Making the Spectral Real: Asian American Film in Glen M. Mimura’s Ghostlife of Third Cinema

“What is Asian American cinema?” asks Glen M. Mimura in Ghostlife of Third Cinema. As other scholars in related fields have addressed Asian American citizenship, housing segregation, and racialization, Mimura explores the cultural production of Asian American film and its relation to the transnational Third Cinema. Mimura describes Third Cinema as a “revolutionary international movement,” radical in its politics and form. Emerging in the 1960s, the Third Cinema proliferated over the following two decades. According to Mimura, it helped to develop community based film centers and independent Asian American cinema, while also creating spaces for previously marginalized identities, notably queer sexualities. Drawing on the work of Paul Gilroy, Nayan Shah, and Lisa Lowe among others and exploring the film and media productions of numerous Asian American artists/filmmakers, Mimura focuses on “the meaning of Asian Americans’ discursive occasional presence” a constant vacillation between foreign threat and “conciliatory Model Minority.” Along the way, Mimura engages in discussions of modernity, spectrality, and erasure.

In her 1998 work Immigrant Acts, Lowe argued Asian American culture, due to its experiences with fragmentation and erasure, provided a unique site for resistance. Mimura builds upon Lowe’s assertion suggesting that the cultural production of Asian American cinema illustrates a resistant creative agency that challenges hegemony. Third and Asian American cinema’s development during the 1960s and 1970s influenced their collective political leanings. Shaped by events, the two film communities pay close attention to politics, social justice and transnational solidarities. Rising from the Bandung Conference and the non-alignment movement, Mimura argues that “Third Cinema shares complex histories and relations with the Third World . . . “ (Mimura, 29) The community of Third Cinema exists more as a membership of political ties than geographical localities. (Mimura, 29) Mimura identifies Third Cinema as an intensely political project committed to “a democratic, participatory, socialist cinema” that challenges traditional ideas. (Mimura, 30)

As with other authors incorporating transnational perspectives, Mimura points to the increasing interconnectedness of peoples, movements and ideas in the last half of the 20th century. Invoking Saidian Orientalism, Mimura notes that as late as the mid-twentieth century, many western imaginaries considered Asia “the last refuge from history.” This primordial designation works to legitimate western hegemony while inscribing inferiority on non-westerners. Undoubtedly, the issue of modernity functions as a key factor in conceptualizing diasporic communities. Furthermore, observers attentive to transnational histories and peoples have altered understandings of what and who is “modern.” How Asians fit into the racial hierarchy of western imaginaries remains a fluid issue. In the past, “Asianness" emerged as analogous to blackness … “as the West’s redemptive other. (Mimura, 3) However, Mimura argues “Asia has also been figured as ambivalent,” a term occupying a space between “black and white.” This has been particularly notable in regard to Western discourse on sexuality. Accelerating in the early 1990s, the deconstruction of binaries has served as a central task of many scholars. The pervasiveness of binary thinking fractures our understanding of history, while obscuring peoples, events, processes and interactions. Mimura attempts to uncover the very erasures binary thinking has hidden.

Undoubtedly, the process of globalization influences Mimura’s work. As a process it performs the paradoxical task of both expanding and contracting community. On the one hand, increased interaction and interdependencies draw people closer but critically this also serves to differentiate. Supralocalisms are sometimes enacted, confining membership to very specific local contexts that exclude as many as it includes. Moreover, as Arjun Appadurai argues, globalization unfolds in various ways, affecting various peoples in equally diverse manners. The process of globalization fetishizes localities. Lowe adds that “it obscures a much longer history of global contacts and connections.” (Lowe, 120) Earlier connections and interactions deserve attention as they reveal spaces of resistance and cultural politics. In an intriguing reversal of Adam McKeown’s “globalization” argument, Mimura suggests that today’s globalization and the perceived reduction in racism or prejudice serves not as evidence of improved race relations “here” but rather “because middle class (primarily white) consumers are now going there.” (Mimura, 79)

