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sanetI love symposiums. Symposia. You know, those things where people present papers on esoteric topics and then debate over issues you never get to talk about normally, and other things you didn’t even know about before.
Case in point: the “Borderlessness and Youth Cultures in Modern Japan” symposium held in Montreal Oct. 15-16. There was a lot packed into a day and a half, from hikikomori to “precariat” literature to narrative consumption in marketing. What really struck me, though, were two papers following on each other by Livia Monnet and Mari Kotani, who took two different approaches to gender and sexuality in women’s media/performance.
Livia Monnet’s paper, “Sexuality, Prosthetics, and the Fantastic in Momoko Ando’s Kakera: A Piece of Our Life” drew on Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytic approach to analyze the 2009 live-action film Kakera by Momoko Ando, a 28-year-old first-time director from a film-biz family. Kakera tells the story of Haru, the dissatisfied girlfriend of a military otaku named Ryota. One day Haru is approached in a café by Riko, a lesbian prosthetics maker who likes Haru’s “kawaii” face and soon falls in love with her. But Haru is oddly ambivalent about this relationship too. This leads to many complications, new lovers, prosthetic breasts, and a finale that can only be described as Haru’s inconclusive but potentially liberating “primal scream.”
The schizoanalysis comes in as Monnet describes how the film breaks with the heteronormative model of the Oedipus complex and focuses instead on the question of desiring machines, the “thousand tiny nonhuman sexes which make up a subject.” (Which I think is pretty damn cool.) One specific process of subject-making she focuses on is facialization, described in Deleuze’s work on cinema as the “affection image,” a machine of faciality that produces identity, allowing characters to slide into individuation. The idea of schizoanalysis is not to shore up individuation but to dismantle the face, to show where desire –or rather, affect- is deterritorialized, liberated from the body along lines of flight. You have to get rid of your face –the machine of identification and subjectification- in order to find yourself. Ando’s insistent uses of close-ups that show strangely blank or distorted faces, and her final cut away from the face to a shot of a flock of birds overlayed with the sound of Haru’s screaming voice breaking out, is a perfect schizo example for Monnet.
Still, Deleuze’s emphasis on asubjectivity and the pre-personal puts him at odds with the identity politics of queer theory, on which this film also draws. For instance, in Judith Butler’s concept of iterative difference, it is repetitions and parodic performances of the hetero norm that create queer identity. Her style of queer theory focuses on the tensions between autonomy and recognition. In Kakera, too, lesbian and straight identities are repeated and performed queerly, reflecting this tension.
But Deleuze is not about identities or recognition: he is concerned not with repetitions of the personal, but repetitions of qualities, intensities that undo and go beyond the organism and the self. Art is about the liberation of sensation from subjection and figuration: the power of art to destroy the self. Kakera, though grounded in third-wave feminist theory and defiant queer cinema, also suggests a liberation of the figure from figuration in that cut away from the face to the birds and the scream. This is becoming imperceptible, becoming animal, becoming queer.
And yet, at the very end of her presentation, Monnet did question the political value of such utopian high-level philosophy, which doesn’t offer any practical program of activism for, say, indigenous women under neoliberal capitalism. The end was a bit rushed due to time constraints, but I think what Monnet was getting at is the difficulty of applying Deleuzian theory (which after all takes a certain amount of privilege –education, free time– just to read and understand) to the practical struggles of people still dealing with “identity politics” of all kinds.
It was interesting, then, that Mari Kotani’s presentation “Mad Scientists in Love: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mad Scientist” was all about fan praxis as an intervention into gender politics. She describes an event she helped set up at the Wiscon feminist sci fi convention called the “Mad Scientist Tea Party,” which parodied the maid café by having men dressed up as scientists waiting on female customers with the help of robot maids. The tea party was introduced by co-founder Ms. Oyama in comparison with Akihabara’s maid cafes at Wiscon, and Kotani went on to talk in her presentation about Akiba’s maid cafes as places where otaku boys transgress ordinary codes of masculinity, since, being too shy to talk to real girls, they turn to a stranger form of sexuality not compatible with heteronormative society. (I find this both promising and debatable, but let’s move on.)
Their own version of the maid café performed at Wiscon, and based on Oyama’s Café Scifitique, does the same thing in reverse, turning otaku boys into a new cultural icon (a la Densha Otoko) who are fetishized by girls for a change. The reverse-cafés also reveal the artificiality of constructions of women by having female robot maids who perform their artificial nature overtly.
Now, this is a praxis, a performance, that demonstrates how female fans are remaking the anime icons presented to them in largely male-oriented spaces such as Akihabara. And yet, I can’t help wishing that this (also pretty utopian) praxis had some of the complexity and deterritorialization of Deleuze’s work. Because to my eyes, just using the same structure with a bit of self-conscious gender role reversal only goes so far. I found myself feeling impatient with the limitation of active, desiring roles to male or female in some reversal or other -a feminist holdoever despite the queer theory overtones of some parts of the presentation. I want the “thousand tiny nonhuman sexes” of desiring machines, that molecular model, however impractical.
