Another post from Penn Asian Review:

If you’re looking for an old Chinese film to watch, I have four to share with you. On October 6, 2008, I attended an interesting CEAS Humanities Colloquium, entitled “Love and Politics in Chinese Film.” In this fascinating cinema studies presentation, Stanford Professor Ban Wang spoke about four films: Nie er, Zhao chun er yue, Fu rong zheng, and Wo do fu qin mu qin.

Professor Wang notes that, during the time periods for several of these films, the public realm is reserved for nationalism, patriotism, and political activity. A cynical construction of love in the early days of the PRC would suggest that a person has a duty to procreate to expand the party. This mechanical construction would repress the individual in favor of the party. Though early films served propagandistic functions and were subject to strict censorship, the expression of private desire becomes a way to poke holes in the system’s limitations. As love becomes subterranean, confined to the private realm, Prof. Wang suggests that the explosion of restricted passion in reaction becomes a way to access the sublime. The degree to which the represented love can sublimate contrasts from film to film, as the turbulent political climates of different decades react against each other. Among these factors, Prof. Wang also examined the different representations of gender.

In the first section of his talk, entitled “Love and Patriotism,” he showed a clip from Nie er, about the composer of China’s national anthem. To celebrate the young nation, the movie was made in 1959, the decade anniversary of the PRC. Interestingly, the woman leads the way in this scene. With the 1930 invasion of the Japanese in this clip’s background, Nie er and his more mature girlfriend’s political passion about the Communist movement legitimizes the expression of their romantic passion (similarly, in the Spanish-language film El crimen del padre Amaro (2002), a priest and his lover couch their physical passion in terms of religious passion). As the camera panning includes the entire surrounding landscape, the Chinese filmmaker invests the scene with a wider scope that embraces patriotism as a form of sublimation. Prof. Wang links the intertwining of personal and political love here with how personal the Beijing Olympics ceremony feels to the Chinese citizenry. In both cases, the expectation that one should love one’s country as one loves himself invests patriotism with personal stakes.

In the second section, entitled “Love and Idealism” he showed a clip from the 1964 film Zhao chun er yue, which refers to ‘early spring in February.’ It takes place after the second revolution’s failure in the 1920s. As the idea of democracy takes hold, the film rejects old society in favor of sublimating movement into the modern world. Here, we see an image of New Youth, the magazine for the new China. The scene closes as a man, shaking his finger in an instructional manner, stands high above a woman.

In the third section, entitled “Love in Bad Times,” he showed a clip from Fu rong zheng, or ‘hibiscus tower.’ This film is from 1986, a time when the Chinese felt as if released from a bad dream. As the figures in the clip sweep in a labor camp, the love contained in this small space is not sublimating. Nonetheless, as relief from this political mayhem, romantic love is presented as a redeeming form of grace.

In the fourth section, entitled “Love and the schoolmaster,” he showed a clip from Zhang Yimou’s 1999 film Wo de fu qin mu qin, or ‘my father and my mother.’ Relying heavily on primary colors, this clip comes from a time when China has been trying to reclaim older cultural values. This is the demonstrated through the sacred Confucian shrine in the scene. Just as Confucius is loved as a teacher, so is the man in the clip. Love is represented in a sublimating way here because the source of the love is his role as a teacher, not for his own personal subjectivity as a man.

I found this presentation interesting as I often look at representations of romantic love in medieval English and French literature, in which tropes of religious love are mapped onto romantic love (also, the female lover idealized as doctor, teacher, etc.). However, where the analogy in medieval writings is between human love and God, the analogy in these 20th-century Chinese films seems to be between human love and the state. In each, love becomes an external projection of a larger ideal onto another person.

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I wrote a blog entry for Penn Asian Review about a talk given by Dr. Nancy Abelmann at Penn last month. The talk was entitled “Impossible Labor: The ‘Domestication’ of Early Study Abroad.” Dr. Abelmann is a professor of anthropology and women’s studies at University of Illinois. She has studied the role of Korean mothers in “early study abroad” (ESA)- that is, studying abroad before the college level, as has become pervasive among primary and secondary students in Korea.

Dr. Abelmann spoke about the pressure on Korean mothers to take their children abroad to study English, while the fathers stay in Korea to fund the family in America. Dr. Abelmann noted that Korea has historically had a higher rate of early study abroad than other countries. She attributed this phenomenon to Korea’s economic policies, which have embraced globalization to a greater degree than those of other countries. Furthermore, as the 1997 Asian Financial Crash created middle class anxiety about social reproduction, the greater demand for consumer education manifested in ESA’s appeal.

Dr. Abelmann has researched several published memoirs that give mothers instructions on how best to manage their children’s educations in America – the “impossible labor” in the title of her presentation refers to the unattainable standards these instructions set for mothers. As means of socially reproducing the role of the mother, these memoirs made explicit prescriptions for “normative demands of femininity.” While the mother inherits a familiar, straightforward role in managing the child’s education if she stays in Korea, she faces the challenge of navigating an unfamiliar education system once she goes to America. In these memoirs, mothers express anxiety about their children’s loss of Korean culture. Dr. Abelmann also noted the particular strain on transnational subjects who were in America temporarily and had no intent of immigrating here permanently.

