Excess and Masculinity in Asian Cultural Productions

Kwai-Cheung Lo

Description

In Excess and Masculinity in Asian Cultural Productions, Kwai-Cheung Lo explores the excesses associated with the phenomenal economic growth in East Asia, including surplus capital, environmental waste, and the unbalanced ratio of men to women in the region, connecting the production of capitalist "excess" to the production of new forms of transnational Asian masculinity. Lo draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxist ideas as well as gender theory in his examination of East Asian cultural products such as religious and parenting books, transgender literary fantasies, travel writing, gangster movies, female action heroes, and online games. Through this analysis, Lo argues that the excess of Asia's "masculine" modernization throws into relief the internal inconsistencies of capitalism itself, posing new challenges to the order of global capitalism and suggesting new possible configurations of global modernity.
Acknowledgments

Introduction - Asian Modernity and Its Unassimilable Male Excess

1. Ethnic Ghosts in the Asian Shell: Racial Crossover and Transnational Cinema

2. The Racial Other and Violent Manhood in Murakami Haruki’s Writings about China

3. Becoming-Woman in the Male Writings of Hong Kong Chinese Society

4. Fighting Female Masculinity: Modernity and Antagonism in Woman Warrior Films

5. Ethnic Excess in Films about Minorities

6. Clean Modernization, the Web-Marriage Game and Chinese Men in Virtual Reality

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

• Popular culture
• History of Asia
• Asia

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 04 août 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438432106
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 15 Mo

Extrait

SUNY series in Global Modernity
Arif Dirlik, editor

EXCESS
AND
MASCULINITY
IN ASIAN
CULTURAL
PRODUCTIONS

KWAI-CHEUNG LO

Cover image Fly Away Home #12 by Yim Tae Kyu
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2010 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Ryan Morris Marketing by Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lo, Kwai-Cheung.
    Excess and masculinity in Asian cultural productions / Kwai-Cheung Lo.
       p. cm. — (SUNY series in global modernity)
    Includes bibliographical references and index.
    ISBN 978-1-4384-3209-0 (hbk. : alk. paper) 1. Masculinity in popular culture—China. 2. Popular culture—China. 3. China—Civilization, Modern—21st century. 4. Asia—Civilization, Modern—21st century. I. Title.
    HQ1090.7.C6L62 2010
    305.38'8951—dc22
2009052584
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Academic work is a product of collective wisdom. Different people at various stages offered help by pointing me to significant materials and different perspectives. I would like to thank the many friends and colleagues that I cannot mention individually here for their comments and encouragement while I was working on this project. I am particularly indebted to Arif Dirlik who has greatly supported this project and generously endorsed my work in general. My expressions of gratitude also go to Aoyagi Hiroshi, Nancy Armstrong, Weihong Bao, Chris Berry, Peter Canning, Natalia Chan, Rey Chow, Kirk Denton, Magnus Fiskesjö, Poshek Fu, Jane Gaines, Lawrence Grossberg, Harry Harootunian, Rebecca Karl, Olivia Khoo, Ling-Hon Lam, Lee Tain-Dow, Ping-kwan Leung, Tonglin Lu, Eva Man, Gina Marchetti, Austin Meredith, Sean Metzger, Meaghan Morris, Kwok-kan Tam, Tan See-Kam, David Wang, Wang Hui, Lorraine Wong, Terry Yip, Zhang Zhen, Qian Zhu, and Angela Zito for their friendship and help.
I would also like to acknowledge the support of the Competitive Earmarked Research Grant by the Hong Kong Research Grant Committee for the completion of this project. My thanks are owed to Andrew Kenyon, Larin McLaughlin, Ryan Morris, and the staff at State University of New York Press who have assisted in the production of this book at every level. My sincerest thanks also to Yim Tae Kyu for permission to use his beautiful painting on the book's cover, and to Amanda Lai for her help to communicate with Yim.
Laikwan Pang and our son, Haven, are always major sources of inspiration. Their brief mention here is only a reminder that I'm so fortunate to have this family. This book is, again, for them and also for our new baby boy, Hayden.
An earlier and shorter version of the first section of chapter 1 was published in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 17, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 133–158; and an earlier and shorter version of part 2 of chapter 1 has been anthologized in Futures of Chinese Cinema: Technologies and Temporalities in Chinese Screen Cultures , edited by Sean Metzger and Olivia Khoo (Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2008). An earlier and shorter version of chapter 2 was published in Novel: A Forum on Fiction 37, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 258–276. An earlier and shorter version of chapter 3 has been anthologized in Gender, Discourse and the Self in Literature: Issues in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong , edited by Kwokkan Tam and Terry Siu-han Yip (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2009); its shorter Chinese version was published in Envisage 3 (April 2005): 119–133. An earlier version of part 1 of chapter 4 can be found in Masculinities and Hong Kong Cinema , edited by Laikwan Pang and Day Wong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005), 137–154; and an earlier version of part 2 of chapter 4 was published in Hong Kong Film, Hollywood and the New Global Cinema: No Film Is an Island , edited by Gina Marchetti and Tan See-Kam (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 126–136. An earlier and shorter version of chapter 6 was published in Cultural Studies 23, no. 3 (May 2009): 381–403.
Note: All Chinese and Japanese names, except those with recognized English names, appear in the text in their original order, namely, surname first, given name last.
INTRODUCTION

