you-dont-
own-me.
44
they produce. In fact, I propose to see the excessive absorption of subject positions that we
witness in the videos as a search for possible alliances beyond the conditions of possibility for
sociality as predetermined by white hegemony. In this context, the biographical figure of Lee
Boggs as an Asian American woman activist in the Black Movement inspires my discussion in a
further way. For her own political engagement pushes wide open our imagination of anti-racist
collaboration among people of color. To draw the connection back to Geer and his description of
drag as a means of worlding, “drag can be about more than the subversion of gender; it can also
speak to a collective, psychic longing that does not see ‘man’ or ‘woman’ as its only locations of
desire.”
111
Wong’s drag shows us an Asian German subject in pursuit of “collective” minoritarian
sociality to shake off his social insulation. His physical and affective imitation puts him in
proximity with others and allows him to give his suffering a voice. Drag expresses a “longing”
that remains illegible in narratives of normative identity and their affective structures. As well, it
generates pleasure from trying out new self-presentations, and it permits for moments of laughter
when those fail to satisfy. Yet I want to ask about the limits of those “radically different” social
worlds that drag produces but seems unable to sustain. Wong’s slipping in and out of roles not
only enables a physically and affectively shared world of seemingly incompatible subjects and
relationships. It also raises the question of who has access to a playful appropriation of
masquerades, and who is forced into continuous migration and deprived of such choice? In the
end, the minoritarian pleasure drag evokes is the experience of one Asian German subject alone,
and the cross-racial sociality the performance gestures toward remains unfulfilled, too. We need
to keep in mind that what allows Ming Wong to mobilize Asian German subjecthood is also what
distinguishes him from the majority of Asian Germans and other persons of color. In contrast to
111Geer, “You Don’t Own Me.” “Worlding” is the term I choose here to describe the imagining and production of
social worlds.
45
them, the self-defined “guestartworker” Wong remains a privileged artist whose life is
characterized by the movement between metropolises, professional recognition, and economic
viability.
112
As an educated, gay artist of color, whose work is shown in museums, galleries, and film
festivals around the world, Wong embodies the racial and queer capital that contributes to Berlin’s
“good” multicultural makeup that has become particularly necessary after the declared “failure” of
multiculturalism.
113
By imitating iconic film figures from around the world without making more
explicit claims about the local particularities in the production of difference, Wong also casts doubt
on a serious engagement with concrete forms of discrimination. Are identities just façade and
simulacra? Is race just a game? In this view, Wong appears much more like an updated Asian model
minority subject whose diligence, containability, and political disinterest continue to support the
image of a white progressive German society – if not the global triumph of liberalism.
114
How do we evaluate the work of artists like Ming Wong, who scrutinizes the unequal
distribution of access and belonging in Germany while he also profits from Berlin’s institutional
branding? Moreover, given the artist’s access to various forms of capital under neoliberal
multiculturalism, including his racial and ethnic majority status as Han Chinese in Singapore, how
112Ludwig Seyfarth, “Ming Wong. Portrait,” vonhundert, November 2009, http://www.vonhundert.de/index.php?
id=226. A look at the artist’s CV gives a good overview: http://www.mingwong.org/index.php?/artist-info/cv/.
113Eng-Beng Lim offers a critical discussion on the commodification of racial and sexual “diversity” in neoliberal
Singapore and the use of this “diversity” as proof of the progressive state. According to Lim, “Singapore’s much
desired ʻdiversity quotientʼ can only be enhanced if its own sexual minorities are no longer subjected to the kind
of persecutory surveillance and crackdown that had earned the country such ignominious descriptions as
ʻoppressiveʼ and ʻauthoritarian.ʼ” Lim, “Glocalqueering in New Asia: The Politics of Performing Gay in
Singapore,” Theatre Journal 57, no. 3 (October 2005): 393. His argument is relevant not only for a Singaporean
context however, but offers valuable insights into neoliberal state policies more general. For a thorough
discussion of Singapore’s use of “queer capital” see his Brown Boys, 126.
114For a critical assessment of the visibility of minority populations in the branding of urban spaces as creative
cities, see El-Tayeb, European Others. For a discussion of the problematic use of diversity and multiculturalism
in the branding of the creative city, in particular its intimate connection with neoliberal capitalism, see J.P.
Catungal and D. Leslie, “Contesting The Creative City: Race, Nation, Multiculturalism,” Geoforum 40, no. 5
(2009). For a discussion of Singapore’s use of cultural policy to implement its ideology of national identity in
concert with global capitalism compare Lily Kong, “Cultural Policy in Singapore: Negotiating Economic and
Socio-cultural Agendas,” Geoforum 31, no. 4 (2000). While this goes beyond the scope of the current chapter,
such further discussions can be helpful for contextualizing Wong’s work within a broader notion of Asian
transnational governance and global capitalism.
46
useful is his work to inquire about the difficult place of Asian Germans?
115
Rather than concluding this discussion with a binary logic of either or – either compliance
or resistance, either “pure” or “contaminated” minoritarian articulation – I suggest to remain
attentive to the wider context of the governance of minoritarian life today. As critical race
scholars discussing the complexities of neoliberal multiculturalism such as Eng-Beng Lim and
Jodi Melamed have convincingly shown, the possibilities of politicization and resistance are
oftentimes intimately entwined with the normalization of life, but not reducible to it.
116
In this
regard, a discussion of Wong’s artworks through a limited framework of “good” and “bad”
minority subjectivity not only renders irrelevant expressions of life that do not fit into either
designation; it also threatens to reproduce the very logic it interrogates.
For me, Lerne Deutsch and Angst Essen reflect the seeming paradox of an Asian body’s
exclusion and stickiness and its simultaneous privileged position within a hierarchy of racial
value, mobility, and a corresponding degree of creativity and playfulness. The videos both
document and participate in the shifting meanings of foreignness, exclusion, and access that come
with the dynamics of colonization, migrancy, and global capitalism. More specifically, they illustrate
how the perception of a single subject and the meaning of Asianness he embodies are constantly
revised. In this light, let me reframe my previous stance about the necessity to integrate into an
Asian German discourse resources and references that are not yet institutionalized. For it may be
wiser to start by acknowledging that alternative sites of knowledge, too, are always already
implicated in hegemonic power relations rather than insulated utterances of sheer imagination.
Thus we need to ask about their epistemological, institutional, and biographical attachment to
normative orders and, in doing so, carve out the potential for reappropriation, for critical
115For a particular discussion of the racial politics in Singapore see Brown Boys and Chua Beng Huat, “The
Cultural Logic of a Capitalist Single-Party State, Singapore,” Postcolonial Studies 13, no. 4 (2010).
116Compare Eng-Beng Lim and Melamed as cited in this chapter as well as David Harvey’s A Brief History of
Neoliberalism (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
47
analysis, mockery, and resistance that stems precisely from their proximity to dominance and
control.
117
So this is the claim with which I wish to end my discussion of Wong’s work: that the
elusive mobility, strategic positioning, and systemic exploitation of Asian German subjectivity
that emerge around Wong’s enactments make impossible not the fact of Asian German life but its
ultimate containment in the midst of institutional appraisal. As the following discussion of
Wayne Yung’s video elucidates as well, Asian German subjectivity does not emerge from a
vacuum. Rather, both the protagonist and the filmmaker are subject to and simultaneously make
use of dominant economies of desire.
MY GERMAN BOYFRIEND
Wayne Yung’s work explores the experience of the stranger from more than one standpoint. The
filmmaker’s emphasis on the complex intersections of race, citizenship, and sexual desire
informs his approach to everyday negotiations of cultural essentialism, which comprise a
leitmotif in My German Boyfriend, the video I discuss here, and across all of Yung’s work.
Specifically, my analysis explores how Yung intersects intimate sexual desires with violent
political histories to suggest an Asian German sociality beyond the limits of German national
commonsense as well as conventional anti-racist politics.
Yung was born in Edmonton, Canada, to Chinese immigrant parents and moved to
Germany at the age of 30. He graduated from the Academy of Media Art in Cologne and married
his German partner. As of 2014, Yung holds permanent residency and lives as a freelancer in
Berlin. In his narrative short film My German Boyfriend (2004), the artist alludes to parts of his
biography, and he continues a discussion on Asian masculinity and gay sex and desire through
117I am drawing here on Ina Kerner’s proposal for a Critical Whiteness Studies that interrogates racist practices on
the three levels of knowledge discourses, institutions, and personal attitudes and interactions. “Critical Whiteness
Studies,” 288.
48
the lens of national, racial, and ethnic belonging that characterizes most of his work. In the video,
Yung stars himself as a naïve Chinese Canadian gay man who leaves the home country for Berlin
to follow his German dream and find a German boyfriend. Beginning with the filmmaker’s
preconception of the German people as critical thinkers (as his voice-over fancies, “Germans are
so intelligent. Just look at the great thinkers: Goethe...Hegel...Nietzsche...”), culturally and
politically open-minded, and progressive (“If I had a German boyfriend, he would be political:
anti-racist, environmentalist, pro-choice and vegetarian. And we’d have lots of lesbian friends.”),
we follow Yung’s disappointing encounter with actual white German gay men. Not only do they
differ greatly from his German imaginary; they also harbor their own racial stereotypes against
the protagonist. During his dates with them, Yung finds himself continuously silenced.
In one scene, the protagonist meets a Buddhist German man who takes him to the
Chinese garden in Berlin. They have sushi for lunch and end their day meditating on a rooftop at
sunset. Throughout the whole time, Yung does not say a word. Rather, his German date keeps
talking about his understanding of “Asian” values and traditions. As he makes clear from the
beginning, “In Asian culture, I feel completely at home. They’re so much nicer than the
Germans. So sweet and devoted, almost like children.” Toward the end of the scene, while the
German Buddhist is deeply immersed in his meditative exercise, the protagonist gets up and
leaves the scene quietly. Ironically, it is only then that the former exclaims, with eyes closed, to
feel the fullness of Yung’s aura. Once again, an Asian German’s worthiness emerges in his very
absence.
What appears at first like an individual’s praise of, or harmless ignorance toward our
protagonist quickly turns out to be the expression of an engrained commonsense perception that
separates an “Asian other” from proper Germanness.
118
However, what exactly Asianness means,
118Homi K. Bhabha names such a commonsense perception as original misconception a stereotype: “a fixed reality
which is at once an ‘other’ and yet entirely knowable and visible. It resembles a form of narrative whereby the
productivity and circulation of subjects and signs are bound in a reformed and recognisable totality. It employs a
49
remains unclear, for it emerges here more as that which renders illegible the complexity of
Yung’s biography, for instance being a Canadian citizen but also being a man with his own
racialized expectations toward white German men, and, moreover, with his own intimate desires.
Reminiscent of El-Tayeb’s notion of “political racelessness,” the liberal attitude that Yung
encounters remains closely tied to a belief in racial hierarchies, or rather inherently superior and
inferior “cultures.”
119
I contend My German Boyfriend exemplifies how the norm of Asian
German identity serves to support the sovereignty of white liberal subjecthood even or precisely
in a seemingly progressive gay scene. Queer scholars such as Lisa Duggan, Roderick Ferguson,
Jin Haritaworn, and Jasbir Puar have cautioned against a hasty celebration of “gay liberation” to
ask about those populations – the racialized, poor, incarcerated, women, gender nonconforming,
disabled, and so on – who have no part in such liberating claims. They argue that the inclusion of
formerly rejected subjects into a liberal mainstream identity not only enables an assimilationist
politics, but that it tends to reinforce existing stereotypes and exclusionary practices.
120
As my
discussion of the model minority norm equally shows, the price of social visibility often comes at
high cost both for those who are now said to be fully represented as well as for those who remain
without a voice. Likewise, Yung’s video elucidates how Asian German desirability depends on
system of representation, a regime of truth, that is structurally similar to realism.” Bhabha, “The Other Question:
The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse,” in Visual Culture: The Reader, ed. Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall
(London: Sage, 1999), 371.
119Critical race scholars including Nanna Heidenreich as cited previously have pointed out that the “cultural” other
is just another articulation of racializing practices and racist attitudes. Specifically, these latter reflect a shift
away from a “naturalistic paradigm of the understanding of the history, diversity, separation and hybridation of
social groups,” and towards “a sociological and cultural paradigm.” See Balibar, “The Genealogical Scheme,” 7.
120See Ferguson’s elaboration of a queer of color critique in Aberrations in Black, Duggan’s notion of
homonormativity as the adoption of heteronormative values under neoliberalism by gays and lesbians in “The
New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism,” in Materializing Democracy: Toward a
Revitalized Cultural Politics, ed. Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).
For Puar’s discussion of homonationality as the merging of state ideology and queer self-identification compare
“Homonationalism and Biopolitics,” in Out of Place: Interrogating Silences in Queerness/Raciality, ed. Adi
Kuntsman, Esperanza Miyake (York: Raw Nerve Books, 2008). Jin Haritaworn offers a queer of color critique of
homonormativity and homonationalism in the German context in “Queer Injuries: The Racial Politics of
‘Homophobic Hate Crime’ in Germany,” Social Justice 37, no. 1 (2010-2011).
50
the silence or, to return to a trope previously referenced, the bottomhood of Asian German
subjects.
121
By using the character of a liberal gay German man, who essentializes cultural
difference from a privileged position of white skin and the holding of citizenship rights, My
German Boyfriend demonstrates how the reproduction of the figure of the Asian bottom – bottom
not only in a sexual sense but conceived as the absence of social participation and political voice
– persists across multiple spheres of socialization.
122
Yet the protagonist we see may be silent,
and seemingly submissive, but his silence is pregnant with irony and criticism and also complex
desire. As the ensuing discussion shows, Yung challenges the frequent equation of Asian
masculinity with sexual and political submission, featuring instead a gay Asian German man
with uncanny wants, pleasures, and attachments.
DESIRE GONE ROGUE I
When I asked Wayne Yung how he would position himself and his work in relation to German
identity, after living in Berlin for almost two decades now, he responded:
When I applied for film school in Cologne at the Kunsthochschule für Medien,
one of my motivations was to become a “German filmmaker.” I thought that
having a German diploma, and the professional connections made through school,
would help. But by the time I completed my studies, I realized I would never
become a German filmmaker, “und das ist auch gut so” [and that is a good
thing].
123
Because “being German” also requires a certain fluency in the local
culture that I might never achieve.
124
121My argument is not that Yung rejects Asian bottomhood per se. Rather, and not unlike Nguyen’s discussion, I
propose he complicates the racial stereotype by exposing an Asian German’s experience of pleasure, desire, and
political activism.
122Likewise, Eithne Lubhéid stresses the experience of queer migrants is often defined by “both ‘alienation from
white gay communities’ and ‘histories of multiple diasporas’ forged through colonialism and capitalism.” Eithne
Luibhéid. “Queer/Migration. An Unruly Body of Scholarship,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14,
no. 2-3 (2008).
123Yung plays here on the remark by Berlin’s gay mayor Klaus Wowereit who publicly came out before the mayoral
elections in 2001 with the following, by now infamous, sentence “Ich bin schwul, und das ist auch gut so.” (I am
gay, and that’s a good thing.)
124Wayne Yung, email to author, April 22, 2011.
51
If a life in Germany, the possession of a German diploma, and one’s participation in the local
film industry do not suffice to count as German filmmaker, what does it take to “have” or
“perform” German identity? Who may claim a German self and who falls outside the normative
parameters of such an identification? While Yung’s response speaks to the difficulty of
“foreigners,” and here specifically of an Asian-identified gay man, to pass as German, it also
suggests – similar to Wong’s drag – that “being German” and thus obtaining white normative
subjecthood might not be everyone’s primary desire. In fact, I see this attitude reflected in My
German Boyfriend. For me, the video is less about the failure of an Asian German subject to
become “full-on” German. Rather, it is a critique of the systemic racialization he faces and,
furthermore, a means to complicate the norm of Asian bottomhood. However, this does not
preclude the racialized subject’s uneven attachments to the value of white masculinity.
While the protagonist indulges in his fantasy of German gay men as progressive and
critical thinkers, the video shifts towards images of a white man with shaved head wearing black
combat boots and bomber jacket. We then see the two fooling around in an abandoned building
of Berlin and making out in front of the camera. Yung is dressed in a Bundeswehr (the German
Federal Defense Force) tank top displaying the German flag that is too big for his slender
physique and contrasts his delicate body to the muscular appearance of the German skinhead.
How do we respond to the protagonist’s uncanny attraction to a figure of white working class
masculinity and male aggression that also happens to embody German racism?
125
Despite the
video’s overall humorous and ironic tone, I, as viewer, feel uncomfortable and exposed. What
125Whereas skinhead aesthetics are not necessarily representative of racist ideology, they are commonly associated
with hypermasculinity and male aggression. In the particular context of the video, the skinhead is certainly meant
to evoke discomfort around Germany’s past and present racism For a discussion of gay and/or queer skinheads
see Matthew Williams, “Queer Skinheads,” in Gay Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia, V olume 2, ed.
George E. Haggert (New York: Garland, 2000), 727. Williams mentions as well the working class aspect of
skinhead enactment.
52
face in this moment is an intimate pairing and a sexual attraction that makes no sense. What is up
with Yung’s “bad” desire?
If we take desire as an affective force that, in Lauren Berlant’s words, “reorganizes
worlds”
126
outside the imagined, a force that “joins diverse lives and makes situations”
127
beyond
people’s knowledge and, oftentimes, control, then it seems safe to say that all desire harbors a
transgressive quality or at least borders on the socially acceptable. However, not all desire must
therefore be “bad.” In fact, Yung’s desire appears so dismantling not only because it strives
towards what is potentially destructive, but because it clearly jeopardizes the norm of the good
life. Lauren Berlant explains,
people are schooled to recognize as worthwhile only those desires that take shape
within the institutions and narratives that bolster convention and traditions of
propriety. They learn, further, to be afraid of the consequences when their desire
attaches to too many objects or to objects deemed “bad”: whether they find
themselves longing for persons of an illegitimate or merely inconvenient-to-
comfort sexuality, race, class, ethnicity, or religion, or marital status.
128
My German Boyfriend enacts desire gone rogue. It misbehaves. Specifically, we witness an Asian
German gay man opting for a “bad” object, thereby refusing to settle into a “model” minority life
that severely confines who he can be. Looking at the video’s second part however, I maintain My
German Boyfriend’s main concern lies less with the figure of the skinhead than with the practices
of racialization within economies of desire. More specifically, the video prods us to ask about the
preconceptions we have about social life and intimate identities, and how these inform what we
deem desirable, good, and bad. What does it mean to be attracted to white masculinity as a gay
person of color? Who is an Asian German man supposed to be with?
129
What is at stake here is
126Lauren Berlant, Love/Desire (New York: Punctum Books, 2012), 14. Berlant offers a thorough examination of
desire from a psychoanalytic and cultural studies viewpoint which is beyond the scope of this discussion. Rather,
my use of desire seeks to investigate the production of alternative affective economies and social worlds.
127Ibid., 13.
128Ibid., 44.
129On the various labels of gay Asian dating both intra- and interracial see Lim, Brown Boys, especially chapter 3.
53
not only the scope of possible subjecthoods and relationships available to an Asian German gay
man, but how the scope changes depending on the kind of subject, minoritarian and majoritarian,
it speaks to.
DESIRE GONE ROGUE II
Half way into the video, the work’s title reappears: My German Boyfriend. “Two Years later.” We
now follow the filmmaker to Hamburg where, as we learn, his real German boyfriend and later
husband lives. Leaving Berlin behind, Yung reflects on the filming process of the video’s first
half and the people he met there. That is, the film has shifted from humorous story-telling toward
pensive self-reflection. The filmmaker’s voice-over tells us that he is torn not only between two
cities, but between two lives, two loves, two possible futures. He confesses his curiosity for and
attraction to the actor who embodied the skinhead while we see them again intimately kissing
and caressing each other. This time, we do not conceive of the white German actor as a skinhead
anymore, but as a man who reciprocates Yung’s desire. In an imaginary dialog with his co-actor,
Yung states, “You said you never knew if we were acting or not. I didn’t even know myself. I
thought I could just act, or just pretend. But I’m not good at pretending.” Just like the
protagonist’s desire in the video’s first half, so too has Yung’s desire in the second half gone
rogue and developed a narrative on its own. Whereas, “according to the script,” My German
Boyfriend was supposed to end with the protagonist falling for a Kurdish German gay man,
“that’s not what really happened.” Instead, the filmmaker took center-stage, and he fell for his
co-actor.
The switch from an ironic portrayal of an Asian German’s encounter with white German
men toward a somber confession of the filmmaker’s own desires is not the assertion of truth over
fictionality, however. I am not implying that the video’s latter part (alone) reflects the real Wayne
54
Yung. Both parts are just too intertwined and dependent on each other. Rather, I understand the
unexpected narrative turn as a strategy to show the filmmaker’s own implication in and, indeed,
attachment to a global value economy that circulates white manhood as inherently desirable, and
positions it at the top of a racial and gender hierarchy. Like his protagonist, Yung is attracted to
white German men, and he meets more than one he wants to be with. The double enactment of
an Asian German’s unruly desire, his intimacy with a skinhead in part one and his falling for
someone else while being in a committed relationship in part two, further pushes us to reconsider
socially-sanctioned forms of being and being with. In particular, how they are are informed by a
white and reproductive sociality that values politically correct and that is, intra-racial,
monogamous, and safe-sex relationships. As Haritaworn, Lin, and Klesse ask so wisely in their
intersectional approach to polyamory,
Which bodies pass as attractive, which desires as ‘cool’ in the sexual economies
that govern our scenes? What community knowledges of sexual entitlement and
bodily integrity are available to us? How are experiences of pleasure and danger
differentiated in our sexual scenes, and mediated not only by femaleness [...], but
also by race, class, disability and transness?
130
While My German Boyfriend certainly shows Wayne Yung’s ambivalent positioning vis à vis
valued forms of intimacy, the video also challenges those dominant identity configurations that
separate an Asian German man from white masculinity and assign him to certain attachments
alone – for instance to relationships with people of color, to those that represent “unhealthy” and
“dangerous” forms of pleasure, or else to no intimacy at all.
131
In contrast, My German Boyfriend
renders whiteness into an object of both Asian German desire and inquiry.
132
As Sara Ahmed
130Jin Haritaworn, Chin-ju Lin, and Christian Klesse. “Poly/logue: A Critical Introduction to Polyamory,”
Sexualities: Studies in Culture and Society 9, no. 5 (2006): 517.
131The wiping out of Asian (gay) male sexuality and its identification as threat are less contradictory, since they
complement each other in the devaluation of an Asian minority subject whose sexuality is rendered either absent
or “bad.”
132I am not making a value judgment of what kind of gay coupling – whether intra- or crossracial – is “better” as in
“anti-hegemonic.” Rather, I try to work out the tensions inherent to Yung’s expression of desire in the video. For
a helpful discussion of the politics of racialization in an Asian and Asian transnational context see the
conversation between Wayne Yung and Nguyen Tan Hoang. “Queer Hongcouver And Other Fictions,” in Reel
55
states so properly, “whiteness tends to be visible to those who do not inhabit it (though not
always, and not only.)”
133
Reminiscent of Ming Wong’s targeting of whiteness as the invisible
norm, Yung figures an Asian German’s subjectivity here through the objectification, or
objectifiability, of white male bodies.
134
To be sure, such an Asian German subjectivity remains
elusive as it is alive, both unpredictable and uncontainable in its directionality. For just when we
think we know the video’s narrative, another one emerges; and just when we think we understand
an Asian German’s desire, it outdoes itself.
135
CONCLUSION
In Trans Desire, artist and scholar Micha Cárdenas describes her own uncertainty about the body
and identity she wants to have. As a transgender woman, Cárdenas identifies with the female
body and opts for surgery, yet she also feels hesitant to suggest in advance what her female body
will look like. The author thus rephrases the question of her desire – what does she want? – to
respond to the unknowability of her future experience. She writes, “I am not attempting to fit into
a different transcendental category of gender, ‘woman,’ but to shapeshift out of the current body I
have into something outside of the spectrum.”
136
The videos I have discussed here are similarly marked by a desire for life whose outcome,
and whose object even, remain perhaps necessarily uncertain. They feature Asian German
Asian. Asian Canada on Screen, ed. Elaine Chang (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2007).
133Ahmed, On Being Included, 3.
134Yung’s most recent documentary Schwanzfilm (Cockfilm, 2011) continues to explore the sexual experience of
white bodies through the lens of an Asian German filmmaker. Schwanzfilm explores the protagonist’s penis
through multiple visual apparatuses while “reifer6” explains his physical preferences, the transformation of his
body through time, and the difficulties of intimate encounters both his aging and the advent of digital culture
entail.
135On how desire constantly undoes itself see Berlant’s discussion of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of desire.
Desire/Love, 65.
136Micha Cárdenas, “Trans Desire,” in Micha Cárdenas and Barbara Fornssler, Trans Desire/Affective Cyborgs
(New York, Dresden: Atropos 2012), 25.
56
subjects who long to speak of their experiences, to undo their social death, and to make their
presence matter. These subjects imagine a social world of collaboration, indulgence, and also
self-doubt. Yet they refuse to settle for finalized identities and do not affirm the meaning of Asian
Germany. Instead, the various subject positions the videos mobilize push against sovereign
subjecthood, against becoming synchronous with the here and now, against being neatly aligned
with the paradigms of national history. Thus, while the artworks strive toward an elsewhere,
utterances of social identities and worlds that are not yet, they continuously defer an arrival and
deny us closure and control over the Asian German subjectivities they enact. I maintain the work
of Wong and Yung unleash a form of desire that is defined by both the attachment to particular
objects and the inherent drive towards “new narratives of possibility [and] erotic
experimentality.”
137
Even more, they suggest desire where there is supposed to be none. In fact,
the subjectivities emerging from the videos are so provocative not only for their deviancy from
the good life and the social imaginaries they evoke, but for the unexpected image of an Asian
German “bottom” who desires in the first place. In this view, it may make sense to consider
desire, as Cárdenas does, too, as a possible “basis for shared political formations.”
138
I am aware of the open-ended proposal of this statement: What kinds of desire are we
talking about? How many? For whom is such desire possible, helpful, counter-productive? What
can desire pragmatically speaking achieve? And also, as Cárdenas points out, “if desire is to be
the basis for shared political formations, what about desires which are unethical, or
oppressive?”
139
I leave this discussion for others to continue. Let me just say that what we want is
not a “solution.” What we want is a life. The following chapter will pick up exactly where I leave
off this one – it asks about life without a “solution.”
137 Berlant, Desire/Love, 34.
138Cárdenas, “Trans Desire,” 70.
139Ibid.
57
CHAPTER TWO
Asian American Disabilities: Precious Bodies, Precarious Minds
Depression is another manifestation of forms of biopower that produce life and death not only by
targeting populations for overt destruction, whether through incarceration, war, or poverty, but also
more insidiously by making people feel small, worthless, hopeless.
140
What concerns me is how much this turn to happiness actually depends on the very distinction
between good and bad feelings that presume bad feelings are backward and conservative and good
feelings are forward and progressive. [...] The demand for happiness is what makes those histories
disappear […] These histories have not gone: we would be letting go of that which persists in the
present, a letting go which would keep those histories present.
141
Kristina Wong’s one-woman show Wong Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest grapples with big
questions.
142
As a performance on Asian American women in crisis and, specifically, the
overlooked prevalence of depression and suicide among Asian American women, Wong Flew
asks, “Why are all these Asian American women killing themselves? And how will Kristina
Wong save them all?”
143
The show opens with the artist’s self-introduction as “Kristina Wong,” a
Chinese American artist fighting for Asian American empowerment.
144
“Wong” wants to offer the
audience a history of depressed and suicidal Asian American women; but her ambition reaches
even further: She aspires to tell “every story of our community,”
145
and to become “this miracle
140Ann Cvetkovich, Depression. A Public Feeling (Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2012), 13.
141Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press), 217.
142The following discussion of Wong Flew over the Cuckoo’ s Nest is mainly based on the concert film of the show
from 2011. I attended a live performance in 2010 as well. The show has with several variations played since
2006 however, Wong’s website states, “The movie is a high definition broadcast quality capture of the play in its
entirety. It has visual enhancements and cinematic direction to make it suitable for the screen while not
detracting from the critically acclaimed play.” http://www.flyingwong.com/faq.html.
143Kristina Wong, Press Kit, 3, accessed May 14, 2013, http://flyingwong.com/WongFlew_Presskit.pdf.
144In the following discussion, I use “Kristina Wong” to distinguish the character in the play from the artist Kristina
Wong, who offers additional information, comments on, and strategically publicizes her show.
145Unless otherwise stated, the quotes are directly taken from the show. My emphasis added.
58
worker,”
146
who can “save them all.”
