posted under
feminism
,
film review
,
history
by Unit for Criticism
Written by Andrea Ferber, Art History
Pamela T. Boll’s most recent film Who Does She Think She Is?(2008) was screened Thursday May 7th as part of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory’s Feminist Futures conference. The documentary focuses on women balancing motherhood and creative drives. Although well-intended and insightful at points, the film left many in the audience wanting—for a more weighted concentration on motherhood or creativity (with less conflation between the two), and for examples of female artists who have achieved prominence in their field rather than women who manage to subsist on their artistic work but will not make it into the history books.
Boll follows five women—two sculptors, a painter, an actress, and a printmaker/ “goddess” teacher as they describe their decision to pursue art while being the best mom they can be. While some in the post-film discussion commented on the “diversity” of the women, I saw racial and ethnic diversity trumped by the structural homogeneity of these women’s lives in which mothering either was the primary function or was regarded as a forsaken primary task because of the pull of art. All five women had children (resulting in an unquestioned alignment between women, femininity, motherhood and artistic expression). All were in a roughly comparable socioeconomic class (financially stable enough to choose to pursue art even if it did not provide sufficient material needs for themselves and their children, often because of the ambiguous assistance of male husbands or ex-husbands). All were heterosexual and either were or had been married. Moreover, the highly conventional parenting relations depicted in the film reinforce parenting primarily as a woman’s responsibility. Additionally, art seemed in all of these cases to have been fueled by self-expression. Indeed, most of the artwork derived its forms and content from an essentialized “womanness” and/or reproductive femininity; none was focused on politics or some other “non-women’s” issues. As Patricia J. Williams described it in her input from the audience, the documentary reduces art to an expression of or escape from domestic life. Three of the five women were divorced, presenting the idea that a woman might manage success in her art and as a mother, but probably at the expense of a romantic relationship. Some of the most significant artist-moms were never mentioned: Mary Kelly, Mary Beth Edelson, or Nancy Spero, to name a few.
The success of Born Into Brothels is a big act to follow. Boll proved that she is capable of excellence, but audiences will have to wait to see if she can fill those shoes with her next project.
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posted under
biopower
,
esposito
,
feminism
,
foucault
by Unit for Criticism
Written by Samantha Frost, Political Science
In responding to Penelope Deutscher’s Monday presentation, “Biopoliticized Maternity and the Trope of Immunization,” I want to briefly outline the questions and insights that animate her main argument and then offer some questions and observations that, hopefully, may provide the basis for our broader discussion.
Deutscher considers how we might understand the operations of biopower in feminisms in which claims to women’s reproductive rights are articulated in a language or rhetoric that participates in state racism: women must have control over their reproductive lives in order to ensure the vitality of the volk, the people, the racialized nation. Deutscher is interested in tracing how such feminisms participate in the unfolding of biopower. And of course, she finds that Foucault is not much of a direct help in his writings.
Foucault, it turns out, has a blind spot. When he analyzes sexuality, sex, and the biopolitical management of populations, he develops his insightful account of how biopower constitutes subjects, of how biopower’s elaboration forms the basis for resistance that is incorporated into the elaboration of biopower itself. In other words, there is no outside to power; instead we must speak of subjects’ redeployment or redirection of power, a redirection that doesn’t undermine or detract from power but rather enables subjects to use it to their relative advantage even as they become more enmeshed in its tentacles and operations. Now, what Deutscher points out is that when Foucault is confronted with questions about feminism, particularly as feminists have made claims about reproductive rights, he chokes, theoretically. In other words, whereas he talks of resistance to imperatives about sexuality in terms of the complex operations of biopower, he seems unable to draw on that analysis of power in talking of women’s resistance to imperatives vis a vis reproduction. Instead, he reverts to the language of defiance and counter-attack--a language that positions feminists as outside of and countering biopower and not as participating in it.
Deutscher marks this as a curious blindspot in Foucault’s thinking: for all his attention to sex, sexuality, and the biopolitical management of the life of the population, he does not seem to recognize that these turn on women’s reproductive capacities and that therefore the control and management of women’s reproductive lives is necessarily at the center of the operations of biopower.