The dispersal of labor globally contributed to the growth of diasporas. Paul Gilory most famously suggested that there exists a “Black Atlantic” which postulated that diaspora existed as a space for countermemory. (Mimura, 26) Similarly, Mimura explains Asian American film and Third Cinema as a similar space. Despite their obvious relationship, few scholars have explored the relationship between the two, which Mimura credits with helping to create a cinema that was “politically, aesthetically, and institutionally self aware as Asian American . . . ” (Mimura 45) According to Mimura, Asian American film served to both “articulate” many of the goals within Third Cinema but also to critique its tendency to “fold gender into class, feminism into socialism and to regard sexism as a residual social inequality to be resolved by authentic class solidarity and consciousness.” (Mimura, 45) Asian American filmmakers addressed these inadequacies, most notably in the 1990s, as feminists and queer filmmakers produced works exploring issues of sexuality, gender, and subjectivities in an attempt to reorient, rework, and engage with “the politics of representation.” (Mimura, 45)

In this way, Mimura points toward diasporas not dependent on race and ethnicity alone. The contours of Asian American sexuality often excluded queer and transgendered voices. Since the 1990s, independent Asian cinema has promoted these voices. Harnessing Stuart Hall and to a lesser extent Lowe, Mimura credits the “politics of difference” for opening up a space “for the margins to gain visibility as dominant discourses . . . ” (Mimura, 124) Accordingly, the fissures of identity politics need to be attended to, considering the potential problems that may arise from intersectionality. Intersectionalities serve as a source of strength when viewed through this prism as “the politics of difference” enables numerous subjects, even those “marginalized simultaneously by race, class, gender and sexuality, ” to gain intelligibility. Clearly, Mimura shares a fundamental distrust of liberal democracy. The promises of multiculturalism and liberal democracy serve as levelers that obliterate valued differences, while erasing our understanding of the longer history of peoples.

Unsurprisingly, Mimura addresses the spectrality of Asian American representation. While Mimura acknowledges the scholarship of Ronald Takaki and the aforementioned Lowe and Shah, he also incorporates more theoretical works by Avery Wood, Bliss Lim, and Derrida. (See Wood, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination; Lim, “Spectral Times”; Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International.) Spectrality haunts Asian American representation and identity as Asian Americans flicker in and out of public visibility, often representing a foreignness placing them outside of time. (Mimura, 64) Attempts by Asian Americans at claiming “political or cultural subjecthood” result in reactions of “disbelief, skepticism, disavowal,” responses not unlike those of a “scientific, rational, secular society to the presence of ghosts, and the fantastic more generally.” (Mimura, 68) The emergence of ghosts threatens the normal historical consciousness, undermining the idea that modern history remains stable, progressive and linear. Like Lowe and others, Mimura rejects multiculturalism, arguing it symbolically embraces Asian Americans culturally while failing to address the social, economic, and political “material exclusion” imposed them.

Conflicts arising within Asian American media illustrate the film’s ability to disrupt traditional normative forms, enabling previously excluded voices to thicken our understanding of histories. Mimura juxtaposes the goals of the Japanese American Redress and Post-Redress movements. The difference between the two categorizations rested on epistemological concerns rather than chronology. To put it succinctly, the Redress movement focused on broadening mainstream history to include Japanese Americans as soldiers, advocates for Asian American riots, draft resisters, and so forth. In general it embraced an Americanism that continued to privilege liberal democracy, neoliberalism, and the nation state. Critics argue Redress’s maintains a reductive approach that squashes internal complexities in favor of uniformity, thus, silencing segments of Asian America, while failing to account for the long term psychological trauma imposed on those who experienced it and their children. Moreover, many in the Redress movement “privileged heroic, therapeutic stories.” (Mimura, 88) In contrast, Post Redress works address the continuing effects of internment on Japanese families, while avoiding the silencing of voices that Redress’s uniformity required. Post Redress conventions often employ non-linear fragmented approaches, reaffirming, as Mimura points out, that “remembering is itself a generative, creative, fictionalizing act.” (Mimura, 95) For Mimura, Asian American politics of the 1960s and 1970s, the same politics that informed Third Cinema, rejected the “silence in Japanese American history.” Asian American history more broadly exhibited a “short circuiting” of collective memory. According to Mimura, the danger in the Redress approach meant “relegating Japanese American life to historical artifact, we are not confronting racism today, and we are failing to confront the tremendous changes in our own cultural identity.” (Mimura, 116) Focusing on family life and more personal, less stereotypically “heroic” examples uncovers the pervasiveness and meaning of the internment experience.

