Lost in Translation

I'm still plowing through Gay and Lesbian Subculture in Urban China, which in fact is the second academic book in a row that I've taken on. (The previous one was Sun Jung's Korean Masculinities and Transcultural Consumption [Hong Kong University Press, 2010], to which I may return sometime.) That may account for some of the impatience I feel with it. It occurred to me today that academic writing bears a certain resemblance to the Homeric mode of composition, using well-worn epithets to string the text together: instead of rosy-fingered Dawn you use global sexual politics, instead of owl-eyed Athena you use same-sex attracted Chinese. The difference is that using epithets enables a bard to spin out an epic on the fly, while academic prose can be composed, edited and polished before it's presented to its audience.

But I digress. Back to Gay and Lesbian Subculture in Urban China. Page 15:

On a personal level, only a few same-sex attracted Chinese, mostly cultural elites, are open about their sexuality. But they also see coming out as problematic. In Beyond the closet, Steven Seidman writes that “simply coming out does not rid us of feelings of shame and guilt, and that visibility alone does not threaten heterosexual privilege”. It is thus vital to ask what happens to them after they have come out.

Here's a difference between Chinese and American styles of gayishness: in the US, only a few marginal artistic figures -- marginal in the larger commercial cultures, I mean, not necessarily in artistic circles -- were openly gay before Stonewall. Most gay and lesbian celebrities relied on the custom of the open secret and on the complicity of the commercial media to keep that secret. When being openly gay became an articulated political tactic and goal, the people who chose it were mainly activists who hadn't been famous before and mostly didn't become famous afterwards, since the commercial media and heterosexual culture didn't really know what to do with them. Gay and lesbian cultural elites -- political, artistic, and media -- generally refused to come out on the grounds that doing so would destroy their careers. So in the US, uncountable thousands of "same-sex attracted" Americans began living their lives as openly gay, to be followed over the decades by various celebrities, often with bad grace. Rosie O'Donnell, for example, griped: "I don't know why people make such a big deal about the gay thing. ... People are confused, they're shocked, like this is a big revelation to somebody." But even assholes should come out; there's room for all in the Rainbow Nation.

In China the creation of a gay community may move in the opposite direction, from top to bottom; it remains to be seen what choices gay and lesbian Chinese will make.

Indeed, some same-sex attracted Chinese are open only to the extent that their traditional and social identities are protected from intolerance and discrimination. Many of them reject the need to be “out”.

Well, that's their individual choice, hee hee hee. Contrary to the myth of Western gay individualism that I so often encounter, it's the closeted who are the isolated individuals.

As Chris Berry remarks: “It is still impossible to be publicly gay and retain respectable employment [in China]. Frequently, they reconcile their personal identity with the social obligations to maintain family ties and social harmony, an approach that is appreciated as an avoidance of confrontation or conflict. In most cases, same-sex identity in China is concealed. It is the identity that dare not speak its name; whereas the central strategy of Western gay assertion is to render it speakable [15].

The impossibility of being publicly gay while retaining respectable employment was true in the US until quite recently, and probably still is in much of the country, outside the urban centers. (Depending on how respectable you think it is to be in the military, for example, the official barrier remained in place until last year.) It's impossible to know how many of us still lead double lives to some extent, since the closeted, for obvious reasons, aren't telling.

It was downright offensive, though, when Ho wrote (17):

Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize laureate in economics, once spoke of globalization as a process “from which there is no escape and no great reason to seek escape”. Sen seems to suggest that globalization is highly uneven, but inevitable, and that this uneven distribution of globalization is part of the larger process of globalization.

The quotation came from Sen's op-ed piece “If it’s fair, it’s good: 10 truths about globalization”, for the International Herald Tribune, 14-15 July 2001, text available online here. As I suspected, Ho misrepresents him. Here's the context:

Anti-globalization protests are not about globalization: The so-called anti-globalization protesters can hardly be, in general, anti-globalization, since these protests are among the most globalized events in the contemporary world. The protesters in Seattle, Melbourne, Prague, Quebec and elsewhere are not just local kids, but men and women from across the world pouring into the location of the respective events to pursue global complaints.