For intellectual succor, Deutscher turns to Roberto Esposito’s effort to expand the political insights available through Foucault’s account of biopower. Esposito notes that biopolitics--the management and enhancement of life--is inextricably bound up with thanatopolitics--the dispensing and management of death. Indeed, he claims that each is the obverse of the other. However, Foucault and his commentators often disregard the obverse relationship between biopolitics and thanatopolitics, instead favoring analyses that point to either the productive or the destructive elements of biopower. Esposito suggests that the notion of immunity might be helpful to highlight the points of contact between the destructive and maximizing elements of biopower. With the immunity model of power, biopower divides itself, fights against itself, in order to preserve itself.
Deutscher argues that it might be helpful to analyze feminist politics of women’s reproductive rights through the model or trope of immunity. Within this model, as women’s reproductive capacities are harnessed for the purposes of enhancing the vitality of the race/nation, feminists deploy a language of rights and autonomy that is framed in terms of the vitality of the race and nation. Accordingly, feminists’ rights rhetoric participates both in their subjection to biopolitical imperatives as well as in the thanatopolitical designation of the unwanted racial others. It is not clear to me, in Deutscher’s analysis, whether the racialized feminisms are the relevant instance of biopower’s immunitary self-negation (feminism qua protest movement takes a form that serves or protects the biopolitical imperatives of the nation), or whether the racialization of the feminisms is the relevant instance of biopower’s immunitary self-negation (racialization is feminism’s effort to preserve itself in the face of biopolitical imperatives). In other words, insofar as it serves the biopolitical imperatives of the nation, feminists may make demands for women’s reproductive autonomy. Here, the racial other is sacrificed for the sake of the survival of feminism. Or perhaps both these immunitary moments are in play. So a question I have, then, is about where Deutscher locates this immune response.
A second question concerns the close relationship Foucault and Deutscher sketch between women’s reproduction and the racial interests of the state. If women are constituted as political subjects through biopolitical interest in and management of their reproductive capacities, are political claims about reproduction necessarily steeped in forms of racism? Given the analysis Deutscher wants to develop, is it possible to articulate non-racist feminist claims about women’s reproductive rights, or will they always be a reformulation of the racialized terms through which women’s reproductive capacities vehiculate racialized biopolitical imperatives?
A final question I have--it is perhaps more an observation than a question--concerns Esposito’s intention to use the immunitary model of power to develop what he calls an affirmative biopolitics. I have to say I am not yet clear what this might be. Part of me wants to say that it might be seen in those movements in which racialized others--those who are the subjects of thanatopolitics--redeploy the rhetoric of race to make claims for the right to have families--the right to give birth, to reproduce. I am thinking here of Latinas, Native Americans, or African-American women who have been caught up in the longstanding eugenics policies of the US. And of course, since such redeployments are made precisely through the language of race, they are also a retrenchment of biopolitics: are such feminist movements instances in which an immunitary logic of biopower is at play? Would this constitute an affirmative biopolitics (it enhances life as it undermines thanatopoltics)? Or is an affirmative biopolitics, as Esposito also seems to suggest, one in which discourses of reproduction would no longer be enclosed within specific racial bodies, detached from the nation? Might one substitute the vitality of the planet for the vitality of the nation? And if we did so, what difference would that make to women’s efforts to be roughly self-determining with respect to their reproductive life cycle?
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Written by Michael Verderame, English
In responding to Melissa Orlie’s paper “There Is No Alternative,” respondent Eric Freyfogle jokingly remarked that she had, in the course of the evening, insulted her entire audience. Indeed, listening to Orlie’s paper was at times an uncomfortable experience, as she drove home the myriad ways in which all of our choices in purchasing and consuming food on a daily basis implicate us in a global political and economic regime which many of us claim to deplore.
Professor Orlie calls for us to live our professed environmental values by turning away from the current global food economy towards food production at the local level (or, as she phrases it, the individual “land community”)—whether through individually or cooperatively growing one’s own food or through purchasing from local farmers and co-ops. This turn, Orlie argues, would not only have direct beneficial environmental and social effects, but would extend far beyond the realm of food to encourage greater happiness, self-awareness, sensitivity to our local environments, and humility about our place within those environments.
