Schedule and Tentative Panels

Schedule - March 13, 2010

14th Floor, John P. Robarts Library, RL14087
University of Toronto
130 St. George Street
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M5S 3H1

Time
9:15 – 9:45	Registration and Breakfast
9:45 - 10:00	Welcome Greeting
10:00 – 11:00	Keynote Speech from Professor LaMarre with Q&A
11:15 – 12:45	Panels 1 to 3
12:45 – 2:00	Lunch
2:00 – 4:00	Panels 4 to 6
4:00 – 4:15	Break
4:15 – 6:15	Panels 7 to 9
6:15 – 7:30	Closing Remarks, dinner
7:30	Onwards Dinner

Panels (subject to change)

Panel 1: Metamorphosis, Narration & Voice: the power of women’s desire in contemporary Japanese texts

♦ Panel abstract: “Metamorphosis, Narration and Voice: The Power of Women’s Desire in Contemporary Japanese Texts.”

♦ “‘Where’s the Fun in a Dry Kiss?’: Suspended Desire in Yamada Eimi’s ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ and ‘Fiesta.’”

♦ “The Metamorphosis of Female Desire: Contemporary Japanese Imaginings of The Little Mermaid”

♦ “The Power of Female Desire/Narration in Murakami Haruki’s Norwegian Wood”

Panel 2: Literary and Cinematic mediations of desire in Hong Kong

♦ The Charm of “the Other” in Colonial Hong Kong: Eileen Chang’s Narrative of Desire and Chinese National Identity

♦ Distance and Desire in Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express and Happy Together

♦ Revealing Reunions in 1980s Hong Kong: Hsiao Sa’s “My Relatives in Hong Kong” and Li Li’s “Spring Hope”

Panel 3: Premodern Philosophies of Desire

♦ Nishkama: Exploring the Viability of Desirelessness

♦ Early Confucian Conception of Desire

♦ “The desire of the spirit moves”: Zhuangzi and Aristotle on craft and happiness

Panel 4: Mobilizing and Circumscribing Desire in the Literatures of Japanese Colony

♦ Shock and the City: Soseki and the Intellectualization of Modern Life

♦ The Empire of Hygiene—The Hygienic Discourse in early 20th century Japan

♦ The People Haunted by Fingerprints in Pre-war Japan

♦ Women and the Colonial City of Korea: Murayama Tomoyoshi’sDancheong

Panel 5: Desire in Premodern Chinese Cultural History

♦ Neo-Confucians, Local Families, and Remarriages in Southern Song China, 1127-1279

♦ Dress code - the desire for ethnic identity in the Qing Dynasty

♦ Imperial Fetishism in an Early Modern Chinese Novel

Panel 6: Visual and Material Projections and Appropriations

♦ "American Images of Japan in 1950s Popular Culture"

♦ (Art Deco in Hong Kong and Shanghai)

♦ An Epistemological Aporia: Reading Xu Bing’s tianshu Through the Four Discourses of Jacques Lacan

♦ "Tang Xianzu, let me learn from you": Appropriation and Quotation in Wang Li Hong's Music Videos.

Panel 7: National Territoriality, National Subjectivity

♦ The Language of Civilisation: Identity and Desire in the Meiji Era Japanese Language Reform Debates

♦ The Total Body and Naesŏn Ilch’e: The Japanese Wartime Films in Late Colonial Kore

♦ The Desire for Territory in Northeast Asia

♦ The Construction of the Chinese Museum-Going Subject

Panel 8

♦ Ozu Yasujirô's Cinema, the limits of Cinema and the Limits of Desire

♦ <Hiroshima Mon Amour>

♦ The Resistance of Non-Resistance: On The Meaning and Possibility of Ethics Within Chinese Capitalism

♦ The Destruction of Pleasure as a Radical Weapon: Spectatorship and the Japanese Pink Film

Panel 9: Regulations of Genders and Sexualities

♦ (Yi Ok)

♦ Making ‘Opposite-sex’ Love: Representational Conflict and the Construction of Normative Desire in Linglong Women’s Pictorial Magazine, 1931-1937

♦ Three Types of Social Authority over Homosexuality in Contemporary China

♦ Interracial Sexual Preferences Involving East-Asians: Present Depictions, Future Possibilities

 

• MORNING
  Panel 1: Metamorphosis, Narration & Voice: the power of women’s desire in contemporary Japanese texts
  Emerald King
  Lucy Fraser
  Kayo Takeuchi
     

  Panel abstract: “Metamorphosis, Narration and Voice: The Power of Women’s Desire in Contemporary Japanese Texts.”
  Organiser: Lucy Fraser, University of Queensland.

  The works of Murakami Haruki, Yamada Eimi, and Studio Ghibli’s Miyazaki Hayao are often viewed—in their home country as well as abroad—as representative contemporary Japanese texts. In this panel we have chosen to discuss key works from Japan that are translated into multiple different languages and marketed overseas. It is important, then, to interrogate their portrayals of gender; to examine how women in Japan are situated by these creators, whose works are consumed and discussed in East Asia as well as throughout a broader global community.
  Desire, and its power to motivate action and change, is an ideal theme to address these issues. These papers move beyond condemnations of women as objects of desire and analyse female figures as desiring subjects. They deal with a range of desires, from “controversial” or taboo sexualities in young and adult women, to a fantastical child’s demand for a new physical shape. We read the subjectivities of these female figures in their complex intersections with gender and desire in both male- and female-authored texts.
  The power of desire for these female characters is the driving force that underpins their narratives, demanding our attention and calling for critical interpretations. These papers explore the textual moments women/girls give voice to their desires, the ways in which these desires are narrated, and the different ways desires transform their subjects and the worlds around them.
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   “ ‘Where’s the Fun in a Dry Kiss?’: Suspended Desire in Yamada Eimi’s ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ and ‘Fiesta.’”
  Emerald King
  University of Tasmania, Australia.

  Yamada Eimi is widely considered the pioneer of a ‘generation of Japanese women novelists noted for their frank, sexually explicit portrayals of women’s lives,’¹ whose work is synonymous with desire: her pages drip with vivid depictions of voluptuous flesh, violent embraces, over-indulgence and heady sex scenes. Her female protagonists are well known for their love of soul music and their obsession, bordering on fetish, for black lovers. These lovers are invariably characterised equally by their skin colour as their infinite sexual prowess, their tendency towards violence and excessive drinking, a ravenous appetite (for all things), and a childlike quality that renders them incapable of clear verbal articulation or rational thought.²
  ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ (‘Otoko ga onna wo aisuru toki’ 1987) and ‘Fiesta’ (‘Fuiesta’ 2001) explore the desire of two different women as perceived by male figures – the protagonist’s lover Willy Roy and the male gendered personification of Desire respectively. These two short stories are of note as, somewhat unusually for a Yamada narrative, they depict thwarted desires that cannot be achieved until certain obstacles (or people) are removed. This paper will explore what this suspended desire signifies in the world of a Yamada Amy text. Furthermore, it will engage with the idea of sexual desire as the all powerful motivational force behind the women protagonists’ actions throughout both narratives: what are the results, if any, of the pursuit of desire? How does the attainment of these desires affect the characters and their surroundings?