For some, Mimura’s focus on abstractions like spectrality, ghosts, and hauntings undermine what they consider more clear eyed approaches. Ghostlife is not social history. Additionally, Mimura employs terms like violence in a fashion that continues to divide academics. Older scholars and some younger ones will surely bristle at this methodological approach. Still, in Ghostlife, Mimura provides a useful synthesis and reconfiguring of transnational Asian American cultural production, placing it in dialogue with transnational forces of the last three decades, thus, adding to the groundbreaking insights of scholars like Lowe.

Ryan Reft

Visions of the “Long Emergency”: How Will We Live After Peak Oil?

Stories about the end of the world are as old as culture itself. While many traditional belief systems posit history as an endless cycle of renewal, humans have often imagined time as having a beginning and an end, an origin story and an apocalypse or day of judgment. In modern society, these stories have often taken the form of dystopian literature; Nineteen Eighty Four and Brave New World depict a kind of “end of history,” where the despotism of politics and technology have extinguished humanity’s potential for progress, either by grinding people down with pain or numbing them with pleasure. More recently, we have seen tales of nuclear disaster (Cloud Atlas), environmental catastrophe (The Day After Tomorrow), economic and demographic collapse (Children of Men), and the ever-reliable zombie apocalypse (Confessions of a Shopaholic). 

 

The dizzying number of problems the world faces in the early twenty-first century has clearly prompted a renewed interest in the genres of apocalypse and dystopia. Particularly, climate change offers the same kind of imaginative possibilities that nuclear war once provided during the Cold War, where the threat of radiation made for fictional scenarios both silly and profound. (You had giant ants attacking Los Angeles; you also saw humans fiddle with time travel as they attempted to survive in tunnels under Paris in the 1960s classic La Jetée, the basis for Terry Gilliam’s later film 12 Monkeys). The difference between nuclear and climate catastrophe, though, makes for very different stories – the difference between a sudden calamity that renders the landscape almost unlivable for humans, and a potentially slow, erratic change in the environment that makes life more difficult in a variety of ways, whether rising waters, food shortages, or political conflict. In the dystopia of climate change, the world might look a lot like ours, just without the plethora of consumer goods we have gotten used to or the shorelines we’ve come to expect when we look at a globe. 

 No, you can't have your Medicare Grandma

In part these stories reflect a consciousness of natural limits that emerged with the rise of the environmentalist movement in the 1960s, at a time when the spectacular advances of productivity and living standards in the US, Europe and Japan seemed to augur a future of infinite possibilities. Environmentalists began to question whether endless growth was wise or even possible, but the awareness of serious side-effects from rising temperatures since the 1970s has made such concerns far more tangible than they once were. Whereas the New Left once pondered whether ever-greater consumption would make for a just society or a contented life, we now wonder whether millions in Bangladesh or Manhattan will be able to go on living above sea level. The incredible leaps of productivity in the 200 years or so since fossil fuels were widely exploited for fuel begins to look like an anomalous, if miraculous, blip in the longer history of human drudgery. 

 

Writers in the peak oil movement believe our era is truly exceptional. They say we are burning through the energy stored in the Earth over millions of years, and once this supply runs out there is no remotely comparable alternative. Authors such as James Howard Kunstler, Sharon Astyk, and Richard Heinberg have tried to warn the public of an imminent resource crunch, arguing that the depletion of oil will have an even more dramatic effect of human society than climate change, although the problems are likely to be felt simultaneously. These critics insist that oil is rapidly becoming scarce even now, and the idea that solar, wind, and other alternative energy sources can provide anywhere near the level of energy of fossil fuels is a dangerous illusion. We simply have to prepare ourselves for a future where much less energy is available, with all the economic, political, and cultural consequences that come with this new reality. 