Orlie’s argument is part of a growing trend, in both academic and activist circles, to emphasize food production and consumption as a key site of political and ecological commitment. Aside from environmental devastation, dislocation of populations, conflicts over resources, economic inequality, erosion of cultural distinctiveness, and public health crises, Orlie argues that the current food economy has also had a pronounced negative impact on the quality of food that we consume. While we have the privilege of consuming, at any time of year, specialty foods from Asia, Africa, Europe, and all points throughout the Americas, we have lost the ability to distinguish the taste of fresh produce (or “real food,” as she calls it), grown in season, in our own communities. Furthermore, the transportation of food also has enormous costs in energy consumption and CO2 emissions, contributing substantially to anthropogenic global warming. Perhaps most disturbing, in Orlie’s view, is the sense that we, like the food we consume, have lost the sense of embededness in a particular place.
The most obvious objection to Orlie’s proposal for a turn to the local is one which was voiced, in a number of different ways, by both Professor Freyfogle and by several members of the audience at Monday’s colloquium--is such a move in effect an abandonment of collective action at the national and global level? Many of the significant barriers to local and cooperative food production result from public policies to subsidize corporate agriculture and shield it from paying for the considerable environmental damage it produces. Moreover, cost and time are all too real considerations for workers who work longer and longer hours for less and less money, and for whom “buying local” is a luxury reserved for the affluent. Can the eco-localism Orlie envisions be practiced on a wide scale before these systemic issues have been addressed?
Orlie argues that this dichotomy between local activity and collective action is a false one; after all, our consumption choices every day perpetually remake and support a global economic system that imperils all life on this planet. If a significant portion of the population of wealthy nations simply chose not to participate, new forms of organization would of necessity emerge. Caring for our local “land communities,” Orlie contends, would be transformative in more far-reaching ways as well, resulting in a wholesale reordering of our “table of values” to restore nature to its proper place of priority.
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posted under
Dean
,
Ryan Jones
,
Sexuality
,
Subculture
by Unit for Criticism
Written by Ryan M. Jones, History
Tim Dean’s Unlimited Intimacy provided a provocative experience on Monday, December 8, one that I was honored to participate in. I read the section of this book with a certain bias—two people I know recently found themselves facing life-changing news due to their sexual experiences, and as such, reading about a subculture that actively cultivates the HIV virus as a form of kinship struck me as particularly pathological. However, I also understood that part of the exercise Dean’s work intended to complete was to challenge an initial response such as mine, one cultivated by two decades of safe-sex education, but also one that is enmeshed in competing ideologies of health and illness, risk and pleasure. I believe that Dean succeeds, although ethical concerns seem to be unresolved with the current form of his book...
The event was headlined by Dean reading from his work, followed by an insightful look the process by which books are reviewed and revised on their trajectory towards publication. This was offered by Prof. Matti Bunzl, who had been one of the reviewers of the text. Bunzl’s primary claim was that a tension existed in Dean’s work between the self-reflexive revelation of his HIV status and at times dismay at activities in the bareback culture (such as the intention infection of others) and his desire to remove discussion of the subculture to a neutral ground where new insights into sexuality and society could be better evaluated, free from kneejerk reactions that were biased against bareback culture. Bunzl asserted Dean could have his cake and eat it too—at once create a neutral space as well as offer his own judgment on the subculture, something that I too found desirable from Dean as author, yet didn’t find in the text. Following Bunzl, Cris Mayo offered a reading of Dean vis-a-vis her work on queer youth, citing similarities in the way that subcultures rewrite more mainstream cultures (such as through appeals to risk and nonnormative behaviors), as well as her concerns on the implications of bareback culture for queer youth already surrounded by a confusing array of sexual information, especially as these youth are entering complex adult cultures partially unaware of the significance of the activities taking place. As for me, I had a number of questions as the final respondent, which I have elaborated on below. I do wish to thank the Unit for inviting me to participate and for helping make my presence in person possible.
Masculinity
On my own second reading of he text, a number of questions remained unresolved for me. First, I found it difficult to believe that bottoms (men who are penetrated) were as actively praised as “heroes” for the subculture and as hypermasculine men as Dean described. This is due in part to the manner in which the bottoms are treated, from parties in which negative bottoms are proffered to tops of indeterminate HIV status in a sort of roulette game.
It seems to me that far from a bonding event, a hierarchy remains that privileges tops over bottoms, whether in terms of power (such as who is dominating who towards a certain desire), in terms of tops being “gift givers” who can bestow HIV on someone else, or in the lack of evidence that after sex, bottoms were affirmed as hypermasculine and that the degredation during sex was just part of the fantasy, rather than an expression of reality.
