Windows to the soul / the subaltern / racial imitation as melancholia

I'm going to copy Sam's list format:

1. Though I find problematic the way many of our readings oppose the “mental” and “physical,” I think appearance is seen as expressing an inner essence; “the eyes are the windows to the soul.” According to the logic of positivism, observing someone closely will reveal the truth about their nature. How does the ability to change one’s appearance complicate this? Since people have more control than ever over their appearances, do we still put as much stock in appearance as reflections of an inner essence? Do we in fact put more stock in it, since people can use appearance alterations to “express themselves”? Do these ideas of a) expressing oneself through appearance-altering technologies and b) the body revealing someone's true nature both stem from the same essentialism? Both seem to reflect the idea that a self inheres in all of us, which is expressed — not created — through physical markers of identity. If, in trying to resist this notion that our appearance says something about identity, we alter appearance to express how we truly identify, aren’t we buying into the very notion we’re resisting?

2. The elephant in the room when reading Zane and Kaw was the question, can the subaltern speak? Who was driving the invention and use of these technologies: Asian women or white men? Are the women Kaw interviews doing what they, as Asian American women, truly desire, or are they buying into an oppressive ideology? It seems to me like both: Ideology creates individual desires, and nobody is exempt from that. Their choices are personal, but the personal is political.

3. Like Pecola wants her eyes to absorb whiteness, Kaw argues that Asian women who get eye surgery want to internalize markers of a white subjectivity from which they have been rejected. Is this a melancholic relationship?

4. Is the question of race-related surgery really one of race, or is it one of gender and beauty? In other words, is Asian women's feeling of inadequacy the result of racism, or the result of not-thin-white-and-blonde-with-huge-lips-and-eyes-and-boobs-and-a-tiny-nose-ism (which does discriminate based on race but also discriminates against women in general)?

On an only slightly related note, large eyes are considered universally attractive in evolutionary psychology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection_in_human_evolution). Does this have racial and/or racist implications?

Bluest Eyes and Lid Surgery

I'm going to do it list style (sorry... sometimes that's the only way I can even begin).

1. It is a battle, defining places in your life where you will resist and also managing places where your happiness has become attached to unhealthy constructions.

2. I love how the film used the pueblo to advance the story of colonization in parallel with the story of the mother's eyelids. I think this comment about the pueblo not even really being constructed by native americans is telling, too. Even after the mother gets surgery, she is still not attaining the real standard. It's still not authentic, because those standards are only truly attainable to a few. But why not make an industry from people's attempts to try. And then, is there any incentive to make women feel good in their bodies?

3. "... you want to look good, but you don't want them [other people] to know how much effort goes into it ." This is part of how we have constructed femininity. Effortless, flawless beauty. The effort is important, because excess work makes you masculine. So it's as if even the work that women must endure to perform feminity is in itself unfeminine. Therefore it must be hidden.

4. You have to be aware of the stories that you tell through your actions and through your words. Stories are powerful, which is a point that Toni Morrison is making through The Bluest Eye. In terms of Two lies, it becomes clear that this is part of this movie's point as well. The story could be simply the story of a woman who gets eyelid surgery. The inclusion of children is crucial to the story, because we get to see firsthand the story this mother is telling through her decisions and words. This is the raw material with which her children will then have to build their own narratives.

5. I love Kaw's point about the body being a place for resistance. So. So. True. The questions raised by The Bluest Eye and this weeks reading force me to question the potential for structural change with simultaneous individual complacency?

Week of 03.16 - Power and Agency or Who is Entitled to Speak (Truth)?

This week’s readings brought up a lot of the tensions that have emerged from discussions around identity politics. While the “double eyelid” surgery requested by Asian American women would seem to suggest, if not symptomatic of, a Western standard of beauty. The trend of such surgeries, as we can all too easily read are implicated within images and constructs of normalizing “beauty,” which we can argue has been constructed around whiteness. Eugenia Kaw’s reading of the medicalization of Asian American women based around racial markers, while sound in some respects, fell into some of the traps of visual politics and agency. While I do think that Kaw’s reading of the medical institution of plastic surgery brings up the kinds of articulations made by “science” (via plastic surgery) that positions non-white subject as physically abnormal or “puffy,” “droopy,” etc., what struck me in her readings was the sense that she “knew better” than the women she interviewed. Even as Kaw expressed the opinions of the interviewees, which denied desires for white- Western beauty, such statements were often followed by personal commentary unable to accept the women’s’ testimonies. The kinds of categorical judgments made by Kaw about these both unenlightened/ unknowing women and the structuring organization “always” at work in oppressive regimes of visual culture centered on white beauty, seemed to fall into a trap that Katherine Zane articulates in “Reflections.” Drawing from Rey Chow’s critique of the ethnic subject’s being called upon to perform in or to legitimate the ‘authentic ethnic subject,” such “failures” of authentication, as Zane argues, essentialize such subjects as either a victim of power (without agency) or as anti-feminist (Zane, 180).  While the course thus far has made it a point to situated a politics of ethnicity within capitalist commodification and visual politics (i.e. Rhodes, Osucha), the move that Zane and Chow make concerning the ways in which ethnic subject are called upon to prove authenticity and are therefore judged by it, seems to be an important line of thought for this course. Going further, what can we then say about Zane’s move to hybridity (especially in light of the dangers of privileging hybridity that David Palumbo-Liu seems to make in “Written on the Face”)?