So how can they be reconciled? Should they be? How can we do schizoanalysis and/or feminism?
Case in point: the “Borderlessness and Youth Cultures in Modern Japan” symposium held in Montreal Oct. 15-16. There was a lot packed into a day and a half, from hikikomori to “precariat” literature to narrative consumption in marketing. What really struck me, though, were two papers following on each other by Livia Monnet and Mari Kotani, who took two different approaches to gender and sexuality in women’s media/performance.
Livia Monnet’s paper, “Sexuality, Prosthetics, and the Fantastic in Momoko Ando’s Kakera: A Piece of Our Life” drew on Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytic approach to analyze the 2009 live-action film Kakera by Momoko Ando, a 28-year-old first-time director from a film-biz family. Kakera tells the story of Haru, the dissatisfied girlfriend of a military otaku named Ryota. One day Haru is approached in a café by Riko, a lesbian prosthetics maker who likes Haru’s “kawaii” face and soon falls in love with her. But Haru is oddly ambivalent about this relationship too. This leads to many complications, new lovers, prosthetic breasts, and a finale that can only be described as Haru’s inconclusive but potentially liberating “primal scream.”
The schizoanalysis comes in as Monnet describes how the film breaks with the heteronormative model of the Oedipus complex and focuses instead on the question of desiring machines, the “thousand tiny nonhuman sexes which make up a subject.” (Which I think is pretty damn cool.) One specific process of subject-making she focuses on is facialization, described in Deleuze’s work on cinema as the “affection image,” a machine of faciality that produces identity, allowing characters to slide into individuation. The idea of schizoanalysis is not to shore up individuation but to dismantle the face, to show where desire –or rather, affect- is deterritorialized, liberated from the body along lines of flight. You have to get rid of your face –the machine of identification and subjectification- in order to find yourself. Ando’s insistent uses of close-ups that show strangely blank or distorted faces, and her final cut away from the face to a shot of a flock of birds overlayed with the sound of Haru’s screaming voice breaking out, is a perfect schizo example for Monnet.
Still, Deleuze’s emphasis on asubjectivity and the pre-personal puts him at odds with the identity politics of queer theory, on which this film also draws. For instance, in Judith Butler’s concept of iterative difference, it is repetitions and parodic performances of the hetero norm that create queer identity. Her style of queer theory focuses on the tensions between autonomy and recognition. In Kakera, too, lesbian and straight identities are repeated and performed queerly, reflecting this tension.
But Deleuze is not about identities or recognition: he is concerned not with repetitions of the personal, but repetitions of qualities, intensities that undo and go beyond the organism and the self. Art is about the liberation of sensation from subjection and figuration: the power of art to destroy the self. Kakera, though grounded in third-wave feminist theory and defiant queer cinema, also suggests a liberation of the figure from figuration in that cut away from the face to the birds and the scream. This is becoming imperceptible, becoming animal, becoming queer.
And yet, at the very end of her presentation, Monnet did question the political value of such utopian high-level philosophy, which doesn’t offer any practical program of activism for, say, indigenous women under neoliberal capitalism. The end was a bit rushed due to time constraints, but I think what Monnet was getting at is the difficulty of applying Deleuzian theory (which after all takes a certain amount of privilege –education, free time– just to read and understand) to the practical struggles of people still dealing with “identity politics” of all kinds.
It was interesting, then, that Mari Kotani’s presentation “Mad Scientists in Love: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mad Scientist” was all about fan praxis as an intervention into gender politics. She describes an event she helped set up at the Wiscon feminist sci fi convention called the “Mad Scientist Tea Party,” which parodied the maid café by having men dressed up as scientists waiting on female customers with the help of robot maids. The tea party was introduced by co-founder Ms. Oyama in comparison with Akihabara’s maid cafes at Wiscon, and Kotani went on to talk in her presentation about Akiba’s maid cafes as places where otaku boys transgress ordinary codes of masculinity, since, being too shy to talk to real girls, they turn to a stranger form of sexuality not compatible with heteronormative society. (I find this both promising and debatable, but let’s move on.)
Their own version of the maid café performed at Wiscon, and based on Oyama’s Café Scifitique, does the same thing in reverse, turning otaku boys into a new cultural icon (a la Densha Otoko) who are fetishized by girls for a change. The reverse-cafés also reveal the artificiality of constructions of women by having female robot maids who perform their artificial nature overtly.
Now, this is a praxis, a performance, that demonstrates how female fans are remaking the anime icons presented to them in largely male-oriented spaces such as Akihabara. And yet, I can’t help wishing that this (also pretty utopian) praxis had some of the complexity and deterritorialization of Deleuze’s work. Because to my eyes, just using the same structure with a bit of self-conscious gender role reversal only goes so far. I found myself feeling impatient with the limitation of active, desiring roles to male or female in some reversal or other -a feminist holdoever despite the queer theory overtones of some parts of the presentation. I want the “thousand tiny nonhuman sexes” of desiring machines, that molecular model, however impractical.
So how can they be reconciled? Should they be? How can we do schizoanalysis and/or feminism?