Versatility
Do people actually inhabit versatile roles, or are they more demarcated. Dean offers that one can be both a gift giver and someone who receives a gift, a top in one moment and a hypermasculine bottom in another. But, like with the unclarity towards the status of bottoms in bareback subculture, I’m left wondering if people in bareback subcultures are truly versatile, or if versatility, a stated goal of many gay rights organizations and a feature of North American gay cultures that at least partially eschewed heteronormative gender identities, is part of the homonormativity which bareback subculture also attempts to undermine.
Health and Risk
If bareback subculture rewrites the manner in which we can conceive of health and risk in that it refuses to link infection with illness, what they do we do with the bodies involved in such a subculture, especially as the subculture is identified as one that worships muscularity and masculinity. Many men who are HIV positive also take testosterone supplements, thereby promoting a stereotypical masculine physique at the gym which translates into a body desirable in ways similar to mainstream culture: big muscles, ripped physique, an appearance of overall health. In this way, bareback subculture seems to ratify mainstream health perspectives (e.g., those of gym culture), even as the appearance of health belies the possibility of infection. Additionally, what of the presence of bareback twinks? Gay porn sites are rife with younger, less muscular men having “raw” sex (think Chaosmen, HotStuds or Bareback Twinks). Two questions then: first, in relation to Cris Mayo’s points on the problems with young queers who grew up with little sex education being initiated into a complex subculture they may not fully grasp the consequences of, what role do twinks have in the bareback culture? Or in another way, what role do those who do not have muscular bodies have in this subculture? Are they more frequently found in the bug-chasing or bottom positions vis a vis more experienced members? Tim Dean did have an interesting response in the presence of emaciated, diseased bodies in bareback porn—this then points to the subculture’s possible glorification of other forms of eroticism, but more evidence would be needed. The second question is this: is the presence of barebacking now in mainstream gay porn—which has long been a bastion of promoting safer-sex practices after AIDS forced the abandonment of the pre-condom romps of the 1970s—an attempt at the normalization of bareback subculture by those in the mainstream who themselves like (whether as fantasy or reality) unprotected sex, but prefer it under a regulated guise, rather than the free-flowing, often anonymous practices of the subculture. That is, under circumstances which do not transmit the disease, such as is required by many of the websites through the constant screening of models for HIV. Is homonormativity striking back, bringing this unruly subculture under its regulatory purview by eroticizing “deviant” behavior inorder to control it and reaffirm the commitment of the mainstream gay community to stopping HIV.
Evidence
As a historian, I wanted more evidence to support Dean’s work. I wanted to see more oral histories or at least evidence why the anecdotes chosen were representative. I wanted, perhaps, more numbers on participants and roles played in the subculture, as well as evidence on how the visual aspects of bareback subculture—the pornographic aspect, for example—actually influence the decisions and desires of the participants. I imagine some of this evidence will be provided in the later chapters we didn’t get to read. Additionally, I was unsure about the significance of etymology to the subculture. Dean makes some provocative, insightful, and elegant readings of the etymology of “gift” and “virus” and how older meanings of these terms related to current realities in the bareback subculture. I wanted to know, however, if the individuals actually were thinking of etymology as they fucked.
Death culture
One of Dean’s most interesting and crucial assertions is that bareback subculture has reconfigured what “life” and “death” are, making death a part of life rather than the opposite of life itself. This occurs in the relexification of HIV as a gift rather than as a death sentence, HIV as a trial of masculinity rather than a stigma, and death as something to be eroticized rather than feared, among other ways. I saw parallels to this relexification in the Death culture of Mexico, a place where death is celebrated yearly on Dia de los Muertos and is seen as a passage in life, rather than life’s end. Anti-AIDS campaigns in Mexico have at times linked themselves to Mexico’s different perspective on death as a means to destigmatize the disease, even as mainstream culture can be significantly phobic about those with the disease. However, if death is seen as part of life rather than its end, then like in bareback culture, death is seen as a consequence of living and as a means of potentially challenging the medicalization of health and life. Moreover, an acceptance of death provides spaces for attaining desires at least partially free from the fear of HIV, as well as a lifestyle that is bittersweet: cognizant of the dangers and risks of sex, but desirous of both the risks and potential consequences as a result of having lived, with death as the freedom from sexual regulation and previous concerns in life.