  ¹ Cathy Layne, ‘Editor’s notes “Amy Yamada,”’ in Cathy Layne ed., Inside and other short Fiction: Japanese Women by Japanese Women. Kodansha, Tokyo, 2006 (Tokyo, 2004), p.170.

  ² Richard Okada, “Positioning the Subject Globally: a Reading of Yamada Eimi” in “Us-Japan Women’s Journal – English Supplement,” 9:1995, p.117

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  “The Metamorphosis of Female Desire: Contemporary Japanese Imaginings of The Little Mermaid”
  Lucy Fraser
  University of Queensland, Australia.

  Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 fairy tale The Little Mermaid was translated into Japanese in 1904, and remains popular today. The story is driven by the mermaid’s desire: she aspires to an eternal soul and marriage with a prince. The pain and tragedy she endures is often read as the author’s punishing of female desire.
  This paper examines two contemporary Japanese adaptations of the story. I explore the changing portrayals of the mermaid’s desire, as well as the relationship of this desire to the mermaid’s bodily metamorphoses. The texts—Watanabe Peko’s two short manga episodes that frame a collection titled Tales of Metamorphosis, and the celebrated Miyazaki Hayao’s most recent animated film, Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea—render these metamorphoses in both image and language.
  Both the creators of these contemporary mermaid stories eschew Andersen’s heavy Christian overtones, making their adaptations more palatable for contemporary Japanese audiences. Interestingly, Andersen’s mermaid’s longing for an eternal soul—assured survival and escape from death as annihilation—is a more selfish and therefore arguably more subversive desire in a female figure. When this desire is removed from these texts we are left only with her more socially acceptable, self-sacrificing heterosexual desire. 
  This latter desire does have the power to change individual bodies and the world around them. In Watanabe’s work, although the pain of the mermaid’s metamorphosis is eliminated by modern technology and she wins the prince she desires, the tone of the piece is ambivalent. Miyazaki’s depiction implies both an awe and unease with the power of female desire. These Japanese reworkings of a canonical Western fairy tale reflect contemporary discourses around the power of women’s desire, its metamorphosis and its sameness over great cultural, geographical, and temporal distances.
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   “The Power of Female Desire/Narration in Murakami Haruki’s Norwegian Wood”
  Kayo Takeuchi
  Ochanomizu University, Japan.

  Murakami Haruki’s Norwegian Wood (1987) is the ‘love story’ that triggered his explosive popularity in Japan. When it was first published, however, the novel was not critically well-received and it has continually fared poorly under feministic scrutiny. Critics have attacked the homosocial desire evident between the protagonist Watanabe and his male friends, which is narrated paternalistically and sentimentally in Watanabe’s first-person recollections. There has also been a backlash against the misogyny and homophobia of the text as it promotes the continued closeting of male desire.
  Looking at the storyline, the book appears to be an esoteric love story in which Watanabe devotes his true love to Naoko, who symbolises “death,” before discovering his own significance in life through Midori, who is associated with “life.” In actuality, Watanabe shares his women as if they were goods with his male friends Kizuki and Nagasawa. Furthermore, misogyny is clearly apparent in the ‘confession’ Watanabe hears from Reiko, Naoko’s roommate in the sanatorium: Reiko confesses her lesbian experience as if it were a dirty transgression. As a result of these and other instances in the text, Murakami has been castigated for his misogyny and homophobia. This begs the question: are all the women in Norwegian Wood really represented in this way? Is lesbian desire completely rejected?
  This paper focuses on Reiko’s narration as opposed to Watanabe’s. I argue that her narrative voice has an important role as she is the one who informs Watanabe of the circumstances surrounding Naoko’s suicide; she also encourages his love for Midori. However, can we really trust the narration of a sanatorium “patient?” How can we re-read this work if doubt is cast on the veracity of her narration? In my reading, I restore the power of female desire in Reiko’s narration and move beyond earlier feminist readings of the text.
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• MORNING
  Panel 2: Literary and Cinematic mediations of desire in Hong Kong
  Bonnie Hsueh
  Xi Cheng
  Jennifer Lau
  
  

  The Charm of “the Other” in Colonial Hong Kong: Eileen Chang’s Narrative of Desire and Chinese National Identity
  Bonnie Hsueh
  University of Michigan

  Under the British colonial and imperialist forces during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Hong Kong, situated on China’s south coast, had become a booming commercial port of hybridity in which merchants, missionaries, colonial officials, workers and professionals flocked to form a diverse community of Chinese residents and multinational expatriates from Europe, Eurasia, and South and Southeast Asia. Colonial Hong Kong, served as an intersection of nationalism, imperialism and colonialism, thus underwent substantial social transformations that led to the reconstitution of national identity and the discussion of “Chinese-ness and “Other-ness.”
  This intercultural and multicultural social landscape was observed and captured by renowned Chinese woman writer Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing, 1920-1995), a native Shanghainese who had briefly lived in Hong Kong till the Japanese occupation in 1941. In her two short stories about Hong Kong, Love in a Fallen City (1944) and Aloeswood Incense (1944), the protagonists are both female Shanghainese and are attracted by non-native Chinese men—one is overseas Chinese and the other Eurasian respectively. What is special about these two ‘exotic’ male characters? Does their attractiveness to Chinese women have to do with their foreign background? This paper, while explicating the charms of the foreign male antagonists, will examine the issues of national identity, colonialism, migration and transnationalism, cultural authenticity, and gender and sexuality, in relation to the construction of desire. In Chang’s illuminating literary narrative, colonial Hong Kong during the first half of the twentieth century represented a space of significance that challenged Chinese nationalism and availed expand human imagination and understanding of humanity and desire through meaningful cultural interactions between China and the West.
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  Distance and Desire in Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express and Happy Together
  Name: Xi Cheng
  University of Western Ontario

  Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express begins with a chasing scene in a crowed, tense urban environment. Here space is calculated in centimeters, and people merely pass by without interpenetrating each other’s lives. Chungking Express is a film about submerged passion and repressed desire in small spaces.The protagonists live in tiny apartments and hotel rooms; work in congested buildings, restaurants, and markets. In such a cramped world, distance is created deliberately in order for desire to detach itself from the messiness of passionate love. Wong’s another film, Happy Together, however, launches straight into a lovemaking scene as the film opens, presenting sexual desire in its most intimacy. But this scene is one-off, and the two characters Yiu-fai and Bo-wing seem further and further apart in the course of the film, implying that a lack of distance, or being too close, invariably leads to disagreement and disillusionment. This paper will evoke the relations between distance and desire in the two films that enable a re-reading of the manner in which the impossibility of contact challenges the very idea of touch and sensation. The two films also mocks the way Hong Kong is desired as an exotic place in a distanced Western popular imagination. In Chungking Express exotic locales, places like the derelict, crime-infested Chungking Mansion and ubiquitous chaotic street market, are shown to coexist with the modern, Westernized world of urban high-rises, international airport, subways, and so on. Moreover, present Buenos Aires as an underdeveloped foreign land for Chinese to visit, Happy Together signals a turning point in Hong Kong cinema where Chinese concerns and perceptions can be explored in a non-Chinese subaltern space.
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  Revealing Reunions in 1980s Hong Kong: Hsiao Sa’s  “My Relatives in Hong Kong”  and Li Li’s “Spring Hope”
  University of Toronto
  

  After the Communist victory on the Mainland China in the 1940s, many soldiers and civilians fled to Taiwan.  Their relocation was understood as temporary, however this myth was soon shattered.  After almost forty years of separation, the Chinese diaspora on the small island were finally allowed to visit their relatives in Hong Kong.  The two narratives examined in this paper are significant to revealing the importance of Hong Kong and the implications tied to these stories of desired reunions. 
  Using Hsiao Sa’s “My Relatives in Hong Kong”(1986) and Li Li’s “Spring Hope” (1986) as primary texts, I will examine the journeys to Hong Kong taken by Hsiao’s narrator and Li’s protagonists for reunification with family. These two texts will be studied in light of Susan Friedman’s notion which focuses on space in narrative – a “spatialized approach to narrative poetics” (149).  Her approach places significance on “travel, movement, setting, cultural difference, and intercultural contact zones for the generation of story” (149). The importance of Hong Kong as a critical space due to its desirable geographical and political position will be depicted.  The desire to redeem oneself through reunion can be found within the abundance of reunion narratives; this paper seeks to examine two samples from this genre in Taiwanese literature.
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• MORNING
  Panel 3: Premodern Philosophies of Desire
  Renee Fuchs
  Doil Kim
  David Machek
  
  

  Nishkama: Exploring the Viability of Desirelessness
  Renee Fuchs
  Concordia University

  Is desire something to which we should succumb or resist? The answer to this question depends on the framework (i.e. cultural, religious) in which one finds oneself. Vedic tradition has different interpretations as to how one should manage desires and to what degree desires should be restrained. Some Upanishads explain that the samnyasin (renouncer) should do his best to suspend all action in order to achieve complete cessation of desire, which is required if one is to attain moksa (freedom from bondage). Conversely, the popular Kamasutra insists that sexual desire and bodily pleasure are not a move away from, but a part of ultimate reality. Another important and novel interpretation of how one should manage desire presents itself in the Bhagavadgita, which will be the focal point of this paper.
  I will outline a few of the major interpretations of desire, desirelessness and its connection with moksa (freedom from bondage) within Vedic tradition. I will argue why desire should be understood as an inextricable part of action which leads me to finally conclude that action is inevitable and cannot be performed without some degree of desire. This argument is twofold: 1) There is an important distinction that needs to be made between what I will call noble and base desires. 2) The Bhagavadgita does not explicitly address the issue of whether or not noble desires (that hold no concern for the fruits of one’s action) still count as desire at all. Moksa requires either freedom from action or freedom from desire. It is through my account of how desire and action are always intertwined that rejection of desireless action is made possible.
  The Bhagavadgita presents us with the appealing notion that action can be performed without desire. This paper explores why a complete and sustained freedom from either action or desire is dubious.
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  Early Confucian Conception of Desire
  Doil Kim
  University of Toronto
  

  In this paper, I will investigate the conception of desire in the context of early Confucian moral psychology. Early Confucian thinkers, including Xunzi, used a distinctive cluster of terms to describe and understand human mental phenomena, particularly, those involved in human interactions with the external world. Such mental phenomena cover various modes of responsiveness to the external world, such as hao wu, yu, xǐ nu āi le, and qīn zūn. I will discern the commonalities and differences of these modes and attempt to grasp early Chinese conception of desire in relation to hao, wu and yu. Building on this basic understanding of desire in early Chinese thought, I will further look into how Xunzi understood hao, wu and yu in his discussion of lǐ. Lǐ is one of key terms in early Confucian thought, and it roughly refers to ethically-justified formal rules of conduct. Early Confucians believed that, under the guidance of lǐ, one should transform one’s initial mental constitution and cultivate an ideal personality in harmony with the community. I will particularly explore Xunzi’s idea that the aim of following lǐ is to bring order to one’s various modes of responsiveness,e.g., by controlling one’s naturally unlimited desire, viz., hao or yu, and,simultaneously, by cultivating one’s natural capacity to respect for other people, viz., zūn. Thus, this paper will elucidate not just how desire was conceived of in early China, but also how it figures in early Confucian ethical discussions.
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  “The desire of the spirit moves”: Zhuangzi and Aristotle on craft and happiness
  David Machek
  University of Toronto

  In Zhuangzi 莊子, the motif of craftsman is both frequent and ambiguous. On one hand, craftsmen are taken to represent the narrow-minded human tendency to impose purposes on things while disregarding and harming their intrinsic nature.  On the other hand, some perfect craftsmen are embodiments of sagehood. The most famous example of the latter case is the parable about Cook Ding cutting up an ox from the third chapter, Yang sheng zhu 養生主. His craft is perfect because it respects the natural structure of the ox. But does it mean that he has discarded his own individual purpose to cut up an ox?  To answer this question, I will attempt an interpretation of this passage in the light of Aristotle's theory of action. In the sixth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, he advances the famous distinction between two kinds of action, poiēsis (making) and praxis (acting), and between two corresponding excellences, technē(craft) and phronēsis (practical wisdom). While poiēsis (the process of building)is a means to attain a goal (to build a house),praxis is done for the sake of itself (such as an activity that makes one happy). The activity of Cook Ding is both poiēsis and praxis: it is an action using the perfect technēto achieve a purpose, but as an activity that is in accord with heaven, it is also an actual realization of good life and thus a goal in itself. This dichotomy is captured when Ding describes the creative process as “desire of the spirit“ (shen yu 神欲). Any desire is a drive towards what has not yet been accomplished; but this is not only an ordinary desire, but the desire of the spirit which is a heavenly agent. Ding does not have to suppress his individual purposivity because he understands that his own desires are just a part of the natural transformations of things. This understanding would not be possible within the framework of the Aristotelian metaphysics where the realm of the distinctively human action is on a different ontological level than the realm of “heavenly spheres“.    
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• EARLY AFTERNOON
  Panel 4: Mobilizing and Circumscribing Desire in the Literatures of Japanese Colonial Modernity
  Nicole Go
  Wang Jing
  Inoue Kishô
  Han Yeonsun
  
  

  Shock and the City: Soseki and the Intellectualization of Modern Life
  Nicole Go
  University of Toronto
  