147
Moreover, she must do so rather quickly, for it happens to be
Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month and, as she explains, “that’s the month we really get to
work.” So she begins.
“Wong’s” first enactment embodies a 33-year-old Korean American woman suffering from
postpartum depression. The short portrayal is followed by the story of a 63-year-old traumatized
Cambodian refugee, an anxiety-ridden 20-year-old Taiwanese pre-med student, and finally a 30-year-
old Japanese American woman who experiences sexual abuse. Throughout her representation of the
different women however, “Wong” gets increasingly sucked in by the negativity of the individual life
journeys, and caught up in the attempt to do justice to all of their experiences. There is just too much
to tell in too little time, and no solution in sight.
According to the Department of Health and Human Services, “Asian American women
over the age of 65 have the highest female suicide mortality rate among women across all
racial/ethnic groups. Among women aged 15 – 24, Asian American girls have the highest suicide
mortality rates across all racial/ethnic groups.”
148
I start with these data here to introduce a little
known fact about the lives, and deaths, of Asian American women.
149
As official statistics reveal,
depression is the second leading cause of death for teenage and young adult Asian American
women, whereas those 65 and older have the highest number of female suicide in the US.
150
Why
146Kristina Wong, Email to the author, May 11, 2013.
147Wong, Press Kit, 3.
148Cited by The National Collaborative For Asian American Women’s Mental Health, these data come from the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which belongs to the Department of Health and Human Services.
See “Empowering Avenues for Community Action: The National Collaborative For Asian American Women’s
Mental Health,” accessed May 15, 2013
http://www.hawaii.edu/hivandaids/Mental_Health_and_Depression_in_Asian_Americans.pdf. See also The
National Alliance On Mental Illness, “Mental Health Issues among Asian American and Pacific Islander
Communities,” 2011, https://www.nami.org/Template.cfm?
Section=Fact_Sheets1&Template=/ContentManagement/ ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=123209.
149Although Pacific Islanders are included within the same research, I will limit my discussion here to Asian
American women.
150The National Collaborative for Asian American Women’s Mental Health defines major depression in
concordance with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), more specifically the
59
are these numbers barely publicized, and why does no one seem to care?
This chapter sets out to disturb the silence around the high rates of depression and suicide
among Asian American women in US-medical and minority discourses. Specifically, I want to shed
light on how institutionalized ways of thinking, as represented by state and medical discourses, and
the socialities built around such thinking consistently fail to do justice to the complex experience of
Asian American women. On the one hand, these women are framed as self-sacrificial and self-
responsible “model” citizen-subjects, who never struggle in the first place; on the other hand, and in a
Freudian Kettle Logic, the institutional structures that surround these women – from the state to the
Asian American community to close family members – expect them to “get better,” and to do so by
themselves.
151
Building off of the analytical framework of “existential surplus” I developed in the
introduction, which explains how articulations of worthiness justify the state’s abandonment of
racialized minorities, this chapter expands a perspective on Asian minority life by interrogating more
closely the role of affect in the management of Asian American women. I contend the invisibility of
Asian American women suffering from depression and attempting and committing suicide gestures
to a politics of racial uplift, where Asian Americans have deeply internalized the norm of emotional
stability and mental health, or at the least successful recovery, that defines good citizenship.
152
As
fourth edition of the DSM, a main reference for clinical definitions of so-called mental disorders in North
America: “[Depression] is diagnosed by the presence of several symptoms such as depressed mood, lack of
interest in activities, significant weight loss or gain, thoughts of worthlessness or guilt, or thoughts of death or
suicide. By the year 2020, depression will be the second largest disease burden in the world. It currently ranks
third in mortality and lost workdays. Approximately 17% of adults report having a major depressive episode at
least once in their lifetime. Ten percent of Americans currently suffer from depression.” “Empowering Avenues.”
I do not seek to meddle depression and suicide here. Rather, my discussion theorizes the experience of social
negativity as expressed in depression and/or suicide.
151The Kettle Logic refers to a set of contradictory statements from the same source about the same incident and
functions as a defensive mechanism. Freud refers to it for the first time in The Interpretation of Dreams, where
he gives the example of “a man who was accused by his neighbor of having returned a kettle in a damaged
condition” defending himself in the following ways: “In the first place, he had returned the kettle undamaged; in
the second place it already had holes in it when he borrowed it; and in the third place, he had never borrowed it
at all.” Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (New York: Macmillan, 1913), 101.
152Following the figure of “Kristina Wong,” my discussion focuses on Asian American women as legal citizens and
socially recognized minority subjects who are yet, pragmatically speaking, deprived of the right to state care. I
do not mean to imply a universal Asian American woman. In fact, I am hoping for others to continue the project
toward further interrogating the experience of women, men, and gender queer people who do not identify with
60
David L. Eng and Shinhee Han likewise suggest, “not only mainstream society but also Asian
Americans themselves become attached to, and split by, [the model minority myth’s] seemingly
admirable qualities without recognizing its simultaneous liabilities.”
153
Historically, the notion of the model minority emerged in the 1960s in the midst of
market and immigration reforms, which were meant to recover the U.S. state from its precarious
economic and political standing on the global map.
154
As part of a national self-reinvention project,
the positive image of Asian Americans has ever since obliged minority subjects to participate self-
sacrificially in the market, and it has become a token for the egalitarian, meritocratic nature of the
United States. In other words, the model minority has come to embody a nation’s striving for
freedom – economic, racial, political – or rather, the “solution” to the problems toward achieving
such.
155
In response, Asian American scholars have pointed out repeatedly how the model minority
discourse invokes the arrival of a “postracist world of freedom and opportunity,” wile it
simultaneously supports a logic of individual responsibility, minimized state care, and the
exploitation of racialized labor both home and abroad.
156
Helen Heran Jun argues, “Asian uplift
the dominant matrix of heterosexuality. For a beginning, see Jenn Fang, “LGBTQ Native/Pacific Islander youths
(aged 13-18) most likely to self-harm, attempt suicide,” Reappropiate, August 3, 2014, http://reappropriate.co/?
p=6363.
153David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, “A Dialog on Racial Mourning,” in Loss. The Politics of Mourning, ed. David L.
Eng and David Kazanjian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 351.
154Sapna Cheryan and Galen Bodenhausen relate the emergence of the model minority narrative to the change in
immigration policy with the implementation of the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965 (enacted in 1968),
which aimed to attract “professionals and scientists” from abroad. As the authors elaborate, “As a result, a large
influx of highly-educated professionals (such as doctors and engineers) and scientists from Asia left their home
countries after 1965 and immigrated to the United States.” Sapna Cheryan and Galen Bodenhausen, “Model
Minority,” in Routledge Companion to Race & Ethnicity, ed. S. M. Caliendo and C. D. McIlwain (New York:
Routledge, 2011), 173. Moreover, in view of the various struggles the government faced both domestically and
in its foreign politics – civil rights movements including redress claims by Japanese Americans, the Vietnam
War, the Cold War, and their ever-evolving costs – the model minority narrative became certainly a handy tool to
alleviate intranational tensions while also showing the world a progressive and inclusive US government. See
Victor Bascara, “Cultural Politics of Redress: Reassessing the Meaning of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 after
9/11,” Asian Law Journal 10, no. 2 (2003).
155For a critical discussion of the rhetoric of freedom in a U.S.-context see also Mimi Thi Nguyen, The Gift of
Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).
156Jodi Melamed. “The Spirit of Neoliberalism. From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism,” Social
Text 24, no. 4 (2006): 1.
61
entails the production of Asian American idealized subjects of a neoliberal world order, which
not only pathologizes the racialized black poor but also reproduces a neoliberal episteme that has
devastated the global South since decolonization.”
157
I am interested in this episteme that Jun
brings up, and in the ways in which it produces not only economically diligent and politically
submissive subjects, but very concrete emotional and physical wounds.
158
Put differently, this
chapter expands a critique of the model minority identity and its particular place in (neo)liberal
American commonsense to understand the violence of inclusion on an embodied level. Within
this context, Wong Flew offers a powerful way to challenge the fatal silencing of Asian American
women in need of help and, furthermore, to find creative outlets for those who are excluded from
dominant sociality to access political and public agency. At the same time, Wong’s performance
enacts on both the level of content and form an experience of failure and despair that brings us
closer to, yet does not presume to fully know or represent Asian American women’s encounter of
negativity. In fact, Wong Flew shows no interest in claiming an identity for them. In this, it
avoids as well a “relapse” into narratives of progress and cure that aim to (re)integrate minority
subjects as cultivated citizen-subjects into the national mainstream, while diminishing the need
for social critique and concrete change.
When Kristina Wong started working on “the topic of the high rates of Asian American
women killing themselves,” she saw herself continuously confronted with the model minority
myth. “People say the same thing to me over and over about the issue: ‘I had no idea. Why are
they killing themselves? They seem so beautiful and perfect.’”
159
While research on Asian
American mental health still lags behind research on white groups, the high suicide and
depression rates among Asian American women are commonly explained with difficulties of
157Jun, Race for Citizenship, 9.
158See also Santa Ana, Racial Feelings.
159Wong, Press Kit, 7.
62
“acculturation” and the discrepancy of so-called Western and Eastern values.
160
For instance,
“The cultural expectations are that Asian women don’t have that kind of freedom to hang out, to
go out with friends, to do the kinds of things most teenagers growing up want to do.’ And in
Asian cultures [...] you don’t question parents.”
161
Moreover, Asian Americans are commonly
assumed not to know how to express their feelings directly. As a mental health professional
focusing on Chinese American communities explains, “In terms of Chinese culture, it’s not an
expression that you say you are sad; you don’t say that directly, [...] You don’t say ‘I don’t feel
happy, I’m sad, I’m depressed.’”
162
Fewer discussions point to the women’s double exposure to
racial and sexual discrimination. Such as social work scholar Aileen Duldulao’s remark, “You
need to be [...] very accomplished, [...] yet society is also looking at you as this very, you know,
hypersexualized person.”
163
Whereas Wong Flew refers to the many norms Asian American women have to negotiate
and live up to on a daily basis, the show does not further add to the pool of explanations. It is
much more interested in the logic that eradicates Asian American women from public view
despite, or rather through their social recognition. Perhaps Wong puts it best in her artist
statement, where she suggests, “the issue that so many people refuse to believe there is a problem
inside such a ‘perfect’ package [...] is perhaps one of the main reasons why the problem
continues to persist.”
164
In line with Wong Flew, I am concerned to frame depression as more than
160One of the few exceptions is Eliza Noh, who does not, however, come from the natural sciences. Noh is a
professor in Asian American Studies at the California State University Fullerton and specializes in depression
and suicide among Asian American women specifically.
161Psychologist Dung Ngo quoted in Elizabeth Cohen, “Push to achieve tied to suicide in Asian-American women,”
CNN.com, May 16, 2007, http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/05/16/asian.suicides/index.html.
162Wen-Chun Hung cited in Roxanna Asgarian, “Aches and Pains Offer Window to Deeper Problems,” Voices of
New York, July 28, 2014, http://www.voicesofny.org/2014/07/mental-health-in-asian-american-community.
163Michel Martin, “Asian-American Women More Likely To Attempt Suicide,” NPR, September 23, 2009,
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113114107.
164Wong, Press Kit, 7.
63
an individual’s medical problem, and to place it within a form of governance that works its power, to
pull from Ann Cvetkovich here, “by making people feel small, worthless, hopeless.”
165
Especially,
when they disappoint the norm of valuable subjecthood. In dialog with feminist and anti-racist works
on affect and disability, this chapter approaches negative feelings as both a symptom of and a
disciplinary tool for social discrimination. Following Ahmed, I further suggest to understand so-
called “bad feelings” as an alternate memory that contests the erasures of dominant history,
especially the realities of imperialism, militarization, and exploitation that condition Asian American
history and intersect with a racializing medical regime.
Multiple critical race scholars have conceptualized feelings that are commonly regarded to be
“negative,” including feelings of sadness, anger, melancholia, and depression, as archives of racist
encounters.
166
They have convincingly elaborated how specifically people of color carry with them
histories of violence, exploitation, and devaluation that oftentimes remain unaddressed by the larger
public and continue to impact them in oppressive ways. In “But Some of Us Are Wise,” Lisa Marie
Cacho argues that racialized subjects are frequently stigmatized as subjects of “unhealthy”
feelings, which are said to “displace and replace historical and contemporary ʻfacts.’”
167
Drawing
on Sara Ahmed’s concept of “affective economies,” the idea that feelings, too, are actively
165Cvetkovich, Depression, 13. As Cvetkovich further claims, “It is customary, within our therapeutic culture, to
attribute these feelings to bad things that happened to us when we were children, to primal scenes that have not
yet been fully remembered or articulated or worked through. It’s also common to explain them as the result of a
biochemical disorder, a genetic mishap for which we shouldn’t blame ourselves. I tend to see such master
narratives as problematic displacements that cast a social problem as a personal problem in one case and as a
medical problem in the other” (14f.).
166For some of these writings, see Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger,” Women’ s Studies Quarterly 9, no. 3 (1981);
Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000); David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (eds.), Loss: The Politics of Mourning, specifically
the chapter by Eng and Shinee Han, “A Dialog on Racial Melancholia”; Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia
(New York: University of Columbia Press, 2006); José Esteban Muñoz, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina
Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society 31, no. 3 (2006); Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings; Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the
Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007); Lisa Marie Cacho, “But Some of Us Are
Wise: Academic Illegitimacy and the Affective Value of Ethnic Studies,” The Black Scholar 40, no. 4 (2010);
Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness; Ann Cvetkovich, Depression.
167Cacho, “But Some of Us Are Wise,” 28.
64
involved in the making of social meaning and capital, Cacho maintains that negative feelings are
dehistoricized and said to originate in minority subjects for no reason other than their rational
inferiority.
168
Put differently, “bad feelings” are taken as excuse to keep discriminated minorities
outside official knowledge discourses and exclude them from public cultures. In contrast,
institutionalized knowledge discourses as represented by the state, sociological data, medical
assessments, and even commonsense perceptions, are taken as objective and true – despite their
frequent inconsistency. To challenge such affective and epistemological devaluation of minority
life, this chapter draws out how dominant forms of knowing harbor their own feelings of bias
and, moreover, mobilize an affective economy that becomes a literal matter of life and death for
Asian American women. My discussion proceeds from the claim that “feeling bad” is part of a
biopolitics that regulates subjects through seemingly “private” feelings – feelings we have about
ourselves, about others, and about other people’s feelings. Whereas my aim is not to determine what
counts as depression, nor to offer a scientific explanation of why so many Asian American women
are haunted by the specter of negativity, I embed their precarious experience within the production of
social difference. My approach to depression thus bears affinities to what disability scholars call the
“social model of disability,” which emerged in the 1980s in the wake of disability rights movements
and as an alternative to the medical model that highlights a person’s deviancy from the norm. Ellen
Samuels summarizes it this way: “the social model of disability separates impairment, as physical or
mental difference, from disability, the social effects of that difference.”
169
At the same time, I am
168Ibid., 29. For Ahmed, it is precisely the movement of emotions that defines the value and identity of people and
things. She argues, “Rather than seeing emotions as psychological dispositions, we need to consider how they
work, in concrete and particular ways, to mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social, and
between the individual and the collective.” “Affective Economies,” 119.
169Ellen Samuels, Fantasies of Identification. Disability, Gender, Race (New York: New York University Press,
2014), 21. For some critiques of the social model see Tom Shakespeare, Disability Rights and Wrongs (New
York: Routledge, 2006); Liz Crow, “Including All of Our Lives: Renewing the Social Model of Disability,” in
Exploring The Divide, ed. Colin Barnes and Geof Mercer (Leeds: The Disability Press, 1996). The document is
available at http://disability-studies.leeds.ac.uk/files/library/Crow-exploring-the-divide-ch4.pdf; and Anna
Mollow, “’When Black Women Start Going on Prozac....’: The Politics of Race, Gender, and Emotional Distress
in Meri nana-Ama Danquah’s Willow Weep for Me,” in The Disability Studies Reader. Third Edition, ed. Lennard
J. Davis ( New York, Abingdon: Routledge, 2010).
65
concerned with the concrete suffering of Asian American women Wong enacts, and the denial of
mental health support services from which they could benefit. Some of the questions I will be
following in dialog with Wong’s performance are thus: Where do feelings and their “badness”
come from? What does it mean that, as in the case of Asian American women, subjects are
denied the right to feeling certain ways, and what is the impact of this kind of blockage? How
might feelings of depression also resist their being mobilized or blocked, eliciting uncared-for
histories and ways of coming together?
CRISIS OF REPRESENTATION
In contrast to the demand of high productivity and the absence of any personal problems that
undergird the model minority norm, “Kristina Wong” appears stuck. Despite her ambition to do
good, and to do so perfectly, she fails to advance her project properly. Instead, and as her
increasing despair to give voice to a whole community shows, “Wong” finds herself first
stagnating and then quickly exhausted. But being the model minority subject she is, she does not
quite give up yet. Upon realizing that she cannot represent every depressed and suicidal Asian
American woman, “Wong” chooses a different tactic: By telling her own story of crisis and
recovery, she wants to lead by example and offer guidance to affected others. However, this story
is purely imaginary or “fiction,” as “Kristina” asks the audience to repeat aloud with her. She
insists it has no connection whatsoever to her “real” life. Yet the initial separation between the
narrating artist, placed at a safe distance from the events, on the one hand, and the lost person she
embodies temporarily for the sake of the depressed, on the other hand, quickly begins to blur. As
“Wong” tells “her” story of seeking outside support for those overwhelming feelings of
negativity, the story gets out of hand. For what she encounters are barriers and dead-ends only.
Her family members do not understand her – at times literally, for instance when “Wong” uses
66
her little Cantonese to explain her complex feelings to her Chinese grandmother. Her former
college friends all have settled down in their own families and secure job positions, too busy to
listen to the struggling protagonist. In addition, the limited office hours and capacities of
community health centers, the lack of individualized medical assessments, and the high costs of
medical treatment all prevent “Wong” from receiving professional care. Luckily, “Kristina”
eventually finds an agency that offers free mental health referrals. She calls them and with great
hesitation tells the person on the phone her story: about the pressure she has always felt growing
up; about the doctor who molested her during a physical examination when she was a young girl;
about her mother refusing to listen to her daughter’s revelation; about being physically abused in
college. The protagonist ends her long talk in tears, asking for help to face her history and
remember the “black holes” in her memory. “I wonder if you can help me, please can you help
me?” The response on the other end of the line is compassionate yet with an unexpected twist.
“I’m so sorry to hear what you’ve gone through. No one should have gone through what you’ve
gone through alone, and I am so glad you called. Unfortunately, I’m just a weekend
receptionist.” The receptionist tells “Kristina” to call back on Tuesday, when the person in charge
will be available. But when “Wong” does so, she encounters a similar speech by an agency
worker who tells her that, because of budget cuts, she can no longer offer free referrals. “Wong”
is given a different number to call, and then another one, and another one...
THE MODEL MINORITY: SOME FACTS AND FICTIONS
This chapter argues that an institutional mental health discourse or, more broadly put, scientific
epistemologies cannot be understood outside dominant value regimes. Instead, as scholars such
as Warwick Anderson have shown, they constitute core mechanisms for the regulation of
citizenship and are deeply complicit with racial violence. Drawing on Anderson’s important
67
project to “recapture the civic vision of medicine and science,” I here elucidate how the various
statistics and empirical data on Asian Americans participate in the construction of certain truths
that serve to reinforce human hierarchies.
170
Asian Americans are the fastest growing minority in
the United States. According to the national census, about 18 million people with Asian
background currently live in the country.
171
Yet the prevailing image of Asian Americans is still
that of a homogenous model minority defined by upward mobility, political passivity, and no
mental health issues. According to a recent Pew Research Center report, the number of Asian
Americans with college degrees and the median household income lie above U.S. average.
172
As
a result, the survey argues, “Asian Americans are more satisfied than the general public with
their lives.”
173
Although some state-gathered data complicate such view – the Congressional Asian
Pacific American Caucus, for instance, holds Asian Americans suffer the highest share of long term
unemployment, make up 10% of undocumented youth, and it maintains that 40% of Hmong,
Laotian, and Cambodian Americans do not finish high school
174
– scientific research agrees on the
emotional stability of Asian Americans. A study conducted by the National Center for Education
Statistics found that only 0.1 percent among “Asian” students age 3 to 21 suffer from “emotional
170Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 2.
171These are the numbers as of 2010. For a detailed overview see Elizabeth M. Hoeffel, Sonya Rastogi, Myoung
Ouk Kim, and Hasan Shahid, “The Asian Population 2010,” United States Census Bureau, March 2012,
https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-11.pdf.
172Pew Research Center, “The Rise of Asian Americans,” April 4, 2013,
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2013/04/ Asian-Americans-new-full-report-04-2013.pdf.
173The entire statement reads, “Asian Americans are the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial
group in the U.S, with Asians now making up the largest share of recent immigrants. A Pew Research survey
finds Asian Americans are more satisfied than the general public with their lives, finances and the direction of
the country, and they place a greater value on marriage, parenthood, hard work and career success.” Pew
Research Center, “The Rise of Asian Americans,” 2012, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/asianamericans-
graphics.
174See the infographic by the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, “Breaking the Model Minority Myth:
The Facts About Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders,” accessed August 17, 2014, http://capac-chu.house.gov/
sites/congressionalasianpacificamericancaucus.house.gov/files/images/CAPAC%20-%20Model%20Minority
%20Infographic.jpg.
68
disturbances,” under which depression is commonly filed.
175
The American Psychological
Association (APA), the largest organization of psychologists worldwide, supports these findings. On
a special web page dedicated to countering the “Myths About Suicides Among Asian-
Americans,”
176
the APA clarifies that the rate of Asian American suicides is, in fact, “about half
that of the national rate.” As to gender differences, the APA equally defines as “myth” the
assumption that “[y]oung Asian-American women (aged 15-24) have the highest suicide rates of
all racial/ethnic groups.” Rather, “fact” is, “American-Indian/Alaskan Native women aged 15-24
have the highest suicide rate compared to all racial/ethnic groups.”
What confuses me at this point are the various data and statistics by government and
other recognized institutions that do not seem to add up properly. On the one hand, the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, which operates under the Department of Health and Human
Services, declares an exceptionally high number of depression and suicide among certain groups of
Asian American women. On the other hand, the National Center for Education Statistics, which
belongs to the U.S. Department of Education and the Institute of Education Sciences, finds Asian
Americans rather unaffected my mental illnesses. Similarly, the non-governmental Pew Research
Center and the APA declare Asian Americans to be “happier” in average than the general U.S.
population – at the same time that the American Psychiatric Association (not to be confused with the
American Psychological Association) observes that “Among all ethnicities, Asian Americans and
175By contrast, the categories “Black” and “American Indian” show the highest numbers of “emotional
disturbance.” For the original data see National Center for Education Statistics, “Children 3 to 21 years old
served under Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), Part B, by race/ethnicity and type of disability:
2010-11 and 2011-12,” Institute of Education Science, June 2013,
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_204.50.asp. For a critical breakdown of these data that looks
further into “who gets labeled with a disability,” see Rajiv Narayan, “The Jaw-Dropping Prison Pipeline No One
Talks About,” Upworthy, June 8, 2014, http://www.upworthy.com/the-jaw-dropping-prison-pipeline-no-one-
talks-about?c=ufb1.
176American Psychological Association, “Suicide Among Asian-Americans,” accessed August 2, 2014,
http://www.apa.org/ pi/oema/resources/ethnicity-health/asian-american/suicide.aspx. The following quotes are
taken from this website.
69
Pacific Islanders are the least likely to seek help for mental disorders.”
177
So whom are we to
believe? Why are the numbers so confusing? And what are the paradigms for measuring
happiness, mental illness, suicide, and their connection among particular populations to begin
with?
Rather than trying to solve the mystery behind the various numbers and turn them into a
coherent picture of Asian American women and mental health, I propose to focus on the specific
hierarchy of racialized and gendered subjects they enact. What stands out to me in looking at the
research data from a lay perspective is not only the voice of authority, or what Vicente Rafael
calls with respect to the census “the persuasiveness” of quantitative data – one that announces
the ultimate truth where others were wrong; but a ranking of subjects with disabilities and their
respective need of attention and care.
178
As Dean Spade similarly argues in Normal Life,
statistical documentations are not neutral, they are tools for administering and managing
populations. “The terms and categories used in the classification of data gathered by the state do
not merely collect information about pre-existing types of things, but rather shape the world into
those categories that, ultimately, are taken for granted by most and thus appear ahistorical and
apolitical.”
179
According to the APA’s research, young American-Indian and Alaskan Native
women represent the most vulnerable group; one that is even less visible than Asian American
177American Psychiatric Association, “Asian American-Pacific Islanders,” accessed September 5, 2014,
http://www.psychiatry.org/asian-americans. According to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, in 2010, 18.1%, or slightly above 14,300 people, of the Asian American population had no health
insurance (26). The US-average of uninsured people that year was 16.3% (23). Carmen DeNavas-Walt,
Bernadette D. Proctor, Jessica C. Smith, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States:
2010,” United States Census Bureau, September 2011, https://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/p60-239.pdf.
178“No single reader can exhaust the entirety of the census report, just as no single reading can comprehend its
meaning insofar as its myriad tables and graphs of statistical data escape total recall. [...] The power – that is to
say, the persuasiveness – of a census to convey what appears to be an objective representation of the world
derives, in part, from its remarkable capacity to picture in quantitative terms the totality of the world’s
multiplicity.” Vicente Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Durham: Duke University Press,
2000), 21.
179Dean Spade, Normal Life. Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law (Brooklyn,
NY: South End Press, 2011), 141.
70
women and have more urgency. Instead of calling out the simultaneous precariousness of
racialized women’s health and meeting their respective needs by interrogating the larger systems
– social, economic, state-based, medical – that aggravate their situation, minorities are pitted
against each other.
180
One group is used to push the other further into marginalization, either as
the stigmatized mentally ill, who, the logic quickly goes, better remain socially excluded, or as
the ones who are doing “good enough” to be left alone. Ellen Samuels observes a similar logic in
her study of medical justifications behind the legal restrictions of property rights for native
Hawai’ians in the first half of the 20
th
century. She summarizes, “while those who were
improvable did not need help, those who were unimprovable did not deserve help, and thus
legislation was passed that could help virtually no one.”
181
Whereas the contradictory statements
on Asian America’s mental health might be the result of limited research paradigms and different
political agendas; they certainly speak to a bendable definition of truth that regulates the kinds of
rights and support minority populations can access.
FAST LEARNERS OR THE “WHITE MAN’S TEST”
The racial I.Q.’s as found are, by way of résumé: whites, 100; Chinese, 99; Japanese, 99;
Mexicans, 78; southern Negroes, 75; northern Negroes, 85; American Indians, full blood, 70. If
one says that what is fair for one is fair for another, then regardless of environmental difficulties,
the Chinese and Japanese score so nearly like the white that the difference is negligible. Certainly
they possess a quality which places them in a class beyond the Negro, the Mexican in the United
States, and the American Indian, whatever that is. Perhaps it is temperament which makes the
latter groups unable to cope with the white man’s test.
182
After a long journey of financial and administrative obstacles, “Wong” finally makes it onto a list
180For one of the first scientific approaches to mental health issues and suicide among America’s youth that
examines the intersection of race and sexuality, see Wendy B. Bostwick et al., “Mental health and suicidality
among racially/ethnically diverse sexual minority youths,” American Journal of Public Health 104, no. 6 (2014).
181Samuels, Fantasies of Identification, 173. It would be interesting, albeit beyond the scope of this chapter, to
connect the racialization of particular minorities through medical discourses to current discussions of affirmative
action.
182Psychology professor Thomas R. Garth in his 1931 study of racial differences in intelligence, cited in Palumbo-
Liu, Asian/American, 151. Albeit almost a century ago, Palumbo-Liu points to similar research projects and
arguments being made during the mid 1990s, that is, the time of his writing of the book.
71
of candidates for free therapy, and receives the “part” after a successful “audition.” In order to
qualify for further medical help, however, the protagonist must yet take another hurdle: a three-
hour-long standardized personality test. “Kristina Wong” summarizes, “It consists of over 560
questions, was first developed in the 20s, edited once like in the 80s. There are two possible
answers to the questions of this test, there is ‘true’ and then there is ‘false.’” Anxiously trying to
conform to the format of the outdated questionnaire, but finding it impossible to respond in such
reductive ways, “Wong” breaks down before even finishing the test. Failing it, she fails to
qualify for professional treatment. Yet given the highly biased logic of the questionnaire – a test
ostensibly designed for “anyone” to complete while severely restricting the range of possible
responses and thus the experiences of “non-standard” lives – how could “Kristina” not falter and
fall?