Condom culture
In contrast, many Latin American nations such as Brazil have also had successful condom campaigns that took unsafe sex—which is the general norm in Latin America—and deroticized it in favor of condom culture. For one Brazilian campaign, it was a matter of honor for fathers and sons to use condoms and get tested, regardless of their sexual proclivities. Using fun commercials and phrases like “strapping on a condom,” safe sex was eroticized in a culture that had seen it as the male right to inseminate any orifice he chose. It is interesting, therefore, that in North America, bareback subculture was the solution to the restrictions of the AIDS epidemic, while condom culture sprouted in Latin America for the same reasons, seeing condoms not as restrictive (as bareback culture did) but liberating from previous notions of sexuality and a conservative backlash against sex during the epidemic.
Conclusion
Overall, a fascinating and provocative study which generated much discussion among professors and students at the Unit’s event. I look forward to further conversations about this work. If you attended…any thoughts?.
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posted under
Medieval
,
Nostalgia
,
Reading
,
Trilling
by Unit for Criticism
Written by Amity Reading, English
Shortly after listening to Renée Trilling’s paper and the provocative discussion it sparked, I found myself trying to very roughly summarize her ideas for an undergraduate in my medieval literature and culture course. I explained as succinctly as I could that Trilling was exploring the aesthetic function of nostalgia both within modern constructions of the medieval and within medieval texts’ constructions of themselves. Although different, both nostalgias perform the work of fantasy: they are a longing for an idealized past, a time when things were different, better, other than they are now. These fantasies of the past provide the present with something it is perceived to lack even though, of course, the ‘past’ that is mourned is imaginary, constructed based on the needs and desires of the now.
“Oh,” said my student. “Isn’t that what you do every day in class? Talk about how great the Anglo-Saxons were and what a disaster the Norman Conquest was?”
I smiled politely.
Of course, my student was not incorrect. It is hard to keep scholarly distance when you love something, but you have to love something to study it as a scholar. Thankfully, we can get ourselves out of this pickle by studying our method of studying. As both a medievalist and a lover of medievalisms, the question of distance, nostalgia, and the medieval is one that I find both extremely interesting on a personal level and also crucial for understanding the intellectual tendencies of medieval scholarship—not too surprising, given my own interests. But Trilling’s talk was relevant to more than just the sub-field of Anglo-Saxon studies, or even medieval studies in general. Her arguments were about our own historical moment as much as they were about the medieval one.
Trilling began her paper with an amusing and incisive summary of popular “medieval” movies, focusing on Michael Curtiz and William Keighley’s The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Robert Zemeckis’s more recent Beowulf (2007). Although ticket and DVD sales reveal that such movies are clearly appealing to modern audiences, Trilling pointed out that they are rarely good cinema and are obviously not concerned with representing a historically accurate or even feasible version of the Middle Ages. How, then, can we begin to explain their popularity? By looking at the cultural work they perform through their nostalgia, separate from their function as mere entertainment.
Robin Hood, for example, is obviously a product of its own historical moment—the economically- and politically-fraught 1930s—more so than it is a representation of twelfth-century England. With its forceful assertion of class equality and its vivid depictions of the plenty of Sherwood Forest, the film takes the desires and concerns of the moment in which it was produced and projects them onto another moment that was perceived as similar-but-better, this one situated vaguely in ‘medieval times.’ It would be an over-statement to say that the medieval setting of the movie is purely accidental—after all, it is the story’s very medievalness that made it appealing and appropriate. But certainly it is the idea of history behind the figure of Robin Hood that is of importance here, not his historicity.
And because medieval movies like Robin Hood are fantasy only loosely disguised as history, it really shouldn’t surprise us that they scoff at accuracy, textual or historical—their whole purpose runs counter to it. In order to function as they do ideologically, they must make use of the ideas of facts, not facts themselves. As Trilling phrased it, they must be and are “a pastiche of stereotypical images,” images that easily and quickly conjure medieval for a modern audience but that do not risk acknowledging the complexities and uncertainties that must necessarily accompany the study of a period’s history and culture. Onto this fabricated and homogenous but nevertheless ‘historical’ background, we are able to fling fantasies and anxieties about our own culture—an act in which we find pleasure despite the discomfort of our longing.
