Louisa Schein

The consumption of color and the politics of white skin in post-Mao China

It is dusk in the Miao mountains of Guizhou, China, September 1993a quintessential site for Western ethnological and Chinese nativist imaginings alike. A wedding is under way. The couple being wed are educated local youth with good jobs-she an elementary-school teacher, he the manager of the subcontracted state dry goods outlet in the Miao market town of Xijiang. Amidst firecrackers, the guests are arriving bearing shoulder poles of gifts-pork, sticky rice, home-brewed liquor, quilts, fabric. The bride stays in the nuptial chamber while guests are received at a long table in the central room of the grooms house and are offered a simple meal and some shots of home brew. Languorously, the bride makes up her face with powder, blush, lipstick, and eyeliner, then dresses in Miao finery-a full-length pleated skirt layered with a circle of embroidered bands, a jacket laden with brocade, applique, and silver panels, chokers and chain necklaces of delicately handwrought silver. Her hair is thickened with extra strands and combed upward into a topknot dense enough to support the weighty silver ornaments that will complete the ensemble. Just then a group of city friends arrive, classmates from the days when the couple attended high school in the prefecture seat. The firecrackers they set off are so noisy as to put the local village guests to shame. Then, the piece de resistance-the gift borne on shoulder poles. It is an ostentatious yard-long framed wall hanging behind glass, a photographic decoration slated for the walls of the nuptial chamber. The picture, in a bizarre juxtaposition with the bride, even upstaging her, is of a blonde model in a hot-pink G-string bikini supine atop a snazzy racing car. Lovingly, the hanging is given front center placement among the other gifts-heaps of quilts and household goods-on display in the nuptial chamber for guests to review. Upon completion of her ethnic adornment, the bride poses with the thing. As representations of white women continue to deluge the globe, an initial task of this essay is to explore how such renderings mean within particular contemporary Chinese contexts. The account above suggests that the erotic codes through which most Westerners read the exposure of female-gendered flesh may be idiomatic. That a young woman of Chinas Miao minority would, in the midst of her own beautification as bride, Louisa Schein

The other goes to market: The state, the nation, and unruliness in contemporary China

Nations/states are conventionally portrayed as producers of hegemonic or normalizing codes for gender and sexuality. This essay, on the contrary, explores circumstances under which the nation/state might tolerate, if not support, the proliferation of unruly difference. Examining the case of post‐Mao China, the author first traces normalizing discourses of sexual and gender impropriety directed at particular others throughout Chinese history. She then analyzes the multiplication of discourses and practices in the post‐1979 reform period, as well as counter‐discourses generated by members of the historically vilified Miao minority, thus pluralizing the sites from which nationalist ideological production is seen to emerge. It is argued that, as the contrastive other shifts, so too do formulations of appropriate gender and sexual conduct. Finally, the market—with its burgeoning production and consumption of commodities—is posed as an alternative form of rule to which the Chinese state may have partially relin...

Beyond Gran Torino's Guns: Hmong Cultural Warriors Performing Genders

Clint Eastwoods feature film Gran Torino (2008) represents an ongoing site of cultural struggle from the perspective of Hmong Americans, not only because of issues around the portrayal of Hmong culture and society, but also because of the very fraught politics of the films production process itself. This collaborative piece stages conversations and critiques so as to be stylistically consistent with the ensemble nature of film production, bringing together the voices of a Hmong antiracist media activist, a white academic in media and Hmong studies, the Hmong lead actor from Gran Torino, and a Hmong PhD student in English. With special attention to how regimes of gender and sexuality manifest racial and ethnic hierarchy, the piece asks questions about the consequences of hypervisibility for Hmong Americans who have been chronically silenced and invisibilized, and interrogates the counterpointing of Eastwoods character, Walt, and his normative white masculinity with two dysfunctional immigrant masculinities—that of the effeminate, childlike geek and that of the hyperviolent and transgressive gangster. The piece proceeds to read Hmong cultural production and critique as racial struggle which entails a queer response that would go beyond exclusively textual readings of alternative masculinity to refigure racial engagements beyond conventional binaries of hyposexual versus hyperviolent, and beyond queer as antimasculine.