Among the numerous scholars who have written about the history that preceded and,
indeed, led to the emergence of the model minority identity, Nayan Shah maps out how policies
of immigration and public health have structured representations of Chinese Americans from the
19
th
century onward. In particular, he examines how the perception of Chinese immigrants as
major threat to public health developed along with severe restrictions of their legal and social
rights. Until the 20
th
century, Shah notes, Chinese Americans were equated with regressive
sanitary and sexual mannerisms that had to be eradicated to protect “the general population’s
longevity, health, and well-being.”
183
This inscription of physical, mental, and cognitive
inferiority onto racialized populations in the United States (and beyond) has a long history.
Scientific research in particular came to justify enslavement and settler colonialism and sustained
a system of white supremacy.
184
As disability historian Kim E. Nielson shows, much of the post-
183Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides. Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’ s Chinatown (Berkeley, Los Angeles,
London: University of California Press), 3.
184See Samuels, Fantasies of Identification, 11f. and 165f.
72
Revolutionary American elite equated racial difference with degeneracy and argued slavery to be
an act of benevolence toward the enslaved.
Slavery and racism rested on the ideology that Africans and their descendants in
North America lacked intelligence, competence, and even the humanity to participate
in civic and community life on an equal basis with white Americans. Slave owners,
medical experts, theologians, the drafters of the US Constitution, and nearly all parts
of the dominant Euro-American society argued that both slave and free African
Americans were disabled mentally and physically. The concept of disability [...]
allowed many whites to delude themselves, or pretend to delude themselves, that via
slavery they beneficently cared for Africans incapable of caring for themselves.
185
In a similar gesture, Nirmala Erevelles and Andrea Minear trace how the common belief that
“biological difference” is “the ‘natural’ cause of all inequality” backed a past colonial regime
and, in fact, continues into the present.
186
As Erevelles argues, “an attribution of diminished
cognitive and rational capacities to nonwhite people” facilitates the exploitation of the global South
and sustains the ongoing devaluation of minoritized subjects in the global North today.
187
One only
needs to look at common representations of Black Americans as naturally prone to “emotional
disturbances” – confirmed by scientific research data – and hence, it is said, to criminality and
violence.
188
The high numbers of incarceration and the frequent shootings of unarmed Black men and
women by policemen throughout the United States is certainly no coincidence.
189
185Kim E. Nielson, A Disability History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012), 56f. According to this
logic, slaves’ desire for freedom turned into a disability. As medical doctors claimed at the time, “drapetomania
caused the enslaved to attempt escape; hebetude caused laziness, shiftiness, and the damaging of property such
as farm tools; and dysaethesia aethiopica was the psychotic desire to destroy an owner’s property” (57). Nielson
also elaborates how dominant understandings of disability confined the lives of white women. “For example,
medical expertise regarding women’s biological deficiencies buttressed the exclusion of white women from
higher education, voting, and property ownership” (66).
186Erevelles cited in Nirmala Erevelles and Andrea Minear, “Unspeakable Offenses: Disability Studies at the
Intersections of Multiple Differences,” in Nirmala Erevelles, Disability and Difference in Global Contexts:
Enabling a Transformative Body Politic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 104.
187Nirmala Erevelles, “Embodied Antinomies: Feminist Disability Studies Meets Third World Feminism,” in Ibid.,
142. As the authors highlight, such colonial attitude makes possible the exploitation of the Global South, too.
188Rajiv Narayan, “The Jaw-Dropping Prison Pipeline.”
189Writer s.e. smith concurs: “Black men, for example, are more likely than white men to be forcibly labeled with mental
health diagnoses that pathologize normal behavior, such as rational responses to racism. Likewise, people of color,
particularly women, are more likely to be identified as drug seekers when they report problems like chronic pain, while
women’s medical complaints and those of gender-variant people are often dismissed because their symptoms don’t
73
Yet the model minority appears somehow exempt from the “fact” of the inherently “weak”
and “criminal” minds of racialized others. After all, Asian Americans are known to be fast learners,
too smart or “brainy” to fall mentally ill, and kill themselves or other.
190
As Shah argues, Chinese
Americans were eventually embraced as model citizens, because they quickly internalized the social
habits and the legal rhetoric of dominant America to speak up for themselves. In other words, they
claimed a recognizable subjecthood, which brought them state support.
Chinese American activists in the mid-twentieth century proceeded upon a strategy of
assimilation to American ‘norms’ in domestic arrangements, consumption
patterns, and social conduct in the arduous struggle to be perceived as ‘normal’ in
their social habits and living styles. This strategy produced both the recognition of
citizenship for the Chinese American family community and the disbursal of
government resources for the infrastructure and services to sustain the normalized
Chinese Americans in their health.
191
Being a model minority safeguards one from biologist claims of inferiority and instead promises
inclusion, betterment, and appreciation. It becomes an identity, to speak with Douglas C.
Baynton here, “which seeks to distance one’s own group from imputations of disability.”
192
The
embrace – whether deliberate or not – of the model minority identity as an Asian American self-
narrative that promises safety and protection is thus hardly surprising. A look at current
government health campaigns confirms the ongoing medical care of the model minority. State-
match a medical model based on the body of the ‘normal’ person: one who is a white and cisgender man.” s.e. smith,
“Defining Disability in a World that Fears Disability,” The WisCon Chronicles. Vol. 7. Shattering Ableist
Narratives, ed. JoSelle Vanderhooft (Seattle: Aqueduct Press, 2013), 27-39, 31. See also Jonathan Metzl, The
Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009).
190In the words of Kristina Chew, “Asian Americanness requires that Asian Americans not only be, but act,
intelligent and ‘brainy’; otherwise, an individual ‘cannot’ be Asian American. Individuals who have disabilities,
especially cognitive and neurological disabilities, pose a unique challenge to Asian Americans’ understanding of
their identity.” Kristina Chew, “The Disabled Speech of Asian Americans: Silence and Autism in Lois-Ann
Yamanaka’s Father of the Four Passages,” Disability Studies Quarterly 30, no. 1 (2010), http://dsq-
sds.org/article/view/1068/1233. My emphasis. On the role of intelligence tests to measure racial value see also
Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American.
191Shah, Contagious Divides, 251.
192Baynton cited in Michelle Jarman, “Coming Up from Underground: Uneasy Dialogues at the Intersections of
Race, Mental Illness, and Disability Studies,” Blackness and Disability. Critical Examinations and Cultural
Interventions, ed. Christopher M. Bell (East Lansing/Münster: LIT Verlag/Michigan State University Press,
2011), 18.
74
led online health promotion and disease prevention programs inform us about the leading causes
for Asian Americans, which include cancer, heart disease, and strokes.
193
We can find various
diagrams, tables, and illustrations on the latest numbers of Asian Americans’ Hepatitis B, HIV,
and STD infections; sheets of symptoms for recognition; and contacts for medical support.
194
In
short, the wellbeing of Asian America seems fairly well monitored. Probably in response to its
own research results, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services even created a special
online section on Asian American mental health issues.
195
Under the heading “Especially for
You,” the website offers two links: one, perhaps ironically, to the APA (the same institution that
names the high rates of suicide among Asian American women a “myth”); another one
announces “Mental Health Problems and Suicide Information For Women” provided by the
Office of Women’s Health. This latter, however, leads to a dysfunctional web page.
196
More
precisely, it opens to a pop-up window, which prods a viewer to take a survey and offer feedback
to the Office of Women’s Health.
197
Only after that, do we arrive at the main site, which features
in big purple letters the phrase “WHOOPS 404 ERROR!?” Next to it, the absurd image of a
white, blonde woman in Safari gear with eyes wide open staring at us. Like a modern female
colonizer. And then the familiar phrase: “The page you are looking for does not exist or has
encountered an error.” It is like being back in Wong’s play.
193Centers For Disease Control and Prevention. “Minority Health: Asian American Populations,” last modified June
2, 2013, http://www.cdc.gov/minorityhealth/populations/REMP/asian.html#HiPrev. Suicide is ranked tenth.
These data represent both genders of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.
194See Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, “Health Disparities in HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STDs, and
TB,” last modified April 1, 2014, http://www.cdc.gov/nchhstp/healthdisparities/Asians.html.
195Whereas the introduction of the overall “Asian American Health” website was last updated in September 2013
( http://asianamericanhealth.nlm.nih.gov/intro1.html), the dates on the linked resources of the mental health
section go back as early as 2012. Hence, I assume the mental health site was implemented around that year.
196National Library of Medicine, “Behavioral and Mental Health Issues - Mental Health,” National Library of
Medicine, accessed August 27, 2014, http://asianamericanhealth.nlm.nih.gov/behissues02.html.
197Office on Women’s Health, “Error 404 Page Not Found,” Office on Women’ s Health, last modified February 16,
2012, http://www.womenshealth.gov/minority-health/asian-americans/mental-health.cfm.
75
The broken link of mental health support for Asian American women might look like a
mere accident – “WHOOPS,” things happen, especially in the vast archive of the Internet. Yet I
argue it reflects a much larger issue, namely a strategy of U.S. liberal governance that Shah calls
“limited inclusion.”
198
Meaning the incorporation of racialized subjects into the mainstream on
condition of their assimilation into dominant norms of sociality; and at the expense of those who
continue to be marginalized as unassimilated deviants and/or the socially illegible.
199
In the case
of Wong, those norms describe the absence of a struggling Asian American psyche. To be more
precise, they prescribe the absence of “bad feelings” from the narrative of the liberal, postracist
nation-state; one that cares for its minorities. As Sara Ahmed has argued, making happiness the
normative affect of national belonging “allows historical forms of injustice to disappear.”
200
After
all, the other online links on Asian American mental health work just fine, including the citations
of hundreds of scientific journal articles from a medical database. The problem is then less the
denial of the high rates of depression and suicide among Asian American women, since those
rates are, at least partially, confirmed by state campaigns, statistics, and scientific publications.
Rather, the problem lies in the consistent failure of institutional forms of management to attend
to the needs of the very subjects they so arduously document.
201
Dare we say, to narrate needs in
certain ways such that attending to them is a form of violence, too. For as much as racial and
198Shah, Contagious Divides, 253.
199In Shah’s study, those norms of assimilation refer to middle-class, familial domesticity, and they produce its
counterpart, what he terms “queer domesticity”: “The prevailing social arrangements of Chinese bachelor society
produced several types of queer domesticity, such as multiple women and children living in a female-dominated
household, the affiliation of vast communities of men in bunkhouses and opium dens, and common law
marriages of Chinese men and fallen white women.” Ibid., 13.
200Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 217.
201Grace Kyungwon Hong traces the shift of minority management from legal exclusion to bureaucratic
administration under the emergence of Fordism; a shift that entails a new conception of the racialized other as an
abstract disembodied subject, who counts numerically, but whose lived experience does not count. See Ruptures
of American Capital, 80. While Hong’s discussion offers valuable insight into the ongoing differentiation of
racist practices and epistemes of race, I argue Wong Flew shows how intertwined and mutually constitutive they
are. Indeed, their being coeval rather than distinctly successive is what makes them so fatal.
76
gender hierarchies seem in flux today, and, as Jodi Melamed rightly observes, “new categories of
privilege and stigma [...] overlap older, conventional racial categories,”
202
– the fact remains: By
neglecting the mental health needs of Asian American women, a whole community is denied the
right to proper care and, indeed, to life as such. They may be recognized as model minority citizens,
“too good” to be pathologized; yet they apparently lack the value to be saved.
HEALTH AND DISABILITY
Wong Flew elucidates the barricaded access Asian American women may face in their attempt to
obtain, or maintain, the norm of “health.” As Jonathan Metzl reminds us, health is not a universal
entity. Instead, it is “a term replete with value judgments, hierarchies, and blind assumptions that
speak as much about power and privilege as they do about well-being. Health is a desired state,
but it is also a prescribed state and an ideological position.”
203
By showing us how “a prescribed
state of health” and, in tandem, of mental illness, restricts the protagonist’s medical support,
Wong Flew expands a necessary critique of the frequent pathologization of racialized subjects to
ask about forms of exclusion and devaluation that disguise as benign attitude or accidental
neglect, while they harm the lives of persons of color – in concrete and potentially fatal ways.
Put otherwise, the assumption of Asian American women’s mental health or able-mindedness
makes extremely difficult their use of mental health services and their exercising of disability
rights.
204
202As Jodi Melamed points out in her discussion of governance under neoliberalism, or what she calls a “world
historic organization of economy, governance, and biological and social life.” (15) : “Privileged and stigmatized racial
formations no longer mesh perfectly with a color line. Instead, new categories of privilege and stigma determined by
ideological, economic, and cultural criteria overlap older, conventional racial categories, so that traditionally
recognized racial identities – black, Asian, white, or Arab/Muslim – can now occupy both sides of the privilege/stigma
opposition.” Melamed, “The Spirit of Neoliberalism, 2f.
203Jonathan Metzl, “Introduction. Why Against Health?” Against Health. How Health Became The New Morality,
ed. Jonathan M. Metzl and Anna Kirkland (New York and London: New York University Press, 2010), 1f.
204Anna Mollow rightly points out the dilemma: “The enormous power that the psychiatric profession wields in
modern Western societies creates a double bind, in which both diagnosis with a mental illness or, alternatively,
the lack of such a diagnosis, brings with it serious negative social consequences for people experiencing
77
To repeat, when I insist on Asian American women’s rights and access, I do not mean to
identify bad feelings as a medical deviancy that necessarily needs “fixing.”
205
Likewise, I remain
deeply ambivalent about a rights discourse that propagates inclusion while it obscures the very
violence a politics of recognition continues to entail. Rather, I am trying to understand how
racialized subjects are foreclosed from making use of their rights – whether by being stigmatized
as inherently anormal or as super-subjects who never fail. As the show makes clear, the
experience of negativity is very real for “Wong,” but is not adequately met or even recognized by
her environment.
206
The messy conjunction of ignorance and attention to Asian American
women’s mental health that Wong Flew exposes, clearly speaks of the “limited inclusion”
referred to above. Here, certain racialized populations are deemed “unimprovable,” whereas
others, like “Wong,” do “not need help.” (Samuels) But who is left in a system that screens out
so many lives? Who is the imagined reference for a 560 question long personality test that only
allows two possible answers?
emotional distress.” Anna Mollow, “‘When Black Women Start Going on Prozac,” 490.
205As medical anthropologist Janis H. Jenkins asks in tandem with critical race scholarship on affect: “In what
sense can we draw a distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’ emotion? If normal emotions are those
commonly shared within cultural setting, are abnormal emotions those outside the range of human experience
within a particular community? Or within the range of normal experience but inappropriate to a particular setting
or event?” Janis H. Jenkins, Handbook of Medical Anthropology, Contemporary Theory and Method. Revised
Edition, ed. Carolyn F. Sargent, Thomas M. Johnson (Westport, Connecticut, London: Greenwood Press, 1996),
77f. In a similar vein, Elizabeth J. Donaldson and Catherine Prendergast critically evaluate the inconsistent
treatment of emotions in Western medical discourse: “In some cases emotion is elicited; in others, suppressed.
The lack of emotion is pathologized: the ‘flattened affect’ of people diagnosed with schizophrenia is treated as a
disabling symptom by psychiatrists. And the presence of emotion is pathologized: sustained feelings of sadness
prompt consumers to seek medical and pharmaceutical interventions, while sustained feelings of elation might
lead consumers to shun them.” Elizabeth J. Donaldson and Catherine Prendergast, “Introduction: Disability and
Emotion. ‘There’s No Crying in Disability Studies!’” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 5, no. 2
(2011): 130.
206I am reminded here of Liz Crow’s comment on the reality of suffering and the hope for betterment. Writing
against an outright rejection of the notion of impairment, Crow writes: “Many of us remain frustrated and
disheartened by pain, fatigue, depression and chronic illness, including the way they prevent us from realizing
our potential or railing fully against disability (our experience of exclusion and discrimination); many of us fear
for our futures with progressive or additional impairments; we mourn past activities that are no longer possible
for us; we are afraid we may die early or that suicide may seem our only option; we desperately seek some
effective medical intervention; we feel ambivalent about the possibilities of our children having impairments. Yet
our silence about impairment has made many of these things taboo and created a whole new series of constraints
on our self-expression.” Liz Crow, “Including All of Our Lives.”
78
Arguments against the standardization of mental health tests are not new. Allan V.
Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield, for instance, point out the problematic use of institutionalized
definitions of “mental disorders” that then get rigidly applied to people’s lives. “All major
surveys in psychiatric epidemiology, the field that assesses the patterns of mental illness in a
population, attempt to translate as exactly as possible into survey questions the diagnostic criteria
published in various editions of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).”
207
In addition, I see a major problem in the
prioritizing of a normative subjecthood that centers around whiteness, heterosexual gender
configurations, and, at best, include a recognizable “diversity.” It is no coincidence that, until the
late 20
th
century, depression was mainly regarded as a Western phenomenon that spoke of the
intellectual capacities of the affected. In other words, depression became a sign of the innate
value of (some people’s) human nature. Medical anthropologist Junko Kitanaka explains, “the
symptoms of depression – particularly sadness, a sense of guilt, and self-blame – were regarded
as signs of maturity, even of adult selfhood. […] By contrast, non-Westerners, it was claimed,
did not possess reflexive selves and were unable to suffer from depression because their
immature and nonautonomous selves did not have a capacity for introspection.”
208
While such outright racist views seem impossible in contemporary medical discourses,
scholars have elaborated how today’s medical “standards” still are informed by and, in fact,
reinforce the norms of citizenship.
209
As this chapter has shown, such standardization both creates
207Allan V . Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield, “The Epidemic in Mental Illness: Clinical Fact or Survey Artifact?”
Contexts 5, no. 1 (2006) 5: 19.
208Junko Kitanaka, Depression in Japan. Psychiatric Cures for a Society in Distress (Princeton and Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2012), 15. Ann Cvetkovich, too, points out how depression became attached to
Western values of enlightened subjecthood. Specifically, Cvetkovich calls attention to the equation of
melancholy, the “precursor” to depression, with creative and enlightened individualism. Cvetkovich, Depression,
89.
209For further discussions on the norm of whiteness and masculinity in medical “standards” see Lisa Cartwright, “A
Cultural Anatomy of the Visible Human Project,” in The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender, and
Science, ed. Paula A. Treichler, Lisa Cartwright, Constance Penley (New York and London: New York
University Press, 1998); Chris Bell, “Introducing White Disability Studies: A Modest Proposal,” in The
79
and depends on the existence of subjects, who have no place in the imaginary of liberal inclusion
– what Grace Hong has called the “existential surplus.” And if we recall Grace Hong, “being
surplus means being extinguishable. To be surplus in this moment is to be valueless,
unprotectable, vulnerable, and dead.”
210
Wong Flew stages the conflicting experience of being existentially surplus while also
embodying an identity that is both politically recognized and socially valued. Like the critical
narratives provided by Hong, Shah, Nielson, and others, Wong highlights the regulation of
minority subjects on a structural level – how suicidal and depressed Asian American women are
rendered il/legible as medical, social, legal identities through institutionalized discourses.
However, the artist also complicates a seemingly clear-cut divide between improvable subjects
here, and surplus life there; showing instead how the two together make up the experience of the
protagonist. Put differently, “Wong” shows how it feels to be in constant need of measuring and
assimilating herself to the standard of Asian American womanhood, yet never arriving at the
norm she so tragically represents.
LOST PROPERTY
For Wong, her subjecthood is never a given. In contrast to what Grace Hong calls “the propertied
subject,” the normative and valuable citizen, who “is defined by the ability to own, and what the
subject primarily owns is the self,” “Wong” does not seem to have authority over her
subjecthood.
211
Her self appears rather like someone else’s property, managed by state-sanctioned
Disability Studies Reader. Third Edition, ed. Lennard J., Davis (New York, Abingdon: Routledge, 2010); Anna
Mollow, “When Black Women Start Going on Prozac”; Keith Wailoo, How Cancer Crossed the Color Line
(Oxford, New York etc.: Oxford University Press, 2011); Christopher Bowers, “The Effects of Racial Bias on
Diagnoses of Psychological Disorders,” White Privilege, February 1, 2013,
http://whitepriv.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-effects-of-racial-bias-on-diagnoses.html.
210Hong, “Existential Surplus,” 92.
211Hong, The Ruptures of American Capital, 3.
80
institutions that determine the kinds of subjectivity she is allowed to “acquire” or foreclosed
from “owning”; and whether they will be protected or excluded by law, or slip quietly under its
radar. However, “property,” for Hong, “references not only the actual objects that are owned, but
the way that social relations are both legitimated and contested.”
212
Put differently, it names as
well the narratives that tell the stories of our identities. In using “Wong’s” inability to narrate
herself or other Asian American women coherently, Wong Flew stages the dispossession of Asian
American women’s personhood. Rather than “having it all together,” the protagonist becomes
split into multiple selves – “Wong” the healthy narrator and art professional, and “Wong” the
depressed Asian American woman in search of help – which yet refuse to stay distinct. By
default, the plot, too, fails to come to full close.
Throughout the play, “Wong” the artist narrator walks up frequently to an overhead
projector at the side of the stage to measure her efficiency as storyteller. The projector displays
on the stage back wall Freytag’s pyramid, a common narrative pattern based on five consecutive
segments: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. However, while
“Wong” certainly aspires toward this norm of dramatic storytelling, Wong Flew resists such
teleological narrative. Instead, the play gets stuck at the “climax,” incapable of advancing any
further. Each time “Wong” returns to the projector, she must realize that the subject of her story
is still in crisis, and that her narrative has made no progress. Whereas the first few self-
assessments still evoke laughter from the audience, “Kristina’s” ongoing failure to move on
quickly becomes tiring, reflecting the subject’s ongoing state of despair. Striving for a resolution
that never arrives, “Wong” loses once again control over her representation. “Now, instead of
solving the crisis and saving them all, Kristina IS the crisis!”
213
212Ibid., 4
213Wong, Press Kit, 4.
81
“Kristina IS the crisis”: She disappoints the norm of sovereign subjecthood, which even
in its model minority variation still adheres to the image of a coherent, rational, and self-
determined self; and she is similarly unable to pursue the linear trajectory such selfhood
presupposes. But “Wong’s” impossibility to reproduce the “standard,” which renders her “the
crisis,” also puts into question the kind of personhood and life narrative against which she is
measured and evaluated. That is, Wong Flew flips the logic around to reveal what really needs
fixing: the standard itself. It takes another reset, however, for “Wong” to realize this, too.
Exhausted by the double labor of seeking outside support for her condition and to
reproduce a functional narrative, “Wong” decides to start the play again. After all, it can only get
better. Locating the “failure” still within herself but determined to stay on top of the game this
time, the protagonist chooses yet another position from which to tell the story. And she chooses a
powerful one to begin with. Rather than embodying the mentally ill, “Wong” assumes the role of
medical authority. In fact, she becomes the ruler of society, who decides over other people’s
mental health. As she announces loudly, “In our new society we won’t take tests to figure out
who is what and what is what. We will figure out who’s crazy based on what neighborhood they
live in. And I will assign each person to live in a new neighborhood […] arbitrarily.” Indeed, far
from figuring a rational authority, “Wong” turns into a despot. In her world, there is no reliable
logic that explains where people end, no scientific truth to sanity and disability, no way to escape
the hungry clutches of “Kristina,” who gets sexually aroused from distributing “arbitrarily” the
lives and deaths of the people.
Wong’s enactment targets the abuse of power by both state and medical institutions in
determining the life of minority populations. Specifically, the protagonist’s arbitrary actions
dispute the claim to rationality and objective truth by those very institutions. Instead, the latter
are shown to actively maintain racial hierarchies, and to do so for their own profit; whether
82
through urban planning policies that reinforce segregation, or through culturalist arguments of
difference that justify the state’s abandonment of its most vulnerable citizens.
In a moment of clairvoyance, “Kristina Wong” is able to see the self-serving system that
she, too, has helped to feed. Falling out of her role as the ruler, she is eager to share her newly
found insight with the public. “I know why it is that Asian American women are so depressed
and killing themselves,” “Kristina” shouts out in excitement. But before she can utter the next
word, she is abruptly cut off by an external female voice that asks her to leave the stage.
“Activity hour is over. It’s time to get back to your room.” Sharing is not allowed here, change
must be foreclosed. The voice reveals that “Kristina Wong” has been the patient of a mental
health institution all along. Or perhaps she was quietly admitted to a psychiatric facility while
desperately looking for help. Before further questions are raised and answers are given, “Kristina
Wong” disappears into her room, and the play concludes. “I’m fine,” are the last words we hear
from her.
MORE ON TRUTH AND FICTION
While “Kristina” initially insists on her position as an outside artist-narrator who has no personal
experience with depression or suicide, the audience is quickly made to realize how fragile this
distinction is. The off-stage voice that sends “Wong” back to her room further undermines her
sovereignty. Indeed, the protagonist’s apparent stay in a mental health facility does not bring
relief about the medical support, but enhances the impression of her being trapped in a system
she can neither control nor exit. Rather than offering a final resolution, or at least some hope for
betterment, Wong Flew ends in crisis mode.
In foregrounding the precarious nature of “Wong” and of the dramatic narrative that is
supposed to hold her together, Wong scrutinizes those (self-)narratives that we deem
83
unquestionable, even if they harm us. She exposes them as fictions. Indeed, the multiple forms of
failure that traverse the performance – from the failure to represent, to the failure to own a self
and offer the solution – make clear the artist’s unwillingness to speak for and represent the story
of depressed and suicidal Asian American women. The position Wong assumes is not one of
authority, her voice is not supposed to be taken as ultimate truth. In figuring the ambitious but
faltering “Wong,” whose goal lies in representing and finding a cure for the suffering of Asian
American women, Wong rather exposes the utopian and potentially harmful dimension of such
endeavor. Harmful, because the act of representing others immediately comes with
generalizations, standardizations, and exclusions; harmful, too, because the narrative of cure and
healing pressures subjects into a developmental life trajectory that must end in one’s ultimate
liberation. Michelle Jarman points out the ways in which claims to inclusion and social equality
through self-narratives of health enforce the stigma of those with disabilities. Jarman writes,
“while racialized biomedical or psychiatric diagnoses are rightly rejected and exposed,
arguments resisting misapplied diagnoses writ large – in this case those of ‘brain dysfunction’
and ‘mental illness’ – often have the effect of solidifying the stigma already attached to
disability.”
214
In a similar gesture, David Palumbo-Liu criticizes Asian American narratives of
“healing” that are based on overcoming one’s crisis and finding closure. He maintains, “the route
to happiness (that is, health) follows the path of a specific bildung that reinforces dominant
notions of subjectivity.”
215
Here, Palumbo-Liu continues, the norm of economic productivity,
214Michelle Jarman, “Coming Up from Underground,” 18.
215Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American, 398. From a different perspective but making similar conclusions, Bioethicist
Carl Elliott maintains that the medicalization of depression targets those who question the norms of life, and
turns the experience of “alienation” into a social ill. Elliott argues that the national affect of optimism and
positivity in the United States, and its heavy marketing by a pharmaceutical industry, does not allow for the
common feeling of alienation: “the experience of an incongruity between the self and external structures of
meaning – a lack of fit between who you are and the way you are expected to be, say, or a mismatch between the
way you are living a life and the structures of meaning that tell you how to live a life.” (8) The pathologizing of
the experience of alienation becomes, then, closely linked to a normative definition of “psychiatric well-being”
(11). Carl Elliott, “Pursued by Happiness and Beaten Senseless. Prozac and the American Dream,” Hastings
Center Report 30, no. 2 (2000).
84
which facilitates one’s entrance into valuable citizenship, conjoins with “the interests of minority
groups in attaching themselves successfully to the promise of upward mobility on the strength of
inner conviction and self-help. Psychic, social, and economic well-being become one.”
216
“Wong’s” premise to get everyone from crisis to resolution, to be all-inclusive and uplifting at
once, is noble. Yet it is predestined to fall back onto a limited inclusion of “the propertied self,”
and leaves behind those subjects, who cannot or do not want to transform their negative feelings
into the nation’s “happiness.”
There is a third angle from which to understand the harmful potential of a
representational narrative of healing. “Wong” herself is not exempt from the high demands of
such narrative and, as this chapter has shown, quickly thrown into despair by her failure to
“deliver.” As such, the protagonist reflects as well the challenges that Kristina Wong encountered
in her work as a female minority artist. Wong describes,
For about a year, when I was giving talks in college classes, I would announce,
“I’m doing a new show about depression and suicide among Asian American
women.” And what was surprising is how many women (Asian and not) came out
of the woodwork and would start telling me about their depression, their suicide
attempts, being hospitalized— intense things that I could hardly believe I was
being trusted to hear. Some of these were professional women, some were
seemingly very well put together, one was the professor of a class I spoke at. It
was amazing the trust people had in me, and how I unintentionally put myself out
there as this safe open vessel for everyone to put their trust and requests into.
