Editor's Introduction

This general issue focuses on intimacy, politicization, and depoliticization. Arnika Fuhrmann's critical poiesis introduces contemporary Thai artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, who, in Fuhrman's words, delineates "a feminist anatomy of desire in an idiom of negativity." Rasdjarmrearnsook films her own interactions with individual women's dead bodies at a city morgue. The rationale for this video performance is, Fuhrman explains, political in the particular manner that only the arts can adequately display. Having captured and deracinated earlier, more elastic boundaries around erotic expression among nonnormative subjects, the Thai state's depoliticizing procedure had reinforced, maybe even created, singular, malignant social conditions by the early 2000s. Avenues for directly expressing eros at all, normative and not, are wildly constricted. So Rasdjarmrearnsook reconsidered how a pedagogy of nonnormative attachment might be thinkable, and thus presentable. She chose an unremarkable cultural site. A woman's corpse had conventionally provided a model for teaching Theravada Buddhism's message about the futility of attachment. Yet, Fuhrmann argues, Araya's aestheticized, Buddhist-inspired pedagogy voiced not just meditation on attachment, but also a complaint against depoliticization. The complaint targeted depoliticization's prohibitions against female erotic expression, or more accurately female erotic expression's critical intelligibility in any shared space. Rasdjarmrearnsook's lament invented a feminism that makes comprehensible, even elemental, the sensual and worldly desire of female sexualities, female mourning, and geometries of female attachment and detachment, or, to say it bluntly, politically appropriate eros.

Along the same pathway of intimacy under conditions of state depoliticization, what are we to make of President Lee Teng-hui's insistence that he visit the Japanese rightist bastion, the Yasakuni Shrine, in 2007 to commemorate his own brother's death during military service in the Japanese Imperial Army fighting against China? This in a nutshell is the stark example animating Shi-chi Mike Lan's "(Re-) Writing History of the Second World War: Forgetting and Remembering the Taiwanese-Native Japanese Soldiers in Postwar Taiwan." Lee, the native-born, Taiwanese, democratic president of the Republic of China during the transition from martial law and brother of a Taiwanese soldier impounded and forced to fight on the side of the Japanese Imperial Army, raised complex problems in his intimate politics of mourning. Lee's actions lifted out of a forced amnesia undocumented injustices; thousands of Taiwanese, Han and non-Han, had fought only to be abandoned by all states — including Taiwan — in the postwar years. Lee's visit allowed, Lan notes, families of these soldiers finally to situate their mourning. And they put themselves on display as bereaved Japanese colonial subjects. Also these "Japanese" soldiers mark the present absence of men who committed, if not atrocities, brutal acts against an alleged enemy who might have been a family member. Perhaps a politicization of belonging would at last allow conditions for mourning.

Lest "'Kawaii' and 'Moe' — Gazes, Geeks (Otaku), and Glocalization of Beautiful Girls (Bishōjo) in Hong Kong Youth Culture" appear to be a harmless bit of fluff, the essay's theme performs a steely critique of the commodification and consumption of creepy, violently rhetorical, super images in conditions of class war and violent sexual staring. In their ethnographic meditation on the gazing geeks and the disjointed "moe-ized" bishōjo girls of the pan-Asian anime world and its life worlds, Wai-hung Yiu and Alex Ching-shing Chan describe shifts in the logic of sexual accommodation and sexual gazing that are not just commodified but externalized into a language that is not capable of conveying political import, and perhaps is not even comprehensible to the nonaficionado: the ka-mui-look, the "moe elements" of female celebs, otaku gaze, loser dogs, neah-mo, tsiu-mo, mo-art, cheap chickens. And the authors show that people speak this language, as in "When all those otaku killers found their breasts flaccid and dangling, their faces deformed, and their body pillows unsold and stocked, would a university be like those otaku spurting their sperms internally into their brains, thinking with their hormones, and peeping under the pants of a neah-mo?"

Laikwan Pang's essay, "Depoliticization through Cultural Policy and...