Astyk in particular has made a salient case about the gender implications of peak oil, asking how a dramatic diminution of living standards will affect men and women differently. For instance, oil is an essential ingredient in countless consumer goods, such as anything mad with plastic, and the lack of fuel to move goods will make many basic necessities costlier or simply unavailable. “I teach classes for people attempting to adapt their lives to lower energy usage, and one of the things I've found startling is the degree to which conversations about ‘men's issues’ and ‘women's issues’ look completely different. When women's issues come up, women are worried mostly about material realities - How will I keep safe?” Astyk writes. “How will I handle pregnancy, birth control, breastfeed, menstruation and menopause? These are the central issues that women perceive as specific to them.” She goes on to describe the implications for men: 

When we talk about men's issues, almost always one of the central discussion points, however, is depression, anxiety, drug and alcohol use, and even thoughts of suicide. The difference is startling - and it doesn't seem just to be my audience. In states that have collapsed or had a major crisis, there's considerable evidence that men often have more trouble with the shift in their roles than women, and with heavy consequences. In Russia, for example a combination of poor health care, increased alcoholism, rapidly rising suicide rates and other linked factors created a disparity of almost a decade between the lifespans of men and of women. Both sexes saw declines in lifespan - but for Russian men, the difference was extremely dramatic - 4 years from 1980 to 1999.

Clearly, the possibilities of a dramatic drop in living standards are real and very serious, but Astyk suggests they might not be all bad. The loss of automation and automobility will reintroduce a great deal of drudgery to everyday life, but the shift may bring with it a revaluing of manual labor. Millions of people whose livelihoods have been destroyed by labor-saving technology, plunged into despair, poverty and even incarceration, may find that their skills and physical capabilities have worth again. That world might be one of organized physical intimidation by local gangs or security forces, or even civil war, but Astyk at least suggests that physical work may have renewed dignity in a future where today’s post-industrial service economy is no longer feasible. Critics of capitalism, consumerism, technology and various other ills have long suggested that a life alienated from nature and tradition is profoundly unrewarding; Astyk and her compatriots simply suggest we may not have much choice in the matter of whether we abandon consumer society or not. 

Hollywood liberals have been keen to dramatize the possibilities of climate change on the screen – perhaps because catastrophic weather lends itself to high-tech spectacle better than the grinding poverty of an oilless future. The most vivid fictional vision of both peak oil and climate change may be in David J. Williams’s The Mirrored Heavens. The author is a retired grad student who appears to run a side business as a consultant on the next wave of military technology, specifically the space-based weapons that he believes will become inevitable as the US, China and other nations attempt to cope with environmental crisis. During the depths of the economic collapse in 2009, I compulsively read the book’s timeline of the twenty-first century; its dystopian trajectory seemed well suited to a world that was careening toward catastrophe across the board. (Remember when economists said that if the US government did not step in to rescue the banks “we are then in a world in which the only things that have value are bottled water, sewing needles, and ammunition”? The tone is not too different from the prophecies of Astyk and Kunstler.) 

Don't try this at home

Williams’s story is a fascinating one – an alternative history of the future where green technology and Freakonomics can’t save us, where nations pursue various paths to survival that all ultimately lead to famine and authoritarianism. The EU adopts the Helios Project, a battery of solar panels in space meant to beam energy back to Earth. The ironic outcome is that the new energy source simply adds to the rising temperature of the planet, and the project is ultimately abandoned. Japan pursues research on cold fusion, which seems promising until a horrific accident known as the Kyushu Incident unleashes unimaginable destruction in 2049, leading to a near-complete evacuation of the island nation. (A year ago this plot point seemed gratuitous: the always high-tech Japanese are collectively done in by their scientific hubris. Recent events have made this aspect of The Mirrored Heavens seem not so unreasonable.)

Meanwhile, oil grows scarcer and dearer, dragging on national economies throughout the world and mounting debt. The US fights a series of “eco wars” with various developing countries, particularly Brazil, on the premise that their increasing consumption and resource usage is to blame for rising temperatures. With shorelines receding and no new viable energy source coming online to replace fossil fuels, escape from Earth through space travel and colonization becomes a priority, and different blocs fight for access to libation points along the equator as the critical points of departure for the Moon. China and Russia form an alliance, reminiscent of the early Cold War, after the Communists fall in the 2030s and the “Neo Confucians” gain power through a lengthy civil war. Russia has not-unpredictably shucked off the illusion of democracy and come under the yoke of Marshal Sergei Olenkov. 