People were emailing me in the middle of the night, “I want to be part of your
show!” And I didn’t actually know how to do that. I felt like I was disappointing
people because I wasn’t the multi-character actor they wanted me to be. And
people were making requests of my show like, “Do something about post-
partum!” “Do something about Lao refugees!” “Somatic blindness!” It was like I
was this miracle worker suddenly to people and I couldn’t handle the pressure.
217
It is easy to see the parallels between Kristina Wong and Wong Flew’s protagonist here, both of
whom are overwhelmed by the demands to be available to and represent all these women.
216Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American, 399.
217Wong, Email.
85
Wong’s statement vividly pictures what has been called the “burden of representation” – the
assumption that minority artists necessarily speak from their own experience and must represent
their entire community.
218
Such “burden” must be viewed within the context of a (neo)liberal
politics of inclusion, where visible diversity suddenly turns into capital.
219
As the previous quote
shows, “the burden of representation” comes in many shapes, but each time it entails an
audience’s desire to occupy or, perhaps, own the artist’s personhood. It also registers the
tendency of a wider public to read people of color culture as “ethnography,” where the
minoritized subject becomes the native informant. Wong elaborates on the urge to claim full
knowledge over her:
The character of “Kristina Wong” actually developed after the show premiered—
mostly to protect my life offstage. I realized that I was really confused as to who I
was supposed to be in the making and performance of this show— a savior? A
brochure? A comedian? Myself? And the first Q&As were some of the most
assaulting and horrific experiences ever [...] the audience would just start asking
very invasive questions about me, my mental health and my family. Even though
the character I play is a fictitious version of me, people were asking me questions
as if all these things had happened to me. It was completely uncomfortable and
very upsetting. And I didn’t think to draw boundaries because in the back of my
head, I thought that maybe it was my duty to put myself out there like that.
220
Like the character she embodies, Wong finds herself constantly grappling with not only the
aspirational drive to social justice that defines activist art projects like Wong Flew; she needs to
negotiate and monitor as well the boundaries between her, the subject of her performance, and
other people’s expectations and needs. Wong’s public self-positioning vis à vis her character
“Wong,” which she frames as a strategic narrative device meant to protect her from invasive
questions, further exemplifies this delicate balancing act. I argue Wong chooses a strategy that
218See Kobena Mercer, “Recoding Narratives of Race and Nation” and “Black Art and the Burden of
Representation,” in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge,
2013).
219Jodi Melamed summarizes aptly: “Antiracism becomes a nationally recognized social value and, for the first
time, gets absorbed into U.S. governmentality.” “The Spirit of Neoliberalism,” 1.
220Wong, Email.
86
stresses a relatability to Asian American women’s experience of self-negativity, while she rejects
a one-to-one translation between her and the subject she embodies. By doing so, she pushes
against the multilayered burden of representation: limiting her own vulnerability as a female
artist of color, and opting out of claiming full knowledge over and thereby disappropriate Asian
American women of their experience .
221
Whereas the artist explicitly states that her performance is not autobiographical – she
calls it “a swear-to-god-not-autobiographical, serio-comic portrayal of the high incidence of
anxiety, depression and mental illness among Asian American women”
222
– she often does so
tongue-in-cheek, and still draws on her own experience. In her guest blog for Tavis Smiley,
ironically titled “I’m Definitely Not Crazy. But I Probably Am Lying,” Wong suggests going
through a similar experience as the character she enacts in her show. “My earliest memories of
even thinking I might be depressed were met with warnings by my mother that if I ever dare seek
professional help for depression, even as a kid, my employers would one day find out and fire
me. […] So I hid it for years.”
223
Likewise, her entry for the online magazine xoJane stresses the
negative feelings that defined a large part of her life. Here the artist writes, “I believed for many
years, and even now, that the misery of my life was not a diagnosable medical disorder, but was
just about being a Chinese American navigating life in the Western World whilst being held to
unrealistically high expectations (bilingual concert pianist brain surgeon anyone?).”
224
Rather
than labeling her own experience as clinical depression, however, Wong foregrounds once again
221As Wong explains, “I didn’t like the idea of interviewing depressed people and then en-acting them on stage – it
felt dirty to me. It felt unethical to interview people about their depression, make them talk about things that
could make them more depressed, possibly risk leaving them in a situation where they felt poached, then run off
and do a show about their lives.” Wong, Email.
222http://kristinawong.com/projects.
223Kristina Wong, “I’m Definitely Not Crazy. But I Probably Am Lying,” Tavis Smiley, Jul 29, 2010,
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/tavissmiley/blogs/staff-guest-blog/im-definitely-not-crazy-but-i-probably-am-lying.
224Kristina Wong, “I Thought Being Miserable Was Just Part Of Being Chinese American,” xojane, May 15, 2014,
http://www.xojane.com/issues/i-thought-being-miserable-was-just-part-of-being-chinese-american.
87
how dominant identity norms – norms that an Asian American community itself largely aspires
to – produce bad feelings. “In retrospect, it may not have even been that I was actually clinically
depressed. I think I was just very isolated in a predominantly Chinese-American community that
shunned ever talking about anything that might be going wrong.”
225
I read the statements here less as authentic “self-revelations” than as cultural texts the
artist offers that allow for a deeper understanding of her representation of negativity. If, as Karen
Shimakawa writes in National Abjection. The Asian American Body Onstage, “performance […]
depends for its effects on the acceptance of (and/or willed blindness to) self-division on the parts
of both performer and audience,” Kristina Wong refuses to settle for “acceptance” and
“blindness.”
226
Instead, both the show and the public discourse the artist creates around it
continuously play with and complicate the fixity of boundaries between various identity
narratives – medical, social, autobiographical, artistic; not to conflate them, but to render visible
the inherent conflict of representation. As Wong writes,
So essentially, what the show is in the first few acts, is me going through every
attempt to make the show that other people wanted me to make— one that
provides feel good results [...], one that attempts to portray every single Asian
American woman in a character monologue show [...], until what really needs to
be confronted is my insistence that the show follow a neat “arc of fiction.” This
“fiction” motif is what really runs my show. I think it echoes the issue of
depression in Asian communities on so many levels.
227
Wong’s work both on- and offscreen clearly insists on the reality of Asian American women’s
suffering. Yet she scrutinizes how we decide what counts as “normal” life experience and,
conversely, mental illness. Indeed, the artist refuses to subsume the various experiences of Asian
American women under a handy medical label or easily knowable identity. Instead, Wong Flew
225Wong, “I’m Definitely Not Crazy.”
226Karen Shimakawa. National Abjection. The Asian American Body Onstage (Durham, London: Duke University
Press, 2002), 67.
227Wong, Email.
88
approaches the matter of Asian American women’s depression and suicide through the
limitations of representation, specifically through the shortcomings of narrative and subjecthood
as secure “properties.” For Wong, an ethical representation of negativity is only possible in the
negative.
Do not be mistaken, just like any performance, Wong Flew depends on some form of
representation – both as “proxy” and “portrait,” a replacement and a particular framing of an
other, as Spivak writes.
228
After all, the performance does bring into focus the high rates of
depression and suicide among Asian American women. In fact, in order to educate a wider public
about the topic, Wong claims the professional role of a “cultural ambassador” – the less we know
about the topic, the more valuable it becomes. The show’s success with canonical institutions
both in terms of funding and circulation is certainly a result of Wong’s skillful engagement with
such identity politics.
229
However, the deliberate promotion of her work through a rhetoric of
minority empowerment and visibility not only serves to “satisfy a liberal audience” in its quest
for authenticity and multicultural “inclusion.”
230
It is also what allows her to make a living, and
still a continuously exhausting one, in a rather precarious profession. As Wong Flew thematizes,
Asian American artists oftentimes depend on canonical institutions to make any money at all –
whether that be in the form of a liberal politics of inclusion and special minority grants, a
national university campus tour, or the establishment of Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month
228Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can The Subaltern Speak?” Can The Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History
of an Idea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 33.
229Since 2006, the show has played at over 50 venues. The concert film has further enhanced its circulation as an
educational project. As the film’s website states for instance, “This program has been presented to help de-
stigmatize mental health issues and bring cultural sensitivity and awareness around Asian American mental
health.” http://flyingwong.com/faq.html. For more detail on the work’s funding: “Wong Flew over the Cuckoo’s
Nest is a National Performance Network Creation Fund Project commissioned by Asian Arts Initiative and La
Peña Cultural Center. Funding for Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’ s Nest has also been provided by the National
Endowment for the Arts, The Ford Foundation, and La Peña’s New Works Fund supported by The James Irvine
Foundation. Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is also a Project of Creative Capital.”
http://kristinawong.com/projects.
230Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American, 401.
89
(which, at closer look, ironically celebrates Asian Pacific diversity in tandem with “the
anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental railroad”).
231
But Wong does not shy away
to put forth the strategies – both those implemented by various institutions and her own as a
response to them – that contribute to the play’s marketability. Rather, Wong Flew deliberately
claims the various tensions around the issue of representation to confront us with the
impossibility to fully access the interstitial place of Asian American women’s negativity. In doing
so, she exposes as well what is oftentimes an empty commitment to minority issues by those
very institutions that seem to welcome and support her.
CONCLUSION: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
And you, you are a plant. Do you know that? That’s all you are if you don’t talk. If you don’t talk,
you can’t have a personality. You’ll have no personality and no hair. You’ve got to let people know
you have a personality and a brain.
232
In this chapter, I have focused on Kristina Wong’s one-woman show Wong Flew Over The
Cuckoo’s Nest and her public framing of it, to get a better understanding of the ways in which
certain people are rendered existentially surplus – through the same process by which they are
institutionally recognized and protected. Wong’s work delineates the various blockages to and of
inclusion, and it helps to see how violent racial hierarchies are maintained and reconfigured by it.
However, the inherent negativity of Wong Flew also prods the question where do we go from
here? What are the alternatives to a politics of inclusion and rights that systematically abandons,
to the burden of representation that enhances the vulnerability of minority subjects, and to those
narratives of healing that discipline and assimilate one into certain models of life? These
questions seem especially urgent in light of the ongoing precariousness of many Asian American
231“Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month: About,” The Library of Congress, accessed August 25, 2014,
http://asianpacificheritage.gov/about.html.
232Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (New York: Vintage), 180.
My attention to this quote was raised by Kristina Chew’s “The Disabled Speech of Asian Americans.”
90
women, where non-intervention might simply mean to let die.
Rather than seeing the enactment of negativity in Wong’s work as a dead end, I propose
to approach it as a creative reframing of a social rights discourse. Specifically, of one that
demands the concrete betterment of lives without disciplining minority subjects back into the
norms of self-improvement and rehabilitation. The show develops the topic of depression and
suicide to point out social inequalities, but also to open up a space for those subjectivities that
have been muted – rendered negative – by a “liberal fantasy.” As Crystal Parikh formulates it in
her discussion of an Asian American right to health, we need “a conception of health not simply
as freedom from illness and injury, but as a granting of dignity to subjects other than the
idealized able bodies of liberal fantasy.”
233
How does such a conception and “granting of dignity”
look like?
Similar to Wong, Parikh grapples with the dilemma of claiming social justice for a
particular population while attending to its internal heterogeneity. She suggests to refrain from
“convert[ing] the ideal of wellbeing into normative sets of moral obligations and privatized
goods” that turn minority subjects into self-responsible entrepreneurs of their own becoming.
234
Rather, Parikh articulates the right to health and wellbeing as “an entitlement” that demands to be
“fulfilled.”
235
Put differently, an Asian American right to health does not define the norm of
healthy subjectivity, it provides a vantage point from which to ask “what has been rendered
historically and materially impossible in the present.”
236
Wong’s approach to Asian American
women’s experience of negativity resonates strongly with Parikh’s take in that depression
233Crystal Parikh, “Being Well: The Right to Health in Asian American Literature,” Amerasia Journal 39, no. 1
(2013): 34.
234Ibid., 35.
235Ibid., 37.
236Ibid.
91
emerges as a means to ask precisely that – to inquire about the conditions that simultaneously
require yet also prevent Asian American women to “simply be.” In Wong Flew, depressed and
suicidal subjects enter into public consciousness not by acquiring a distinct and representative
identity – a claiming of the self – but by merely being possible. Meaning being possible without
having to become otherwise. Here, negativity must not be overcome to render subjectivity
legible and legitimate – to turn the plant without “personality” and “brain” into a recognizable
human being. Instead, negativity names a sensorium through which not yet imagined socialities
can emerge. Following Ann Cvetkovich’s notion of an archive of feeling, which maintains that
lived experience can become the foundation for minoritarian public cultures, I posit Wong Flew
and its economy of negativity as such a site for alternative social formations. Without
representing negativity as a uniform experience, the performance still suggests an affinity among
subjects. Albeit one where the subjects themselves might never meet or even know each other.
237
So why even affinity, you ask, with sense? And I reply, because this form of sharing insists on
one’s belonging to this world. And perhaps most importantly, it stubbornly holds onto lives,
when no one seems to care.
237My discussion here is inspired by Crystal Parikh and Grace Hong, both of whom suggest similar forms of
sociality that are based on lived experience without closure. Parikh envisions “a shared (‘universal’) embodied
vulnerability, while also attentive to the uneven historical and spatial distribution of that vulnerability.” “Being
Well,” 44. Hong argues for “forms of coalitions that are not necessarily based on conscious identification or
sentimental sympathy between members of racialized groups” but rather “arise through a variety of
disidentifications and contestations.” The Ruptures of American Capital, xix.
92
CHAPTER THREE
Me llamo Peng: Can The Chinese Working Body Be Creative, Too?
Some forms of precarity are obvious and totalizing dramatizations of the thing in itself. The
concept of frailty now, for instance - a medically defined threatening condition: your weight drops
below a certain point, you’re not steady on your feet, you’ve had falls, statistically you’ll be dead
within three years. But other forms of precarity, and of the living in it and through it, are not
metaculturally marked at all, not moralized. Precarity can take the form of a sea change, a
darkening atmosphere, a hard fall, or the barely perceptible sense of a reprieve.
238
While the previous chapter explored how narratives of social negativity – the declared absence of
a person’s positive value – can disrupt representational violence by refusing to fold the negative
into a story of success, this chapter asks what happens if and when negativity does, in fact, not
feel so bad? This is less to suggest that negativity must feel “good,” or that it must feel a certain
way at all. For instance, the experience of marginalization might manifest itself in mere
indifference. Or it might feel, as Kathleen Stewart puts it in her description of precarious life,
like “the barely perceptible sense of a reprieve.” Therefore, rather than equating negativity with
distinctly negative feelings, the ensuing discussion reconsiders negativity in relation to forms of
governance that, similar to Foucault’s notion of governmentality, involve a person’s
participation, attachment, and self-regulation.
239
I am especially concerned to understand how
such self-regulation takes place through an affective investment in certain forms of life through
such feelings as optimism, perseverance, and also indifference.
In what follows, I analyze Me llamo Peng (My Name is Peng, 2008), the personal
238Kathleen Stewart, “Precarity’s Form,” presentation at the Annual Convention of the American Anthropological
Association, Montreal, November 15-20, 2011. Available for download on
http://supervalentthought.com/sensing-precarity-allison-stewart-garcia-berlant-mclean-biehl.
239With reference to Sianne Ngai’s definition of negativity in Ugly Feelings, I understand feelings to be negative
“in the sense that they evoke pain or displeasure [...] in the sense that they are saturated with socially
stigmatizing meanings and values […] and in the sense that they are organized by trajectories of repulsion rather
than attraction, by phobic strivings ‘away from’ rather than philic strivings ‘toward.’” Ugly Feelings, 11. In sum,
negative feelings describe the absence of resolution and productivity, and are contrary to the compulsory
happiness of the good life.
93
documentary of a Chinese migrant worker living in Europe, to interrogate the affective labor it
takes to survive – sometimes disguised under the impression to thrive – in a precarious
environment. I use precarity here similar to social negativity, to describe mechanisms of
exploitation that diminish a life’s worth simultaneously through and beyond the economic: How
the logic of a global labor market defines people’s sense of self and, how, conversely, as living
and breathing historical subjects, people respond to and inform that very logic.
240
But more than a
dialectical relation between global economy and intimate experience, precarity here serves as an
analytic to tease out the extent to which subjectivity as the seemingly most private “thing” a
person “owns” or “is” becomes translated into work and into capital. As critics of so-called
“immaterial” labor, in particular under the conditions of contemporary neoliberalism, have
argued, “what is exchanged in the labour market is no longer abstract labour (measurable in
homogeneous working time), but rather subjectivity itself, in its experiential, relational, creative
dimensions. To sum it up, what is exchanged is the ‘potentiality’ of the subject.”
241
In dialog with
Me llamo Peng, I approach the matter of subjectivity in its intimate binding to new forms of
capitalist exploitation, the regulation of racialized bodies, and the perhaps existential human need
for recognition. Expanding upon existant work on immaterial labor, my particular interest in Me
llamo Peng lies with a subject’s folding into hegemonic value systems through the promise of
240This chapter discusses precarity on a macro- and micro level. That is, how it is achieved through individual
subjects while it maintains geopolitical and social hierarchies. For a broader context behind my employment of
the term, see Jasbir Puar et al., “Precarity Talk: A Virtual Roundtable with Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Bojana
Cvejic, Isabell Lorey, Jasbir Puar, and Ana Vujanovic,” TDR: The Drama Review 56, no. 4 (2012). Rosalind Gill
and Andrew Ross give a good overview of the history of the term from the Italian autonomists to the present-day
in “In the Social Factory? Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural Work,” Theory, Culture & Society 25,
no. 1 (2008). Two papers on the conference panel “Sensing Precarity” at the American Anthropological
Association convention in 2011 have helped me to think about precarity and social negativity in relation to affect
specifically. Lauren Berlant, “Austerity, Precarity, Awkwardness,” and Kathleen Stewart, “Precarity’s Form,”
These two papers and the other panel presentations can be downloaded here:
http://supervalentthought.com/sensing-precarity-allison-stewart-garcia-berlant-mclean-biehl/. On the connection
between financial regimes and the regulation of subjects see also Hong’s excellent essay “Existentially Surplus.”
241Cristina Morini, Andrea Fumagalli, “Life Put to Work: Towards a Life Theory of Value,” ephemera: theory &
politics in organization 10, no. 3-4 (2010): 236.
94
validation, specifically how the protagonist’s aspirational attitude – his relentless pursuit of
freedom and self-making – feeds into a regime that renders him disposable. Within this context,
the notions of “work” and “labor” take on extra meaning, connecting a financial exchange
relation (work for money) to the investment in a certain form of subjecthood. In so doing, these
terms do not seek to distract from the fact of material exploitation and its corollary, financial
need, but to analyze the various overlapping and also conflicting articulations of a subject’s effort
to survive.
Similar to the preceding chapters, “Me llamo Peng: Can The Chinese Working Body Be
Creative, Too?” carves out the high stakes of this “self-work” for populations who inhabit a
space of socioeconomic marginality. With the video of a low-paid Chinese migrant worker at its
center, however, the present discussion prompts as well a critical reconsideration about extant
hierarchies among Asian transnational subjects. For instance, Peng appears cut off from certain
forms of material, social, and cultural capital that Ming Wong, Wayne Y ung, and Kristina Wong, as
professional artists who make a living from their diasporic situatedness, might easily access. Yet
rather than antagonizing the visual works and makers against each other, I approach Peng’s
uneasy identity of the exploited migrant worker and a creative cultural producer to track the
ways in which varied forms of structural oppression produce linked but distinct experiences of
devaluation among Asian diasporans. Specifically, I employ Me llamo Peng as a compelling
entrance into the ambiguous representation of human subjectivity as something seemingly
universal yet rarely “had.”
The ensuing analysis begins by investigating how Peng as documented in the video
makes himself legible to ruling value systems. In this context, I engage Me llamo Peng as a
document of current forms of governance and exploitation and, moreover, as a work of theory
that helps to disentangle and analyze how interrelated regimes of life and death conceptualize
95
human value. I then expand upon this inquiry and ask about the work the video does in the
crafting of a self. Specifically, I tease out how the film as the expression of subjectivity maintains
dominant notions of subjecthood and worthiness while it also gestures to an act of self-care that
possibly reorients a hierarchy of human beings.
ON CREATIVITY AND CRUELTY
Me llamo Peng is a documentary short shot by Chinese migrant worker Peng Ruan after moving
to Europe in 2002. The film is the product of 60 hours of footage assembled over 6 years, and it
shows Peng’s worklife trajectory through France and Spain. However, Peng is not the director of
the video. In fact, Me llamo Peng is a collaborative project, directed and produced by two female
filmmakers – Venezuelan born Jahel José Guerra Roa and Spanish born Victoria Molina de
Carranza.
242
The two women met each other at film school in Barcelona, and Guerra Roa made
Peng’s acquaintance while the two of them were working at a Sushi restaurant in the same city.
Guerra Roa recounts in an interview, “En cuisine, il n’y avait que des Chinois, je m’entendais
assez bien avec eux… En parlant de notre intérêt pour leur culture, l’un d’eux – Peng – m’a dit
avoir fait ‘le film de sa vie.’ La semaine suivante, il m’a apporté huit dvds. Je suis entrée dans la
vie de Peng et il est entré dans la mienne.”
243
The challenge that the professional filmmakers
faced after receiving Peng’s footage was to come up with a narrative that could hold the
recordings together so as to – in their words – “make a movie from footage filmed without any
aim.”
244
This, without any deeper knowledge of Chinese. In the end, Guerra Roa and Molina de
242Film Website, http://mellamopeng.blogspot.com/p/equipo.html.
243“Journal du Réel #2: Entretien avec Victoria Molina de Caranza et Jahel José Guerra Roa, Me llamo Peng
(Interview with Victoria Molina de Caranza et Jahel José Guerra Roa, Me llamo Peng),” 37e Cinéma du réel,
March 25, 2011. http://blog.cinemadureel.org/2011/03/25/journal-du-reel-2-entretien-avec-victoria-molina-de-
carranza-et-jael-jose-guerraroa-me-llamon-peng. “There were only Chinese [working] in the kitchen, and I had
quite a good time with them... As we talked about our interest in their culture, one of them – Peng – told me he
had made ‘a film about his life.’ The following week, he brought me eight DVDs. I entered into Peng’s life, and
he entered into mine.” My translation.
244From the filmmakers’ statement, Press Kit.
96
Carranza chose to structure the film around what they call “Peng’s life philosophy: Where there’s
money, I’ll go.”
245
And so we follow Peng as he labors in a restaurant in Paris, on a pig farm in
Biscarri, at a dry cleaning business in Tarragona, and as construction worker in Amposta.
While Me llamo Peng is roughly divided into four parts that reflect the different stops of
his trajectory, the film frequently jumps back and forth between different years, and offers more
of an overall impression of Peng’s ongoing migration rather than a chronological journey. In the
directors’ words, “The place or the order didn’t matter, history made sense because it reflects on
our main character’s life and his close relationship with the camera.”
246
Oftentimes, we see the
protagonist talking to the camera as he ends his workday late at night – exhausted, eating by
himself, housed in cramped, provisional places, and recording his common work injuries.
247
Indeed, the camera seems like a life companion who participates in Peng’s leisure activities and
shares with him the moments of joy – such as getting excited about a new pair of real leather
shoes; going on a hike in nature on his day off; eating a bowl of steaming, freshly prepared
noodles; and musing on the meaning of life. Moreover, the camera registers Peng’s cursing and
frustration with the endless demands of work – like being ordered to cook yet another dish after
midnight on New Year’s Eve. It further inspires the protagonist to transform his working
environment into a site of fun. For instance, to perform a nightly masquerade in his boss’
traditional Chinese dress after everyone else has left the restaurant. The camera, then, is as well a
vehicle through which Peng releases his discomfort creatively. As Ann Cvetkovich maintains,
“Creativity encompasses different ways of being able to move: to solve problems, have ideas, be
joyful about the present, make things. Conceived of in this way, it is embedded in everyday life,
245Ibid.
246Ibid.
247The term protagonist here and in the following chapter is not meant to identify a work as fiction but rather to
suggest the inevitable blending of documentary narratives with a filmed subject’s performance and the power of
emotions in these stories of (self-)representation.
97
not something that belongs only to artists or to transcendent forms of experience.”
248
Despite the money-guided “life philosophy” Guerra Roa and Molina de Carranza ascribe
to Peng, the directors, too, understand the protagonist primarily as a creative agent. In their
telling of the filmmaker’s biography on Me llamo Peng’s website, the women highlight Peng’s
cultural taste, his urge to explore, and his strong sense of optimism:
[E]ver since he was a little boy, he has always been watching films. He never
missed a new release because his mom worked at the movie theater selling tickets.
As the years passed, Peng began to see his monotonous surroundings “in black
and white.” That’s why in 2004 [sic] he decided to search for the colors he
needed.
249
He packed his suitcase and headed for Europe to begin his own
adventure. After his arrival, Peng invested in a second-hand camera that would go
with him from town to town as he worked on whatever job available. He always
says: “where there’s money, I’ll go,” but it’s his desire to change his life and see
what lies beyond his limits that keeps him moving forward. In most
circumstances, Peng answers with, ‘everything, always very good.’ With this
positive attitude and constant collaboration, we were able to move on with Me
llamo Peng.
250
In the directors’ account, Peng appears as a subject hungering for the “colors” of life outside the
“black and white” confines of his home. The recordings are proof of his ceaseless energy to
“keep moving forward” and optimize – or fully realize – his talented self. Interestingly enough,
Peng’s precarious existence seems to have no place in such a narrative, and the women make no
further mentioning of the arduous working and living conditions that are clearly captured in the
video. Rather, Me llamo Peng is presented as the ultimate expression of Peng’s exceptional
personality which remains intact despite the violent reality of capitalist exploitation. Even more,
once turned into a legible structure by the directors, Peng’s filmic engagement emerges as that
which retains his subjectivity against “capitalism’s penetration of workers’ very souls.”
251
248Cvetkovich, Depression, 21.
249By contrast, the film opens with the following caption: “Peng Ruan arrived in Europe in 2002 and started filming
everything. In total, he shot 60 hours of footage, showing his life over a period of six years.”
250Film Website, http://mellamopeng.blogspot.com/p/personaje.html.
251Gill and Ross, “In the Social Factory,” 19.
98
The current discussion seeks to rectify such one-sided representation. It does so by
zooming in on the visual documentation of Peng’s precarious worklife and, moreover, by
interrogating the systems of governance and exploitation that the film thereby brings to the fore.
Rather than countering the directors’ claim of Peng’s positive subjectivity with the image of his
suffering, however, I am interested in Peng’s own performance of subjectivity before the camera.
That is, while my critique does concern the directors’ biographical sketch (both verbally and visually)
of Peng’s exceptionality, I first and foremost want to understand how Peng confirms this
exceptionality and articulates himself through ruling value economies. On the one hand, the
protagonist engages personality traits – including playfulness, dedication, creativity – that challenge
hegemonic conceptions of a faceless Chinese labor force. Yet Peng’s self-enactment also gestures to
new forms of discipline and value measurement that reiterate a capitalist agenda of non-stop and self-
guided productivity. As Rosalind Gill and Andrew Ross have pointed out, “contemporary forms of
capitalist organization demand ‘cooperativeness’, ‘participation’, ‘creativity’,” and they depend on
“passionate” subjects who are emotionally invested in what they do.
252
Concurring with Gill and Ross, I suggest to reframe Peng’s “positive attitude” away from a
person’s inherent quality and rather as a form of affective self-regulation. One that aligns the subject
with the status quo through such feelings as optimism and ambition, and ensures that the money
252Rosalind Gill and Andrew Ross, “In the Social Factory,” 15. My engagement with critiques on immaterial labor is
further informed by an interdisciplinary body of feminist scholarship, including Viviana A. Zelizer, “The
Purchase of Intimacy,” Law & Social Inquiry 25, no. 3 (2000): 817-848; Kathi Weeks, “Life Within and Against
Work”; Donatella Alessandrini, “Immaterial Labour and Alternative Valorisation Processes in Italian Feminist
Debates: (Re)Exploring the ‘Commons’ of Re-Production,” feminists@law 1, no. 2 (2012): 1-28. Alessandrini
specifically highlights the contribution of Italian feminists to a better understanding of immaterial labor that has
been overlooked in most critical discussions. For a further discussion of immateriality in relation to capitalist
practices see Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” in Radical Thought In Italy: A Potential Politics, ed.
Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000) and Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age
of Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2004). As introduced at the beginning of the dissertation, Keeling offers
in The Witch’ s Flight an intriguing take on the labor of cinematic perception and political imagination. In
addition, media scholars such as Tiziana Terranova have analyzed immaterial labor in the Internet age, arguing
that the line between production and consumption becomes increasingly blurred. See Terranova, “Free Labor,”
Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory, ed. Trebor Scholz (Abingdon, New York: Routledge,
2013).