Globalization is not new, nor is it just Westernization: Over thousands of years, globalization has progressed through travel, trade, migration, spread of cultural influences and dissemination of knowledge and understanding (including of science and technology). ...

Global construction is the needed response to global doubts: The anti-globalization protests are themselves part of the general process of globalization, from which there is no escape and no great reason to seek escape. But while we have reason enough to support globalization in the best sense of that idea, there are also critically important institutional and policy issues that need to be addressed at the same time. It is not easy to disperse the doubts without seriously addressing the doubters' underlying concerns.

Ho's conception of globalization, like that of too many academic writers I've read, is drastically incomplete. It mainly draws on "globalization" triumphalists like Anthony Giddens, and critics who take the triumphalists at their word, while ignoring any number of other writers on the subject who correct their tunnel vision. (I'd recommend Aijaz Ahmad, Amartya Sen, Justin Rosenberg, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak for a beginning.) Still, I can't see much excuse for misreading Sen as Ho does here. And on page 104 she quotes Arjun Appadurai saying essentially the same thing Sen said: "Globalisation does not necessarily or even frequently imply homogenization or Americanisation, and to the extent that different societies appropriate the materials of modernity differently, there is still ample room for the deep study of specific geographies, histories, and languages." (That turns up in her chapter on Chinese cyberspace, adapted from a journal article, which helps to explain the conflict.)

But back to gay and lesbian matters. I'm not always sure how aware Ho is of the faultlines in the stance which draws a line between "authentic" Chinese or other "non-Western" identities and (apparently inauthentic) "Western" ones (page 19).

For instance, current transgender identities, kathoey or tom-dee, in Thailand are established categories, which “largely ignore English and continue to reflect long-established Thai terminologies for same-sex eroticism”. The term “gay” does not adequately substitute for such local identities as kathoey or tom-dee.

I don't think tom-dee is an identity, any more than butch-femme is an identity. Tom-dee refers to a particular construction of eroticism between women. "Transgender" is a Western concept and identity built on the medicalized discourse that Ho, being the good Foucauldian that she is, shouldn't be imposing on Third World people. "Gay" probably is not an adequate substitute for these local identities, but if so, why did "gay" catch on among Thais and Japanese, and others, who appropriated “gay” as a category in their own environments, redefining it to suit themselves? Generally, it seems to have been assimilated to gender-variant styles of presentation, as in Japan, where a gei boi is a pretty sissy boy in commercial entertainment. And, as I've pointed out before, in scientific and popular conceptions in the US, "gay" still means a sort of third-sex figure, a feminized male or masculinized female -- not a "sexual orientation," whatever that might be.

However, segments of Western community tend to simplify and identify these categories with gay or homosexual in Western discourse, without recognising their unique cultural heritage. This presents serious problems for researchers in the realm of global gender and sexual expression.

No, it doesn’t, not really, if the researchers do their job properly; except that so often they don’t. As for simplifying and identifying these categories with Western ones, that isn't limited to the West. For example, the anthropologist Rudolf Pell Gaudio wrote of his research among "sexual outlaws" in Nigeria (Allah made us: sexual outlaws in an Islamic African city [Wiley-Blackwell, 2009], 281)

Though it has become commonplace among anthropologists of sexuality to refrain from using terms from a colonial language (English, French, Dutch, etc.) to describe the identities and practices of people who speak other (usually non-European) languages, scholars have paid little attention to translation that operates in the other direction. The Hausa-language newspaper Kakaki, for example, had no trouble reporting on President Clinton’s ill-fated proposal in 1993 to permit gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the US armed forces, though the term the newspaper used for “gay men,” `yan ludu [literally, “sons of Lot”] conveys a negative moral judgment akin to English “sodomites.” `Yan madigo, the term used for “lesbians,” has more neutral connotations. Such translations occur in day-to-day conversations as well. In talking with Hausa friends I frequently found myself using terms like harka and dan daudu to describe gay life in the USA. I also heard such terms applied to me.

