hosted by the graduate students in the Department of Comparative Literature at
UC Irvine
DISJUNCTURED RESEMBLANCE, INTERSUBJECTIVE DRAG
Respondant: Simon Leung, Studio Art link to faculty profile
Moderator: Chuan Chen
"Dressed up in the Latest Drag: Melancholia, Identification, and Group Formation"
Aisling Aboud, University of California, Irvine
In Society Against the State, Pierre Clastres asks what revolutionary event reduced “primitive” societies to state servitude. Sigmund Freud addresses a similar question in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego: what causes a group of people to subject itself to a leader or leading idea. Unlike Clastres, Freud does not believe that there is a single instance of subjection. Instead, an individual enacts multiple identifications, or submissions to social morality, throughout life. The first occurs when a child melancholically identifies with a parent who is the object of unrequited love (“introjecting” into the ego-ideal the beloved superior’s repressive, censorious demands). Eros binds the individual not only to the sovereign ruler, state, or even leading idea but also to the other members of the group who share the same love. “Character” is lodged in the ego-ideal, which Freud figures as an interior space whose contents are the history of a series of introjected object-choices up to the most recent, perhaps a commander-in-chief in the army or Jesus in the Christian church. The remarkable consequence of “being in love” is that all previous character formation is overturned, according to Freud’s model. The latest identification absolutely consumes the devoted lover and silences all earlier identifications. The same melancholia that binds a group together simultaneously undermines any notion that the group has an essential commonality or foundation. Freud’s description of melancholia’s role in group formation ends up deessentializing and historicizing the very identifications that, in other places, he posits to be primary and originary. Freud’s theory of group psychology undermines both Pierre Clastres’ hypothesis that “primitive” societies, free from political power, existed before a revolutionary event reduced them to a unified State and Freud’s own confident claim in Totem and Taboo that all problems in social psychology can be explained by the single identification of man to his father. Freud’s later writings on melancholia at times sound surprisingly similar to Judith Butler’s arguments in her article “Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory, and Psychoanalytic Discourse” that a primary identification does not organize nor unify identity and that every individual has a personal, contingent, and incoherent history of identifications. In The Ego and the Id, Freud tries to account for cases of multiple personality in which multiple object-identifications cleave and, in turn, seize the reigns of the consciousness. However, Freud’s account of multiple object-identifications does not go far enough in explaining the non-pathological ability of individuals to perform different identities in various contexts. Identification, according to Judith Butler, is not a psychic process, as Freud holds, but a material process that involves first one’s fantasy of a social role and subsequent projection of this fantasy onto the external body. Butler uses the practice of drag to evince the power of the individual to mix and match traditionally incommensurate discursive practices. In parodying culturally sanctioned roles, one reveals him/herself as the fragmented product of multiple subject positions in addition to revealing the illusory, unstable nature of each particular subject position.
"‘You and I’: Surrogate Selves , Yearning Identifications, and the Construction of an Archive in Byun Young-ju’s The Murmuring"
Christine Hong, University of California, Berkeley
At the close of The Murmuring, Byun Young-ju's 1995 documentary on the post-"outing" lives of former "comfort women" (Pacific War military sex slaves), Kang Dok-kyung, a vibrant resident at the House of Sharing, a Buddhist communal home for aging survivors, serenades her visitor, Professor Yun Chong-ok. Singing, "Live together forever, you and I. You and I made a vow when we first met," Kang clasps the hands of the renowned feminist academic from Ewha Women's University tightly in her own. Using the intimate form of "you" (noh) in her crooning address to the woman she typically refers to as "Teacher" (sunsengnim), Kang urges a visibly self-conscious Yun to act the part of lover—all before the camera's recording gaze.
I isolate this moment in the South Korean filmmaker's documentary as a poignant example of yearning at a curious intersection of parallel lives. Two figures on the screen, of the same generation yet of drastically different pasts: one a prominent feminist activist and intellectual and the other an illiterate woman publicly defined by conscription, some fifty years earlier, into military sexual slavery. This paper examines yearning, as an affect of subjective orientation, in the political collaboration between locally situated feminist activists and self-identified "comfort women" survivors. Yearning, expressed in the conditional, "could have been," has functioned as the mode via which deliberative justice has been imagined in "comfort women" activism. Based not upon quietism toward the past, but rather, upon futures that could have been, yearning both suggests the subjective orientation of feminist activist toward survivor and vice versa and implies a profoundly intersubjective political stance. Political praxis, in nineties' transnational feminist campaigns for "comfort women" redress, thus has as its affectively charged premise a mutual counterfactual identification—an uncanny recognition traversing disparate class histories and enabling a shared present between feminist activists and former "comfort women."