Trilling then turned to the modern and the medieval versions of Beowulf. Beowulf is interesting, Trilling posited, because its fantasies are harder to identify. What are we longing for when we watch the movie Beowulf? And if we ask this question, we must ask another: What were the Anglo-Saxons longing for when they read or heard the poem Beowulf? This question is crucial because the poem itself is thick with nostalgia, as are all Anglo-Saxon texts. The heroic culture of the poem, the culture that modern nostalgia attributes to the Anglo-Saxons, was already a thing of the past even in the late Anglo-Saxon period (ninth- to eleventh-centuries) when Beowulf was committed to manuscript. The poet, in essence, was already engaged in his own nostalgic act: Beowulf is a commemoration of the heroes of old, the pagan ancestors of the poem’s Christian audience. But in its nostalgia, the poem also maintains distance—men like Beowulf were heroes, yes, but they were not Christian, and while they can be judiciously celebrated, they are not meant to be emulated. So, in Beowulf, our longing for the medieval period, concentrated on the idea of Anglo-Saxon heroic culture, collides with the period’s longing for its own past, creating something of a nostalgic mise en abyme.
Trilling finished her paper with a solid reading of the Old English metrical and linguistic features of the poem that contribute to its own sense of ‘pastiche’ and nostalgia. While Beowulf itself ought not to be read as history or as a window into the ‘historical’ heroic culture of the Anglo-Saxons, one of the things the poem does do, and quite fruitfully, is tell us something of what the Anglo-Saxons thought about their own past. The same model can be useful for us: what can our versions of the medieval tell us about our own culture? Trilling concluded with the thought that the violent and sexually explicit Beowulf movie presents us not with the idealized past of Robin Hood, the past as it should have been, but rather the past as we fear it might have been. What does this anxiety say about our own moment, our own project of nostalgia?
Eleonora Stoppino’s response reformulated the questions raised in Trilling’s paper and presented them back to the audience as touch-points—a technique that encouraged a wide range of enthusiastic and productive responses from the audience. What does it mean that movies like Beowulf are produced in America? We didn’t actually experience the medieval period (not in the United States as a country, nor in our own personal lives as people), so we are being nostalgic for a time and place largely unconnected to us. This, too, links us to the object we are romanticizing: Beowulf itself, although an Anglo-Saxon poem written in Old English, was nevertheless a poem about Danish and Geatish heroes set in Scandinavia. In what ways is the idea of Beowulf, both the poem and the movie, related to a desire for origins, a desire for a foundational myth? Is nostalgia also a desire for belonging, community, history? Can we think of personal or individual nostalgia as separate from group nostalgia? Is the aesthetic function of nostalgia altered when it is employed in an epic as opposed to a novel? Why is it that violence seems to be an inherent feature of our modern nostalgic desires? Was the Anglo-Saxon conception/use of nostalgia different from the modern?
And perhaps most strikingly: is nostalgia always backward-looking? That is, could the fantasies and desires and longing intrinsic to nostalgia ever look forward to the non-existent, the unavailable, rather than back? Such questions left the audience thinking about more than just the medieval.
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posted under
Basu
,
Cold Intimacies
,
Eva Illouz
,
nationalism
by Unit for Criticism
Written by Manisha Basu, English
As I began to read Eva Illouz’s 2007 book Cold Intimacies, I realized that this was one of those rare books that spoke around and across the boundaries of distinct regimes of knowledge. Indeed, as it moved deftly from modern selfhood to postmodern role-playing to the ontic self produced in the conjunction between psychology and new media, and again between Durkheim’s sociology, self-help pamphlets, and traditions of romantic love, it drew in, perhaps demanded even, different disciplinary responses. In particular, I think there are two principal conceptual energies that impel Illouz’s book in these different directions for thinking. The first is an emphasis on the fluidity, the malleability, and the infectious intermixing of rigid binaries like public and private, rational and emotional selves, the surprise of love and the regularities of the market.
The other and deliciously contrasting impulse is an emphasis on stasis. For instance, when in talking of “the writing down of emotions,” Illouz says, “The reflexive act of giving names to emotions in order to manage them gives them an ontology, that is, seems to fixate them in reality,” and later again, when she refers to the ontic self arrested in the intersection between psychology and new media, she is bringing to the foreground “the colonization of time and space” that underlies visions of fluidity. With these two conceptual energies as a kind of framing device, I am going to shift Illouz’s analysis to a slightly different domain of analysis—that of colonial and postcolonial studies with particular reference to the South Asian context. I hope that such a shift is not too cavalier on my part, because of course Cold Intimacies gestures toward this movement when it extends its analysis of interpersonal relations to the imagining of nation and in particular, when it draws attention to Benedict Anderson’s emphasis on style in his diagnosis of the nation as imagined community.