I wonder if this sort of "translation" was practiced by Loretta Wing Wah Ho's Chinese informants. I'll bet it was, and I'll bet that when official Chinese media must refer to such American issues, they don't bother to use Western terminology and concepts either.

*See Peter Jackson, Dear Uncle Go: Male Homosexuality in Thailand [Bua Luang Books, 1995]; and Jackson and Gerald Sullivan, eds., Lady Boys, Tom Boys, Rent Boys: male and female homosexualities in contemporary Thailand (Haworth Press, 1999); Mark McLelland, Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), pp. 96 and 154.

Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom

I'm in the middle of a reading push, as I think you could call it, trying to get through a pile of books that I've had out from the library for too long. (Not overdue; I've just been renewing them a lot.) It's been successful in that I'm making good progress, but I've found it difficult to make time to write. You'd think that retirement would have eliminated such time conflicts in my life, but it hasn't.

Tonight I just began reading Loretta Wing Wah Ho's Gay and Lesbian Subculture in Urban China (Routledge, 2010), which looked promising in the library because it is based on many interviews with gay and lesbian Chinese. First, though, I have to get through the introductory material, which is heavy with theory and some drearily typical generalizations about "Western" gay life. For example, from page 10:

There is, however, little copying of the mainstream Western gay politics of employing the rhetoric of human rights as a claim to assert the legitimacy of sexual diversity, and push for visibility and social change in China. This is because this politics, central to Western constructions of gay and lesbian identities ...

Not true – Western constructions of gay and lesbian identities are based on the same medicalization of sexuality that Ho shows to be dominant in China. Rights-based rhetoric and strategies are a relatively recent development here, and though they're certainly well dug-in in the US, that's because they conform to "mainstream" American notions of politics.

... is considered by some non-Western gay activists, including some of those in China, to be in conflict with local cultural traditions. Furthermore, same-sex politics in contemporary China is complicated by rivalry and conflict among elite same-sex groups.

Omighod, that’s like so different from the way it is here! (Sarcasm Alert! for the irony-impaired.)

There is a competition for foreign funding and international representations among these local networks: gay-oriented website operators, tongzhi (a same-sex attracted Chinese man or woman) hotline organisers, NGOs, a few voluntary groups and informal social groups.

A major factor in US gay life that really does differ from Chinese gay life, on Ho's account, is the commercial sector: bars, discos, magazines and other publications, and the like. Most of this, I believe, is still grass-roots and close to everyday life.

On the whole, the politics of identity in China rejects the "confrontational" idea of disrupting family and community ties as a result of coming out – that is, Chinese traditions prescribe that primacy should be given to family ties and social harmony over an individual’s sexual identity or pleasure.

On the other hand, Ho concedes in an end note (161, note 15) that "'pride parades' in Western societies are no longer seen as confrontational ... Pride parades are increasingly called 'festivals', while Western gay men and lesbians are now targeted as a desired market and a potential voting bloc." She doesn't seem to realize that this undercuts her theoretical framework, since it shows that "Western constructions of gay and lesbian identities" are not monolithic. Confrontation has only ever been one facet of gay politics in the US.

One seeming difference between Ho's approach and that of many other non-American writers on emergent gayish life around the world is her embrace of "identity" and "the politics of identity," both of which are dirty words in most academic writing on the subject, including writing on gayish life in the US. (I think "gayish" could be a useful word in this context, certainly better than Ho's essentializing "same-sex", which makes sense only some of the time.) Her concept of identity comes, she says, from Stuart Hall, which made me try to think of how much queer academic work has come from the Cultural Studies approach Hall epitomizes. Not much that I know of; really only a few Afro-British writers like Kobena Mercer. (Maybe I should reread Mercer's Welcome to the Jungle now that I've read Raymond Williams, who was Stuart Hall's teacher. But it seems to me that Cultural Studies, despite its pedigree, is mostly unlike the kind of work Williams did.)