To make a long story short, the spiraling problems of diminishing resources and environmental degradation bring civilization to the brink of collapse in the 2090s. Nuclear attacks between Jerusalem, Tehran, Tel Aviv and Damascus demolish the Middle East. Food shortages and riots lead to mounting paranoia in the US and Eurasia, where information is scarce because the nations have “cauterized” their Internet systems to ward off cyber attacks. Eventually, the US defaults on its national debt in 2088 and the government collapses; the military seizes power, and a Reformed Constitution is put in place where the departments of the army, air force, navy, space and counterintelligence replace Congress and the courts, the President serves for life, and only military personnel and veterans can vote. If you can think of a more depressing scenario for the twenty first century, let me know. 

The author’s interest seems to be telling the grimmest story possible, outlining a future where the most weapons will be sold. He imagines one human folly after another, with no innovation or creativity or democratic movements to save humanity from its (admittedly staggering) economic and environmental problems. He extrapolates from the worst of current trends; the necessity of telling a plausible story requires leaving out the unpredictable events that actually lend shape to much of history, such as the Egyptian Revolution that caught so many observers off-guard in 2011. Regardless, the author gives us a compelling possible future, a fictional spin on the fears voiced by the writers who try to rally public awareness of climate change and peak oil. It is not the kind of story where the majority of us are wiped out in the blink of an eye by a nuclear bomb, and the survivors envy the dead, but one that forces us to consider how we will react to the slow, unpredictable unfolding of an interrelated set of problems. It is the epitome of "not with a bang, but a whimper."

In considering these baleful prospects, we find ourselves torn, as ever, between the perennial poles of human nature – between the ideas of “original sin” and “the war of all against all” on one hand and the conviction that human ingenuity, cooperation and simple goodness can overcome the insurmountable barriers thrown up by nature. One of the reasons why people do not listen to critics like Astyk and Williams is that predictions of scarcity have been proven wrong as often as forecasts of the Second Coming; from Malthus down to Ehrlich, humans have expected to come up against the material limits of nature only to overcome them again and again. Of course, just because something has not happened before does not mean it never will. People forget that the wolf eventually did show up in the “boy cries wolf” story. I for one am unsure of what to believe: is there simply not enough energy in the world to maintain the American standard of living for long if the oil runs out, or will some geniuses figure out a way to keep the whole machine running through the foreseeable future? The latter will never happen, though, if we don’t consider the former – however unhappy the thought may be.

Alex Sayf Cummings

Me and You and Everyone We Know: Newsweek’s Sex Problem

With Easter just behind us, it is a fine time to consider sex. The Christian holiday celebrates the fertility and renewal of the Spring season, with its symbols of flowers, eggs, and the internationally recognized go-to reference point for libido, the bunny rabbit.  But Easter also more explicitly embodies the sexual weirdness of the religion itself – the rebirth of God’s son, who was born to a chaste woman but grew up to enjoy the company of prostitutes. In this spirit, we take a look at a 2009 Newsweek piece, “Only You. And You. And You,” one of many awkward discussions of sexuality broached by the nation’s most august newsmagazines over the years.

This remarkable piece of work introduces the Peorians of middle America’s checkout lines to “polyamory,” the practice of sustaining emotional and sexual relationships among multiple different partners, with mutual consent. Writer Jessica Bennett suggests that polyamory descends from the free love movement of the 1960s and the swinging fad of the same era. The magazine’s photo editors underlined the point by pasting a photo of Elliot Gould’s chest hair in bed with co-stars Natalie Wood, Dyan Cannon, and Robert Culp at the top of the article, referencing an era when films like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) and I Am Curious (Yellow) (1967) shocked Americans by portraying unconventional sexuality. (As an indicator of how little progress we have really made, consider this: ABC actually had the chutzpah to adapt swinger film Bob & Carol into an incredibly ill-advised sitcom in 1973, whereas today we are forced to listen to debates about whether a show called S*** My Dad Says is too risqué for primetime; God forbid American children would be exposed to asterisks.) 