Illouz points out how if “Victorian emotional culture had divided men and women through the axis of the public and the private, the twentieth century therapeutic culture slowly eroded and reshuffled those boundaries by making emotional life central to the workplace.” At the same time, Partha Chatterjee ,in an of-quoted articulation, has argued that the colonial situation and the response of nationalists to the critique of Indian tradition had already in the nineteenth century introduced a new flexibility in dichotomies like public/private, inner/outer, and spirituality/ materiality.
With the expansion of modern European powers into the Empires of the Orient, the Western male subject, fashioned on a principle of rational self-conscious individuality was confronted with a problem: How was he to practice slavery, oppression and exploitation of native men in the colonies who, as men, were rational individuals and, hence, equally deserving of freedom and dignity in the public sphere? Given this pressure to legitimize practices of domination, the public and private realms are reconfigured in terms of the colonial projects and their nationalist responses.
This reconfiguration involved the simultaneous effeminization and hypersexualization of Hindu Bengali men by colonial administrators who must naturalize the regularities of British imperial expansion, and by extension of British patriarchy. As a result, British women and Bengali men were both deemed incapable of rational political life because they were plotted on a continuum with one another. In response, at least the early Indian nationalists, many of whom were western educated, accepted the domination of the latter in the spheres of rationality, public works, impersonal bureaucracy, and modern education but maintained their cultural superiority in the ‘inner’ sphere, traditionally the domain of Indian women.
The modern Hindu Bengali woman was a key figure in this discussion—the nationalist text had painted her as the very repository of tradition, untouched by the profanity of the material world. But at the same time, she needed to have some idea of the world outside the home, into which she could even assay as long as it did not taint her core self. It is this latter criterion which loosened the boundaries of the home from the yoke of confines earlier defined by purdah to a more flexible, but nonetheless culturally determinate domain constituted by the differences between socially approved male and female conduct. The essence of woman had to be initially ossified in terms of certain culturally visible spiritual qualities, but once this was so, the domain constituted by differences clearly marked for the Hindu middle-class Bengali woman her "superiority over the Western woman for whom, it was believed education meant only the acquisition of material skills to compete with men in the outside world and hence a loss of feminine (spiritual) virtues” (Chaterjee). In other words, the binaries remained rigid for the western woman—she was a static figure who could be either feminine or masculine, either spiritual or material, either of the inner or of the outer world—whereas the Hindu woman was superior precisely because she was endlessly fungible and able to lubricate the boundaries between private and public spheres.
My point in bringing colonial and nationalist projects into the discussion is not a mere nominalism, but rather I think in some way to follow Illouz’s lead as she attempts to map how the self produced in the nexus between psychology, the language of productivity and the commodification of identity is further transformed and shaped by internet technology. In other words, in a situation where dichotomies like east and west or spirituality and materiality endlessly fold into one another through the neo-colonial traffic in alterity, how do we map popular understandings amidst the Indian middle-class, for instance, that ‘psychology’ is a ‘western’ luxury necessitated by the relentless materiality of that culture? How then do ‘eastern’ practices like yoga combine so seamlessly with ‘western’ psychology to provide a narrative of self-realization and infuse the materiality of the workplace with the spirituality of family and home? In what ways do we begin to theorize the packaged and codified re-entry of these forms into the newly liberalized Indian market when we witness management trainees in a swanky office building in Mumbai meditating after a long day of work, but this time not in response to a loin-cloth wearing ascetic, but rather a theater screen beaming an American CEO leading their meditation from his office in San Francisco. Is the apparent fluidity here undergirded by a stasis in which difference as a function of time and historicity is itself apprehended and arrested?
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posted under
Cold Intimacies
,
Eric Dalle
,
Eva Illouz
by Unit for Criticism
Written by Eric Dalle, Comparative Literature
Professor Illouz began her talk with an overview of her general research project which she describes as “how capitalism transforms the self.” That is an issue I have been struggling with in my own examination of Mainland Chinese literature beginning in the 1980s. This was, therefore, my personal point of departure in addressing some of the issues in Cold Intimacies.