Asian Modernity and Its Unassimilable Male Excess
In an American internet chat room some years ago, I found the following comments regarding China's online population of 123 million (by January 2009, the amount of internet users in China has already reached 298 million):
A: That said, if half the internet was in chinese all of us would be screwed, or at least heavily burdened by the fact we wouldnt know the language.
B: … and not a single one of them are allowed to read Digg [referring to their own website].
C: In related news, these 123 million can only view the 2 following sites:
www.chinaownsyou.com
www.donttrytousegoogle.com (“China's Online Population Hits 123 Million” 2006)
“China owns you,” of course, refers to the autocratic Chinese regime; “don't try to use google” points to the fact that Beijing has blocked the Google search engine and censors the flow of information on the internet in general. Modernization in China and elsewhere in Asia, through the agency of capitalist machinery, always looks strange to Western eyes. The element of fear is always found in the narrative of (a China-centered) Asia, probably because Asians are now extensively following the Western path to a capitalist mode of production. However, the faster Asia grows under the driving force of the profitability principle, the further it seems to deviate from the values of freedom, democracy, and equality that accompany the spirit of Euro-American modernity, presuming that liberal democracy is a natural consequence of capitalization and that the West had not gone through a long struggle to attain a democratic state. The modernization of Asia attracts the Western gaze because it arouses a disturbing distortion of the hegemonic model of Euro-American modernity, allows the West to see the features of their own development in an alternate form, and, at the same time, conveys the disquieting notion that China's undemocratic and authoritarian path to capitalism could be more efficient and powerful than the Western liberal one, thus paradoxically generating local and unfamiliar senses. 1 “They” are like “us,” and so there is a threat of competition. “They” are not exactly like “us” and the difference solicits fear.

Overabundance, Waste, China's Loins
Asia's rise is always associated with huge numbers: its enormous and still growing population, its big market, its colossal demand for resources and energies, and its vast consumption and destruction of everything—from clean air and water to brand-name luxury goods. One recent Western fascination with fast-developing Asia, and China in particular, is based on its increasingly sharp sex imbalance under the looming shadow of its population growth. In Western perception, patriarchal Asian culture has a very long tradition (dating back to 600 BC) of favoring male babies, and disparaging girls. The imbalanced ratio of about 120 men to 100 women in Asia has been accelerated by the introduction of modern sex-identification technologies such as ultrasound scanners that can help parents distinguish the fetus's sex. Girls now can be aborted before they are born, and infanticide has always been common in rural areas, especially once the Chinese government implemented the one-child-per-family policy to curb population growth. Some Western scholars predict that by 2020, males aged fifteen to thirty-four may outnumber females by more than 60 million in China and India combined ( Hudson and Boer 2004 : 179–185; 264). 2 Pakistan and Taiwan also have disproportionate sex ratios, though on a smaller scale. The populations of South Korea and Vietnam are also imbalanced in favor of males. In other words, it is an Asia-wide phenomenon. The most serious ramification of this is a surplus of Asian bachelors in the two most populous nations in the world, which are undergoing the intense process of capitalist modernization.
How will Asia deal with this potential demographic catastrophe? The increasing economic affluence brought by modernization may encourage people to breed, although greater affluence is generally correlated with a lower birth rate. Which situation will Asia end up in? This question probably concerns the West as much as Asian nation-states themselves. In the Western view, the excess of young single males in Asia, on top of the already excessive population of the region, may very likely create sociopolitical, and particularly international, security problems. Domestically, excess male populations that are believed to cause more violent behavior may pose threats to sociopolitical stability, encouraging a more authoritarian rule to crack down on crime and violence, thus slowin