On page 11 Ho writes,

In short, many same-sex attracted Chinese in China are still exposed to great vulnerability.

Which is interesting: how can they be “exposed,” in light of everything Ho has said about their low profile? It's a reminder that, as David Halperin wrote in Saint Foucault (Oxford, 1995),

[Eve Kosofsky] Sedgwick has shown that the closet is an impossibly contradictory place: you can’t be in it, and you can’t be out of it. You can’t be in it because – so long as you are in the closet – you can never be certain of the extent to which you have actually succeeded in keeping your homosexuality secret; after all, one effect of being in the closet is that you are precluded from knowing whether people are treating you as straight because you have managed to fool them and they do not suspect you of being gay, or whether they are treating you as straight because they are playing along with you and enjoying the epistemological privilege that your ignorance of their knowledge affords them [34].

Unfortunately, it seems Ho has only listened to a narrow part of the discussion of these issues in the West.

It is this vulnerability [Ho continues] that both binds and splits the local Chinese and global same-sex networks, and witnesses a struggle for representing an “authentic” Chinese same-sex culture among the diasporic Chinese same-sex communities. This vulnerability reinforces the formation of a decentred identity, expressed through an incomplete but dominant model of Western homosexuality, which is overlapped with culturally determined notions of Chinese gayness.

This too will be familiar to anyone who remembers or has studied the recent history of gayish life in the West. Before the early 1960s, when the American homophile movement began to constitute itself as a national presence with increasing militance, Ho's description could apply just as well to American queers. There was considerable resistance even after Stonewall to the idea that gay people had common interests, even if these were limited simply to an end to police harassment and antigay violence, whether official or freelance.

Ho admits that in the past decade or so "the spread of the Western-oriented concepts of 'gay assertion' and 'gay identity' in urban China has been extraordinary" (13); could it be because gay Chinese have found these supposedly alien ideas useful? There was a similar explosion of gay organization in the US after Stonewall: suddenly almost every college or university and every city of any size had a gay group. I concede that some of it was mere copycatting, that only after groups were founded did people begin to think about what they were for. But that didn't make them illegitimate or inauthentic.

Gay netizens in China are increasingly exposed to the transnational gay scene via the internet, where notions of “coming out”, “gay rights,” “gay marriage” or “individualism” [whoa, Tessie!] are widely promoted. These notions enhance general [?] awareness of identity and community, and yet they lead some gay netizens in China to imagine the Western gay world as a gay haven, where gender or sexual variation is the norm [14].

The second sentence is true enough: even before I set foot in Korea (the only Asian country I've visited so far) I encountered gay Asians online who had an unrealistic picture of American gay life: they had no idea of the extent of antigay violence here, or of organized homophobia and bigotry, or even that most American states had laws against sex between males. It's understandable, of course, but scholars should know better, and many don't; Ho at least seems to, though she still has a distorted view of the lives most of us lead.

I objected to "individualism" because I don't recall having encountered that word in much American gay discourse, at the popular or scholarly level. "Widely promoted"? Not a bit of it. As I've pointed out before, gay identity is not individualistic but situates the individual in a category, a community, a collectivity; "coming out" is double-edged, referring to self-avowal before straight society but also to emerging into gay society, joining with others in the same boat. Far from rejecting the family, most American gay people are trying to get their parents to keep them. In a remarkable number of cases, they succeed; there's no good reason in principle why they shouldn't. Another phenomenon of American gay life that Ho should be aware of is PFLAG, Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, a national organization in which supportive heterosexuals come together to protect their gay and lesbian family members.

That's where I am so far, still in the first introductory chapter. More to come, maybe.