As Mainland China moved away from high Maoism to a no-holds-barred global capitalism, major changes in the narration of the human subject have highlighted the relationship between economic conditions and psychological and emotional characterization. Beginning in the 1980s, writers began to purposefully write against the previously prescribed Maoist protagonist. They accomplished this by characterizing main characters that were often physically weak, maimed, prone to emotional outbursts, or severely mentally deficient.
My research thus far had concentrated on this particular time period of literature, so after reading Cold Intimacies I became curious about the current representation of the self as performed by the media and pop culture. As China has become a global economic competitor, has an emotional lexicon similarly been mobilized to treat the understanding of the self?
The answer is a resounding yes, and Professor Illouz in her justification for focusing her work on American pop culture and media gave some of the reasons why. Illouz stated that there is a global condition that facilitated the importation of the psychological model of business. Although this importation does undergo a cultural filter, it nonetheless is an importation of an emotional model of the self that is intertwined with capitalism. This model of the self had developed in the United States within corporate culture, and it is from here that it has spread worldwide.
In rummaging through recent scholarship on popular culture in China, I found much work that describes importation of a ‘vocabulary of the self’ (though not referring directly to the notion of “emotional capitalism”). I found interesting work on this in work looking at the popularity of women’s lifestyle magazines beginning in the 1990s. Woman’s magazines and pictorials are not new to Chinese popular culture. Similarly after 1949, the Maoist agenda necessitated pictorials and magazines to provide the model of behavior within the new society.
In the 1990s, these magazines drastically changed their overall project. Now, instead of the agrarian modern woman assisting in the work unit, the front cover of these magazines shows a solitary woman, in a business suit, with laptop. Accompanying this portrayal is a new lexicon of emotions geared toward the purpose of personal success through interpersonal relations. For example in 1999 one magazine ran an article called the “Thirty Traits of the Talented Woman” which lists among these traits: sensitive to the feelings of others, but not suspicious, intelligent, sharp-witted, independent, self-respecting, generous.”1
The reason for highlighting some similarities that I have found between the rise of the “homo sentementalis” as outlined in Cold Intimacies and the contemporary Chinese popular culture is not to suggest a completely parallel narrative between different contexts. Rather I see within the examples an intricate relationship between a desire for success and a parallel need for an emotional lexicon to express this striving for this success. This is shown in parts of chapter one which detail the adoption of psychological models by American corporations. If we are to agree that there is a modern appeal to quantitative emotional comprehension within the public/private sectors in which the capitalist subject inhabits, must we also look at the contribution to productivity? Why else, I would ask, should American corporations swiftly incorporate the various permutations of emotional self-reflexivity if in the end there is no perception of a monetary benefit? But what is actually gained and what is at stake when (as it is argued) that the persuasions of therapy, productivity, and feminism provide the rationale for extracting the emotional from the affective and sanitizing it into the “model of communication”?
I believe that the previous questions were addressed by Professor Illouz as she attempted to explain what she saw as the “political” aspect of the concept of emotional capitalism. This discussion ended our round table, but I found it extremely relevant to many questions that still remained for me. Illouz stated that she did not necessarily see a political agenda, but she immediately retracted and stated that there is perhaps one but it comes with many contradictions. What inspired my question is a need to figure out why the psychological model was so readily adopted by American corporations throughout the 20th century.
Finally, as argued in Cold Intimacies, the precondition of communication is the “suspension of one’s emotional entanglements” so that the project of the self might undergo evaluation, bargaining, and quantification. At what point can an individual categorize the self, so that one in the end one does not discriminate between affective emotions and their quantification? This was the final question that I posed at the end of my response, and again Illouz addressed this issue in explaining what she saw as the relationship between affect and emotion. In my reading of the conclusion to the last chapter, there is a separation of ‘emotion’ as a mechanism for categorizing and describing the self and ‘affect’— which was brought up in the following discussion as perhaps a narrative of affect.
In the end, I believe that the resounding consensus of the panel is that Cold Intimacies is a provocative work that resonates in diverse fields and allows us all to respond and reflect upon our own research from a fresh perspective.
1For this part of the presentation, I referred to the article “The New Chinese Woman and Lifestyles Magazines of the Late 1990s” found in Perry Link ed. Popular China: unofficial culture in a globalizing society
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