  Walter Benjamin wrote of insulating oneself against the “shock” of modernity in a rapidly urbanizing landscape: the modern person is protected from the trauma of excessive stimuli by developing a “heightened degree of consciousness” that turns the intellect into the dominant mode of perception. Modernity thus creates what Georg Simmel called the “mental life” in the big city, with its citizens adopting a “blasé” attitude in order to desensitize themselves against the overwhelming metropolis. Natsume Soseki, who famously “lamented the sad fact” of Japan’s modernization during the Meiji period, expressed his ambivalence towards the intellectualization of modern life in his novel, Sanshiro. In privileging visuality over other bodily senses, he conflates the visual sense with intellect; meanwhile, senses of smell, touch and hearing become associated with confusion, desire, and even repulsion. The safety and distance provided by mental life renders the protagonist a “stray sheep”:  unable to decisively pursue his desires, Sanshiro is doomed to wallow in his own ineffectiveness.
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  The Empire of Hygiene—The Hygienic Discourse in early 20th century Japan 
  Jing Wang
  University of Toronto

  This paper is an effort to analyze modern hygiene in the early 20th century Japan by drawing on colonial and postcolonial theories to reveal the links between such seemingly mundane hygienic issues with Japan’s empire building. Meanwhile, through transgressing and supplementing the standard categories of the naturalized notions of hygiene, the analysis of imperial hygiene could as well enable the context to complicate the narrative logic of modernization. For a long time, representations of hygiene had been read as the mundane disciplines that were both taken for granted and advocated in various works. By the beginning of the 20th century, the concept of modern hygiene was widely propagated, and the power of hygienist thought and practices had permeated far beyond the boundaries of the medical profession and complicit with forms of domination and exclusion in the project of Japan’s empire building. Modern hygienists’ ideas resonate in literary texts written by such figures as Mori Ogai and Tanizaki Jun’ichiro which contributed in one way or another to certain forms of desire and subjectivity that are integral to nation, colony, or empire. Following the example set decades ago by scholars like Foucault, new visions of science have threatened to undermine the legitimacy of modern hygiene. With the roots of many hygienic methods being revealed as arbitrary and contingent, it facilitates us to undertake a new reading of texts related to hygienic practices to show collaborations between the norms of modern hygiene and the constructions of Japanese identity. Furthermore, the modern hygiene is not only a product appeared to satisfy necessities or desires as it claimed, but is an influential power which would result into a dominant form of representation of the “modern” by creating desires and new tastes. Therefore, the problematization the self-legitimate modern hygiene also helps to challenge the universality of a certain type of modernity.
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  The People Haunted by Fingerprints in Pre-war Japan
  Inoue Kisho
  Hokkaido University
  

  As can be seen in recent years with the requirement for fingerprint registration upon entry into the United States or Japan, the use of fingerprints as a technology of individual identification remains effective even today. Originally invented and introduced in England in the nineteenth century, it was in 1908 that this technology of identification came to be officially introduced in Japan. Through the mass media – newspapers, magazines, and books – the effectiveness of this technology came to be recognized by the public. As such, when the discourse on fingerprinting is gathered, what can be seen is an obsession, a desire for the fingerprint as the details of the body to the extent that they might be called “haunted.” This obsession or desire for the fingerprint was sustained by ideologies and apparatuses of power of the period. In this paper, I will begin with a discussion of the discourse on fingerprinting in pre-war Japan and the social forms they organize, and then show what desires are incorporated therein. Moreover, addressing not the desire for the fingerprint but rather the desire immanent to the fingerprint, I will take up several detective fictions of the period as cases in point, specifically the work of Sato Haruo, Kosakai Fuboku, and Koga Saburo. While a scene in Koga’s “Taionkei satsujin jiken” highlights the key features of fingerprints, Kosakai’s “Shazai” and Sato’s “Fingerprint” show how through these very features, the fingerprint becomes excessive. Focusing on these aspects of these works, I will then examine the desire immanent to the fingerprint.
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  Women and the Colonial City of Korea:  Murayama Tomoyoshi’sDancheong
  Han Yeonson
  Hokkaido University
  

  Murayama Tomoyoshi is well known as a person who was active in various fields of art, as a leading figure in the avant-garde, as a director of proletarian drama, and as a worker in the stage establishment. Consequently, much of the studies about him focus on these artistic activities, especially the field of fine arts in 1920s. But his other activities are not as often considered. Yet, Murayama was also active in the field of literature, yet discussions of his writing are lacking, and research on his literature tends to efface the fact that he is closely linked with the colonial period of Korea. Among the works of Murayama’s one that is interesting for its articulation of his political positions is Dancheong, which was first published in Chuô-Kôron in 1939. Set in the colonial city　of Keijô (Korean: Gyeong-seong) in 1930s, the story takes place against the backdrop of the cultural exchange between Japanese and Korea artists and addresses trends of the times such as “Joseon (old Korea) Boom” which is inseparable from the popularization of Orientalism in the field of Japanese literature at the time. However, this fiction also illustrates an opposed tendency to the Japanese literary Orientalism vis-a-vis colonial Korea, manifesting on the level of contradictions in the dual language of the text. This study aims to recognize the features of colonial modernity in the 1930s Korea, and the remark on the conflicts and contradiction between Japan and Korea as the colony. Concretely, I will examine this work as a kind of performance that desires to escape from politics by connecting with politics at the same time.
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• EARLY AFTERNOON
  Panel 5: Desire in Premodern Chinese Cultural History
  Yongguang Hu
  Yan Yan
  Josephine Yuanfei Wang
  
  

  Neo-Confucians, Local Families, and Remarriages in Southern Song China, 1127-1279
  Yongguang Hu
  Stste University of New York, Binghamton

  This paper utilizes several anomaly accounts (biji) and tomb inscriptions to examine the issue of remarriages in the Southern Song period (1127-1279). It argues that, unlike the traditional interpretations of gender inequality as seen in many Neo-Confucian scholars’ writings, the reality of Song women’s lives varies greatly. In general, the status of Song wives was relatively high and comparable to husbands in terms of their marriage rights. This is proved by the neutral style of writings on second marriages of both men and women in local documents. In addition, such accounts demonstrate that gender was not defined as biological binaries in imperial China, but was perceived in the roles individuals played in the family or kinship. There was no general description of women’s status in the Song, but multiple possibilities shaped by their roles in the family, their interactions with other family members, their cultural backgrounds, local practice, and local popular religions.
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  Dress code - the desire for ethnic identity in the Qing Dynasty
  Yan Yan
  University of Arizona