When the likes of Newsweek and Time report on sexuality, it is a bit like your parents commenting on photos of your drunken shenanigans on Facebook: everyone had a vague sense that these things were going on, but actually seeing the evidence prompts an uncomfortable dialogue. And like Facebook, these magazines thrive on exhibiting people’s personal lives for public consumption. The polyamory piece reminded me of numerous articles in the past that have attempted to inform Americans of the latest new thing in sex, such as a 1995 piece that announced the discovery of bisexuality. It tells the story of a young couple who met during freshman orientation at the University of Chicago; much to the relief of their parents, Steven and Lori triumphed over their past dabbling in same-sex relationships to become real married heterosexuals. Except for one thing – Steven’s appetites have shifted from men to women and back to men again. He defined himself as both gay and “a once and future bisexual.” The article provides other details to puzzle readers, such as the couple’s habit of discussing “condoms as matter-of-factly as the weather” and maintaining same-sex relationships outside of their marriage. 

The moment was July 1995 – mere months after the Republican Party seized Congress on a wave of revulsion with liberal deficits and decadence, and a year before Bill Clinton would opportunistically sign the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act. Citing R.E.M., Roseanne, and Melrose Place, the article described a “bisexual moment,” which it envisioned as a curious offshoot of multiculturalism, with bisexuals asserting their status as yet another identity group with its own politics and institutions. There were “bi cable shows, bi web sites, bi newsletters and magazines,” as well as “Bi Women of Color, Bi Adult Children of Alcoholics, Bi Star Trekkies.” You know when you’ve been damaged by alcoholism and science fiction, you’ve hit the mainstream.

Almost as clueless as Newsweek

Such news coverage serves up sexual minorities as a bit of exotic titillation while purporting to educate the general public and ease the subjects’ path to acceptance. Another bedroom curiosity to grace the pages of Newsweek in the Nineties, for instance, was the virgin. Eleven years before Steve Carell made chastity (kind of) cool, a 1994 article tapped into the religious conservative zeitgeist with a look at the latest act of youthful rebellion: refusing to fornicate. “A lot of kids are putting off sex, and not because they can't get a date,” the magazine declared. “They've decided to wait, and they're proud o sf their chastity, not embarrassed by it. Suddenly, virgin geek is giving way to virgin chic.” Virgin chic never hit the runways of Milan or the bocce courts of Brooklyn, but the magazine did accurately forecast the rise of a cottage industry that promoted chastity pledges and “True Love Waits” rings. (The Southern Baptists founded the TLW movement just a year before, in 1993 – a harbinger, perhaps, of the Moral Majority’s subsequent rise to power.) 

Of course, the mass media do not look to sexual rebels only for the sake of voyeurism or amusement. The shameful history of fearmongering about gays and lesbians in the American media is well documented, from the first mention of homosexuality in Newsweek (a 1947 article that warned of deranged, feminine men infiltrating the US military) to a 1969 piece in Time that asked “Are Homosexuals Sick?” The magazine answered its own question ten years later, with a snarky comment on the American Psychological Association’s “highly political” decision to stop classifying homosexuality as a mental illness. It was a “bit like dermatologists voting to ordain that acne is indeed a skin blemish, but only if the acne sufferer thinks it is.” Such pejorative treatment might be unsurprising for the 1940s or even the 1970s, but the continued vilification of gays and lesbians throughout the 1980s and 1990s is harder to understand. Part of the problem undoubtedly owed to media panic over the AIDS epidemic, which was initially termed Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID), but an inert conservatism about sexual values, even on the part of the so-called “liberal media” is undoubtedly more to blame. How else to explain the rather prurient interest Newsweek seemed to take in Lori and Steven’s extramarital liaisons with members of their own genders in 1995, or the surprise the magazine expressed, forty years after Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice was released, that monogamy might not be everyone’s cup of tea? 

Public discussion of sex is often tinged with a kind of amateur futurism. (Is there any other kind?) Changes in sexual behavior are easily read as signs of things to come; young people are often the ones seen to be experimenting sexually, and sex is tied up with reproduction and the making of the next generation. Perhaps sex functions as a channel for people’s anxieties about the future, especially the shared fortunes of the collective. Last August Newsweek gave us “Are We Facing a Genderless Future?” a piece about transpeople that seems to treat sexuality like peak oil, as if traditional gender roles were a kind of scarce and diminishing national resource.  The essay takes for granted the conceit that underlies the convictions of religious traditionalists – that sexual norms have always been fixed in the way envisioned by the Moral Majority or the National Organization of Marriage, and any reconfiguration of those norms perverts a tradition of ancient vintage. In fact, no bygone era of conformity ever existed. Scholars such as Nan Boyd and Daniel Hurewitz have documented the many fluid ways that Americans expressed their gender and sexuality in the early twentieth century, from female impersonation in vaudeville to the “homophile” activism of the Mattachine Society. 