While Dr. Abelmann focused on how this changed social expectations of mothers, she also noted that sometimes fathers ended up communicating with their children more often when their children were abroad. Because the fathers worked late hours, they did not see their children much to begin with when the children were still in the country. However, when the children studied abroad, the fathers had to take extra initiative to keep in contact with their children through Skype and other means.

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I got an email about this event through a listserve and I thought it sounded interesting (I guess there is a gender-bending female soldier other than Mulan):

“Wednesday, October 28, 4-6PM, Annenberg 110 (3620 Walnut Street)

“AUTUMN GEM: A Documentary on China’s First Feminist

“AUTUMN GEM explores the extraordinary life of the Chinese revolutionary heroine Qiu Jin (1875-1907). An accomplished writer, women’s rights activist, and leader of a revolutionary army, Qiu Jin boldly challenged traditional gender roles and demanded equal rights and opportunities for women. Compared to a ‘Chinese Joan of Arc,’ she emerged as a national heroine who redefined what it meant to be a woman in early 20th-century China.

“Join us for a free screening and Q-and-A session with filmmakers RaeChang and Adam Tow.

“Sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies
Co-sponsored by Asian Pacific American Heritage Week”

Qin Jin tried to overthrow the Qin Dynasty and was sentenced to death. She is famous in China for having been a martyr.

Posted in Feminism @ Penn, Feminism in the wider world, This is what a feminist looks like | 1 Comment »

I first heard of Rachel Simmons through a profile in Time magazine.

We’ve all heard the stereotype that girls treat each other with greater underhanded cruelty than boys treat each other, à la Mean Girls. Instead of attributing such behavior to biological differences, Rachel Simmons makes the interesting argument that this actually results from girls facing greater social pressure to be nice than boys face. She seems to suggest that because the repressed hostilities need to have expression somewhere, they come out in the manipulative and catty behavior that we recognize.

She writes:

“the pressure girls face to be nice all the time leads them to repress some of their most powerful emotions and deprives them of skills to express those feelings. As a result, a lot of anger gets expressed indirectly, like online or behind someone’s back, earning girls a reputation for being sneaky and cruel. Again, that’s not about girls themselves but about the culture that they’re growing up in.”

While we’ve all noticed that girls can partake in those rituals, I am not sure myself whether I would agree that it is culturally conditioned—or maybe I just never noticed it myself.  In my elementary school (and for me, elementary school in Chicago is 1^st-8^th grade) girls did place indirect social pressure on each other to be nice. I heard my peers say, “Laura is the nicest girl in the class… Michelle is the second-nicest,” as if it were some competition.  It did make it seem like niceness was something to aspire to.

On the other hand, I didn’t interpret it as something girls had to aspire to more than boys, but I guess the boys weren’t standing around trying to compare who was nicest (maybe because women are expected to be more nurturing?).  I suppose teachers may have been complicit in the stereotype that girls are the nice, well-behaved ones, and there’s a greater expectation that boys will misbehave, but those descriptions never seemed prescriptive to me. I am personally wary of the suggestion that the social pressure pre-exists the stereotype, because I never felt that I had to try to be nice BECAUSE I was a girl.  It just seemed like the basic human-being way to behave.  Even if boys were thought of as the troublemakers in class, I didn’t feel as if teachers were more lenient towards them when they misbehaved; I didn’t sense a different standard for behavior between boys and girls. Then again, there are limitations in drawing conclusions from personal anecdotes.

Simmons’ generalization about Asian girls and families in the last paragraph also makes me uncomfortable, especially since I find it untrue of my extended family. Furthermore, Asia is such a large continent that such a sweeping generalization cannot accommodate either the subtle or pronounced cultural variations that occur (besides, when I think of Asia, I think of Uzbekistan). It is not clear to me why she thinks she has the authority to make the statement in the last paragraph either, since on her web site she doesn’t seem to have any specialization in Asia-related matters.   Even if she had restricted her writing to a particular region of Asia, such as East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, or Asia Minor specifically, I think there is still considerable variation within those subregions. I have found that other journalism about psychological or social attributes about Asians also neglects to take into account noteworthy variations in Asian cultures.

However, I was still curious about her other writings, so I decided to look up her book, Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls.  She writes about girls’ underhanded forms of aggression towards each other, the result of societal pressure to be “nice.” I don’t find the prose or the content especially engaging, but I thought these lines were interesting:

“Annie was so afraid of isolation that tolerating abuse seemed like her only option” (61).

“Annie tried to please her friend at any cost, wanting only to save the relationship. Her unremitting focus on staying friends with Samantha allowed abuse to take over the relationship” (61).

“With meanness so intermixed with the relationship, Annie lost the capacity to tell the difference” (61).

Simmons suggests that girls are under a lot of pressure to be nice, regardless of how they are treated.  Is the relationship she describes above true of girls? If so, are girls afraid of isolation because it is intrinsically unpleasant, or because they feel social pressure not to be isolated? Is the stigma of isolation worse than the intrinsic negative effects? Which is the greater motivating factor that keeps girls in abusive friendships with each other?

Posted in This is what a feminist looks like | No Comments »