Of the grassroots inception of what would emerge a transnational feminist coalition organized around issues of "comfort women" justice, Susan Brownmiller singles out Yun's pioneering significance: "[The] tactical leader, an active feminist, was Professor Yun Chung-Ok of Ewha Women’s University. As a young schoolgirl, Professor Yun herself had narrowly escaped abduction and conscription into the brothels [sic]." This oft-recycled narrative of Yun's near-conscription in her youth has the burnished aspect of hallowed archival fact in accounts of the belated mobilization of Japanese military sexual slavery as a human rights issue. That the fate awaiting thousands of young girls and women, aggressively conscripted from Japan's colonized and invaded territories throughout the Asia-Pacific, was very nearly Yun's moreover suggests a haunting origin to feminist activism on "comfort women" issues. Yet, even as Yun's activism may have been prompted by the specter of an abject future that never came to pass, so too have survivors been motivated, in their quest for justice, by a future that never was. Yang Hyunah writes, "The desire to study, an option that was not available to daughters of poor families, was another important enticement" for young Korean girls and women, lured into sexual slavery by the false promise of work and education abroad. This paper accordingly examines the narrative mode of the counterfactual as particularly suited to the human rights task of imagining otherwise.
"Sister, Brother, Other, Lover: Identification, Desire, and Mourning in the Work of Lyle Ashton Harris"
Jordy Jones, University of California, Irvine
All photographs are photographs of ghosts. The dead return to haunt the living. Light presses a moment of time into chemical emulsion; gazing at the photo’s flat paper surface, we face the past. The past exposed by Polaroid® five minutes ago is no more accessible to us than the century-old carte-de-visite. The temporal chasms separating their pasts from our presents are equally unbridgeable. Our proximity to the one only seems closer. The uncanny sensation we sometimes feel in viewing photographs is more pronounced when the photographic subject is the human subject. We face the other, or an other, not as they are, but as they once were, or as they seemed to be, in that other moment. Portraiture has always had a memorializing function, and while this is most obvious in historical portraits, it is no less true in portraits of the living. And, against all logic, when the subject is not another, but oneself, it is nevertheless another: another self. It is an image of “self” reproduced in effigy, an indexical twin frozen in time and separated in space, an uncanny double, infinitely remote yet claustrophobically proximate, simultaneously too far and far too near.
Lyle Ashton Harris interrogates identity formation and norms of display – cultural, racial, sexual and social. He uses the artificial to address constructed categories and to challenge established stereotypes. In a series of collaborations with other artists, he has created photographic self-portraits in which he and his collaborators engage in various types of gender, racial and class “cross-dressing” in the context of the format of the “family portrait.” In “Sisterhood” he poses with Nigerian/British artist Iké Udé against a backdrop of red, black and green, the colors of the nationalist flag of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. Ashton and Udé are made up androgynously, their features crisply highlighted by a cosmetic overlay that makes no attempt to appear natural. Their clothes, while ostensibly male, are dapper to the point of costume, and refer parodically to the luxurious garb of an imagined leisure class. Their postures are studied, their gestures contraindicative of masculine norms and their positions in relation to one another suggestive of both physical and emotional intimacy. The garish carved gilt chair on which they are posed adds to the impression of fictive luxury.
The sense of disjuncture we experience when viewing this work implicates our notions of what fits into this picture of upper-class familial harmony and what does not. Black faces do not. And Queer bodies most certainly do not. The collective generational traumas of colonialism, racism and homophobic violence are called out in the starkness of this sense of discontinuity. In visually occupying the place of both victim and perpetrator Harris raises psychoanalytical questions including “Why repeat traumatic experiences?” and “How is pain constitutive of psychic life?” In evoking the political through the devices of the Garvey flag and, in the Brotherhood series, the photographic portrait of Black Panther Huey Newton, he raises the questions of possible political and personal agency that tie into necessity of addressing the haunting return of unmourned losses.