  Dressed to Rule is a unique yet interesting way to explore of changes of dress with regards to political impacts as well as Manchu culture and how they preserved their identity in a society dominated by majority Han. In this paper, I posed such questions on aspects of the dress code and ethnic identity in the Qing dynasty, such as: Where is political symptom displayed in the evolution process of dressing? How had the dress code been utilized by political desires of the Manchu rulers? Is there any relation between ethnic identity of Manchu and the decrees of dress code? In answering these questions, I investigate those issues mainly by focusing on two aspects of dress code in Qing dynasty—the qipao (Cheongsam) and the official court attire—the Mang robe. In Qing dynasty, dress not only reflected the conservative aesthetic sense of several-thousand-year feudal ethics, but also the evolution of dress under a certain social transformation. Moreover, I also specifically explore how the dress code in Qing dynasty evolved due to the political turmoil and how they expressed the cultural and political desire of the Manchu rulers. Begins by briefly tracing the history of the Manchu people, I investigate the construction of Manchu identity since the establishment of Qing, and the evolution of court dress since the Manchu’s conquest of China. Originally, the Manchu were nomadic horsemen, whose garments had to function in that context, which was remarkably different from that of China’s educated, urban elites. Politically, the Manchu implemented a system of rank badges for all officials; the Qing embraced the Confucian idea that “court apparel defined and sustained the elite who were responsible for good government on earth and harmony in heaven.” (John E. Vollmer, 23) Such notion revealed the importance of Qing court dress in the rulership and hierarchical relations. I separated this paper into five aspects, 1) The social turbulent transition, 2) Dress and rulership, 3) Dress as symbol of legitimate power and a marker of culture—the court attire and the Mang Robe, 4) The function of dress: divided two distinctive social groups—Manchu vs. Han and lastly 5) Balance between maintaining Manchu identity and appeal of Confucian ideology. Dress served as a political tool for the rulers of the Qing Dynasty, which emphasized the characteristics of nomadic dress should be preserved, including horsehoof cuffs, and a curved front overlap on the coats. No doubt, in the meanwhile Manchu identity is also defined and maintained.
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  Imperial Fetishism in an Early Modern Chinese Novel
  Josephine Yuanfei Wang
  University of Pennsylvania/Yale University

  The Chinese novel Sanbao taijian xiyangji tongsu yanyi dated most likely to 1568 is a literary and imaginary assimilation of the historical event of Admiral Zheng He’s maritime exploration into the Indian Ocean. Historical evidences about the legend abound in the novel, it is constructed with a concatenation of magical battles between the eunuch’s troupe and the indigenous people. Fetishism is shown through a foreign queen's attempted affair with the eunuch, his Muslim origin in Mecca, the indigenous people's obsession with magical objects, and the eunuch's fascination with exotic tributes.  Such fetishism in the overseas marginal space resonates with the geopolitically centered world of Jin Ping Mei in which money works magic in human and gender relationships. The question of this paper is to ask to what extent the mercantile and sexualized idea of things can configure an individualistic perspective of the Chinese empire and the world beyond. This paper will incorporate economic history, art history, aesthetics, and Bakhtinism to explore the hetero-dimensions of the world represented in the sixteenth-century Chinese fiction.
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• EARLY AFTERNOON
  Panel 6: Visual and Material Projections and Appropriations
  Mark Beauchamp
  Prudence Leung Kwok Lau
  James Poborsa
  
  

  "American Images of Japan in 1950s Popular Culture"
  Mark Beauchamp
  Concordia University

  Japan has occupied an important space in the Western imagination from the earliest points of contact between the two regions.  From the mid-19th century, American and British writers increasingly transmitted Japanese culture and traditional practices to English speaking audiences through literature, art and, later, film.  In these representations of Japan, the discourse of these interlocutors was less about what Japan actually was than what their home countries were not.  In Japan, the traditionalist could find the unadulterated past as it was expressed through cultural practices and social relations.  For my PhD research, I am investigating American representations of Japan in the early postwar years.  The interlocutors who brought Japan to American audiences and readers were no exception to the Japanists of the 19th century.  People like Donald Richie, Ruth Benedict, Donald Keene, Edward G. Seidensticker and James A. Michener played important roles in the creation of images of Japan.  These depictions of Japan as a place of tradition could be seen as a response to a wide variety of evolving trends in American culture and society.  Modern urban spaces of the West could be contrasted with traditional rural practices in Japan.  The perceived Western focus on practicality and science could be contrasted with Japanese aesthetics in art and customs.  Even the burgeoning empowerment of women in Western society could be contrasted with the more traditional roles of women in Japan.  By discussing some of these depictions, I aim to illustrate how these comparisons informed the representations of Japan as an imaginary screen where the desires of its interlocutors could be projected.
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  (Art Deco in Hong Kong and Shanghai)
  Prudence Leung Kwok Lau
  Chinese University of Hong Kong
  

  The Roaring Twenties in the West is regarded as a period of decadence and desire, and Art Deco manifested as the ethos of the modern; in China a modern aspiration had also surfaced but had been amidst a surge of nationalism since the 1911 Revolution. Chinese artists and architects, particularly in treaty ports of Hong Kong and Shanghai, had captured and represented the ethos, albeit rooted in a unique ground. Both cities contributed in constructing national identities that boosted the emergence of modern China, via exploring the stylistic potentials of Art Deco and imposing them onto art and architecture; both cities exemplified the unique aspiration for identity that was embedded in the visual and built environment, but documentation and further research of such inter-regional dynamism remain scarce, and historical linkage of Art Deco in Hong Kong’s modernization is particularly absent. How did Art Deco appeal to the Chinese in stimulating modern designs? How did the style move beyond Western importation to indigenization in this Southeast Asian framework? Ultimately, to what extent was Art Deco significant in serving a cultural role in that era, particularly embodied by art and architecture in the two cities? The Hong Kong colonial government had seemingly favored the Art Deco style- besides the demolished HSBC Building (1935) and the Causeway Bay Magistracy (1960), the Western Magistracy (1961) and the old Bank of China building (1950) still stand. Several residential and commercial buildings of the era also suggest Art Deco influences; observing social and cultural layers underlying building design agendas is also a feasible approach. From interpreting printed media, film, commodities, to locating patronages of artistic and architectural output as to how widespread the phenomenon was, this paper contests how identity is visually embedded and concretely constructed in the reinterpretation of Hong Kong and Shanghai Art Deco.
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  An Epistemological Aporia: Reading Xu Bing’s tianshu Through the Four Discourses of Jacques Lacan
  James Poborsa
  University of Toronto