Talk of a “genderless future” suggests a world in which people are so unmoored from tradition that it is no longer possible to sustain any distinctive gender roles. The idea of gender itself collapses and loses meaning. The implication – that some people asking for respect and security in their own identities would somehow affect everyone else’s gender – reminds one of the supposed threat that state recognition of gay marriages would pose to the “institution” of heterosexual marriage. Like Anita Bryant, who stoked conservative fears that gay men were insatiable savages who could not resist the urge to molest everyone’s children in the 1970s, we still find it difficult to separate the sexual expression of others from our own sense of self and security. Perhaps these concerns are rooted in the very social nature of sex itself, or the public dimensions of gender as performance and marker of status. If this is so, then a future without gender is as hard to imagine as a future without sex – or a future where sexual anxiety does not work itself out in public. Given the state of its finances, though, Newsweek may not be around to carry on this proud tradition. Someone will.

Alex Cummings

Hefner, Hughes, and Rogen: Playboy and the Origins of the 21st Century Hipster

It's no exaggeration to say that having large numbers of single young men and women living independently, while also having enough disposable income to avoid ever messing up their kitchens, is something entirely new in human experience. Yes, at other points in Western history young people have waited well into their 20s to marry, and yes, office girls and bachelor lawyers have been working and finding amusement in cities for more than a century. But their numbers and their money supply were always relatively small. Today's pre-adults are a different matter. They are a major demographic event.

- Kay Hymowitz

On first blush, Kay Hymowitz seems to be talking about the rise of the yuppie and its Brooklyn cousin, the hipster. (Is there a difference anymore?) This pack of pre-adults consists of youngish people, presumably educated, who spend the disposable income they might otherwise drop on diapers or a mortgage to do whatever suits them. In fact, though, she is ranting in the Wall Street Journal about young men who refuse to grow up. Untethered to a wife and children, these strays scrounge around dorm rooms, leaving only to export this way of life to their parents’ homes and eventually their own apartments, all while blithely ignoring demands to grow up. The portrayal of the shiftless young man has only grown more prominent in the grand sweep of recent history, from pitched battles over male irresponsibility on Jerry Springer to the rise of Judd Apatow’s empire. Writers turn a pretty penny dishing advice to frustrated women while Apatow rolls out one blockbuster after another about arrested development, portraying the childlike man as a lovable hero. 

But where did this character come from? When did pop culture begin to promote the childless, free-spirited, self-indulgent adult as a cultural ideal? The dream of remaining young and unsullied by maturity is an old one, running from the lost innocence of creation myths through a long cultural tradition of imps, elves, and hobbits, all the way down to naïve Candide and Peter Pan, the lovable permanent child. But the more recent update is deeply tied to consumerism; its origins are largely male-oriented in nature, but it is far from a purely male phenomenon, despite what pundits in the grip of traditional notions about gender, marriage, and parenthood might suggest. The journey of the yuppie/hipster/slacker begins in Chicago, where Hugh Hefner founded Playboy in 1952. Long before the Playboy Mansion moved male fantasy out to the exurbs, Hefner situated his prototypical sophisticate in a hip urban bachelor pad.

The playboy of the 1950s was, in part, a reaction to the so-called domestication of the American male. Shoved into a “gray flannel suit” and boxed in a suburban ranch house world of cribs and Bundt cakes, middle class men yearned for a sense of freedom from the prosaic concerns of child-rearing and breadwinning, especially when their bread was won in a sterile corporate office in the city or a suburban office park. Hugh Hefner’s keen insight was to channel the psychic poverty of suburban manhood into a vision of suave, masculine, uninhibited freedom, defined by discerning taste and consumption of the better things in life – sophisticated drinks, jazz, the hip urban bachelor pad. As historian Elizabeth Fraterrigo has argued, the lifestyle promoted in Playboy was a sort of “answer to suburbia.” At the same time as the magazine promoted the pursuit of individual desires and redeemed the city as a place to live amid the rush to the suburbs, it also set up a sort of mirror image of male domesticity. Interior decorating might seem like a feminine domain in the suburbs, but Playboy actually recast the same activity in acceptably masculine terms. The sophisticated bachelor would seek to emulate Hefner by decking out his apartment in the sleek, high-tech, modernist style depicted in the magazine’s pages. Gone were colors, soft edges, floral prints, and in their place one found “a neutral palette and striking textural contrasts from its cork tile floor, to the stone fireplace heath, to an exposed brick wall” – a hallmark of today’s hip “loft” living, and a fine place for “a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex,” as Playboy said in its first issue.