99
keeps flowing. In dialog with Lauren Berlant’s notion of “cruel optimism,” which describes an
existential attachment to systems of dominance and control, I elucidate how the documentary indexes
an attachment to what feels like the right and “good” kind of life but, in fact, wears out the very
subject it interpellates. Yet this chapter also expands upon Berlant’s compelling argument to ask what
happens to one’s attachments under the conditions of labor migration and the systemic precarization
of migrant lives under global capitalism. In the case of Me llamo Peng, for instance, the good life
refers less to desires for job security, domestic intimacy, and national cohesion – even if these desires
remain attached to the social imaginary of a valued life. Rather, the meaning of the good life has
shifted toward a subject’s possibility to endure and succeed as a risk-taking, “flexible,” self-
enterprising individual in the global economy.
253
I argue this is where a subject’s need for validation
and the strategies of socioeconomic exploitation – cruelly – fall into one. As Berlant explains, “A
relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your
flourishing.”
254
This uncanny entanglement of precarity and positivity, or the making of surplus bodies and
intimate selves, is at the heart of my analysis. I examine how Me llamo Peng brings to the surface the
protagonist’s affective investment in ruling value economies to be – and feel – recognized as human
being in the world. Within this context, cruel optimism is less about happy feelings. Instead, it
designates a structure that orients subjects toward the promise of recognition, especially when
their presence feels disprized.
255
Cruel optimism thus signifies a paradoxical form of self-
253Indeed, as this chapter will further elaborate, Peng embodies the ideal subject of capitalism’s casualized working
conditions, its demand for both personal investment and “flexible” labor migration, and its uncanny wedding to
normative perceptions of worthy human bodies.
254Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 1. The theoretical framework here thus significantly overlaps with discourses on the
self-entrepreneurial subject such as intriguingly discussed by Pheng Cheah but with particular attention on
affective self-governance. See Pheng Cheah, “Capitalizing Humanity. The Global Disposition of People and
Things,” Accumulating Insecurity: Violence and Dispossession in the Making of Everyday Life, ed. Shelley
Feldman, Charles Geisler, Gayatri A. Menon (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011).
255As explained in the introduction, I use the verb “to orient” and its noun, “orientation” throughout this chapter
similar to Sara Ahmed as both a social positioning and an affective way of being toward the world. “Orientations
shape not only how we inhabit space, but how we apprehend this world of shared inhabitance, as well as ‘who’
100
validation that claims a person’s mattering while maintaining their life in chronic precarity.
“Why is it so hard to leave those forms of life that don’t work? Why is it that, when
precariousness is spread throughout the world, people fear giving up on the institutions that have
worn out their confidence in living?” Why, Berlant continues, because the fantasy of a validated
life “represents the possibility of happiness as such. And so losing the bad object might be
deemed worse than being destroyed by it.”
256
The following film scenes exemplify Peng’s
attachment to a “bad object” that is also the stuff and very promise of his self.
SCENES OF PRECARITY
How does capitalism feel?
257
The first scene of work takes place in the kitchen of a Parisian Chinese restaurant. It is almost
midnight as the video’s time display indicates, and we see Peng wrapping up his kitchen duties.
Finally, he can think about prepping his own dinner. In the following shots we learn that Peng
not only works in the restaurant, he lives there as well. It is usually late at night when he sets up
his bed from a couple of chairs in the dining hall, and switches on the television to catch up with
news. But Peng is barely able to sit up straight, let alone to process more information. “Iraq lost
the war,” he mumbles into the camera, then quickly gives up his attempt to deliver more news.
The protagonist looks exhausted and shakes his head. Dark circles show under his puffy eyes.
“Before I began filming, I had so many things to say, but now...,” Peng moves uncomfortably on
his chair, fingering with an alarm clock that shows the advanced hour. He looks frustrated and
worn out, echoing his previous words, “Before I began filming, I had so many things to say, but
and ‘what’ we direct our energy and attention toward.” Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 3.
256Berlant, “Lauren Berlant: On her book Cruel Optimism,” Rorotoko, June 5, 2012, http://rorotoko.com/interview/
20120605_berlant_lauren_on_cruel_optimism.
257Cvetkovich, Depression, 5.
101
now...”
The ensuing shot displays a different date, but an equally late hour, and presents us with a
close-up of the protagonist’s swollen legs. “There’s a hole when I press down,” Peng says as he
squeezes a finger into them and the dents remain. The filmmaker repeats this process several
times, as if unable to feel or grasp the meaning of the physical symptoms that his body shows. As
Peng records in further images, the long and late working hours have resulted in the chronic
impairment of his mind and body: in constant fatigue, the swelling of his feet and legs, lasting
back pain, and, maybe unsurprisingly, the lack of self-care. Peng is strikingly reminiscent of the
self-estranged worker who, as Marx has famously argued, has lost his sense of self and thus what
makes him human.
258
He appears more concerned about the quality of his filming – did he
capture that injury well enough? – than his actual wellbeing.
After changing countries and jobs, Peng’s life still seems devoid of the “colors” he set out
to discover on his journey to the West. When the protagonist starts work at a steam cleaning
business in Tarragona, his provisional home ‘upgrades’ to a cramped dormitory. The labor
conditions, however, remain precarious, leaving Peng vulnerable to frequent injuries and the risk
of being fired in case of actual injury. One night, the protagonist sits on his dormitory mattress in
front of the camera and reports another dismissal. “It’s the third time since I’ve been in Spain, so
I’m used to it. Fuck! What’s not funny is that I spent 20€ on my shoes and today some hot oil
spilled all over my hand and my shoes. I don’t think I can go out with them anymore. My soul
hurts. I don’t care about my hand. My skin will recover, but not the leather.”
The violence of frequent work accidents and following dismissals describe Peng’s
258According to Marx, the systemic separation between the worker and the product of his labor “estranges man’s
own body from him, as it does external nature and his spiritual essence, his human being.” He continues, “If the
product of labour is alien to me, if it confronts me as an alien power, to whom, then, does it belong? If my own
activity does not belong to me, if it is an alien, a coerced activity, to whom, then, does it belong? To a being other
than me. Who is this being?” Karl Marx, “Alienated Labor,” Sociological Theory in the Classical Era: Text and
Readings, ed. Laura Desfor Edles, Scott Appelrouth (Thousand Oaks, etc.: Sage, 2015), 52.
102
everyday life. Open wounds have become normal. The sight of the large reddened surface of his
hand does not seem to bother him. Instead, Peng is upset (“my soul hurts”) about his spoiled
leather shoes. How cruel is that: damaged good becomes a reason for frustration, whereas his
injured body is no reason for concern. I contend the quoted scene reflects the logic of a global
economy, in which the Chinese working body is disposable. As a Chinese migrant worker, Peng
belongs to the fourth largest migrant group of non-EU citizens in Spain and, that is also, to the
large pool of foreign workers who take over the most precarious of jobs.
259
Migration scholar
Wayne A. Cornelius elaborates, “The Spanish labor markets in which immigrants participate tend
to be highly segmented. In every sector, foreigners occupy the least skilled, most physically
demanding, most dangerous, and most temporary jobs, with no promotion ladder, even though
many of the new immigrants employed in such jobs are reasonably well educated and skilled
workers.”
260
While low-paid migrant workers like Peng are supposed to offer flexible labor, and
are systemically employed in dangerous and short-term jobs, Spanish immigration law further
complicates their access to long term legal residency, work permit, and the right to healthcare.
By implication, low-wage foreign workers are not only severely restricted in their mobility; they
are oftentimes left with no other option than to turn toward “the underground economy or to
formal-sector firms” without any social security.
261
259As Gladys Nieto writes in “The Chinese in Spain,” “Following Spain’s economic boom in the 1980s, the
demand for household services (including for middle-income households) and care providers for the elderly rose
sharply. It is here, together with agriculture and construction, all characterized by low wages, insecurity, and
poor working conditions, where non-EU migrants can be found.” International Migration 41, no. 3 (2003): 215-
237, 219. For a different portray of a rising generation of successful Chinese Spanish entrepreneurs see Luis
Gómez, “The New Chinese,” El País, August 27, 2012,
http://elpais.com/elpais/2012/08/27/inenglish/1346069596_299391.html.
260Wayne A. Cornelius. “Spain: The Uneasy Transition from Labor Exporter to Labor Importer,” Controlling
Immigration. A Global Perspective. Second Edition, ed. Wayne A. Cornelius, Takeyuki Tsuda, Philip L. Martin,
and James F. Hollifield (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
261Ibid., 399. According to Cornelius, a work permit “limits the worker to a specific employer” (399n19) and its
renewal requires a Social Security card which only a “minority of immigrants working in certain sectors (such as
domestic service, for example) are able to obtain” (399).
103
The structural exploitation of racialized and ethnicized minorities by nation-states and
private corporations has long been at the center of ethnic studies critiques.
262
Lisa Marie Cacho,
for instance, shows how legal systems target specific populations into social death by foreclosing
them from lawful recognition. “To be ineligible for personhood is a form of social death,” Cacho
writes, “it not only defines who does not matter, it also makes mattering meaningful.”
263
Rey
Chow’s work on “the ethnicization of labor,” too, grapples with the reality of systemic
marginalization. In particular, Chow focuses on the interlocking assignment of foreignness and
work to define a person’s standing in the social hierarchy. “A laborer becomes ethnicized,” Chow
writes, “because she has to pay for her living by performing certain kinds of work, while these
kinds of work, despite being generated from within society, continue to reduce the one who
performs them to the position of the outsider, the ethnic.”
264
Complementing Chow’s discussion
of how social negativity grows out of capital’s agenda, disability scholar Helen Meekosha links
the prevalence of “social suffering” in populations from the global South to capitalism’s
colonizing nature.
265
She writes, “The processes of colonisation, colonialism, and neo-colonial
262Although the following review engages scholars from various disciplines, including film studies and disability
studies, these scholars’ research on racial and ethnic discrimination fits neatly with the agenda of ethnic studies.
263Cacho calls this a state of being “legally illegible.” Lisa Marie Cacho. Social Death. Racialized Rightlessness
and the Criminalization of the Unprotected. New York and London: NYU Press, 2012, 6. Cacho develops the
notion of social death from Orlando Patterson. See Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1982).
264Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Columbia Press, 2002, 34. Chow’s
concept seems particularly resonant given Spain’s ongoing history of ethnonationalist conflicts, specifically the
strive for independence by autonomous communities like Catalonia, where most of Peng’s recordings take place.
For more details see Gunther Dietz and Belén Agrela. “Commentary,” Controlling Immigration. A Global
Perspective. Second Edition, ed. Wayne A. Cornelius, Takeyuki Tsuda, Philip L. Martin, and James F. Hollifield
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). Moreover, Chow’s discussion is reminiscent of Foucault’s notion of
state racism, a form of biopower gone rogue, where the state achieves its goal of fostering life through deadly
processes of purification. However, Chow approaches the deliberate eradication of undesired populations not as
an exceptional form of state radicalism but as a crucial part of the contemporary governance of people. Comp.
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, Lectures at the College de France, 1975-76, ed. Mauro Bertani and
Alessandro Fontana (New York: Picador, 2003), 62.
265Helen Meekosha, “Decolonising Disability: Thinking and Acting Globally,” Disability & Society 26, no. 6
(2011): 671.
104
power have resulted in vast numbers of impaired people in the global South. Much of this relates
to the global economy; it concerns control to resources.”
266
Although I suggest to expand the
model of a global North-South divide to account for the production of capital and surplus
populations on both sides of the divide and, moreover, to acknowledge the blurring of distinct
boundaries through the excessive movement of people and new forms of currency and work,
Meekosha’s intervention allows us to interrogate Peng’s migration as racialized surplus labor in
the global North. As Me llamo Peng shows, surplus bodies can be injured as long as they
continue to enable the free circulation of capital; in fact, they need to be left in constant crisis
and perhaps even stay chronically ill, so as to remain replaceable, pliable, and with little demand.
The less a racialized worker belongs to national ground the more easily this worker’s labor is
exploited.
Against this backdrop, I read the scene of Peng not feeling pain, at least no pain about
himself, as the effect of a complex of forces – geopolitical, economic, legal – that determine a
Chinese worker’s mattering; or what life feels like on a body rendered surplus. Me llamo Peng
not only highlights the systemic exploitation of a racialized Chinese working body in the West.
The film prompts viewers to contextualize Peng’s uneven emotional investment – in his body,
the leather shoes, the feeling of pain – within a form of governance that sustains a hierarchical
order. I term these investments “cruel” not so much because they feel explicitly painful but
because they numb a feeling of the present, spurring a subject only further into the relentless
rhythm of work and migration.
266Ibid., 668.
105
“BUT THERE’S NOTHING WRONG”
After Tarragona comes Catalonia. We follow Peng as he starts working on a pig farm and
eventually moves on to a construction site. On Christmas Eve – the year is 2004 – the protagonist
comes home from another long work day. It is past midnight when he switches the camera on,
and his monologue quickly turns to the recent death of a fellow migrant worker. Peng begins,
Today it’s Christmas. “Merry Christmas.” It’s been a day… I’ve been so busy. I’m
almost done. This finger will recover soon. Look! Let’s do a zoom! Does it look
good? Mr. Wu used to live here. Some people called him Chenjian. Other people
called him Sir Wu. It’s been a week or so since he died. He had something wrong
with his liver. I don’t know what exactly. No one wants to live in this room.
People think there’s something wrong with it. But there’s nothing wrong. I don’t
think it’s contagious. I’ll live here a couple of days and then I might go to Tortosa.
I’ll work anywhere people need me.
Once again, Peng shares with us another injury of his, albeit appearing much more upbeat than
before. “Look! Let’s do a zoom. Does it look good?” he asks excitedly, and holds out his finger
so that we see from up close its broken nail and the dark remainder of a bruise. The protagonist’s
face shows a broad smile. Whether because of the work he has accomplished (“I’m almost
done.”), his finger’s healing progress, or its usability as a fun film prop, the filmmaker appears in
a good mood. Yet his musings suddenly jump to Mr Wu. Wu, as we learn, occupied Peng’s place
of stay previous to the protagonist. “He had something wrong with his liver. I don’t know what
exactly. No one wants to live in this room. People think there’s something wrong with it.” For the
first time in the video, Peng has a bedroom to himself, but its vacancy is the result of someone
else’s death and the fear of other workers to inhabit a space of unresolved illness. Peng’s initial
excitement slowly fades as he speaks and makes place for a nervous frowning. Brief smiles
occasional run across his face, enhancing a feeling of restlessness. “There shouldn’t be any
danger of contagion, should there?” he asks, as if he needed someone – the camera? – to assure
that everything will be OK.
267
In the end, Peng fulfills this role himself. “I don’t think it’s
267Translated as “But there is nothing wrong.” by the English subtitles, the sentence actually designates a rhetorical
question.
106
contagious,” he decides. The show must go on. In his determination to “work anywhere people
need me,” Peng has to quickly get over the death of others and forget that he, too, might fail in
his pursuit of a “colorful” life. Indeed, moving on means to leave behind the possibility of death
and assert one’s difference from the pool of disposable laborers.
THE (CON)FUSION OF LIFE AND DEATH
In his discussion of necropolitics, Achille Mbembe emphasizes the folding of seemingly
exceptional violence into the structure of everyday life.
268
Revising Foucault’s concept of
biopower as a form of governance that prioritizes the fostering of life over the exertion of death,
Mbembe shifts the focus toward the act of killing. The author teases out how from the 18
th
century onward, human history has been entrenched in a politics of death, from slavery and
colonial occupation to contemporary warfare. He asks, “What place is given to life, death, and
the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order
of power?”
269
While the historical moment of Me llamo Peng differs from Mbembe’s examples, I draw
on the concept of necropolitics here to further unpack how death signifies – that is, how it is
assigned, exerted, and also reappropriated – in the context of contemporary labor migration and
the making of precarious lives. As the video suggests, death comes in multiple and oftentimes
overlapping forms, as social negativity and physical decease, demarcating an affective and
epistemic outside to that which deserves protection and care.
Although we get no further information about the cause of Wu’s death, whether he
268Achille Mbembe. “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003). However, Foucault does acknowledge the
simultaneous persistence of different forms of power. Comp. his “Lecture from January 11, 1978,” in Security,
Territory, Population. Lectures at the College de France 1977-78, ed. Michel Senellart (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007), 8.
269Ibid., 12.
107
received any medical treatment, or even knew about his state of being, Peng’s comments suggest
a case of Hepatitis and the neglect of proper care.
270
For one, Wu’s passing gestures to an act of
institutional killing, and one that manifests itself less tangibly than the violent realities Mbembe
unfolds – in the lack of health care and other existential rights, for instance. However, the death
of Mr Wu and Peng’s response to it also index a perverse form of self-management, in which a
population relegated to the realm of human surplus maintains its high level of productivity by
following and fueling itself through the unequal assignment of lives worthy and abandonable.
I contend Peng’s commitment to keep moving on and putting out actively partakes in the
making of precarious lives. I am not saying Peng desires how he lives, or wishes death upon his
fellow workers to assume their spots. To the contrary, the film scenes quoted above rather show
his ambivalent and sometimes resentful attitude toward his circumstances. My argument is less
about “choice” or “responsibility.” Rather, it concerns a way of being oriented toward legibility.
A self-orientation that engages those shared fantasies and feelings about meaningful life – in the
case of Peng, of being the exception to the norm, of owning some sort of agency in the world,
and of having a “sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the
world.”
271
And while I believe the investment into meaningfulness names an arguably universal
need, I term “cruel” those attachments to dominant value economies that constantly produce new
mechanisms of abandonment and survival by pitting fellow lives against each other and by
upholding the promise of a subject’s worth in the midst of surplus bodies.
272
Peng, for instance,
matters little as a low-paid foreign worker in Spain and, at the same time, retains his market
270Once again, the subtitles neglect the details. Peng actually uses the term “Hepatitis” rather than “He had
something wrong with his liver,” as it is translated in the video.
271Lauren Berlant, “Optimism and Its Objects,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 17, no. 3
(2006): 21. As Berlant puts it elsewhere, cruel optimism provides a sense of “coherence and potential” and, in so
doing, represents “the possibility of happiness as such.” [emphasis in the original] Berlant, “Lauren Berlant.”
272For an eye-opening account of the notion of abandonment see also Elizabeth Povinelli, Economies of
Abandonment. Social belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 2011).
108
value simply by being able to move, migrate, and work (still). Indeed, the deaths of those who
fall away like Wu automatically prod those who remain further up the human ladder. Yet what
really counts is less Peng’s life than the state of persevering as what Mbembe calls the “living
dead.”
273
For if the value of a life and the care it deserves depend on productivity and endurance
– of enduring productivity, so to speak – how can a surplus laborer like Peng, who is legally
confined to transience, to high-risk and low-paying occupations, and to frequent injuries and
chronic debility, ever assume the status of the valued human being? How can those who are
denied the right to personhood claim the right to health, indeed to life?
274
The distinction between life and death has become more than blurry in Me llamo Peng.
Here, moving up the human ladder also means to move deeper into a life of deadening
precariousness.
275
Unlike the figure of the suicide bomber Mbembe draws upon to suggest the
ultimate wedding of a subject’s end and freedom, however, those without any further market
value in Me llamo Peng disappear more quietly and rather uneventfully. There are no public
spectacles. There is an emptied dormitory room only and another body to follow suit. In fact,
Peng has never ceased to disappear from the moment we follow him on record.
273Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 40.
274The right to life and the right to health are both defined as basic human rights by the United Nations. The right to
life is claimed in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights from 1966. The right to health is part
of the Spanish Constitution whose Section 43 claims “(1) The right to health protection is recognized. (2) It is
incumbent upon the public authorities to organize and watch over public health by means of preventive measures
and the necessary benefits and services. The law shall establish the rights and duties of all in this respect. (3) The
public authorities shall foster health education, physical education and sports. Likewise, they shall encourage the
proper use of leisure time.”
http://www.congreso.es/portal/page/portal/Congreso/Congreso/Hist_Normas/Norm/const_espa_texto_ingles_0.p
df.
275Me llamo Peng thus gestures to a bio-necropolitics or, as Jasbir Puar has it, “the ever-shifting ‘foldings’ into and
out of life and death that are biopolitical population constructs, but also ontological assemblages of bodily
debility and capacity, coming and going, rising and receding.” Puar in “Precarity Talk,” 164.
109
THINGS THAT MATTER: RECORDING SUBJECTIVITY
So far, this chapter has elaborated how Me llamo Peng registers a contradictory mode of self-
maintenance, where a subject’s becoming takes place through the affirmation of dominant value
regimes. Within this context, I have employed the video as archival document and critical theory
to unpack the violence of inclusion, or how a subject is folded into a hierarchy of human beings.
In this section, I ask to what extent does the video, as cultural product and collaborative work,
itself enhance a form of visibility that positions Peng within such hierarchy? I suggest the
recording of Peng – and, conversely, Peng’s “obsessive” recording – can be understood to stress
the filmmaker’s subjectivity as that which distinguishes him from a disposable Chinese migrant
worker population.
276
The visibility of his subjecthood, that is, bestows him human value or, more
accurately, it promises his validation.
Guerra Roa and Molina de Carranza are committed to introducing the perspective of a
neglected subject into public consciousness. Indeed, they labor hard for this commitment.
First of all, it was a technological challenge that meant spending endless hours in
a campsite we made without tents or a bonfire, but with magnetos, wires, and
computers. We had to transfer Peng’s VHS-C videotapes into another digital
format that we could work with. After long days transferring footage in real time
(taking notes on everything), we had a complete overview of what our main
character had shot. At the same time, we analyzed and classified the footage,
trying to overcome the language barrier. […] After the translation works came
chaos: What did we want to show? […] Choosing scenes, editing, and finding a
suitable rhythm were our main challenges.
277
The directors’ endeavor to offer Peng the visibility he deserves requires a “suitable” narrative
worth public attention. Such narrative, in turn, depends on the presence of a relevant character.
Someone, in the women’s words, who “made sense.”
278
The protagonist’s “positive” and creative
276As the two directors put it on the film’s website, “Peng Ruan is a Chinese immigrant obsessed with filming
himself since his arrival to Europe.” Film Website, http://mellamopeng.blogspot.com/p/personaje.html.
277Filmmakers’ statement, Press Kit.
278Ibid.
110
subjectivity – brought into form by the directors’ reassembling of the footage – not only comes in
handy here but is key: It offers a recognizable narrative structure, and it also signifies a self-
owning individual. In this view, the protagonist’s filmic investment in the idea and expression of
his subjectivity – manifest in a total of 60 hours of recording – is hardly surprising. Indeed, I call
this film collaborative not only because it involves shared production work but because it reveals
the visual and affective labor of all three filmmakers in creating a recognized subjecthood.
279
After all, the “property” of subjectivity determines how we experience ourselves and encounter
other people, who is appreciated as human being and who not. My use of subjectivity is then less
a reference to a form of human authenticity than to a recognizable identity structure – a
subjecthood – that offers meaning and value, and that confers as well some sort of power. Peng’s
video recording is more than a hobby. It allows the filmmaker to inscribe himself as a living
subject into this world, a life that matters in the midst of precarity. The finished film is an even
stronger representation of a Chinese migrant worker’s worth.
NOTHING NEW, OR CAN THE CHINESE WORKING BODY BE CREATIVE, TOO?
In a scene following his newly acquired job as construction worker, Peng holds his left hand
close to the camera. His palm shows a huge, ugly blister. “Not bad, isn’t it,” Peng comments, his
tone somewhere between pride and irony. The filmmaker then begins to make some dramatizing
sounds simulating a suspense movie. The following shot features him sitting at a table with a pair
of pointed scissors in his hand. He adjusts the position of his left arm to find the best angle for its
capture and checks the camera screen once more before proceeding with his action. We do not
see the actual moment of Peng popping the blister – I assume the directors edited it out. Instead,
279In short, this chapter shows both the affective work the video does and a subject’s affective self-regulation in
relation to a dominant visual regime of subjecthood. That is, the form of governance discussed here is not a mere
external force that impinges upon subjects but – in sync with systems of active oppression – realized and
cultivated by the very subjects themselves.
111
Me llamo Peng picks up right after the moment. Here, we watch the protagonist quickly drying
his wound with a tissue before he turns toward the camera to wipe the lens clean of any fluid
splatters. As usual, Peng reveals no sign of physical discomfort; rather, he embodies the satisfied
amateur filmmaker who successfully staged a dramatic scenario.
I read the blister scene as the illustration of a dedicated creative. More could be said on
Peng’s repeated neglect of self-care or the prioritizing of the visuals over his bodily comfort. Yet
I also want to open up the video to a reading that acknowledges his intervention as a filmmaker
who is artistically invested in his recording. Peng builds up suspense, captures the climax, and
closes the scene with a literal “screen wipe.” Using his body as main character and his immediate
surroundings as set, Peng fabricates a film scene. Even though the shots are edited by others, he
created them in the first place.
I have argued before that Peng’s visibility as an “obsessive” documentarian, and
occasional poser, moves to the background the experience of suffering, of repetitive labor, and of
the structural violence against his body and mind. Here, I want to tease out how, at the same
time, such visibility allows viewers to engage the protagonist beyond the all too familiar image
of the precarious Chinese migrant worker. For one, Peng’s (self-)representation as creative
subject disputes the assumption that creativity as an act of imagining and making something new
is reserved for a precious few – that it “belongs only to artists or to transcendent forms of
experience.”
280
Me llamo Peng identifies the protagonist as someone who owns his ideas, who
“make[s] things,”
281
and who knows how to tweak the system to carve out meaningful moments
for himself. The video is, to speak with Hannah Arendt, a product of Peng’s work.
In The Human Condition, Arendt differentiates between labor as a process of repetition
280Quotes from Cvetkovich, Depression.
281Ibid.
112
necessary for a subject’s survival, and work as the introduction of something new and lasting into
the world that distinguishes human beings from other living species. She summarizes, “Labor is
the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous
growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into
the life process by labor.”
282
By contrast, “Work is the activity which corresponds to the
unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not
compensated by ‘the species’ ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an ‘artificial’ world of
things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings.”
283
In so doing, it also leaves behind the
norms of economic exploitation allowing subjects instead to “retrieve their sameness, that is,
their identity” as human beings.
284
Clearly, Peng’s self-recordings enact an antipode to the self-alienating labor he performs
on a daily basis. They allow for his repositioning in the world; indeed, to activate that unique
human potential that Arendt sees in creating social worlds. While Arendt’s writing is informed by
the desire for a political society defined by civic engagement, and need not least be understood
as a direct response to the atrocities of the German Nazi regime, I draw on her definition of labor
and work in more detail here to think through the different levels of value production and human
hierarchies that I see at stake in Me llamo Peng.
285
The video signifies Peng’s human agency. But
more than that, Peng’s visibility as worldmaker also discomfits a persistent conception of the
Chinese working body as “radical opposite” to the valued cultural and civic producer – that is, to
Western individuality and civilization.
286
282Hannah Arendt. The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 7.
283Ibid.
284Ibid., 137.
285For Arendt, “action” is the third and most significant activity, after labor and work, in building a new political
society. See Arendt, The Human Condition, 8ff. and 175-247. Due to the limits of this chapter, I will focus on the
relation between work and labor alone.
286Winnie Wong, Van Gogh On Demand: China and the Readymade (University of Chicago Press, 2014), 45. Wong
113
In their introduction to “China and the Human,” David Eng, Teemu Ruskola, and Shuang
Shen further elaborate on the pervasiveness of this historical antagonizing. Specifically, the
authors outline how China has historically figured as the constitutive outside of a European
humanism. “In the project of universalizing European liberal humanism – whether in the form of
political rights and citizenship, capitalism and the free market, or individual reason and
subjectivity – China constitutes one important limit.”
287
I would add to Eng et al.’s critique that
the idea of “China” as geopolitical and epistemological “other” matches a one-sided perception
of the Chinese population as voiceless mass and automated labor force (labor here very much in
Arendt’s sense). The Chinese, that is, are primarily understood as workers who do not own a
subjecthood. Such conception continues into the present with what Winnie Wong calls “the
conceptual legacies of the Chinese copyist and the Western originalist” that are particularly felt
in recurring criticisms on China’s pirate industries.
288
The underlying message here often being
that whereas the West creates, China only knows how to follow and repeat.
289
In his inspiring
revises how discourses on creativity and individuality have historically centered on Western subjects and
foreclosed Chinese subjects from the claim of original creation. As she calls it, “the historical legacies of the
Chinese copyist and the Western originalist.” (43)
287David L. Eng, Teemu Ruskola and Shuang Shen, “Introduction. China and the Human,” Social Text 29, no. 4
(2011): 4.
