Session 117: The Global and the Local in "Asian" Cinema: Representations of Sexuality, Citizenship, and Ethnicity

Organizer: Hikari Hori, Japan Society

Chair: Karen L. Turner, Holy Cross College

Discussant: Lawrence Liang, Alternative Law Forum

Keywords: Asian cinema, globalization, sexuality, citizenship, ethnic identity.

This panel examines representations of sexuality, citizenship, and ethnicity in films of four regions in Asia: India, Japan, the Philippines, Viet Nam. This comparative project aims to reveal commonalities of their cinematic languages in connection to the aforementioned discursive categories, and, conversely, to examine the diversity of each local context, conditioned by such factors as social norms, economic differences, and war experiences. Our intention is to pursue theoretical questions in regard to the geographical category of ‘Asia’ without losing sight of local specificities.

Creekmur examines popular Hindi (Bollywood) Cinema of the past 50 years, which is widely enjoyed both in India and in Indian diasporic communities. He discusses the representation of homo-eroticism, intimacy and conflicts between Hindi and Muslim men, and the theoretical framework of West versus Asia. Hori focuses on films by ethnic minority groups in Japan, specifically Okinawans and Korean-Japanese. Although gender hierarchy in such films has been closely intertwined with discourses of ethnic identity, very recent films in the 2000s celebrate ethnic and cultural hybridity while maintaining critical political statements. Tolentino turns to the film editor-turned-director Joyce Bernal, a commercial success in the Philippines since her directorial debut in 1998. He examines how Bernal’s representations of Filipina women are situated in gender politics and the socio-economic crisis as context for female labor. Turner discusses the North Vietnamese female director Duc Hoan, who fought against the French and Americans, examining how notions of women’s commitment to nationalism, war efforts, and gender norms are defined by this patriotic, socialist woman in her films from the 1970s through the 1990s.

The Case for Queering Dosti (Male Friendship) in Popular Hindi Cinema

Corey K. Creekmur, University of Iowa

Recently, the belated Western awareness of popular Hindi cinema (Bollywood) has crossed paths with a significant focus within queer theory on forms of South Asian sexuality. This conjunction has led to a provocative re-reading of the representation of male friendship (dosti), commonly valorized in popular Hindi cinema, as homoerotic. While close male friendships have long been celebrated as an Indian tradition, a persistent resistance to homosexuality in South Asian often views it as a decadent Western import. The recent redefinition of dosti as potentially homoerotic thus dramatizes an explicit and controversial dialog between South Asian texts and social practices and Western critical perspectives and discourses. However, if recent attempts to "queer Bollywood" suggest the heavy-handed imposition of Western ideas on Eastern texts, it is also clear that Bombay filmmakers now make films with reference to Western sources, and with an eye towards Western markets and viewers, especially the non-resident Indians (NRIs) who make up a large portion of the international audience for Indian films on DVD. Many recent Hindi films thus rely on Western gay stereotypes, and frequently flirt with the homoerotic implications of more traditional representations of male friendship, including the increasingly sensitive friendships between Hindu and Muslim men. This presentation will present and weigh the claims for reading or resisting the popular representation of dosti in Indian cinema through queer theory, drawing on examples ranging from the pre-Independence Shejari (Padosi in Hindi) (V. Shantaram, 1941) to the Emergency-era blockbuster Sholay (Ramesh Sippy, 1975), up to the very recent Dev (Govind Nihlani, 2004), produced in the context of increased communal (Hindu-Muslim) violence. This presentation will be accompanied by film clips.

Masculinities and Marginalized Citizenship: Ethnicity Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Okinawan and Korean-Japanese Film

Hikari Hori, Japan Society

This paper discusses contemporary Japanese films that focus on ethnic discourses, arguing that "Go" (2001), based on an award-winning novel by Korean-Japanese author Kaneshiro Kazuki and directed by Yukisada Isao, successfully demonstrated the hybridity and problematic status of ethnic identities, a rare achievement among contemporary Japanese films dealing with ethnicity.

The paper proceeds as follows. First, I provide a short film-historical examination of portrayals of Ainu, Okinawans, and Korean-Japanese in prewar and wartime non fiction films and postwar dramatic features, pointing out how anthropological, colonial, and sentimental cinematic gazes and narratives were mobilized to construct ethnic otherness in Mainland Japanese films. Second, I turn to films by Okinawan and Korean-Japanese directors and producers that address ethnic themes. Among such films I analyze "Okinawan Boys" (1983), "All Under the Moon"(1993), and "Tsuru-Henry" (1999) arguing that they reinforce gender difference to enhance the visibility of ethnic identity. In other words, the notion of ethnicity or marginalized citizenship in these films is part of a process of securing the protagonists’ heterosexual masculinities. Finally, based on this examination of the genre ‘ethnicity’ films, I argue that "Go" departed from the conventional dichotomy of self versus other, as expressed through frustrated male protagonists confronting ‘Japan.’ The film questions notions of citizenship, abandons masculinity-constructing narratives of the protagonists, and destabilizes gender hierarchy. However, it still maintains a strong political message that foregrounds historical and social issues of ethnic minority groups.

Globalized Domestic Work and Female Representation in the Films of Joyce Bernal

Rolando B. Tolentino, University of the Philippines

Filipina filmmaker Joyce Bernal has catapulted herself as the most commercially successful director in recent times. Her films present the camp female character embroiled in domestic and work comedies, or the romantic heroine in regional and foreign landscapes. Bernal constructs the contemporary Filipina geo-body, one enmeshed in a process of domestication from which the landscape of the nation and national is imprinted. In her comedies, Bernal’s use of the vulgar female comic gesticulates the romance with mothering and family. In her romantic melodrama, she uses the figure of the daughter to espouse filial sacrifice. The paper examines what these representations mean at a time the nation has yet to emerge out of the global economic crisis, what the stakes are in the renarrativization of the domestic woman and domestication of female work.

Nationalism, Sexuality, and Citizenship in the Films of Duc Hoan

Karen Turner, College of the Holy Cross

Male sensibilities have dominated media interpretations of the Vietnam-American War on all sides, and no more so than in the film business. Women’s memories of war and its dislocations are slowly emerging but very few women have gained access to the means to direct and produce films in any society. Vietnam is unique because it has a long history of women warriors but even there the woman director this paper discusses is considered unique for her ability to translate her understanding of war and its consequences to film. Duc Hoan (d. 2004), served in the French and American Wars, and in 1978 produced and directed her first feature films about the war. Her work continued to explore the human costs of war through the 1990s. This paper examines Duc Hoan’s cinematic views of war through the lens of gender, nationalism and conceptions of citizenship as they developed during Vietnam’s reconstruction and renovation eras. Duc Hoan was a patriot, an advocate for women’s causes, and a social critic, concerned that women’s issues not be left out in the post-war era. She exemplifies the kind of intellectual so well-observed by Mikhail Bakhtin, for she developed creative ways to speak back to power in a society that attempts to control the discourse of war and nationalism.