Media, erotics, and transnational Asia

Drawing on methods and approaches from anthropology, media studies, film theory, and cultural studies, the contributors to Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia examine how mediated eroticism and sexuality circulating across Asia and Asian diasporas both reflect and shape the social practices of their producers and consumers. The essays in this volume cover a wide geographic and thematic range, and combine rigorous textual analysis with empirical research into the production, circulation, and consumption of various forms of media. Judith Farquhar examines how health magazines serve as sources of both medical information and erotic titillation to readers in urban China. Tom Boellstorff analyzes how queer zines produced in Indonesia construct the relationship between same-sex desire and citizenship. Purnima Mankekar examines the rearticulation of commodity affect, erotics, and nation on Indian television. Louisa Schein describes how portrayals of Hmong women in videos shot in Laos create desires for the homeland among viewers in the diaspora. Taken together, the essays offer fresh insights into research on gender, erotics, media, and Asia transnationally conceived. Contributors . Anne Allison, Tom Boellstorff, Nicole Constable, Heather Dell, Judith Farquhar, Sarah L. Friedman, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Purnima Mankekar, Louisa Schein, Everett Yuehong Zhang

Introduction: Mediated Transnationalism and Social Erotics

MOVING AWAY FROM THE COLONIAL TROPE of a feminized Orient that is remote and suffused with erotic alterity (Said 1978; Alloula 1986; Kabbani 1986), this collection presents three ethnographic treatments of the cultural productivity of Asian men and women around issues of sexuality-zines in gay Indonesia (Tom Boellstorff), transnational television programs produced in India (Purnima Mankekar), and the production and consumption of video in the Hmong diaspora (Louisa Schein). We begin from the premise that Asia has historically been a transnational crossroads of cultures. Our position, therefore, is that, despite some continuities and enduring patterns, there are no regionally specific Asian sexualities that can be considered in isolation from global processes (Manderson and Jolly 1997). Our analyses of the erotic in different sites and media texts crosscut scales from the local, to the subnational, and to the national and the transnational. Yet at the same time that we track the differential production, circulation, and reception of media texts in particular sites, we demonstrate the difficulty of keeping these scales apart and point to the mutual imbrication of the local and the translocal.

The unbearable racedness of being natural: A dialogue on the Gran Torino production between lead actor Bee Vang and Louisa Schein

At the age of just 16, Bee Vang (BV), a Hmong Minnesotan, was chosen from several hundred auditioners for the lead role of Thao in Clint Eastwoods Gran Torino. Now a 22-year-old student at Brown University focusing on global political economy and critical race studies, he dialogues here with media studies anthropologist Louisa Schein (LS) unpacking the dynamics by which the contemporary racial order is engendered and reproduced through the micropractices of film production – from casting, to on set, to the reception of the resulting film text – and reflecting on their insights from two years of collaboration. After the release, Vang and Schein developed a Gran Torino workshop on race, masculinity, sexuality, media and Asian Americans which they conducted at universities, film festivals and museums around the USA. What follows here, in keeping with film editing method, represents a cut, cropped and resequenced version of their conversation, which was originally conducted on skype chat.

Micro-Exclusions, Raunch Aesthetics and In-Jokes: A Rogue Hmong Raciosexual Parody

This essay reads closely into the racial politics of “Thao Does Walt,” a YouTube parody of one particular scene in Eastwood’s Gran Torino, featuring Bee Vang, the lead actor from the original. The short, co-created by the authors and a Hmong artistic team, sought to trouble clichéd Asian American masculinities, not by defying them but by caricaturing dominant tropes, deploying camp, humor, raunch and queering tactics to make visible the turgidity of stereotyping. Moving from a production-studies approach that interrogates how the team’s use of silliness and hyperbole in scripting and shooting was to suggest complex personhood and its erasure, we turn to the “failures” of reception, reflecting on how canons of lockstep legibility contravened our queer satiric approach to counter-representation.

The Other Goes to Market: Gender, Sexuality, and Unruliness in Post-Mao China

This essay explores circumstances under which the nation/state might tolerate, if not support, the proliferation of unruly differences in gender and sexuality. To do so, my narrative counterposes historically specific accounts of discursive regulation of sexuality and gender against accounts of a contemporary instance in which such regulation appears ragged if not entirely suppressed.2 This instance is the heteroglot world of post-Mao, reform-era 1990s China in the thick of a profound marketizing transformation.3