288Wong, Van Gogh On Demand, 43. Within this context, I encourage readers to further explore the extent to which
academic discourses on creative industries might inadvertently engage similar racializing and classing
paradigms. Most of this research seems to locate creative labor, or the work of creativity, within urban white
European or North American communities. A small but growing body of scholarship looks at the recent rise of
creative industries in China; yet within this context, only a handful of authors have to my knowledge urged to
reformulate common understandings of creativity and its narrow assumptions of who and what gets to be labeled
as creative practice. Among them Laikwan Pang, Creativity And Its Discontents: China’ s Creative Industries and
Intellectual Rights Offenses (Durham, London: Duke University Press: 2012); Jack Qiu, Working-Class Network
Society: Communication Technology and the Information Have-Less in Urban China (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2009). For an inspiring critique of the concept of authorship and intellectual property rights as they relate
to notions of creativity within a geopolitical power hierarchy see Lawrence Liang, Atrayee Mazmdar, and Mayur
Suresh, “Copyright/Copyleft: Myths About Copyright,” Countercurrents, February 1, 2005,
http://www.countercurrents.org/hr-suresh010205.htm; and Kavita Philip. “What is a Technological Author? The
Pirate Function and Intellectual Property,” Postcolonial Studies 8, no. 2 (2005).
289It is also worth noting that so much academic research on work and the Chinese population focuses on factory
work. What does this say about not only the need to respond to actual social and economic phenomena but a
particular perception of Chinese as human beings, or not? A further aspect that needs exploration beyond this
chapter is the position of the video as the work of a Chinese filmmaker who is neither a professional filmmaker
nor part of the independent film movement that arose at the beginning of the new century and consists to a large
114
book Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, Mel Chen pushes this
observation further, demonstrating how products made in Chinese factories and imported to the
United States carry with them the stigma of literal and political toxicity. In particular, Chen
investigates U.S. debates around the circulation of toxic goods from China and translates how
these debates determine whose life embodies human value. Similar to Eng et al. the author
concludes that in the U.S. social imaginary China functions as the “paradigmatic site of the
inhuman, the subhuman, and the humanly unthinkable.”
290
In sum, the notion of the human has
from its onset been invested in uneven divisions and hierarchies of life.
Me llamo Peng undermines and, in fact, brings to the surface such racialized, and classed,
geopolitical mappings of humanness. As I have argued, the video claims Peng’s humanity by
featuring his subjectivity. Yet in so doing, the film summons as well the larger question of what
is needed to define someone as human, and perhaps even why we need the measure of humanity
to define a life as worthy to begin with. What, and who, is lost when we address the video as a
valuable site of human self- and worldmaking? Because the subject of humanity is first and
foremost, as Ilana Feldman and Miriam Ticktin remind us, “a specific sort of person – one who
possesses bodily integrity, expresses him- or herself freely, and chooses his or her own
beliefs.”
291
It is also, as I have argued throughout, the product of what Judith Butler calls a
“brutal humanism that cleaves [...] raced and sexed humans from other humans.”
292
To what
part of amateur filmmakers. As well, Me llamo Peng does not fit into typical diasporic narratives of immigration
and family histories. In this view, the documentary represents a minoritarian film genre, too.
290Mel Y . Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2012), 5.
291Ilana Feldman and Miriam Ticktin, “Introduction. Government and Humanity,” in In the Name of Humanity. The
Government of Threat and Care, ed. Ilana Feldman and Miriam Ticktin (Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 2010), 9.
292Judith Butler in Puar et al. “Precarity Talk,” 171. Butler further identifies this “brutal humanism” as “a form of
speciesism that […] also complicates any human/nonhuman animal divide and puts under duress our contingent
relations to other animals, plant life, and ecologies of matter and material.” She then continues to ask, “can we
think of precarity “beyond” the human? What would an interspecies politics or vision of precarity entail?” Ibid.
115
extent, then, might – or has – Arendt’s notion of work become folded into a liberal humanism
that eclipses its merry wedding to discriminating mechanisms of regulation: of prioritizing
certain forms of subjecthood over others, and relegating those without legible subjectivity, those
who “merely” labor, to the realm of social, political, and as we have seen physical, death?
Drawing upon my earlier argument about subjectivity as the gauge of economic, social,
and also artistic capital and, moreover, the very stuff of self-discipline, I contend Arendt’s
insistence on the necessity to build a newly shared world ultimately falls danger to reiterate the
very hierarchy of human beings she set out to undo. I do not mean to discredit her quest for a just
political community, in particular her imagining of a community that continuously works (on)
itself through participation, visibility, and exchange. I am more concerned about the limited
understanding of political subjectivity and the idealist assumption of universal access in such
envisioning of community.
293
That is, with the neglect of racial capitalism, the ethnicization of
labor (Chow), the colonial and neocolonial distribution of “social suffering” (Meekosha), and the
legal exertion of social death (Cacho) that a claim of shared humanity and the demand of its
realization might overlook.
Subsequently, Arendt’s embrace of “the new” suggests the possibility of a “clean” break
with history, and conveniently coincides capitalism’s demands of creativity, flexibility,
innovation, and personal investment as outlined earlier in this chapter. “The new,” Arendt writes,
“always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which
for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the
293Jayson Toynbee, for instance, criticizes Arendt’s equation of work with “autonomy and independence,” one that
lends itself to a very narrow ideal of political subjectivity and thus community. Toynbee writes, “As she puts it,
homo faber (the one who works) is ‘master of himself and his doings … Alone with his image of the future
product, homo faber is free to produce, and again facing alone the work of his hands, he is free to destroy’.”
Jason Toynbee, “How Special? Cultural Work, Copyright, Politics,” Theorizing Cultural Work: Labour,
Continuity and Change in the Cultural and Creative Industries, ed. Mark Banks, Rosalind Gill, Stephanie Taylor
(London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 89. In his essay, Toynbee is, however, more concerned about Arendt’s
hierarchization of different kinds of work – the “good” kind signifying self-realization, the “bad” constraint and
dependency – than the underlying notion of the human subject that I am discussing here.
116
guise of a miracle. The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be
expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable.”
294
This initiation of
the new – or as Arendt puts it, “natality, and not mortality” – defines the political subject, defines
the good society, defines humanity per se, by orienting itself away from normative orders.
295
But
I contend “the new” also gives itself over to an immediate translation into necropolitical regimes
(who can and should stay alive, what “being alive” itself means, etc.), surplus value, and a
privileging of human subjectivity that blends inseparably with humanist ideology.
296
It would be too easy, however, to conclude by writing off Me llamo Peng as the
mouthpiece of systems of dominance and control. Rather, the video simultaneously documents
and partakes in the messy interweaving of oppositional forces and seemingly irreconcilable
desires undergirding the governance of minoritized life today. This governance engages forms of
power that are enabling and encourage collaboration while they cannot be detached from the
cruel optimism that perpetually transcribes a chronically injured body into the “healthy” matter
of recognized subjecthood. As this chapter has shown, subjectivity in Me llamo Peng is a site of
busy transaction between dominant value regimes and a subject’s self-investment. On the one
hand, the protagonist’s visibility is deeply tied to racial, national, and economic hierarchies as
294Arendt, The Human Condition, 178.
295Ibid., 9, my emphasis. Arendt’s notion of natality and its figuration through the new born child – “A child has
been born to us.” (247) – is particularly vexing when read through critiques of heteronormativity such as Lee
Edelman’s No Future.
296In “Queer Value,” Meg Wesling offers a compelling reading of Arendt’s work, in which she reframes the
meaning of the “new,” not as a turning away from but a deliberate turning toward and re-signifying of dominant
value regimes. Specifically, Wesling claims drag performance as an activity that provides subjects otherwise
deemed “failed” the possibility of self-articulation through normative identity scripts. Drawing on Butler’s work
on gender as a continuous reiteration of identity norms and Arendt’s idea of labor as a repetitive act of self-
maintenance, Wesling argues drag does a different kind of work. She elaborates, “drag appears […] as a new
kind of work, one that refuses the alienation of labor by claiming self-referentiality through the commodity, by
investigating in and articulating the body as the site of that self-actualizing labor” (120). Similar to Arendt,
Wesling keeps separate notions of labor and work and sees the ultimate value in a new community. For her, drag
represents “socially valuable work” (119) in that it offers outcast subjects a way to relate and redefine their
worthiness collectively. Also similar to Arendt, the author identifies civic and political participation as a
deliberate act that involves “the conscious and psychic registers of social awareness and political consciousness”
(114). Meg Wesling, “Queer Value,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18, no. 1 (2012).
117
well as to the norm of personhood, a socially recognizable and state-sanctioned form of being
that defines the human value of a life. At the same time, Peng’s own attachment to and laboring
for a subjecthood – being a creative agent in the world, being fully human – speak of his deep
commitment to his life. What do we do with this commitment and a subject’s strategies of
survival and pleasure, that cannot but become the same tools for maintaining precarity?
SELF-CARE, TO BE CONTINUED
To care for oneself: how to live for, to be for, one’s body when you are under attack.
297
In “Selfcare as Warfare,” Sara Ahmed grapples with a similar question. Drawing on Audre
Lorde’s by now well-known phrase from her cancer diaries, “Caring for myself is not self-
indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare,” Ahmed argues that for
minoritized subjects self-care signifies a political gesture.
298
It is political in that it counteracts a
dominant distribution of lives and introduces, or rather upholds, what was never meant to last.
Ahmed writes, “When you are not supposed to live, as you are, where you are, with whom you
are with, then survival is a radical action; a refusal not to exist until the very end; a refusal not to
exist until you do not exist.” Yet the author also points to the uncanny mingling of self-care and
an uneven assignment of labor, acknowledging how quickly “self-care can become a technique
of governance: the duty to care for one’s self.” Furthermore, Ahmed maintains, the responsibility
to achieve a state of happiness by yourself not only insulates. As Chapters 1 and 2 have similarly
shown, it also distracts from the task to reach out to others and fight social injustice. For Ahmed,
the building of minoritarian coalitions is key to oppose and subsist within systems of oppression.
These coalitions do not mean neatly defined groups and political agendas. Rather, they designate
297Sara Ahmed, “Selfcare as Warfare,” feministkilljoys, August 25, 2014,
http://feministkilljoys.com/2014/08/25/selfcare-as-warfare.
298See Audre Lorde, “A Burst of Light. Living With Cancer,” in A Burst of Light. Essays By Audre Lorde (Ithaca:
Firebrand Books, 1988), 131.
118
the subtle act of reorienting energy away from care’s “proper objects” and toward minoritized
experience: “self-care is about the creation of community, fragile communities, assembled out of
the experiences of being shattered.”
299
I find Ahmed’s description of self-care as a political act that is not immune to the
disciplinary mechanisms of neoliberalism refreshing as it attends to the conjuncture of
heterogeneous political desires, hierarchical relations, and uneven exchanges; as such, it expands
as well a reading of Me llamo Peng. While Ahmed, like Arendt and Lorde, engages the idea of a
consciously acting subject, one who actively builds and invests in an alternative social world, her
stance simultaneously allows for a recognition of ways of being that lack, or strive away from, a
circumscribed political identity.
300
What if a subject has no capacity or no interest to care for
others? Where precisely do we draw the boundary between self-care as political action and
“benefiting from a system by adapting to it?” In the video, Peng shows no commitment to
making the world a “better place.”
I appreciate Ahmed’s cautioning against hasty judgment that those seemingly invested in
their own survival alone are not doing enough, or are not doing good enough, to advance the
cause of social justice. Because oftentimes the act of political action, a deliberate disidentifying
with a dominant regime, and supporting others requires sufficient resources – material, social,
affective – that simply are not there.
301
Indeed, the labor for social visibility, including being
recognizable as a political subject of minoritarian activism, comes at a much higher cost for
299As Ahmed writes elsewhere, “a refusal to aspire to be whole.” “Fragility,” feministkilljoys, June 14, 2014,
http://feministkilljoys.com/2014/06/14/fragility.
300I think one of Arendt’s strength is that she, too, refuses to engage the norm of a homogenous, coherent society
and rather emphasizes the necessity of a sociality in continuous progress. At the same time, her proposal of the
kinds of subjects and activities that enable such sociality seems, to me, limiting in the ways I have outlined
above.
301In Ahmed’s words, “Sometimes, ‘coping with’ or ‘getting by’ or ‘making do’ might appear as a way of not
attending to structural inequalities, as benefiting from a system by adapting to it, even if you are not privileged
by that system, even if you are damaged by that system. Perhaps we need to ask: who has enough resources not
to have to become resourceful?” “Selfcare.”
119
those who inhabit a space of legal and socioeconomic marginality.
While my own analysis of Me llamo Peng has emphasized the labor of affective self-
disciplining and, in so doing, perhaps also implicitly asked for a particular gesture of resistance, I
want to conclude this chapter in dialog with Ahmed by proposing to broaden an understanding of
Peng’s investment in ruling value economies. Drawing on Ahmed’s concept of self-care as a
shared activity of reorienting labor – the labor to survive and acquire meaningfulness – I ask to
remember that Peng’s cruel optimism describes not only an act of affirmation. Being the
paradoxical act of self-validation that it is, cruel optimism is also and always an investment away
from dominant regimes of power and their “proper objects.” And while I am hesitant to frame the
film as an alternative repository that assembles those numerous experiences of precarization that
escape the naked eye – an archive of the dead, so to speak – I propose Me llamo Peng elicits in
and demands from us viewers a continuous attention, call it investment, reorientation, labor, or
work, toward that which never made it to the screen.
120
CHAPTER FOUR
A Labor Of Love: Sentimental Activism and Figures of Liberation in Lesbian Factory
Lesbian Factory opens with a scene of protest. The first take shows a large group of women
gathering behind a horizontal sign that reads, “Fastfame Company Abused Migrants. No Salary.
No Food. No Jobs. Please Help!!!” As the film informs us, these women are Filipina migrant
workers currently located in Taiwan who dispute a local company’s misconduct. Yet the workers
appear surprisingly cheerful and excited. They giggle and laugh, talk loudly to each other, and
rush behind the sign so that the camerawoman can take a group picture. In addition, viewers
follow the women’s acts of tender care, including embracing, feeding, and teasing each other,
throughout the public intervention. Overall, the situation seems more like a high school reunion
than a protest, although the following shots provide more insight into the women’s precarious
situation. We learn about the closing of Fastfame Technology Company, known for
manufacturing and supplying computer parts, and its dismissal of 120 unpaid Filipina workers.
Like many other local businesses, Fastfame decided to relocate its factory to mainland China and
save money on its production process – without paying out its foreign workers in Taiwan. The
protest is the women’s attempt to pressure the Council of Labor Affairs (CLA), upgraded in 2014
to the Ministry of Labor Affairs, to intervene into the situation and help them receive their
withheld salaries. Recounting how, in view of the government’s non-interventionist politics, the
migrant workers turned towards the Taiwan International Workers’ Association (TIWA) for
support, Lesbian Factory voices the women’s major concerns: “Will workers be repatriated?
How will they survive without food allowance? How can they get back their salary arrears? Can
migrant workers get severance payment?” These questions appear written out on screen and
introduce a shift from the formerly upbeat tone of the protest toward the somber outlook of the
121
protestors’ fate. In fact, the film continuously alternates between cheerfulness and gravity, the
protagonist’s activist organizing and their intimate relationships, reflecting not so much two
separate life realities but the dense and often incoherent affective texture of the women’s daily
experience. As the female voice-over reviews the documentary’s making, “At first we just
wanted to record the struggles of the migrant workers, but as we were filming, many sweet
lesbian couples appeared in the film. So this documentary accidentally developed into a love
story.”
The current chapter zooms in on Lesbian Factory’s interweaving representations of political
grievance and female same-sex love to disentangle the “emotional mess” of social justice
narratives.
302
In particular, I pay attention to the film’s engagement of a sentimental narrative that
joins the two threads of love and protest to advocate for social betterment. While sentimentality is
commonly seen as an excessive and rather manipulative expression of emotions, this chapter argues
that a study of sentimentality and its various and sometimes unexpected articulations is key to
302I engage the notion “same-sex” and later on “queer” over “lesbian” here to attend to the delicate and convoluted
dynamics of the depicted relationships rather than subsuming them under a category that is rooted in a particular
Western history and politics of sexuality. While the English film title employs the term “lesbian,” this is a translation
from the Taiwanese “T-Po,” which literally means “tomboy-wife,” an identity emerging in the 1960s and becoming
solidified after the end of Martial Law in 1987. “T-Po” designates a dynamic comparable to that of butch and femme.
Yet critics of the term have pointed out its severe limitations in attending to the heterogeneous gender and sexual self-
positions of women-loving women. For an insightful overview of the history of the term, not least in its conflicted
relation to “lesbian,” see Antonia Chao, “Global Metaphors and Local Strategies in the Construction of Taiwan’s
Lesbian Identities,” Culture, Health & Sexuality: An International Journal for Research, Intervention and Care
2, no. 4 (2000); Fran Martin. Backward Glances. Contemporary Chines Cultures and the Female Homoerotic
Imaginary (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010); Tze-Lan D. Sang, The Emerging Lesbian:
Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003). On the limitations of the
term lesbian in Southeast Asia see Evelyn Blackwood, “Transnational Sexualities in One Place: Indonesian
Readings,” Women’ s Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia, ed. Saskia E. Wieringa, Evelyn
Blackwood, and Abha Bhaiya (New York, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Tom Boellstorff, The Gay
Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Admittedly, the term “same-sex” comes with its own difficulties, as does the notion of “woman.” Rather than
gesturing to a homogenous gender and sexual identity, however, this chapter concurs with the authors cited here
as well as with the more recent call in migration scholarship to broaden the scope for understanding migrant
workers nonnormative intimate performances. See Arnaldo Cruz-Malave and Martin F. Manalansen IV, eds.,
Queer Globalization, Local Homosexualities: Citizenship, Sexualities and the Afterlife of Colonialism (New
York: New York University Press, 2002); Yau Ching, ed., As Normal As Possible (Hong Kong: Hong Kong
University Press, 2010); Dai Kojima, “Migrant Intimacies: Mobilities-in-Difference and Basue Tactics in Queer
Asian Diasporas,” Anthropologica 56, no. 1. Further resources can be found on the Queer Migration Research
Network website http://queermigration.com/resources.
122
understanding the role – and power – of emotions in political discourses, specifically in liberal
discourses of rights and freedom.
303
Rather than aligning sentimentality with progressive or
conservative ideologies per se, however, my reading approaches the sentimental as an ongoing
negotiation of normative subject positions, shared fantasies of the good life, and political critique.
304
Not unlike Linda Williams’ take on melodrama as a way of knowing that gauges “moral and
irrational truths through a dialectic of pathos and action,”
305
I employ the sentimental as an entrance
into the invisible and often conflicting moral economies that undergird social justice discourses.
306
Within this context, I pay particular attention to what I call sentimental activism – the particular role
of pain, protest, and love in arranging minoritarian worlds and political practices into social
visibility.
307
I explicate how the film’s engagement of images of suffering, romance, and resistance
303See Jennifer A. Williamson, “Introduction: American Sentimentalism from the Nineteenth Century to the Present,”
From The Sentimental Mode. Essays in Literature, Film and Television, ed. Jennifer A. Williamson, Jennifer Larson
and Ashley Reed (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), 4. For a further discussion of the importance of analyzing
sentimentality in relation to politics see Berlant, The Female Complaint and her edited volume Compassion. The
Politics of an Emotion (New York, London: Routledge, 2004). Heather Love, Feeling Backward. Loss and the Politics
of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Rebecca Wanzo, The Suffering Will Not Be
Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009).
Elizabeth R. Anker, Orgies Of Feeling. Melodrama And The Politics of Freedom (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2014).
304See also Anker on “left melodrama” (29) in her Orgies of Feeling and Wanzo’s “Introduction” in The Suffering
Will Not Be Televised.
305According to Williams, “melodrama is a peculiarly democratic and American form that seeks dramatic revelation of
moral and irrational truths through a dialectic of pathos and action.” Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised,”
Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1998), 44.
306I use “moral economies” here with Aihwa Ong as a set of values that translates into concrete social formations
such as the family, ethnic community, or the nation-state: “Conceptually, ‘moral economy’ is a web of unequal
relationships of exchange based on morality of reciprocity, mutual obligation, and protection. In anthropological
terms, moral economies involve substantive relationships of exchange that are governed by morality (whether
peasant, religious, or ‘cultural) or by ethics governing a particular vision of the good life.” Aihwa Ong, “A
Biocartography: Maids, Neoslavery, and NGOs,” Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and
Sovereignty (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 199.
307In this chapter, I deploy the notion of politics in a rather general way and designate with activism a form of
politics beyond major institutions. I find Chávez’ definition very helpful: “I use the word ‘politics’ here to refer
generally to those often agonstic, and sometimes antagonistic, practices of and relationships between people in a
given society that are designed to impact public opinion and state affairs and enact social change. Activism is a
particular form of politics that is explicitly designed to effect social change with a specific agenda, usually
enacted outside traditional, deliberative modes of decision-making conducted with established institutions.”
Chávez. Queer Migration Politics, 156n47.
123
tackle the tumultuous convergence of transnational labor migration, the minimization of state care,
and the emergence of new social worlds. Moreover, I investigate the ways in which these images
enable, expand, and also curtail a human rights discourse and inform the ways we view – and
perform – political acts. The ensuing discussion begins with sentimentality as an object of study,
examining how familiar feelings and images interlock with a rights discourse, and then moves
toward sentimental activism as a method to carve out forms of agency that might not be grasped by
analyses of liberation alone.
ANOTHER SENTIMENTAL STORY?
Shot between 2004 and 2009 by former journalist and then TIW A president Susan Chen, Lesbian
Factory follows the volatile journey of 7 Filipina couples during their workstay in Taipei – some of
them established, others newly formed and first-time same-sex relationships. Lesbian Factory was
produced by Taiwan Public Television Service’s (PTS) Viewpoint – a major Taiwanese documentary
program known for promoting “the rights and interests of disadvantaged groups.”
308
In fact, PTS’
political agenda is closely aligned with TIW A’s mission “[t]o facilitate the communication between
migrant workers and local community, to improve migrant workers’ labor conditions and social
status, and to advocate all laborers’ rights and welfare.”
309
TIW A provides legal counseling, language
classes, and recreational activities to encourage networking between and support the self-
308Viewpoint identifies itself as ““[t]he first and only documentary program in Taiwan.” http://eng.pts.org.tw/
programs.php?cat=3&u=aWQ9Mzk=. Article 11 of the Public Television Act in Taiwan registers, “Public
television belongs to the entire body of citizens. It shall operate independently without interference, and shall
observe the following principles: 1. Furnish complete information, fairly serve the public, and not serve profit-
making objectives 2. Provide the public proper access to PTS, and especially protect the rights and interests of
disadvantaged groups 3. Offer or sponsor the production and presentation of various folk arts, literature, and arts,
in order to promote balanced cultural development 4. Introduce new information and concepts 5. Produce and
broadcast programs that safeguard human dignity; meet the fundamental constitutional spirit of freedom,
democracy, and rule of law; and maintain diversity, objectivity, fairness, and balance of different ethnic groups.”
Taiwanese Ministry of Culture. “Public Television Act.” Laws & Regulations Database of The Republic of
China, December 30, 2009, http://law.moj.gov.tw/Eng/LawClass/ LawAll.aspx?PCode=P0050025 (my
emphasis).
309Mission statement on TIWA’s website, http://tiwa.org.tw.
124
organization of migrant workers.
310
Documentary filmmaking constitutes a further aspect of their
activist work. In 2006, the NGO produced Hospital Wing 8 East, which captures the daily struggles
of a Filipina migrant caregiver in Taiwan. Supervised by Susan Chen and financed by the National
Culture and Arts Foundation, Hospital Wing 8 East is one of only a handful of local features about
the lives of foreign workers on the island. As cultural critics Tsung-yi Michelle Huang and Chi-she
Li point out, these representations share a sentimental narrative to win over a public audience for the
cause of migrant workers.
311
However, the authors see the films’ common emphasis on suffering and
self-sacrificial protagonists to promote an ideal of docile working subjects – and, I would add, to
educate a rather passive viewership – that is very much in line with state and corporate interests.
312
What remains untouched in these productions, Huang and Li maintain, are the larger mechanisms of
exploitation in the global care industry. Berlant holds a similarly critical stance on sentimental
narratives, stating that their common engagement of pain as an individualized yet universally
relatable feeling occludes the systemic production of social suffering. “When sentimentality meets
politics, it uses personal stories to tell of structural effects, but in so doing it risks thwarting its very
attempt to perform rhetorically a scene of pain that must be soothed politically. Because the ideology
of true feeling cannot admit the nonuniversality of pain, its cases become all jumbled together and
the ethical imperative toward social transformation is replaced by a civic-minded but passive ideal of
310Pina Wu, “How outsiders find home in the city: ChungShan in Taipei,” in Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla
Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities (Abingdon, New York: Routledge, 2010), 141.
311Asia Monitor Resource Center, “Hospital Wing 8 East (Video),” Asia Monitor Resource Centre, November 26,
2009, http://old.amrc.org.hk/alu_special/review/hospital_wing_8_east_video. “Between 2003 and 2008,
according to the Documentary Media Worker Union in Taiwan, three documentaries and four fictional films and
docudramas on foreign migrant workers were produced.” Tsung-yi Michelle Huang and Chi-she Li, “Like A
Family, But Not Quite. Emotional Labor And Cinematic Politics Of Intimacy,” The Global and the Intimate.
Feminism in Our Times, ed. Geraldine Pratt, Victoria Rosner (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010),
227n2.
312Ibid., 216. As Williamson elaborates with reference to Jane Tompkins, sentimental narratives educate citizen-
subject through feelings such as sympathy and compassion: “engaging reader sympathy allows the text to
generate compassion for its subjects and subject matter, so that sentimental scenes and characters promote
emotional and moral education for the reader. Sentimental novels, then, attempt to teach readers to ‘think and act
in a particular way.’” Williamson, “Introduction,” 6. See also Berlant, “The Subject of True Feeling.”
125
empathy.”
313
Commonly viewed as a rather “mawkish, nostalgic, and simpleminded”
314
feeling that is
“characterized by apparent emotional excess, in the form of exaggerated grief or dejection or a
propensity toward shedding tears,”
315
sentimentality appears thus rather detrimental to a critical
understanding of the systemic dimensions of precarity and even as a hindrance to social change.
This chapter draws upon and expands such critiques of sentimentality. While Berlant and
others have powerfully described the depoliticizing force of sentimental affect,
I argue sentimentality
has more to offer than that. For me, the sentimental functions as a point of cohesion that brings
together what has been systemically kept apart. It holds the power to conjoin institutional narratives
with subjectivities that go against the status quo, and it mobilizes established social worlds through
unexpected feelings. For instance, Lesbian Factory seems to increasingly prioritize the protagonists’
emotional life over institutional change. At stake are not only the women’s salaries and work permits;
without the possibility to choose their own employer, the loving couples depend on the unpredictable
recruitment policies of local companies and have to face their likely separation, too.
316
Yet the focus
on the women’s intimate experience – the bliss of being together, the fear of separation, and the pain
of saying goodbye – does not distract from the film’s activist agenda. Instead, it shows how the
protagonists’ seemingly mundane feelings directly correlate with legal and economic matters. In fact,
I argue the film offers three major interventions by linking a sentimental narrative to migrant labor
politics and the “unruly” intimacy of Asian diasporic subjects. First, it proposes concrete legal
313Lauren Berlant, “Poor Eliza,” in No More Separate Spheres. A Next Wave American Studies Reader, ed. Cathy N.
Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher (Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2002), 297.
314Lauren Berlant and Earl McCabe, “Depressive Realism. An Interview with Lauren Berlant,” Hypocrite Reader
5, 2011, http://hypocritereader.com/5/depressive-realism.
315Chow, Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility.
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 15. Elizabeth R. Anker’s definition of melodrama seems equally
helpful for understanding sentimentality here. She describes it as “a genre form that portrays dramatic events
through moral polarities of good and evil, overwhelmed victims, heightened affects of pain and suffering, grand
gestures, astonishing feasts of heroism, and the redemption of virtue.” Orgies Of Feeling, 2.
316That is, the documentary clearly engages typical sentimental themes, including “economic deprivation and social
powerlessness” and “togetherness and separation.” Chow, Sentimental Fabulations, 20.
126
amendments, including the right of migrant workers to choose their employer. Second, it mobilizes
images of Southeast Asian migrants as caring and charming human beings rather than the commonly
perceived threat to locals’ job security and resources. Third, Chen ties the circulation of these
alternative images to the cause of same-sex equality.
317
It is from this perspective that I wish to add to a critical debate on sentimentality an account
of the multidirectional engagements of seemingly familiar feelings.
318
After all, as Sara Ahmed has so
competently shown, feelings are not only known to bind and move others, but are themselves
constantly reworked and redirected.