Monica

Post for Week of 02.28 – Imitation of Life: Whiteness as Performativity

One reading of the film that I would like to pose is the performativity that is also tied to whiteness (in somewhat obvious way I argue). As we have brought up in the course multiple times “passing” positions itself on the performativity of passing for white. However, what is so interesting about the film is that while the struggle of “passing” that faces Sarah Jane is central to the film, there is an equal emphasis on Lora, the performer. What makes Sarah Jane’s position within the film so complicated and troubled is precisely because the constructions of race are drawn upon such rigid definitions (along lines of cultural, class, gender, and sexuality).  Drawing from what other people have characterized as publicity, Lora’s performances become equally tied to constructions of what it is to be a white woman and that such constructions of whiteness are equally performed and constructed.  If whiteness in the film is encouraged or situated within public spaces to be exhibited and performed, what can we make of this? As we theorized in class, it would seem that blackness in the film was tied to domestic or private spaces, whereas whiteness was something that was to be performed and exhibited. Other than the reading of Lora as a performer, Sarah Jane’s dance number where she is “passing” as white also draws upon this relation.  However, what also seems somewhat overlooked in the readings of the film is the character of Susie. In what ways is she also always already performing? She by far seems the most “fake” or constructed within the film, particularly with the banality of her personal life and seemingly forced interest in Steve.

Monica Garcia

This week's post: "Windows to the soul," and beyond

The emphasis on the eyes in this week’s readings falls into line with things I wrote in last week’s post: patients themselves admit to the special significance the eyes have beyond simple racial markers, being the primary representation of a person’s internal mental state: “dull,” “sleepy,” “alert,” &c. The “double eyelid” operation is particularly opportune, whether as “Westernization” or “individuation,” because it is relatively easy and remarkably effective at changing the appearance of one’s character.

I was very much intrigued by the comment made by Kaw that other modifications Asian-American women would consider for the purposes of beauty include things like leg-lengthening, not presently within the scope of medical practice, but certainly within the realm of theoretical possibility (consider what is presently possible with hip replacement, for example). Going forward into the future, are we entering an age in which extreme bodily modification becomes normal? It certainly seems we might, if Bordo’s comments about our “plastic culture” are correct. The holy grail of this sort of editing would be human genetic engineering.

Regardless of why women undergo “double eyelid” surgery, it does conform to white-Western standards of beauty, and white-Western concepts of self identity. In a possible future, race disappears (for those with money) into some pseudo-Greek ideal—not multiracialism but a new human construct of engineered sameness. I think we’d all feel uncomfortable about that, and it re-presents the same problems as “double eyelid” surgery on a larger scale. With the rapid and seemingly ceaseless progress of technology, this seems worth thinking about.

Random: Some disturbuing dialogue that it might be worth reading

I did a quick Google search for the Times cover "The New Face of America," and the second image result let me to this article:

http://www.racialcompact.com/Dutch_e-mail.html

I read through most of it, and found many of the ideas most disturbing, particularly that it advocates in no uncertain terms for the deportation of non-Nordic peoples from Nordic countries, and outlawing racial mixing as of paramount importance for the "survival of the Nordic race," which would otherwise be obliterated by "mongrels" with dominant non-Nordic genes. It privileges the Nordic race as a living entity in itself, with a right to flourish unhindered, which is being subjected to "multiracial genocide." The "one-drop rule" is out in force. Keep in mind this is from the late 90's, so hardly the ancient past.

There is so much twisted logic I'm not sure where to begin, but not the least of its problems is its privileging of the Nordic race over the individual, the survival of "the Nordic people" depends on removing the people's rights to marry whomever they choose. And among other things it contains a variety of bigoted remarks about women in multiracial marriages: "I have met such girls on sevral[sic] occasions (mostly at my job, or at the periphery of my social world), and I have in most cases always felt there was something lacking in their personality, a kind of emptiness I find difficult to describe."

I figure it could be useful for people to know about and look at, at least briefly, because it is certainly a set of beliefs about race we will have to contend with outside of the classroom. (Take a look at the last email at the bottom, and note the words "natural condition": I think we've seen this before!)

consuming lost objects

Having not built a ton of background with Freud, I had my mind blown some when reading Cheng's explanation of melancholia. Her move to apply it to race was confusing in some ways, but tremendously interesting.

Things I was fascinated with:
-The idea of melancholia as an object consumption, and essential in constituting the ego.
-The complex relationship between consumption and becoming the lost object. The intimacy of this process is then so intense that an ego/subject cannot withstand an actual return of a lost object.
-Perhaps most interesting: the treatment of this as a structural foundation of the production of ego.

At first I was intrigued but confused when Cheng made the move to race. I presumed race to be the lost object, but couldn't really make sense of when it was lost or how that would work.
The direction that eventually made the notion possible was her exploration of the United States as founded on constitutional liberties that it has never universally endorsed. Perhaps this strange disavowal then functionally serves as the distance between a self and the return of a lost object. In a way, her formulation the implies the ego of discussion is American identity. This suggests that the very structure of American identity or ego is of racial split, guilt, and trauma. This read endorses ego psychology in a way I have trouble with (or, at the very least, become confused by with respect to American identity). In any case the piece was a great read, both at the theoretical level, and also in exploration of concrete studies like clinical work and children's interactions with dolls.