  The artwork of Xu Bing 徐冰 confronts the linguistic form with equal measures of transgressive certainty and peripatetic apathy, and evokes within the viewing subject the desire to establish some form of discursive referentiality. This article endeavours to read Xu Bing’s monumental installation work tianshu 天书 through the four discourses of Jacques Lacan, as articulated in his seminar of 1969-1970, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (L’envers de la psychanalyse). As an analysis of the limits of representation within the confines of a carefully crafted discursive structure, tianshu fosters a degree of aporetic validation, which I contend serves to enliven our understanding of the production of discourse. Tianshu reveals the desire of the affected subject (Xu Bing) to destructure and transgress the discursive regime, while also revealing the desire of the viewing subject to comprehend and consume the discursive properties of the work. If we accept Lacan’s assertion that all determination of thought depends upon discourse, might there exist the possibility of openness to forms of visuality which disrupt this signifying relation, wherein such openness ushers in a ground disjoined from the discursive relationship? The question then arises as to how one might disrupt the systematic representation of form, while attuning oneself to both the viability of the Lacanian project and the possibilities for discursive transgression. Through a reading of tianshu, this essay will explore Lacan’s interpretation of both the linguistic structure and truth, and the incessant tendency of discourse to promote a relationship of reason which upholds the truth-functional validity of an uncontested logic. If we further uphold Lacan’s claim that truth is the product of language, the subsumption of language under meaninglessness in the art of Xu Bing envelops the dwelling subject (both artist and viewer) in cautious apathy, while also engendering feelings of freedom and openness.
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  "Tang Xianzu, let me learn from you": Appropriation and Quotation in Wang Li Hong's Music Videos
  Monica Guu
  University of Toronto
  

  “Appropriation” and “quotation” are not new terms to scholars of Asian studies. In cultural studies, appropriation refers to modalities of consumption that blur racial and class limitations, and is intimately tied to the divide between monetary and cultural capital. In Asian studies, “appropriation” is often a label for misinformed Western “pillaging” of Asian histories, cultures, objects or identities. Quotation, buttressed by the illusory emancipation of postmodernism, is a sign of cultural literacy: a means by which youth subcultures speak to their peer groups or a strategy for popular culture to reinforce its hegemony while masquerading as purveyor of diversity. For Asian studies, however, quotation is a means by which texts or authors, by allusion to historical precursors, gain legitimacy. In the last two decades, Chinese pop has witnessed multiple attempts to fuse Chinese tradition with musical genres like hip hop and R&B: attempts which may be read as appropriation or quotation. My paper, through a close reading of two music videos by Chinese-American singer Wang Li Hong, resituates the politics of appropriation/quotation from the sphere of culture to that of interiority. Zai mei bian (By the plum blossoms), which references the Ming-dynasty play, The Peony Pavilion, is a tongue-in-cheek articulation of the disjuncture of classical romance in the age of media modernity. Hua tian cuo (Mistake in the field of flowers), using parallel narratives of a modern couple and of the scholar-beauty romance, creates fantasy spaces in which the classical beauty becomes the impossible object of desire. While deeply critical of the ways in which visual and literary traditions are breezily invoked in these music videos, my paper also proposes that these references, alongside aspects of production design that index “traditional China,” construct hybrid spaces in which contemporary viewers apprehend their estrangement from history.
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• LATE AFTERNOON
  Panel 7: National Territoriality, National Subjectivity
  Naoko Hosokawa
  Sunho Ko
  Paul O'Shea
  Leksa Chmielewski
  
  

  The Language of Civilisation: Identity and Desire in the Meiji Era Japanese Language Reform Debates
  Naoko Hosokawa, PhD candidate in Japanese Linguistics at the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford, UK

  This paper will analyse the fierce language reform debate in Japan during the Meiji Restoration in terms of competing libidinal investments of desire in a struggle to define Japan in relation to mythified constructions of East and West. After 250 years of self-imposed closure, Japan experienced a large influx of foreign culture in the late nineteenth century, bringing with it a series of vigorous arguments for and against Japanese language reform. This debate coincided with the time when Japan reengaged with the existence of outsiders and started searching for a redefinition of the nation other than through its geographical isolation by sea and historical isolation in the preceding years. On one hand, pro-Western intellectuals supported reform, whether to replace the national language by English, on an extreme side, or to facilitate writing by reducing the number of kanji characters and unify the written and spoken language (genbun itchi). These proponents of reform, claiming that it was imperative to approximate the simpler phonetic writing of European languages, sought to define Japan as part of the Western world order according to idealized views of the West as developed and sophisticated and the East as backwards and tradition-bound. On the other hand, opponents of language reform, arguing that by abolishing the use of kanji and the knowledge of Chinese text the country would lose access to its rich cultural heritage, wanted to see Japan remain in the Eastern Asian world order, viewing the East as the venerable origin and vehicle of Japanese values and mentalities and the West as a dangerous corruptor of Japanese authenticity. The language reform dispute was thus the site of competing views of Japanese identity through which the categories of Self and Other were (re)constructed in relation to conflicting understandings and libidinal investments of desire over East and West.
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  The Total Body and Naesŏn Ilch’e: The Japanese Wartime Films in Late Colonial Korea
  Sunho Ko
  University of Toronto

  Under the slogan of naesŏn ilch’e (naisen ittai in Japanese), whose literal meaning is one body of Japan and Korea, Koreans were summoned to the Japanese empire during the wartime period between 1937 and 1945. In this paper, I analyze the Japanese wartime films in late colonial Korea focusing on how the concept of naesŏn ilch’e as the image of the total body or the People-as-One appeared in the films. One of my major focuses is to show that the concept of the total body is accompanied with a twofold image of the enemy located both inside and outside and that the existence of the enemy necessitates and justifies the constant struggle for dividing a clear line between “us” and the enemy and for removing heterogeneous others. Secondly, the concept of the total body does not mean that all identities and categories disappeared or that differences are reduced into one category, i.e, “Japan”. Rather, imaging the People-as-One against the enemy goes with the continuous work of recreating various identities and realigning them with the different lines of ethnicity, gender, generation, and the distance from the war front. Finally, the existence of ambiguity and contradiction makes it difficult to draw a clear-cut line between “us” and the enemy and the very same dichotomy within the interior.
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  The Desire for Territory in Northeast Asia
  Paul O’Shea
  University of Sheffield

  Despite the end of the Cold War and the recent unparalleled economic growth in Northeast Asia, the desire for territory in the region maintains a saliency which is unmatched in Europe or North America  This can be most clearly seen in the intractable nature of the territorial disputes in the region, disputes who’s roots are conventionally explained with reference to their economic or strategic values, but which in fact can be far better understood through the territories’ relationships to the national identities of the disputant states.  Where such ideational considerations are included they are usually assumed and bracketed off, without any explication of what the link between identity and the territory actually is.  Thus in this paper I investigate how the desire for territory is rooted in the constitution of the territory itself as integral and sacred national soil.  The paper first assesses the conventional explanations for territorial disputes in Northeast Asia, such as the immaturity of developing states or the economic and strategic gains of the possession of the territory.  Having demonstrated the shortcomings of these accounts, an understanding of how the desire for these territories is created through their constitution into an historical-mythical national identity, rendering the territories as inviolable and sacred parts of the sovereign nation’s homeland, is put forward.  This understanding is tested through its application to each of the disputes and disputants in turn.
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  The Construction of the Chinese Museum-Going Subject
  Leksa Chmielewski
  University of California, Irvine

  Recent scholarship and popular media on the subject of Chinese museum attendance, both domestic and foreign, often agree on the underutilization of museums as spaces of recreational education. However, the questions of what Chinese museumgoers should be learning, and what they are learning, are far from resolved. This paper attempts, through an analysis of the public policy that regulates museums in China, and an analysis of the museum exhibit as a sort of public policy, to begin to answer these questions. Through discourse analysis of Chinese law and policy at multiple levels of government, as well as participant observation in experiencing exhibits in Chinese museums, I argue in this paper that there has been a certain continuity in the goals of museums during the last thirty years, though there have been changes in how the goals are accomplished. I will demonstrate that an emergent mode of museum exhibit design and museum-related public policy call into being a certain type of museum visitor, one who chooses whether a museum visit is desirable and what kind of museum visit is desirable. I will argue that the changes that are slowly gaining ground in Chinese museum display, as well as new tactics of public policy regarding museums, by multiple levels of government, demonstrate a relationship of Foucauldian governmentality between the Chinese government and its population. The paper ultimately considers how Chinese public policy constructs a museum visit as a conduit to a desired subjecthood attainable by Chinese individuals.
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• LATE AFTERNOON
  Panel 8:
  Suzanne Beth
  Darcy Gauthier
  Mark McConaghy
  Ryan Robert Mitchell
  
  

  Ozu Yasujirô's Cinema, the limits of Cinema and the Limits of Desire
  Suzanne Beth
  University of Montreal
  

  In this paper I will consider how Ozu’s cinema can be seen as offering a meaningful articulation of desire and of a limit to it. Doing so means studying how his films relate to the cinematographic medium, to embody a desire for cinema and a contradiction to it. It will be discussed in focusing on the place of narration in Ozu’s films, that is, on the ways in which their narrative form is deliberately thwarted. Yoshida Kiju’s insight that Ozu’s cinema is an “anti-cinema” is the starting point of this reflection. Ozu’s films are built on a narrative scheme, but their editing include images that are clearly  heterogeneous to the “story”. As Yoshida puts it, this attests Ozu’s “distrust toward narration”, in the sense that “a story is not able to tell our reality or the world”. Yoshida thus underlines the part played by “stagnation” in Ozu’s cinema. This will be considered in the light of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema, that places Ozu’s films at the point where the logic of “movement-image” is shaken and hints toward another regime, that of “time-image”. Movement-image describes cinema when images link perceptions or affects to actions; that is when actions prolong perceptions. In this regime, narration is thus possible and has even become the dominant mode of film. Especially in “classical” Hollywood cinema, the relationship of this kind of moving images to a desire for cinema is a direct, linear one, that believes in its thriving. In Ozu’s films, desire for cinema, that is bound with the succession of images to the end of the film, is contradicted by a movement that suspends it and that shows another regime of time.
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  <Hiroshima Mon Amour>
  Darcy Gauthier
  University of Toronto

  We know the oft-repeated first lines of Hiroshima Mon Amour: “He: You saw nothing in Hiroshima / She: I saw everything.” A testament to concision, they summarize the film’s essential paradox, which is also a paradox of the cinematic, and of desire: the compulsive desire to remember, and to see the thing in the absence of the thing itself. Elle conflates memory and seeing, as Kaja Silverman has told us in Cure by Love: her memory is cinematic. And Hiroshima Mon Amour is in part a film about the desire to witness, to see again, for the first time, the trauma experienced in Hiroshima on Monday August 6, 1945. Yet it is also a film about the impossibility of seeing, the illusion of witnessing and being present, which is an affect of the cinematic, of representation and desire, wherein the thing itself is always already absent. Hiroshima is, as Derrida says of the supplement, outside the narrative, an “exterior addition” (Grammatology 145). It is outside, yet inside, haunting the narrative through its absent presence: a “shadow on stone,” as Elle says, a negative trace, a silhouette that leaves nothing of its object. This presentation addresses the problematic of representing trauma through a critique of the continual disappearance of Hiroshima in the film and script of Hiroshima Mon Amour. Special attention is payed to the ‘filmic logic’ of cinema: as fundamentally interstitial and marking the zone for an irresolvable encounter between proximity and separation. Derrida’s writings on the archive, the cinder, and the apocalyptic will be given special privilege for their insights into the logic of representation as it pertains to the traumatic.
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  The Resistance of Non-Resistance: On The Meaning and Possibility of Ethics Within Chinese Capitalism
  Mark McConaghy
  University of Toronto
  

  The re-organization of economic production along largely capitalist lines since the beginning of the reform era in China has produced tremendous social unevenness within the country, even as it has increased tremendously the nation's overall material wealth. Amidst the vociferous drive to accumulate material gain that the reforms have set off and nurtured over the course of their history, how has the problem of ethics been conceptualized and practiced? What does it mean to be "ethical" in contemporary China? How has this vision of ethics changed in relation to the reform era's historical antecedent- the Maoist period's radical egalitarianism? How is the problem of ethics mediated by class, gender, and regional divisions within China today?  Indeed, within an industrializing economy that is defined by tremendous competition, commidification, and expropriation, what can a concept such as ethics really mean in daily life? And how do certain cultural forms- be they films, novels, newspaper reports, etc.- interrogate and produce visions of ethical conduct to which people may aspire to? My essay will perform a close reading of the acclaimed film "Blind Shaft" as a means through which to engage with precisely these questions. In doing so, I would like to reveal the way the film as a cultural text opens up a space both to articulate the tremendous socio-economic forces at work in Chinese society that hinder ethical conduct, and yet how the film works to insist that- despite, or even because of, these forces- the problem of ethics remains an important and timely one. As such, the film will help us understand not only what the concept of ethics could mean within a China defined by the capitalist mode of production, but what the possibilities for its actual practice are. 
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  The Destruction of Pleasure as a Radical Weapon: Spectatorship and the Japanese Pink Film
  Ryan Robert Mitchell
  York University

  The ethical criticism of film is a practice that seeks out those moments where our ‘mastery’ as viewers is challenged by the uncertain affect and desire generated by cinema. This theory posits that the ‘gaze’ is a property of the cinematic object that announces its alterity rather than the all-powerful viewer. At disruptive moments, the image—or Other—gazes back at us challenging the space we inhabit as viewers. The ethical criticism of film involves interrogating the ways in which we as subjects, in our consumption and enjoyment, are implicated in relations of power through the production of images. My discussion of the ethical criticism of film will be grounded within the Japanese exploitation genre of pinku eiga, or pink film. Specifically, the work of the radical director Koji Wakamatsu (Go, Go Second Time Virgin, Ecstasy of the Angels) will be considered with reference to how his films disrupt genre expectations and viewer identification. I will be making the claim that within the context of pink cinema Wakamatsu's films open space for an ethical interrogation of the one's position as spectator.
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• LATE AFTERNOON
  Panel 9: Regulations of Genders and Sexualities
  Yonsue Kim
  Gary Wang
  Pan Gang
  Jamie Paquin
  
  

  (Yi Ok)
  Yonsue Kim
  University of Toronto

  Although the late eighteenth century Chosŏn Korea (1392-1910) was still under Confucian order, change was forthcoming. Yi Ok(李鈺, 1760-1814)'s discourses on sexuality, Yiŏn (俚諺, Village Proverbs), were original in their application of using chinjŏng (眞情) to develop a new way of thinking about the self and the world. Yet, for Yi Ok, chinjŏng was not strictly limited to sexuality, and rather entailed a new manner of examining human affairs in a broader context. Traditionally in Chosŏn society, chŏng (emotion, feeling, affection, love, 情) was suppressed or otherwise controlled or colored in an acceptable moral fashion. Yi Ok draws attention to notions of sexuality, using it as a concept to problematize the existing ideology and build a new understanding of the social system of Chosŏn. This paper focuses on two problematic issues residing within Yi Ok’s Yiŏn: why does Yi Ok privilege sexuality in his worldview, and what is the influence of his revolutionary views on sexuality on his new writing style. The studies on Yiŏn to date have been largely concerned with its poetic form. While my research further develops upon these previous studies, my interest leans towards exploring the ideological significance of chinjŏng in his work and his deployment of a new writing style. To explicate the political and social grounds of his revolutionary views, I will proceed with a textual analysis of the preface in Yiŏn and elaborate his concept of chinjŏng and its realization in his Yiŏn poems by bringing them in a dialogue with the arguments of Michael Foucault, Gayle S. Rubin and. Joan Wallach Scott.
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  Making ‘Opposite-sex’ Love:  Representational Conflict and the Construction of Normative Desire in Linglong Women’s Pictorial Magazine, 1931-1937
  Gary Wang
  University of British Columbia

  My project is a case study of Linglong Magazine that examines representational conflict in the construction of normative heterosexuality and marriage – a regulatory measure that contained the prospect of female autonomy during a period of flux.  The study is a preliminary experiment in ‘horizontal reading’ as outlined by Michel Hockx, which regards journal issues as collectively authored texts (rather than contexts), and emphasizes the spatial relation of printed material.  I refer to editorials and contributions from readers, including commentaries, images, comics, and advice column letters to show how:  i.) the regulatory discourse, in validating its deployment, reveals that alternatives to heterosexual marriage were viable; and ii.) attitudes against alternatives to heterosexuality and marriage were implicitly contested.  I argue, moreover, that on the pages of Linglong, female autonomy – including homoerotic desire (as visual pleasure) – was engendered at the same time that same-sex love and unmarried women were increasingly stigmatized. In reading Linglong ‘horizontally,’ I analyse topics ranging from socializing, marriage, men, modern women, same-sex love, beauty, and athletics.  In my view, what Barbara Mittler identifies in the magazine as cheeky misandrism – ‘distaste for men’ or ‘man-hating’ – was a marketable device that some contributors (many of whom were readers) appropriated for covert expressions of what was becoming increasingly difficult to articulate overtly – namely, support for alternatives to compulsive heterosexuality and marriage.  I also find that Linglong’s nationalistic advocacy of sports and robust beauty, examined by Gao Yunxiang, sanctioned another gimmick: images of strong female bodies and erotic (but ‘vigorous and healthy’) nudes, reminiscent of classical European paintings.  Branching out from more familiar discussions of the male gaze, I consider the display of women’s bodies and female spectatorship.  I suggest that visual pleasure allowed same-sex desire to be sublimated in conversations about fit female heroes for the nation, and discussions about art.
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  Three Types of Social Authority over Homosexuality in Contemporary China
  Gang Pan
  University of Toronto

  This essay attempts to summarize three types of social authority that determine contemporary Chinese society’s attitudes towards homosexuality.  The first is traditional authority.  Traditional views about sexuality reside in contemporary China.  These views are not articulate, yet they have profound influence and have formed the basis of social attitudes towards homosexuality.      The second type of authority is political authority.  Political authority decides legislative and administrative institutions’ attitudes towards homosexuality.  However, political authority advisedly adopts ambiguous attitudes towards homosexuality.  It usually consigns homosexuality as a moral issue to traditional authority, and by backing traditional authority it acquires an absolute authority over homosexuality.  Thus, political authority and traditional authority join together to form an entity or a symbiosis of authority over homosexuality.  Collaboratively they operate at a hyper-law level. The third type of authority over homosexuality is scientific authority.  Scientific authority consists of the western scientific discourses selectively introduced to China. Scientific authority sometimes provides justification for traditional authority and political authority, but not necessarily always in accordance with them.  Scientific discourses also become a channel through which homosexuality enter public discursive space. Three types of authority form a complicated social backdrop and affect the general status of homosexuality in China.  Traditional and political authorities render homosexuality unspeakable and deny its access to public discursive space.  Scientific authority brings homosexuality into public space and helps it gain discursive existence.  The conflict between these two opposite trends becomes one of the motifs of homosexuality in contemporary China.
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  Interracial Sexual Preferences Involving East-Asians: Present Depictions, Future Possibilities
  Jamie Paquin
  Sophia University
  

  In a series of academic, journalistic and popular sources, interracial sexual preferences involving East-Asians have been heavily criticized as expressive of racially stereotyping and objectifying sensibilities.  Stemming from feminist/postcolonial critiques and a methodological reliance upon textual and media analyses, critics depict these desires as the product of stereotyping imagery and ideas which differently situate Asians and non-Asians in an intimate economy that reflects and reproduces the privileges and subordinations of European-American hegemony.  Consequently these desires are deemed highly problematic, and the people holding them cast as villains, victims or dupes.
  Historically generated images and ideas certainly have the potential to shape and constrain perceptions and experiences.  Yet by unreflexively interpreting these desires through forms of empirically and philosophically debatable romantic ideologies while assuming a simple equation between histories, representations and sexual subjectivities, critics have failed to understand the complex biographical and experientialnature of sexual preference formation and meaning, leading to an unfounded conflation of such representations and subjects’ actual desires, and a missed opportunity for greater understanding of the dynamics of preference formation in general.  Consequently, this literature extends the practice of sexual persecution as much as it contributes to a critical understanding of interracial attraction.
  In order to demonstrate the deficiencies of the existing treatment of this form of attraction, and to provide an alternative starting point for its understanding, this paper undertakes two tasks. First, it identifies the key claims and assumptions of this discourse as they relate to sexuality, race, gender and methodology.  Second, it brings these assumptions into dialogue with alternative theoretical understandings and methodological approaches that indicate fundamental problems with existing approaches and depictions.  It concludes by delineating alternative theoretical and methodological starting points in relation to the study of racial preferences involving East-Asians that can remain critical while avoiding normalization.
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