319
Rather than cornering the sentimental into one meaning, then,
my discussion follows the multiple investments – social, intimate, economic, political – Lesbian
Factory’s sentimental story holds, and what these investments tell us about the need to rectify
common perceptions of domination and subjective agency. Furthermore, in linking a study of affect
to a liberal rights discourse, my discussion reconsiders the rhetoric of “liberation” under
contemporary global governance, specifically as it pertains to Taiwan’s aim for sovereignty. Here, I
interrogate to what extent the film’s insistence on freedom and equality for migrant women workers
echoes the buzzwords of a nationalist narrative of independence by the Taiwanese state. Not least
inspired by Inderpal Grewal’s critique of a global rights discourse as both the distinct result of U.S
imperialism and an open-ended source for “many kinds of agency and diverse subjects,” the ensuing
discussion elucidates how the documentary simultaneously makes tangible, opposes, and engenders
317For further commentary on discriminating views and policies regarding migrants and Southeast Asian migrant
workers in particular see Hsiao-Chuan Hsia, “Foreign Brides, Multiple Citizenship and the Immigrant Movement
in Taiwan,” Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 18, no. 1 (2009); Yen-Fen Tseng and Yukiko Komiya,
“Classism in Immigration Control and Migrant Immigration,” Politics of Difference in Taiwan, ed. T.W. Ngo,
Hong-zen Wang (Abingdon, New York: Routledge, 2011).
318As Williamson likewise cautions, “the denigration that has occurred in the twentieth century by critics who
dismiss sentimental texts for their emotionality, femininity, and ‘bad writing,’” not only overlooks the political
potential of sentimental narratives; by dismissing the sentimental as an outdated mode of engagement, such
denigration neglects as well the continuing prevalence – and power – of sentimental narratives in the cultural,
social, and political realm. Williamson, “Introduction,” 4.
319See Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion and Queer Phenomenology.
127
the compulsory visibility of liberated minorities for the claim of independence.
320
SCENES OF LOVE
After setting up the initial context of the women’s labor dispute, the filmmaker introduces the
protagonists through couple interviews. How did the women’s relationships begin? How did they
know the other liked them back? How did they court each other? How do they make love in a
dormitory full of people? Documenting the women’s answers and reactions to these questions,
Lesbian Factory offers us a repertoire of mesmerizing love stories; full of sympathy for the
women-loving women, we are instantly hooked.
321
“If somebody likes you, you will recognize it easily. It’s different from friends,” says
Bing, a butch-looking Filipina worker, as she describes the beginning of her relationship with
fellow worker Yam. Asked how she knew that Yam was more than a friend, Bing responds,
“Because she made me like that,” and mimics an affectionate embrace. The gesture is followed
by loud laughter not only from the two interviewees but from the other women who are present
in the room, though outside the frame. A similarly cheerful and supportive atmosphere reigns
with Lan and Pilar before the camera. Lan, a leading figure in the women’s organizing along
with Bing and Yam, explains how she wanted her mother to retire from working abroad in
Kuwait and went to Taiwan to take over the role of the breadwinner. After one year, her partner
320Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America. Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Durham, London: Duke University
Press, 2005), 2.
321In her historical discussion of compassion in Western culture, Marjorie Garber differentiates between sympathy
and compassion, arguing the former implies an equal footing between two parties, whereas the latter designates a
hierarchical relation.“Where compassion quickly tipped in the direction of inequality, charity, or patronage (the
nonsufferer showing compassion to the sufferer), sympathy remained historically a condition of equality or
affinity, whether between the body and the soul, between two bodily organs, or, increasingly, between persons
with similar feelings, inclinations, and temperaments. Sympathy’ s roots are Greek and Latin: it literally translates
as ‘having a fellow feeling,’ from sym plus pathos, ‘suffering together.’” (23) Marjorie Garber, “Compassion,” in
Compassion. The Culture and Politics of an Emotion, ed. Lauren Berlant (New York, London: Routledge, 2004).
In the context of viewing Lesbian Factory – and perhaps film reception more broadly – I suggest sympathy and
compassion not only alternate with but constantly fold into each other.
128
Pilar – whom Lan teasingly introduces as “the very fat one” – wanted to return home; but when
she learned that Lan needed to stay longer, she decided to remain in Taiwan with her. “You know,
I love her very much,” Lan confesses. Her statement earns her loud clapping and hailing from
other migrant workers sitting in the background. Further confessions follow in the next
interview, this time featuring Ellen and Elsa’s story. Ellen, a pudgy, earnest, and good-humored
character, describes how she came to Taiwan to make more money and support her family, found
a job at a big company, and met her eventual partner. She calls herself “so lucky” and remembers
the overwhelming timidity she felt in her initial encounter with Elsa. “I see her, and I didn’t say
anything, I didn’t say ‘Hi, hello.’ I can’t say a word because I am too shy to see her.” Elsa, in
turn, recalls her struggle with the idea of same-sex love as she realized her feelings for Ellen.
Trying to avoid any further contact, Ellen remembers insisting that “No I don’t like you,”
“because we are the same sex.” Yet she could not help it, “[e]very time, if I see her, I’m happy.”
Elsa’s account is accompanied by loud laughter from everyone in the room with the exception of
her partner Ellen, who is so moved by the words that she starts to cry. “So touching,” Ellen
weeps as she wipes off her tears with a tissue. The emotional intensity that arises as the women
remember the beginnings of their relationship – love at first sight, shyness, embarrassment,
confusion, happiness – further increases when filmmaker Chen wants to know how the women
make love in a room shared with fellow workers. The responding couples fall into giggling,
expressing their amused shock with the question and embarrassment to respond. The camera
shows Pilar hiding behind pillows and grabbing her partner Lan, who seems equally self-
conscious and presses a tissue against her mouth until she finally admits with a big grin that
Pilar, “She is very noisy.” Yam and Bing have to chuckle also but appear more composed as they
state that the women sleeping above them are a couple, too, and therefore probably understand.
Jennet and Haydee, the last two responding to Chen’s question, tightly hold each other’s hands as
129
they elaborate humorously that instead of them, it is “the ones outside our bed [who] are noisy.
So what we do... [laughter] So what we do is just do it the silent way. Side view or...” – and
before Jennet finishes the sentence, everyone’s laughter takes over the interview again.
The scenes of public disclosure, of coming out and sharing secrets about one’s intimate life,
foreground the women’s sense of responsibility and love. Bing and Lam, Ellen and Elsa, Yam and
Pilar – they all appear as dutiful daughters working to support their families at home, dedicated and
loyal lovers, and caring members of the Filipina migrant community. Indeed, the protagonists’
likeability is closely tied to their visibility as carriers of traditional Asian values, including filial piety,
togetherness, diligence, and care. While such representation is strongly reminiscent of the figure of
the docile female migrant worker Huang and Li have criticized, I contend it also serves to introduce
migrant women’s same-sex desire to a wider audience.
The interview scenes convey a feeling of
familiarity and trust – we all know what love feels like – as the women give away their
vulnerable experiences of secrecy, desire, pleasure, and joy to an outsider’s camera and an
unknown audience. As viewers, we believe in the goodness of their characters, the authenticity of
their love, and the rightfulness of their belonging together. To repeat Elsa’s words, which
summarize so well the impossibility to feel and act otherwise, “Every time, if I see her, I’m
happy.” Love makes relatable the women’s experience – it affiliates us with them – because, as
Berlant puts it, “to be in a love plot is to be made particular and generic at the same time.”
322
In “Love, A Queer Feeling,” Berlant discusses love as the entrance into a perceived
common world (where everyone loves). Love, in Berlant’s formulation, “binds subjects to a
world in which they feel possible.”
323
As a shared human feeling, love unites subjects and renders
them legible as members of a social community. Love, that is, holds the “promise that by
322Lauren Berlant, “Love, A Queer Feeling,” in Homosexuality & Psychoanalysis, ed. Tim Dean and Christopher
Lane (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 443.
323Ibid., 448.
130
identifying with intimate spheres – and especially with cultivating love and language about love
– women and persons generally can achieve both subjective uniqueness and a socially generic
status.”
324
Everybody needs and wants to be in love. Love brings (us) together, love “binds a
socius.”
325
This last reference is drawn from Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds, less an explicit
engagement with love than a critique of the streamlining of lives “toward maximum productivity”
through particular temporal arrangements.
326
Freeman writes, “the state and other institutions,
including representational apparatuses, link properly temporalized bodies to narratives of movement
and change. These are teleological schemes of events or strategies for living such as marriage,
accumulation of health and wealth for the future, reproduction, childrearing, and death and its
attendant ritual.”
327
Within this context, binding simultaneously normalizes and integrates, forging the
“naked flesh [...] into socially meaningful embodiment.”
328
I find Freeman’s notion of binding helpful
to grasp the ways in which love as a feeling of shared human quality binds subjects on and off the
screen to each other. Chen, too, seems aware of love’s binding power as she attempts to mold the
protagonists’ self-revelations into a recognizable romantic script. For instance, when asking Lan and
Pilar about their history of getting together, where the two seem rather shy to share more information
– “Then we talk talk talk talk talk, and then one day, we’re together.” – Chen playfully pushes them
324Ibid., 443.
325Elizabeth Freeman. Time Binds, 3.
326Ibid.
327Ibid., 4. Edelman is another scholars who has written on the temporal organization of social subjects. In No
Future, Edelman criticizes the U.S. state’s representation of the heterosexual family as the norm of good
citizenship. Whereas the author is less interested in an elaboration of the national, for instance, its ethnic, racial,
and diasporic fractions, he intriguingly lays bare how the figure of the child signifies a repressive
heteronormativity (11) – what he terms “reproductive futurism” (2) – that poses as human nature. In this context,
heteronormativity goes beyond the the notion of heterosexuality an defines more broadly an “order of social
reality” ( 30). See also Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (1998).
328Freeman, Time Binds, 3.
131
to go into more detail. “That’s too simple,” she complains. “Nobody will be satisfied with your
answer like that.” What an audience wants, her statement implies, is the full disclosure of a
tumultuous love story concluding in the women’s unification. Love comes full circle. This is how
viewers relate and align.
Whereas Lesbian Factory strategically engages such normative visions of love, the film
does not merely fold the women’s experiences into ready-made narratives. Rather, it offers a
complex picture of love as historically contingent, the stuff of cultural, social, and economic
interaction, as well as an affective force that cannot be fully circumscribed by those larger
structural arrangements. As Freeman equally contends, “binding also produces a kind of rebound
effect, in which whatever it takes to organize energy also triggers a release of energy that surpasses
original stimulus.”
329
While we see how the uneven distribution of labor and capital intersect with
social values such as filial responsibility to propel the women’s migration, we also come to
understand that those factors are precisely what promotes alternative intimacies and unexpected ties
among them.
In a similar vein, scholars especially from the fields of anthropology and sociology have
demonstrated how labor migration simultaneously perpetuates and “detraditionalizes” established
social orders.
330
For instance, Amy Sim elaborates how Indonesian women workers in Hong Kong
329Freeman, Time Binds, xvi. Freeman’s formulation is strongly reminiscent of Massumi’s as well as Gregg and
Seigworth’s definition of affect. See Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual; Melissa Gregg, Gregory J.
Seigworth, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg, Gregory J. Seigworth
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
330See Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, The Force of Domesticity. Filipina Migrants and Globalization (New York,
London: New York University Press, 2008); and her Children of Global Migration. Transnational Families and
Gendered Woes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). Parreñas is rather skeptical of women’s possibility
for escaping repressive gender norms. She writes, “Although migrant women are able to – and do – negotiate for
fairer gender relations and more egalitarian relations with men at home and at work, the persistence of the
ideology of women’s domesticity stalls the reconstitution of gender in the family, community, and labor market
that occurs in women’s migration.” The Force of Domesticity, 8. Nicola Mai and Russell King, in turn, argue that
the “transformation of values and sexualities in relation to migration dynamics” always already entails “the
detraditionalisation of established gender and sexual norms.” “Love, Sexuality and Migration: Mapping the
Issue(s),” Mobilities 4, no. 3 (2009): 296.
132
form same-sex relationships to “enact their romantic/sexual scripts for meaningful relations during
labour migration.”
331
For one, Sim maintains, these relationships represent concrete “realities in
women’s lives where despite the given norms, taboos and ideologies built into supporting
heterosexism, and the oppressive conditions that give into exploiting women’s productive capacities,
women are able to find footholds to disagree, resist and protest, and importantly, to stake out the
space to choose differently.”
332
At the same time, the author cautions that migrant same-sex intimacy
not only competes with but also reiterates heteronormative orders of intimacy back home. Sim
writes, the women’s relationships “cannot be understood as [...] simply resisting heterosexuality
because of deeply embedded gender hierarchies that become manifest on the bodies of women who
love other women ‘as men,’ or of femme women who seek out tombois with whom they can behave
‘as women.’
333
Moreover, Sim continues, the reality of having intimate relationships with other
women abroad simultaneously supports, whether deliberate or not, the norm of “women’s sexual
purity – meaning not having sexual relations with men [outside marriage].”
334
Nicole Constable
offers further insight into the ways in which the disciplinary mechanisms of a migrant labor market
rearticulate intimate ties. In her case study of Filipina migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong,
Constable points out how the women repurpose the obligatory maid “uniform” – blue jeans and T-
shirt – to enact a “tomboy,” or “T-bird,” style that suggests same-sex desire.
335
331Amy Sim, “Transitional Sexuality among Women Migrant Workers: Indonesians in Hong Kong,” in As Normal
as Possible: Negotiating Sexuality in Hong Kong and China, ed. Yau Ching (Hong Kong: University of Hong
Kong Press, 2010), 40.
332Ibid., 41.
333Ibid., 39.
334Ibid., 50.
335Nicole Constable, “Sexuality and Discipline among Filipina Domestic Workers in Hong Kong,” American Ethnologist
24, no. 3 (1997). As to the entanglement of capital and intimacy: U.S historian John D’Emilio has demonstrated how
capitalism from the 19
th
century on, in particular through the dynamics of urbanization and labor migration, has
supported the formation of gay and lesbian communities in the United States. He argues that the rupture of traditional
worklife arrangements – with individuals leaving behind family-based working and living environments – has
provided the possibility for alternative intimate socialities to emerge. D’Emilio argues, “In divesting the household of
its economic independence and fostering the separation of sexuality from procreation, capitalism has created
conditions that allow some men and women to organize a personal life around their erotic/emotional attraction to their
133
While my focus is less on the social realities of migrant workers’ same-sex identity, I am
quoting Sim and Constable at length to think more deeply about the circulation of love in Lesbian
Factory. Contrary to common views on sentimental narratives, the documentary refrains from a one-
sided representation of love, employing it instead in multiple and also conflicting ways: as that
special human quality that unites us; as an object of study that tells us more about the ties between
feelings and global capital; and as a narrative device that binds viewers to the women’s cause.
Against this backdrop, I urge to broaden an understanding of sentimental narratives as
“simpleminded” or depoliticizing entertainment, and recognize their validity as both objects and
subjects of political inquiry. Take the following example, where familiar feelings of love and iconic
images of protest combine into demands for legal change.
In between the personal interviews, Lesbian Factory shows the leading activist figures Bing,
Lan, and Yam together with TIW A staff in heated negotiations with CLA officials. As the voice over
informs us, the state representatives reject the women’s appeal for support: “The local government
tends to equivocate on major labor disputes, unwilling to take on the responsibility.” Succeeding
shots show the women voicing their frustration and publicly demanding the Bureau’s intervention.
We see the Filipinas raising their fists in front of the government building, speaking through
megaphones, and shouting out paroles collectively. Knowing the protagonists as deeply loving
women, an audience is quickly convinced about the need for better working conditions. The
charming couples deserve legal protection, they also deserve the right to choose their own employer
so they can organize their worklife around their intimate relationship. Indeed, all of us should own
own sex. It has made possible the formation of urban communities of lesbians and gay men and, more recently, of a
politics based on a sexual identity.” John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” The Lesbian and Gay Studies
Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, David M. Halperin (New York, London: Routledge, 1993),
470. While D’Emilio focuses on the ways in which capitalism has shaped the visibility of gay and lesbian identity in
the United States, his argument offers the more general insight that capital’s non-stop demand for labor, and for surplus
populations who perform this very labor, depends on certain forms of social transgression. Roderick Ferguson concurs,
proposing that “capital requires the transgression of space and the creation of possibilities for intersection and
convergence. Capital, therefore, calls for subjects who must transgress the material and ideological boundaries of
community, family, and nation.” Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 17.
134
the right to love. In an interesting twist, the claim for human rights aligns and, in fact, coincides here
with love as a basic human right. Both a natural quality that needs to be protected and, as Eva Illouz
has it, “a good unequally distributed in our social structure,”
336
love appears once again at the center
of political mobilization.
Sentimental activism describes just that – the entrance of love into the realm of politics, or the
emergence of a scene of intimacy into public view for the good of social change. In Lesbian Factory,
sentimental activism specifically describes the act of making Filipina workers legible to a larger
audience through archetypal images and feelings. The aim is to to elicit a sense of “solidarity” among
viewers, but more than that, sentimental activism is about a visual and affective reorientation with
real world effects.
337
Perhaps these effects seem rather questionable and speculative at first – what
exactly counts as “real world effects” anyway. Yet as I have argued throughout this dissertation, these
begin with widening the pool of fantasies of alignment and sociality among otherwise segregated
populations. Subsequently, sentimental activism can also help us reconsider a common hierarchy of
modes of civic participation, in which feelings, specifically those labeled “feminine,” and the people
who elicit them, are deemed unproductive, backward, and politically inferior.
338
The ensuing film
scene offers further insight into the sentimental configuration of human rights and into the ways in
which sentimentality, as yet another form of binding, can affect “movement and change” (Freeman).
336Eva Illouz. Consuming the Romantic Utopia. Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997), 294.
337Berlant and McCabe, “Depressive Realism.”
338See Williamson, “Introduction.”
135
THE TEARS OF SEPARATED LOVERS
On “The morning of separation,” as the film titles the ensuing scene, Chen follows the women as
they move out of the dormitories and gather in a different building to learn about their reassignment
to yet unknown companies. “If you can’t be in the same factory,” the director anticipates, voicing
what occupies everyone’s mind in the room. Holding her partner closely in her arms, Yam responds,
“Miserable. I don’t want to answer that question... Look at our eyes we cannot sleep tonight.” With
puffy eyes, the couple tries to smile and act playfully before the camera, but Yam soon interrupts the
attempt to cover up any heavy feelings, “Actually I don’t want to reach this day.” Bing immediately
adds, “I feel bad. I don’t like that we separate.” A short moment of silence befalls the two partners;
Yam swallows hard to stay composed, then sets off to thank the NGO. “Anyway. Thank you very
much TIW A for the...,” is all she can say before breaking out into sobs. Overwhelmed by feelings,
Yam hides her head in Bing’s shoulder. Bing, in turn, pads her partner’s hand softly and makes a
short, hard laugh. “That’s all,” she says into the camera. Yet Chen refuses to switch the camera off
and continues to capture the gravity of feelings as the women assemble in a large hall to await the
announcement of their future workplace. The voice-over explicates the process as follows: “Each
migrant worker has an assigned number. Agents choose workers by picking numbers from the
booklet. Migrant workers have no rights to express their wishes and do not know where they will
go.” Chen describes the entire procedure as “enslavement.” In the big scramble for profit led by
invisible corporate enterprises, and enhanced by the inaction of the Labor Affairs Bureau, the
protagonists become reduced to mere “commodities” (voice-over). Only two out of the seven
couples are hired by the same company, and their expressions of gratitude (“God is so good to
us. This is our destiny.”) stands in stark contrast to the tears of grief shown in the faces of the
remaining laborers. “Good friends and gay partners were heartlessly separated,” Chen
summarizes. In contrast, “[t]hose who were chosen by the same factory were like hitting the
136
jackpot.” The random selection process resembles indeed a lottery game.
Rather than giving the women space to grieve and process the news, however, the
filmmaker keeps the camera ruthlessly pointed at the “losers” of the game. Refusing to stay at a
distance, Chen moves right in front of the workers, and records their sobbing and crying despite
the discomfort the protagonists display about being filmed at their most vulnerable moment.
Yam, for instance, tries to hide her trembling body from the camera behind a seat. Only after
waiving Chen away, does the director finally stop shooting them. Why insist on capturing the
women’s suffering to an extent that seems almost painfully intrusive?
In her discussion about the emergence of sentimentality in U.S. labor documentaries, Paula
Rabinowitz argues that the visibility of tears plays a crucial role in winning over an audience.
339
For
Rabinowitz, images of male workers crying in public prove specifically effective in eliciting a call
for political action, because they evoke both a sense of authenticity and an utter social disorder in
need of fixture. Ultimately, the author concludes, these documentaries ask for social justice by
reinforcing a patriarchal world view. Mariana Baltar further unpacks the role of sentimental affect at
the intersection of political activism and the reproduction of social norms, inferring it “creates the
emotion necessary to the act of political mobilization” by calling upon a familiar “moral logic.”
340
Rebecca Wanzo offers a comparable outlook. In The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African
American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling, Wanzo summarizes sentimentality
“addresses the suffering of the politically disadvantaged but utilizes conventional narratives and
practices that will not fundamentally disrupt power.”
341
In light of these assessments, the ambivalent
339Paula Rabinowitz, “Sentimental Contracts: Dreams and Documents of American Labor,” Feminism and
Documentary, ed. Diane Waldman and Janet Walker (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
340Mariana Baltar, “Weeping Reality: Melodramatic Imagination in Contemporary Brazilian Documentary,” in
Latin American Melodrama. Passion, Pathos, and Entertainment, ed. Darlene J. Sadlier (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2009), 133.
341 Wanzo, The Suffering Will Not Be Televised, 9.
137
wedding of dominant value regimes with political progress seems to elicit no more than activism
“light,” if any at all. What else can we expect from sentimental narratives?
Whereas the authors quoted here demonstrate with clarity how sentimentality contributes to
the moral education of an audience, they have paid less attention to the ways in which the
sentimental makes tangible the historical conditions under which political practices and their
legibility are shaped. For instance, in Sentimental Fabulations, Rey Chow argues for a broader
conception of modes of agency that fall outside common narratives of liberation. With a focus on
Chinese films that are geared towards “accommodation, compromise, and settlement” rather than
invested in the project of freedom,
342
Chow proposes that the affect of sentimentality brings with it
“possibilities for perversion, subversion, and diversion” that do not designate “second best” choices
but are often the only way of navigating complex social realities.
343
Saba Mahmood takes a similar
stance in Politics of Piety, where she criticizes the prevalent “belief that all human beings have an
innate desire for freedom, that we all somehow seek to assert our autonomy when allowed to do so,
that human agency primarily consists of acts that challenge social norms and not those that uphold
them, and so on.”
344
For Mahmood the point is not so much to dismiss calls for empowerment, than
to understand the limitations of those calls to grasp the rich and multifaceted ways in which subjects
engage with existing norms at particular historical moments.
Lesbian Factory offers further insight here. On the one hand, the documentary engages a
paternalistic representation of “women at risk,”
345
through which it binds public sentiments of
342Chow, Sentimental Fabulations, 199.
343Ibid., 22.
344Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2005), 5.
345Ong, “A Biocartography,” 212. Ong specifically discusses how NGOs in Southeast Asia deploy the image of the
“‘enslaved’ or ‘at-risk body’” of migrant domestic women workers to ask for the latter’s social rights (ibid.). For
a critical discussion of visibility or “ocular epistemology (the seeing-is-believing paradigm)” (29) in human
rights discourses, see Wendy S. Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions,
Feminisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
138
sympathy (we are all human beings) and compassion (they, too, deserve happiness) to the cause of
marginalized workers. By tying the call for legal reform to the hypervisibility of female suffering, the
film employs sentimentality to show migrant women laborers in utter need of institutional protection.
In this, the documentary appears rather supportive of a patriarchal monitoring of women’s bodies,
leaving unquestioned those “very sources of protection – the state, the law, patriotic ideology – [that]
have traditionally buttressed traditional matrices of cultural hierarchy.”
346
In short, the visibility of
migrant women’s suffering seems to legitimize a hegemonic social order.
Yet it would be too hasty to accuse Lesbian Factory and, by default, TIW A of simply
complying with oppressive social structures and gender stereotypes. The film shows plenty of
moments where the Filipinas socialize with TIW A staff and suggest close friendships between the
workers and the Taiwanese professionals – including scenes of eating, drinking, dancing and
karaoke-ing together in the dormitories; hugging each other for support in difficult times; and the
moving moment when the workers hand over Susan Chen their own donations for the NGO. In fact,
I argue Chen’s rigorous recording and the discomforting exposure of the protagonists’ pain not
simply feeds off, it means to make visceral their lack of privacy.
347
Specifically, the filmmaker’s
apparent disrespect for the women’s personal space stages the workers’ disenfranchisement, and it
points out as well Chen’s own involvement in the mechanisms of exploitation.
Against this backdrop, I propose to understand the documentary’s seemingly ambiguous
method – its use of sentimental activism – as both a reflection of and response to the conflicting
dynamics that define an activist endeavor in the “outside world.” For instance, as Aihwa Ong
elaborates, NGOs have to tackle multiple moral economies – from patriarchal values and nationalist
346Lauren Berlant, “The Subject of True Feeling,” Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century, ed.
Elisabeth Bronfen, Misha Kavka (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 129.
347 As Eden Osucha reminds us, “privacy [i]s a distinctive property right and cultural privilege.” Eden Osucha, “The
Whiteness of Privacy: Race, Media, Law,” Camera Obscura 24, no. 1 (2009): 72. Accordingly, the right to
public visibility and the right to stay put are deeply inscribed by social hierarchies.
139
ideologies to market liberalization and a global human rights discourse – to achieve public support
and negotiate legal reforms. Indeed, the women’s recompense depends on institutional intervention
and therefore a “working with” rather than radical rejection of existing power structures. Within this
context, images of women who suffer can be strategically used to woo a conservative audience and
pressure a neoliberal government into action. Ong explains, “the female body confronted with
potential violence [...] is something that can elicit greater moral sympathy from Asian society than
demands for gender or migrant rights.”
348
Furthermore, while Lesbian Factory employs iconic
imagery of women in crisis to call upon the ideal of a “caring society,”
349
one based on the Asian
values of “kindness” and “respect,” the film simultaneously features them as dedicated activists and
women-loving women who resist the norm of female subordination.
350
After all, the protagonists’
tears are shed over the violent separation of same-sex lovers and are also expressions of the women’s
desire for each other. Thus, by embedding the women’s representation in seemingly antagonistic
realities – of politics and feelings, of private subjecthood and public exposure, the power of global
economy and emerging alternative desires – Lesbian Factory pushes us to reconsider how we
measure things like progress, movement, and change, and why these latter come to signify so quickly
either the “good” or “bad” in human life.
348Ong, “A Biocartography,” 212.
349Ibid., 209.
350Ibid., 190. As Eng-Beng Lim elaborates, the ideology on “Asian values” prevalent in East and Southeast Asia in
the 1990s but still resonant today served traditionally Confucian societies to distinguish themselves from
“Western liberal ideas and practices (homosexuality being a prime example)” (132) while advancing market
liberalization and privatization. Lim summarizes, the Asian values discourse “is used, as some have argued, to
consolidate the postcolonial state’s authoritarianism under the cover of ‘Asian democracy’ and ‘Asian
capitalism.’” (30) Eng-Beng Lim, Brown Boys, 2014.
140
FIGURES OF LIBERA TION
In The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Rey Chow further elucidates the troubling
measures of political participation, and how these translate into human value. Chow argues that the
figure of the wronged racialized other demanding social justice, what she calls the “protestant
ethnic,” has turned into a symbol of the “good” liberal nation-state.
351
For one, the image of the
protestant ethnic signifies social betterment and transformation; but more than that, the branding of
marginalized populations into ethnic activists also gestures to a visual economy that affords social
recognition to those – and only those – who align themselves with liberalism’s aspirational politics.
352
In this view, the “ethnicization of labor” comprises not only a structural assignment of contingent,
low-paid, and high risk jobs to racialized populations (see Chapter 3). It also designates the
capitalization of racial and other forms of difference into social currency as long as the matter of
difference indexes a society’s political progress.
353
Chow’s concern with the devaluation of particular
bodies at the intersection of knowledge and capital, or how ideas of foreignness translate into the
logic of the market, is particularly helpful for analyzing Lesbian Factory’s depiction of Filipina
workers. As foreign laborers protesting in front of Taipei’s CLA, the protagonists literally embody
protestant ethnics. However, their representation as figures in crisis and human lovers, albeit
seemingly antagonistic to the minority activist, plays into the same liberalist scheme. Ultimately, all
of these cases address the broadening inclusion of formerly marginalized groups into public view,
and indicate the state’s continuous progress.
351More specifically, Chow argues that a human rights discourse intersects with capitalism’s logic of exploitation in the
shared ethic of perseverance and self-improvement. The author calls this “a kind of liberation theology” – the “belief in
the possibility of liberation and betterment.” Chow, The Protestant Ethnic, 5.
352I would add to Chow’s compelling discussion that the “protestant ethnic,” here embodied by the Filipina activists,
partakes as well in an affective economy that renders the “other” legible, relatable, even desirable.
353To be sure, Chow prefers the term ethnicity over race, not to dismiss the latter as a powerful category of social
difference but to avoid “replicating the residual biologism” that she sees “inerasably embedded in the term ‘race’”(24).
Ethnicity, in turn, seems to provide the author the possibility to analyze the interlocking forces of power, including the
demarcation of “cultural” difference and labor. As she writes, “Always a shifting relation, ethnicity is virtually
society’s mechanism of marking boundaries by way of labor.” Chow, The Protestant Ethnic, 35.
141
Adding to Chow’s critical inquiry into contemporary identity politics, I want to further look
to the specific context of intra-Asian labor migration that the documentary offers, and how the film
brings to the surface a conjoining of ethnic, gender, and class discrimination with a distinct hierarchy
of East and Southeast Asian economies. As one of the four Asian tigers, Taiwan has ever since the
1990s aggressively pursued new market and production outlets, expanding, on the one hand, to the
south, including Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines, and implementing, on the other hand, a local
migrant labor regime that outsources undesired forms of labor to Southeast Asian workers for
minimal pay. For Kuan-Hsing Chen, these capitalist strategies reflect the formation of a “Taiwanese
subempire” that models itself after the hegemons of the Northern hemisphere, while it sets itself apart
from the less powerful. In the words of Chen, “Taiwan’s own economic, political, and cultural
structure is subordinated to the United States and Japan. Therefore, its targets of expansion are the
politico-economically weaker countries, rather than more robust capitalist areas. I use the term
subempire to refer to a lower-level empire that depends on the larger structure of imperialism.”
354
The
subempire is, however, not only a politico-economic construct, it is as well an ideology that claims
Taiwan’s moral, and often ethnic superiority to the societies of the “weaker countries.” As Hsiao-
Chuan Hsia states, “the belief that ‘Taiwan’s Miracle’ is solely due to the diligence and superior
quality of the Taiwanese people.” By default, popular view prioritizes the island’s “health” over any
critical engagement with the systemic exploitation of southern populations, holding instead that
“[t]he quality of the Taiwanese population is endangered by the influx of ‘low quality’ migrants
from poorer countries.”
355
Drawing on the skillful analyses by Chow, Chen, and Hsia that tease out
forms of domination beyond a common colonizer/colonized divide, I want to advance the current
discussion by paralleling Taiwan’s “subimperial” practices with the island’s political liberalization
354Kuan-Hsing Chen, “The Imperialist Eye: The Cultural Imaginary of a Subempire and a Nation-State,” positions
8, no. 1 (2000): 15.
355Hsia, “Foreign Brides,” 30.
142
since the 1980s. Not only am I interested in the uncanny convergence of capitalist expansion and the
island’s self-reinvention as a liberal democracy. Going back to Lesbian Factory, I also want to think
about the role of sexuality, here the depiction of the women’s same-sex love, in the making of social
justice narratives. How might we expand a reading of the figure of the protestant ethnic to Taiwan’s
LGBT policies? To what extent does the visibility of the protagonists’ intimacy lend itself to a
subimperial vision of the (future) sovereign Taiwanese nation-state?
With the end of the four-decade long military dictatorship by the Nationalist Party
(Kuomintang), civic rights became a central concern to the Taiwanese government. Following the
lifting of martial law, the introduction of the right of assembly, and the legalizing of oppositional
parties, the Taiwanese population was finally allowed to vote again in 1991.
356
The democratizing
process introduced major citizen rights, including the founding of independent labor unions, the
advancement of the state’s welfare program, and the protection of Taiwan’s minority populations.
357
The latter has found its articulation more recently in the government’s embrace of indigenous cultural
“heritage” as well as in the official promotion of sexual “diversity.” As Gunter Schubert sums it up,
“Integration, not assimilation is the official motto since the beginning of the 1990s.”
358
Petrus Liu
further elaborates on the “integration” of LGBT communities into the Taiwanese public sphere. Liu
states, “Unlike mainland China, Taiwan has indeed made some civic space for queer subjects,
356See Gunter Schubert, “Das politische System Taiwans [The political system of Taiwan],” Einführung in die
politischen Systeme Ostasiens: VR China, Hongkong, Japan, Nordkorea, Südkorea, Taiwan [Introduction into the
political systems of East Asia: People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Japan, North Korea, South Korean,
Taiwan], ed. Claudia Derichs, Thomas Heberer (Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 2013). The Kuomintang remained in
power until 2000, when the Democratic Progressive Party took over, and was reelected in 2008.
357Ibid. C. Julia Huang illustrates the proliferation of a rights discourse after the end of martial law in 1987 by
pointing out the burgeoning of Taiwan’s NGO landscape. “For example, the number of registered national social
organizations [...] increased from just over eight hundred in 1988 to over two thousand in 1996, and to nearly four
thousand in 2000. This newly expanded NGO sector has also become increasingly active, pluralist, and transnational.”
C. Julia Huang, “Genealogies of NGO-ness: The Cultural Politics of a Global Buddhist Movement in Contemporary
Taiwan,” positions 17, no. 2 (2009): 348.
358In the original: “Integration, nicht mehr Assimilation, lautet seit Anfang der 1990er Jahre die regierungsamtliche
Devise.” Schubert, “Das politische System Taiwans,” 346.
143
including an annual gay pride parade sponsored by the Taipei city government. A TV series depicting
the anguish of gay teenagers, Crystal Boys, was adapted from a well-known novel by Taiwan Public
Television Service Foundation and aired in 2003 to critical acclaim.”
359
If we recall, PTS, a major
media force in advocating the rights of marginalized groups in Taiwan, is also behind the production
of Lesbian Factory, which broadcasted on public television in 2010.
360
Although PTS declares itself
“completely independent in its personnel operations, editorial rights, program content, with no
interference from the government,”
361
the foundation does depend on regular government funding
and collaborates closely with state institutions to circulate its film productions.
362
For instance,
Lesbian Factory was selected into a national documentary showcase that was actively promoted by
the Taiwanese Ministry of Culture.
363
The film screened more than 200 times around the island,
indicating its value as a public representation of social justice work being done in, and also of the
kinds of diversity that mark, contemporary Taiwan.
While such state-sanctioned initiatives are welcome and necessary for advancing the rights of
various minorities, cultural critics have repeatedly pointed to the double-edged nature of the
government-supported progress narrative. For instance, C. Julia Huang sees in the state’s propagating
359Petrus Liu, “Queer Human Rights in and against China: Marxism and the Figuration of the Human,” Social Text
30, no. 1 (2012): 80.
360According to Sophie Yang, a PTS agent, the film aired on December 28, 2010 on public television. Email to the
author, December 11, 2012. Viewpoint holds the slot from 10pm-11pm.
361Quoted from a self-promotional video on PTS website, http://eng.pts.org.tw/explore.php?cat=1. The video can
be seen separately under http://vimeo.com/26102450#.
362Jinna Tay concretizes, “PTS receives annual funding of up to approximately US$ 28 million from the
Government Information Office.” Jinna Tay, “Television in Chinese Geo-Linguistic Markets: Deregulation,
Reregulation and Market Forces in the Post-Broadcast Era,” Television Studies After TV: Understanding
Television in the Post-Broadcast Era, ed. Graeme Turner, Jinna Tay (New York: Routledge, 2009), 110.
Specifically since the conversion of analog to digital broadcasting, PTS has relied on government support.
Taiwanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Broadcast Media Report,” Infotaiwan, May 25, 2013,
http://www.taiwan.gov.tw/ct.asp?xItem=105381&ctNode=3563&mp=1. The film’s theatrical premier was co-
sponsored by the Taipei City Cultural Foundation.
363See Psyche Cho, “Selected documentaries from 2010 TIDF [Taiwan International Documentary Festival, F.H.]
set for free screening tour,” Culture.tw, June, 17, 2011, http://www.culture.tw/index.php?
option=com_content&task=view &id=2093&Itemid=235.
144
of civic rights, quite reminiscent of critiques of U.S. sentimentality by such scholars as Berlant, a
simultaneous act of moral disciplining, in which good citizenship equals “civility” and “national
loyalty.”
364
Josephine Ho and Petrus Liu build on Huang’s observation, showing how Taiwan’s liberal
politics molds itself closely to the discourse of a global civil society that fosters the democratic ideals
“of responsible humanitarianism as well as respect for diversity,” while it conveniently overlaps
with conservative ideologies that continue to outlaw minority populations.
365
Ho offers the example
of child protection, which rendered visible Taiwan as an active pursuer of a global human rights
agenda, at the same time that it enhanced the legal monitoring of sexual minorities and other
marginalized groups. Ho writes, “A seemingly progressive ‘reason of state,’ expressed as a national
crusade to protect children, has become a hotbed for fascist language and fascist measures against all
marginalized populations, from gays and lesbians, PW As [People with Aids, F.H.], brides from
Mainland China, and alien laborers to innocent exploring Net citizens.”
366
Liu similarly maintains
that the recent elevation of LGBT issues into Taiwan’s human rights agenda is more part of a
government’s self-marketing campaign than actual concern for local queers. In Liu’s view, “the
rhetoric of tolerance, liberalism, and progress is a political ruse designed to win over the sympathy of
the American public, since Taiwan’s continuous de facto and imagined future de jure status as a
364Huang, “Genealogies of NGO-ness,” 351. On the state’s use of sentimental discourse see also Anker, Orgies of
Feeling.
365Josephine Ho, “Is Global Governance Bad For East Asian Queers?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
14, no. 4 (2008): 457. “The rise of transnational systems and networks of governance and norms since the 1990s
has fostered the hope that a new global order, described by the UN as “global governance,” operating through
shared goals, purposes, and values as well as consensus formation, would be created in place of state authority
and brute force. The emergence of the so-called global civil society holds out further hope for democratic
potentials that promote the spirit of responsible humanitarianism as well as respect for diversity while weakening
state power and domination in certain national contexts.” Ibid.
366Josephine Ho, “Queer existence under Global Governance: A Taiwan Exemplar,” positions 18, no. 2 (2010): 547. In
particular, Ho elaborates how “at the urging of Christian child-protecting groups” and their heavy engagement of the
values of familialism and civility, “a series of laws, litigation, and regulations has been put into place since 2000 that
now criminalizes practically all sex-related publications, video images, and in particular, Internet communication.
These new installments of law aim to demonize sexual minorities and their channels for cultural
representation/communication” (538).
145
sovereign nation-state depends on American military protection and support.”
367
The United States
played indeed a major part in the liberalization of Taiwan’s political system. As a political ally and
economic partner to the Taiwanese Kuomintang regime, the United States’ new focus on human
rights under Jimmy Carter and the taking up of diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of
China in 1979 exerted significant pressure on the Taiwanese government to introduce democratic
reforms, if it was to maintain outside recognition.
368
The central role of a liberal rights discourse in
present-day Taiwan thus needs to be understood as the outcome of multiple forces, including national
history, international relations and economic partnerships as well as the emergence of liberal politics
as a global currency.
369
Within this context, the public representation of minorities as “human”
subjects “in need of state protection and entitled to ‘human rights’” that we also see in Lesbian
Factory serves to stage for a global audience Taiwan’s “model” status as a political democracy that is
inherently different from the mainland.
370
Liu summarizes, “the human refers to precisely what is not
Chinese, namely, what distinguishes the citizens of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the diaspora from those
of the PRC.”
371
Subsequently, the figure of the “queer,” as theorized by Liu, offers a way to assert
Taiwan’s moral affiliation with the West.
372
367Liu, “Queer Human Rights,” 80. Schubert further elaborates how the US government began to actively support
the nationalist Kuomintang regime to counter Mao Zedong’s victory on the mainland and, furthermore, to use the
island as a strategic point of intervention during the Korean War. See Schubert, “Das politische System Taiwans.”
368Ibid.
369As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Inderpal Grewal discusses the contemporary global human rights
discourse as an effect of U.S. empire. In particular, she describes how the U.S. ideals of freedom and equality became
circulated as universal values through various forms of U.S. hard and soft power. “America functioned as a discourse
of neoliberalism making possible struggles for rights through consumerist practices and imaginaries that came to be
used both inside and outside the territorial boundaries of the United States. […] America was so important to so many
across the world because its power enabled the American nation-state to disseminate the promise of democractic
citizenship and belonging through consumer practices as well as disciplinary technologies.” Inderpal Grewal,
Transnational America, 2.
370Liu, “Queer Human Rights,” 79.
371Ibid., 82.
372“The category of the queer, in either Taiwan or China, does not describe the empirical existence of a social group. It is
rather a sign of national difference, flashed for a global audience, between Taiwan’s liberalism and China’s lack of
human rights.” Ibid., 79.
146
Given Lesbian Factory’s heavy engagement of a rights discourse, specifically the tenets of
freedom and respect whose institutionalization the authors above heavily criticize, how can we
position the film vis à vis these complicated arrangements of power? I consider this question in more
length in the following concluding section. Here I return to sentimental activism as a method that
hacks into the convoluted ways in which an activist rights discourse assumes political meaning under
state liberalism and, relatedly, global governance.
THE RADICAL OTHER: FIGURING IT OUT
After the protagonists’ assignment to new companies across the island, several of the new working
places turn out to be scams. In addition, many female laborers are sent to the heavy industry sector,
where businesses are simply on the lookout to fulfill their foreign worker quota without caring much
for the women’s safety. Oftentimes, the Filipinas are given the most demanding and dangerous jobs,
and they are miserable. Just when there seems to be no hope for betterment, however, the workers’
political investments start to pay off. As the voice-over announces, “Because of the protest of
Fastfame migrant workers, the CLA finally improved the procedure of changing employers for
migrant workers in 2005.”
373
The collaborative effort of Yam, Bing, Lan, and all the other women is
rewarded with the “gift” of more freedom and the government’s adjustment of its foreign labor
regulation
374
: The Filipinas are allowed to transfer to different workplaces, they also have a say in the
decision process, and the hiring companies are pre-examined for fraud. From now on, Chen
summarizes, “they get to be treated with respect, like a human being.” While such rhetoric evokes
Liu’s critical assessment of both the “human” and the “queer” in liberal Taiwan, I suggest the film
proposes a political and communal alliance beyond the dictate of the local government.
373Compare the announcement of TIWA’s website for more details: http://www.tiwa.org.tw/tpfactory.php?
itemid=131.
374On the trope of “the gift of freedom” see Mimi Thi Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom.
147
The Filipina women have prevailed against the CLA. They have written labor history and,
hopefully, advanced the rights of migrant workers to come. In fact, I contend the female workers
assume a major role in the making of a local counter-public.
375
Here, local NGOs and female foreign
laborers join to hold the government accountable. These agents are not the model citizens of a state-
imagined Taiwanese democracy. Instead, they hail from different national, ethnic, and professional
contexts, and call out the state’s neoliberal governance, encompassing market deregulation, the
precarization of migrant workers, and the government’s increasing abandonment of its own citizens.
The documentary’s critique is not directed at the government alone, however. In focusing on queer
Filipina workers in Taiwan, the film further draws attention to the fundamental exclusion of migrant
factory workers from Taiwan’s public cultures, including the vibrant urban middle-class tongzhi
culture of Taipei.
376
Therefore, while Lesbian Factory may be said to showcase, through the channels
of public broadcasting, local theatrical release, and international film festivals, the state’s concern for
diversity and social justice, the documentary always already undermines and, indeed, refutes an
official rhetoric of national unity, freedom and equality.
377
Yet the film’s perhaps most radical gesture lies, for me, in its staging of sentimental activism
to reimagine the possibilities of cross-coalitional politics and transcommunal care. What I call radical
here does not refer to the outright rejection of state politics and extant power structures. As explicated
earlier, endeavors for rights and recognition inevitably involve negotiating institutional boundaries.
The radicality I see in sentimental activism is about breaking open fantasies of being, to allow for
375The notion of the counter-public has been productively explored by numerous scholars. For some references that
have shaped my understanding of it see the work of Ho and Liu cited above; Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the
Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text 25/26 (1990): 56-80;
Berlant and Warner, “Sex in Public”; Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books,
2002); Purnima Mankekar, Unsettling India: Affect, Temporality, Transnationality (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2015).
376I use the term “queer” following Liu here. For further reading see Liu, “Queer Human Rights” and Hans Tao-
Ming Huang, Queer Politics and Sexual Modernity in Taiwan (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011).
377The film screened internationally mainly at queer film festivals, including in China, Hong Kong, India, Korea,
Canada, Belgium, France, Germany, and Sweden.
148
imaginings of social worlds and ties – intimate, communal, and political – that go beyond those
circumscribed by dominant state fictions. Within this context, I am particularly intrigued by the
central presence of alterity in the film’s imagination of a better place.
In Lesbian Factory, it is the women-loving Filipina factory workers who, through the labor of
protest, suffering, and companionship, forge a safer and juster environment. Indeed, the emergence of
an alternative public is the work of feminist and queer communities of women: Their entrance from
the social margin into, and their reformulating of the fantasy of “subempire” lay the foundation of an
“other” Taiwan. In this, the documentary’s envisioning of alternative public cultures comes very
close to Kuan-Hsing Chen’s proposal of “a postnational cultural imaginary from the margin.”
378
As a
means to counter what he describes as Taiwan’s ruling “bourgeoisie male chauvinism,”
379
the “post”
in Chen’s “postnational” describes a collective act of “imagining something beyond the nation”
380
;
an act performed by those who are “broken” by the (sub)imperial order, including, as the author
states in the case of Taiwan, “aborigines, workers, women, and homosexual people.”
381
By tying
the project of a counter-public to the agency of multiply displaced subjects and to the possibility of
new, transnational affiliations, Lesbian Factory, similar to Chen’s critique, expands the scope for
minoritarian interventions beyond a singular group. At the same time, the film stays critical of the
idea of a global civil society that ultimately overcomes the restrictions of state authority.
382
For
378Chen, “The Imperialist Eye,” 66.
379Ibid., 33.
380Ibid., 66.
381Ibid., 11. Chen, too, makes clear that imagining otherwise cannot simply do away with institutional power. But, he
contends, minoritized groups have and will continue to come together to “develop their autonomous forces beyond
the state and the commercial system and [...] play games with these agents ‘both through cooperation and
through struggle.’” (66)
382In sum, the idea behind a global civil society or global governance is the arrangement of “ordinary” people into
political actors through the implementation of universal democratic values and the gradual elimination of repressive
state authority. For Ho, this political project is mainly “fortified by United Nations discourse and worldwide policy
directives.” Ho, “Is Global Governance Bad,” 458. The vision of a global civil society should further needs to be
understood as the result of a dominant U.S. human rights agenda and the parallel insurgence of neoliberalism. See
Grewal, Transnational America, 21.
149
instance, the documentary puts forth how the lessening of state power and the move toward “the
global” as envisioned by a politics of global governance conveniently intersect with an exploitative
capitalist system. By default, we are left to wonder to what extent liberal discourses of human rights
perpetuate existing power inequalities and remain firmly rooted in majority imaginations of social
order.
Lesbian Factory makes use of and makes visible the incorporation of rights into the
profitable mainstream. In fact, it might be worth to think about the ways in which the film’s own
representation of radical public cultures and, that is, of the possibility of a different Taiwan (perhaps
even Asia) depends on the visual availability of minoritized subjects. Always in plain sight,
recognized as “human” only in their publicness or in the publicness of their intimacy, the Filipina
protagonists resemble Chow’s “protestant ethnics.” Although they figure less as tokens of state
liberalism and more as the necessary condition for an other or minoritarian politics of liberation,
perhaps even the possibility to imagine otherwise.
And yet, as the driving force behind an activist politics that is not quite “figured out” yet –
and notoriously so, because in constant negotiation with both existing power structures and the
unaccounted ways of bending, accommodating, and escaping those very structures – I argue the
protagonists ultimately lose their figurative determination. There is just no single outcome to
embody, no single vision of the good life after liberation. The film’s open ending enhances such
impression. As the filmmaker tries to follow up with the protagonists throughout the following years,
lives move on and settle down in often unexpected manners, making it impossible to find an
adequate conclusion. Some of the women continue for several years to work in Taiwan; others have
to leave from one day to the other as their work visas are not renewed. Similarly, some of the couples
stay together; others eventually separate after returning to the Philippines or moving to new
cosmopolitan hubs. As the documentary’s sequel, Rainbow Popcorn (Susan Chen, 2012), shows,
150
several of the protagonists get married and have kids but continue to stay in close contact with their
former lovers. Others find new girlfriends. Yet others also die along the way.
383
Chen puts it perhaps
most adequately in the rather formulaic phrase, “In the flux of space and time, the coming and going
of love is unpredictable. But the stories of love and migration always continue...”
With these scenarios in mind, let me conclude on a similar note as Lesbian Factory. In
particular, I want to emphasize why I believe in the political effectiveness of sentimental activism as
both a representational method and a political tool. I suggest that in an age where liberal values come
to substantialize a hegemonic regime, the only way to do politics might be in the form of a
sentimental retreat. With which I do not mean to evoke the old dialectic of action and inaction, where
the choice is between the one who leaves behind a condition of oppression to enter into public
collectivity, or else, the introverted subject forever stuck in scenes of social trauma. But a refusal to
restrict the kinds of fiction through which existence becomes meaningful and this means also, and
simply, to opt for life.
383In Rainbow Popcorn, Chen and Jing Ru Wu, another key TIWA staff member, travel across the world to find the
women and document how their previous romantic relationships have developed. Even more than the first
documentary, Rainbow Popcorn is focused on the question love in the times of migration. While I have to leave
out a discussion of this film, it also does not provide substantial new insight into my main argument of
sentimental activism here.
151
CONCLUSION. ON EXISTENTIAL SURPLUS
In “Notes on Travel and Theory,” James Clifford asks, “How does theory travel and how do
theorists travel?” He further poses the question, “How do different populations, classes and
genders travel? What kinds of knowledges, stories, and theories do they produce?”
384
Clifford’s
intriguing questions aim to clarify theory’s production out of particular historical contexts and
embodiments. He argues, not unlike Edward Said, that the traveling of epistemes can dismantle
the inherent bias that is said to absent in so-called universal theory. However, the author goes
further, pointing out how “in a complexly literate, politicized, global system of cultural flows,”
theory cannot simply be assumed to represent the thought-apparatus of an imperial “West” but is
also, and increasingly, the product of new “histories of dwelling, immigration, exile, migration.”
The underlying question thus appears to be, how does the experience of traveling, or shall we say
globalization, inform theory per se?
The kind of theory emerging from the Asian diasporic works and worlds discussed in the
preceding pages, a theory I understand more broadly as social critique, emerges similarly out of
movements, shifts, and other ways of inhabiting the present. Here, theory does not originate in a
place of cultural homogeneity before it starts to travel. It grows out of an original disjuncture that
is both the spatial and temporal reality of the Asian diasporans we encounter. Whether the
protagonists have come from somewhere else to settle down, stay temporarily, or have lived in a
place all of their life, they are perceived as being “out of place.” They are the ones who always
arrive, and who arrive after the fact. Yung captures this experiences in Confessions, where the
subtitle tells us, “When I travel, people always think I’m Japanese. If I put on a Canadian flag
pin, it just looks like a souvenir.” Ironically, Yung travels physically, but finds himself stuck with
384James Clifford, “Notes on Travel and Theory,” Inscriptions 5 (1989), http://culturalstudies.ucsc.edu
/PUBS/Inscriptions/ vol_5/clifford.html. Ensuing quotes from this source.
152
a foreign image or rather an image of foreignness that fixes him into a distinct identity. No matter
where he is coming from or going to, he is already “known.” The disjuncture I referred to above
is thus not only the effect of global “flows” but also of local stoppages, of immobility, and forced
ongoing movement that come with and impose on those very flows. In fact, I want to push
further Clifford’s approach to think not only about the ways in which “travel” informs our
thought, but how commonsense, or dominant ways of thinking and seeing operate very much
through a dialectic of travel and return; a dialectic that leads too often, as Keeling similarly
argues, to forms of life that arrest people into permanent “truths.”
385
By contrast, I contend the
different media productions examined here begin the work of theorizing by showing the
epistemic disjuncture through which Asian diasporans are situated and, in so doing, urge for the
need to recognize and realize the possibilities of making theory travel further – sometimes
without return – so as to make lives matter. To quote once more from Yung, whose comment
illustrates the need to think diasporic affiliation out of synch. “Actually, I think it would’ve been
even more interesting if I’d somehow snuck into these Asian vacation snapshots myself. But then
it was only *after* editing the footage that I realized that I liked these Asian tourists, and was no
longer so embarrassed by being around them.”
386
While the individual chapters have discussed the visual works for the most part separately
and with respect to the particular locality of their production, my analysis also draw out what brings
the videos together, namely a critique of inclusion for the greater good of productivity and
advancement. On the one hand, Asian diasporic populations are a “good thing to have,” desirable
as surplus is; on the other hand, they serve as place-holder to manage other minorities, feed into
the capitalist machine, and signify progressive politics. Existential surplus names just that, the
385See footnote 49.
386Yung, “Confessions.”
153
orientation of Asian diasporic life toward the accumulation of finance and other forms of capital,
or the disinvestment from those subjects necessary to “succeed.” Yet surplus is not simply
liveless mass, nor does it designate one thing alone. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us, it
engenders dynamics that pose an inherent threat to the reigning system of exploitation. Surplus
must be accumulated to guarantee ongoing profit, but it must also be disaccumulated. To be left
with unsold goods, for instance – “overaccumulation – [is] what makes surplus crisis.”
387
Ferguson offers a similar argument in Aberrations in Black where he writes that capitalism
depends on the production of surplus populations who both “fulfill and exceed the demands of
capital.”
388
Most often embodied in racialized populations, pulled into a national territory to
deliver, surplus populations always already jeopardize the integrity of the coherent nation-state
and its normative social order. Drawing on Ferguson, Keeling further elaborates how what is left
out of hegemonic view can unexpectedly emerge when established mechanisms of meaning-
making are loosened in their firm routine. For Keeling, media images hold the power to mobilize
such disturbances, what she calls “perverse surplus”
389
or, with Ferguson, simply “the
multiplication of surplus.”
390
I strongly concur with the authors quoted here, adding that affect as
discussed throughout the dissertation, in the form of feelings and emotions that materialize as
well into images, ideas, and interactions, provides a further entrance into other socialities. Affects
are used to measure, discipline, and order, but they also slip away, become contagious, and bring
together what was meant to stay apart.
To theorize the existential surplus as it is made tangible through affect therefore allows us
387Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California
(Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 56.
388Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 15.
389Keeling, The Witch’ s Flight, 106.
390Ibid. 114.
154
to unpack diasporic presences, affinities, and linkages both in and across particular locales. My
aim is not to theorize the Asian diaspora, to contain Asian diasporas through theory that is. As the
videos likewise show, the various kinds of existential surplus that emerge through the videos can
hardly be synthesized, although I do argue that they are linked by the powers of global capital
and global governance as well as the need for human belonging. Instead, I propose to engage the
tensions that appear among the creative projects and among the differently marginalized groups they
record to work through extant and constantly reformulated human hierarchies, in order to open up
imaginations – a horizon – of political subjectivities and minoritarian coalitions. Indeed, this is also
what I mean by existential surplus, the emergence of other lives and other worlds than those
available in hegemonic conceptions of the world. This “fullness” of diasporic life or the “aspects
and contours that are not [yet] perceived” in common view emerge, I argue, precisely and
perhaps only, in the migration of terms, phrases, and concepts across different political
geographies and intimate worlds, some of which this project has elucidated.
391
Let me close this
work then by offering yet another opening onto the phrase of existential surplus – as an
insistence on the irrefutable materiality of Asian diasporic socialities, which may come in small
gestures of pleasure and big uncertainty sometimes, in what seems like an already fully determined
world.
391Ibid., 33.
155
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Heberer, Feng-Mei
(author)
Core Title
Existential surplus: affect and labor in Asian diasporic video cultures
School
School of Cinematic Arts
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)
Publication Date
06/10/2017
Defense Date
04/20/2015
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
affect,Asia,diaspora,disability studies,gender,Labor,OAI-PMH Harvest,performance,precarity,Race,sexuality,transnational,Video
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English
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Lippit, Akira Mizuta (
committee chair
), Hong, Grace (
committee member
), Imre, Anikó (
committee member
), Keeling, Kara (
committee member
)
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feng-mei@gmx.de
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Heberer, Feng-Mei
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Tags
affect
disability studies
gender
precarity
sexuality
transnational