Clearly, Hefner and his writers were laying out the contours of the single or childless life that many educated, affluent people are embracing in the twenty-first century. The possibility of pursuing one’s discerning consumer taste without responsibility to children or a broader community was pioneered as a fantasy for the men who read Playboy, yet it has mutated into a choice available to anyone who wants to live in a city, dine on Burmese-Mexican fusion, and invite a friend or lover over to discuss The Wire over drinks. (Note the exposed brick in the background.) Once the province of men, the ideal of affluent individualism has been at least partly translated into an option open to women through the sitcom alchemy of Seinfeld and Sex and the City.

Yet this Eden of adulthood without domesticity continues to have a peculiarly male dimension to it, which suggests a deeper tie to the original Playboy idea of unfettered selfishness. In a recent diatribe against prolonged adolescence in men, Kay Hymowitz cited Playboy as the proving ground for a “refusal” of responsibility. “The arrival of Playboy in the 1950s seemed like the ultimate protest against male domestication; think of the refusal implied by the magazine's title alone,” Hymowitz recently said in the Wall Street Journal. “In his disregard for domestic life, the playboy was prologue for today's pre-adult male. Unlike the playboy with his jazz and art-filled pad, however, our boy rebel is a creature of the animal house.” The philosopher-quoting, gin-guzzling bachelor of the 1950s had unwittingly fathered the video-game-addicted schlubs who refuse to grow up in movies like Knocked-Up and Pineapple Express.

In search of adulthood

Growing up, it seems, means getting married and having children – along with, presumably, holding down a mortgage and a job. Without this marker of adulthood, the man drifts further from view and only the manchild remains. Curiously, Hymowitz claims that the transition to adulthood was traditionally clearer for women than men, and has only gotten murkier for the guys in recent years. “It’s been an almost universal rule of civilization that girls became women simply by reaching physical maturity, but boys had to pass a test,” she writes. (Anthropologists would likely quibble with so broad a claim.) “They needed to demonstrate courage, physical maturity, or mastery of the necessary skills.” This argument seems deeply wedded to long-standing claims that men in modern society have had to compensate for the loss of their role as guarantors of physical security (fighting, shooting, performing manual labor) by indulging in a wide array of macho substitutes: playing with guns, buying an SUV, an undue obsession with gadgets and lawncare. Such pop psychological arguments have grown old and stale without losing their ability to hold sway over social critics (as well as the marketers and publishers who have so fiendishly exploited perceptions of male inadequacy).

Pentecostal Captain America and the Racialized Geographies of Muslim Hip Hop in a Toothless Fictive Milieu

The Southern American Studies Association will bring its conference to Georgia State University in Atlanta this week. Scholars will travel from France and Kansas, California and Germany to present at the meeting, although a preponderance of the participants hail from institutions in southeastern states such as Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, and South Carolina. Operating under the capacious tent of American Studies, the conference includes contributions from scholars of history, literature, music, popular culture, and sociology, among other disciplines.

We have looked through the program to single out some particularly intriguing panels. (The entire schedule can be viewed here.) The panels selected will hopefully provide a thumbnail sketch of the most interesting work going on in the multiple fields that make up American Studies, for both casual readers and possible attendees. Although any academic conference includes its share of comedy-gold paper titles -- a quick glance at the MLA’s most recent program serves up the likes of “Bootleg Paratextuality and Aesthetics: Decay and Distortion in the Borat DVD” and “The War of ‘Of’ and Other Polyvocal Syntaxes in ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’” -- we hope to focus attention on some of the most provocative and promising papers in the conference, whether they focus on Elvis Presley or excrement or spottieottiedopalicious angels. The following is a taste of the freewheeling interests of those who study America and its culture today: