Category: East Asia

WEBINAR—International Women’s Day Event: A Conversation with “Convenience Store Woman” Author Murata Sayaka, Monday 18 March, 5pm KST

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes.

From the event website:

To celebrate International Women’s Day this March, Tokyo College’s “Gender, Sexuality & Identity” collaborative research group will host a special webinar event with MURATA Sayaka, author and winner of the 155th Akutagawa Prize for her novel Convenience Store Woman (2016). Through discussing Murata’s writing, experiences, and inspirations, the event hopes to generate reflection on society’s gender and sexuality “norms” and how they shape our world.

Please register there.

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If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)

How my boyfriend CHEATED with another Asian girl

Finally, this segment of her show gives me just the excuse I need to let The Grand Narrative readers about my favorite Chinese-Australian comedian Jenny Tian!

Especially when you realize “Alex” is probably the same guy she mentions in her interview at Being Asian Australian, about Yellow Fever and dating as an Asian-Australian woman…

Not going to lie—I’m especially fond of her because much of her humor is Australia-related, which resonates because I lived in Australia and New Zealand for 13 years, but might be off-putting for you. But never fear, non-Antipodeans! As you’ll quickly realize from her Instagram, most of her content is universal, and particularly funny to East Asian diaspora anywhere:

Enjoy!

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If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)

Remedy, Mobility, and the Feminized Consumption of Beauty in Post-Authoritarian South Korea—Zoom Lecture, 8-9:30AM Thursday, November 16 in South Korea

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes.

Please register here, and see here for more details.

Here’s a quick summary from the latter:

[Dr. So-Rim Lee from the University of Pennsylvania] will discuss remedy (koch’ida), a term she uses to refer to changing one’s appearance through medical interventions—including plastic surgery, cosmetic injections, among others—to make life better. Remedy is much broader than medical discourse alone; Lee’s current book project contends that remedy is a critical cultural ethos, a teleological narrative, a social performance of subjectivity, and a material praxis of embodiment where state biopolitics and individual desire for belonging are inextricably entangled. From the postwar 1950s to the 1970s, remedying the body primarily signified rehabilitating disabled bodies; its grammar was integral to the narrative of nation-building under developmental dictatorship by way of remaking a healthy, re/productive national body marked by continued economic development. However, with the emergence of middle-class consumer culture and rapidly changing mass mediascape in the 1980s-1990s, remedying the body through plastic surgery became normalized in various print media as a gendered, individualized, and hyper-visible consumption practice undertaken by women for upward mobility. Perusing teen pictorials, feminist magazines, newspapers, and films, this work-in-progress talk explores how the consumerist discourse of remedy in post-authoritarian South Korea was keenly entwined with the discursive marginalization of different yet intersecting strata of women—specifically, housewives and working-class young women/teens.

See you there!

If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)

Performing in “Public” Spaces in Korea and Japan—Can Anyone Do it? Or Mostly Just Men?

“Musicians’ experiences of dis/comfort, im/mobility, security and threat, as well as their coping strategies, are all gendered.”

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes. Photo by Chris Barbalis on Unsplash.

My TBR pile is glorious, and it is teetering. So, I really should have known better than to even glance at the New Book Networks feed…

Assuming I can actually find the space then, this latest, slightly pricey candidate is all due to Tuesday’s interview of Dr. Gitte Marianne Hansen and Dr. Fabio Gygi, editors of The Work of Gender: Service, Performance and Fantasy in Contemporary Japan (NIAS Press, 2022). Specifically, the section from 28:35-31:10 where Dr. Gygi talks about Chapter 6, in which his colleague, Dr. R. J. Simpkins, shares his findings from months of observing and talking to buskers and street performers near a Tokyo train station. Like me, listening will probably immediately remind you too, my beloved tribe (*hugs*), of Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-made World by Leslie Kern (Verso, 2020; see my review here). You also get how tempted I am right now then, as I almost seem to hear the soft serenade of  “지금 택배로 주문하면 11월 24일 출고” sweetly whispered into my ear…Oh! Aladin, you tease…

Ahem.

With no further ado then, sorry for any mistakes in my transcript of that section of the podcast below. And please don’t worry about giving offense if you’d rather jump ahead to a reviewer’s excellent summary below that instead!

“Well, I think this is a wonderful chapter, because Rob, the author, was actually playing as a street musician himself, and that’s how he entered the field, and he’s been there for quite a long time, and it’s a wonderful ethnography, and very detailed. But towards the end he realized, ‘Well, I’m only talking to men. I know a few female performers but it seems to be a very different experience for them.’ So he started to focus a little bit more on the differences, and one of the things that he really found was that it’s all about space-making.”

“So, it’s a public space, you’re exposed to the gaze of the passers-by, but as a musician or performer you have to create…you have to take this public space and turn it into something else, like a concert venue or a venue for self-expression. And this of course takes on a very strong gender dimension. So men felt very much at ease, you know…especially the more rock-type musicians who would just start to play…there would be a good vibration and people would sort of assemble. But women working as performers felt very much exposed in a very different way. Now, you have to imagine, during commuter rush hour it’s mostly men…it’s salarymen who come back from work, often in a state of inebriation, and there would be a lot of sexual harassment, there would be a lot of unwanted attention, or rather boundary-breaking attention, so people would come, they would listen to a song, and then they would try to chat you up or get close or break the sort-of boundaries that you have created. And so there was a much greater sense of vulnerability, and what he sort-of concluded from that is a public space is also to a strong degree male-coded, it’s the male gaze that defines what is happening.”

“So if you expose yourself to that, you have to be aware of the gendered dynamics of the space and so his artists chose very different and very creative strategies [to deal with those]…Reyna(?) for example performed in a mask to deflect from the fact that she was a female performer, and so it is very important to understand that this public sphere itself is gendered…not something we would normally, you know, have a good understanding of.”

These difficulties and dangers are underscored by co-editor Dr. Hansen then going on to note that this was the most difficult subject in the book for any of the contributors to research. Because, unlike with other venues and performances, the rules of engagement (and enforcement) were not set. My personal additional takeaway from that being, those rules were also more open to exploitation and abuse by those with (male) privilege.

Photo by Victoriano Izquierdoh Barbalis on Unsplash.

For the busier feminist book geek among you though, as promised here is an excellent summary of Dr. Simpkins’ chapter by Dr. Kai E. Tsao, taken from her review in Feminist Encounters:

“Simpkins observed and interviewed music performers at a Tokyo station, and his chapter demonstrates that the musicians’ experiences of dis/comfort, im/mobility, security and threat, as well as their coping strategies, are all gendered. Male musicians considered their experience, occupying and transgressing in public space, as performing their authentic self and self-realisation. This sentiment was not shared by the female musicians. Instead, they performed ‘charm’ and created a ‘non-threatening atmosphere’ to navigate social interactions in a station space with a predominantly male presence. Public space around the station is coded: compared to their male counterparts who ‘naturally’ hung around to interact with their supporters, female musicians were much more cautious about the risks of inviting passers-by to take an interest in their performance. This makes me wonder: how is the performance of invitation gendered? How might female musicians be perceived if they invited an audience in a space where they were ‘not supposed to be’?”

And which also makes me wonder, what are the Korean parallels? Where are those spaces?

Frankly, I can’t really think of any. In fact, the only place I ever encounter buskers and street performers at all is the main drag of Gwangalli Beach close to where I live, which ironically I don’t visit very often because it’s always jam-packed with happy, 20-something, heterosexual couples (sigh). That very different audience composition to a busy Tokyo subway station then, as well as the very public and open setting, would likely mean performances there were almost completely devoid of the (negative) gendered dynamics described above.

Maybe various Korean laws are responsible for making them much less common than in Japan?

Or maybe not? Are there buskers in, say, Hongdae in Seoul? In Nampo-dong here in Busan, which I haven’t visited for years? Performers in busy Seoul subway stations? Please do let me know then, if know of any similar Korean spaces to what Dr. Simpkins outlines in Tokyo, and your experiences of them. And how do think the gender dynamics play out in those?

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If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)

Note to Self—Check Thy Orientalism!

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, an 18th Century woman of letters, had a keen eye for ignorant European male travel writers who projected their sexual fantasies onto Turkish women, and why they waxed lyrical about women’s suffering under barbarous Turkish men. Her skills at exposing hidden agendas, and at highlighting women’s shared experiences of misogyny, rather than stressing exoticism and difference, remain just as useful and necessary today.

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes. Photo, right, by Kazi Mizan on Unsplash.

Now, I know you’re totally jealous I have a physical copy of Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms, a.k.a. “a sustained reflection on Orientalism, with feminist accents” by Lisa Lowe (1991), and not just an open-access PDF.

Or not? Perish the thought. Still, while this particular tome does make its central point that orientalism “is profoundly heterogeneous,” I can concede it’s also very academic and literary and critical-theory heavy, requiring a lot of concentration. So, if you’re actually just trying to impress fellow bibliophiles and geeks on the subway in the mornings with it, or beat crippling insomnia in the evenings when that fails to elicit the companionship you seek, much of it will simply fail to stick.

But of the two parts that did stand out to me, which I’ll highlight in two separate posts, I wasn’t expecting the first to make me feel so…uncomfortable.

Specifically, it was the second chapter on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters, a collection of her reflections on her travels through the Ottoman Empire between 1716 and 1718, published in 1763 just after her death. In those, she criticized European men’s writings about Turkish men and women for presenting the former as barbarous, and using the alleged civilized treatment of women in Christendom as evidence of that, compared to their supposed abject misery under Islam in Turkey. In other words, they presented a false dichotomy between a feminist West and patriarchal East that, well, you could probably see faint echoes of in my own first attempts writing about Korea nearly two decades ago.

Image: Young Woman Reading, 1880 by Osman Hamdi Bey (Turkish, 1842–1910).

Mercifully, the offending posts have long since been deleted. I don’t think I could ever have been accused of projecting my sexual fantasies onto Korean women like Montagu’s male contemporaries did Turkish women either, let alone doing so while acknowledging they had no knowledge on which to base those fantasies whatsoever, as we’ll see.

But that false dichotomy? Stressing the differences between the men and women ‘over there’ compared to ‘here,’ rather than emphasizing shared experiences and potential solutions to, say, overcoming the patriarchy?

That’s definitely something to be remain wary of. In particular, when so many negatives of women’s position in Korea are genuinely objectively worse than in the countries interested English-speaking readers tend to hail from, it’s deceptively easy for any Korea-related news to simply confirm one’s preexisting prejudices and stereotypes about Korean men and women, or to pander to those if you want your work to be read. And I’m just as open to temptation as anyone.

So, to help maintain that awareness, let me highlight the relevant passages from the second chapter of Critical Terrains for you here. Starting with the first mention of the letters on page 31:

Then on page 32, introducing the crucial additional theme that for all her proto-feminism, Montagu was also very elitist and aristocratic, both in her concerns and in the Turkish women she most interacted with. But for more on that, you will have to read the chapter for yourself sorry!

Then on page 38, on one of those European men waxing lyrical about what goes on in the fabled harems, despite never actually visiting one…

Continuing with yet another man doing the same:

Continuing past the page break into page 39:

Continuing:

Continuing:

Page 40, which I especially liked for its point about Turkish and European women’s shared experiences:

And finally from page 44 (NSFW image coming below):

If you’ll please bear with me a moment, Orientalism, I find, is a bit like the Theory of Relativity. (Hey, I did ask you.) As in, like my physics professor once pointed out back when I was studying to become a professional astronomer (it’s a long story), Einstein’s theory, for all the creativity, originality, and genius behind it, is actually quite simple to understand after a couple of lectures or good YouTube videos. Which is my somewhat arcane excuse for why, wanting to learn more about Lady Montagu, I consulted my other books exclusively devoted to Orientalism, and discovered to my horror and shame that I actually only had two: Culture and Imperialism by Edward Said (1993), and The Erotic Margin: Sexuality and Spatiality in Alterist Discourse by Irvin C. Schick (1999). Alas, Said didn’t mention Lady Montagu at all (perhaps it’s time to finally purchase Orientalism?). But Schick did…

…and then I finally noticed a certain similarity of cover theme with that of Critical Terrains. Potential accusations of hypocrisy by authors and/or publishers and a certain blogger aside though, and how much that extends to the genre as a whole or not (Culture and Imperialism actually has quite a bland cover), obviously both covers were used to sell more copies of both books. Or, to put it crudely, there was an agenda behind the choice to put naked Oriental women on both.

Which finally brings me to how, even 150 years after the publication of Montagu’s letters, Schick explains that the British public, industry, government, and press, for a wide variety of reasons and agendas, were all just too fundamentally committed to their own agendas—an alternative, collective ‘truth’ about the Orient so to speak—to really care less about what its men and women were actually like. Which is also why, sadly, Montagu’s letters ultimately made little impact:

From Pages 211-212:

And finally, from pages 50-51:

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If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)