“green blade in the act of being grazed”: Late Capital, Flexible Bodies, Critical Intelligibility

Bodies of matter jostled to greedy grip Orders of vision and hearing all sort spent When an accidental and spontaneous utterance of this kind No word, that, point to wellspring Breathing blast if often in a short time breathing holes Repeatable green blade in the act of being grazed.

(Kim 54)

Introduction

What are proper historical subjects for histories of gender in contemporary “Asia”? Historians should work with singularity, and yet often we leave in place reductionist explanatory frameworks. When historians are unwilling to take stock of a particular relation of representation-signifier to signified, or, in historical explanation, signifier to metaphor-such unwillingness not only defeats the purpose of history writing. It also blunts the promise of criticism more generally. So-called “development theory” is a growing source of reductionist gender history in regional and area studies. ¹ In the neoliberal discourse of global feminism, as in some neo-Marxist macrologies, development-based historians predictably read superstructural signs as mere signifiers of underlying economic substructures and disregard questions of heterogeneity embedded in the empirical record. Historians ought instead to decline to reassert colonial logics of similitude, logics that underwrite and structure reductionist developmentalist histories of capital. ² That sustained unwillingness should lead to questions such as the following: critically rereading the assumptions structuring developmentalism, what interrogative (as opposed to narrative) histories might be written that attend to the dislocated, differentiated character of global capital, yet provide responsible sites of historical writing?

Différance counsels vigilance: given the extreme instability of basic terms in postcolonial times, it is easy to mistake a nexus for an object or a thing, analytic terms for signifiers of constituted objects of analysis. And although deconstruction is not enough, it is still a chronically useful reminder of the limitations of historiography which, as William Haver reminds us, belong, along with other scholarly hallucinations and inheritances, to the realm of the Imaginary (68–69). For the moment, then, decolonization of “Asia” scholarship will mean a strategy of placing the standard historiography of origin under erasure, while never disregarding the marks of their historicity. The object is to emphasize the instabilities inherent in globalizing claims written into much-used analytic categories such as “Asia” or “revolution” or “women.” This emphasis may be particularly valuable in light of powerful projects such as “gender in development,” projects that are part of a growing globalized, institutionalized representational order that systematically brings to light genuine human rights abuses, photographs of actual brutalized women and children, and gory accounts of body mutilation. Or maybe not. ³

The point is simply that analytic, historical, and theoretical categories cannot themselves be exempted from the pressures of their own political deconstruction. To undo the presumed relation between signifier and signified, historical event and historiographic convention (e.g., “gender,” a signifier of difference, in “development,” a metaphor of control over global processes) and to hold these ensembles up to scrutiny is a useful undertaking, since the logics in question animate forces that discipline into manageable categories conditions of unspeakable heterogeneity. Nation and gendered subject, like history and nation, are not invariably mutually constituting entities. I can conceive of writing interrogative histories that are adjacent to modernization or policy-driven geopolitical stories about “development” and even the new ideological formation called “international feminism.” What follows, then, is part of a critique of the presumed connection between the category of gender and the paradigm of development in “Asia.”

Three Displacements of Gender in Development

Three problematics immediately concern me: late capital in national formation, bodies in political economy, and the globalized historical heritage of competing claims on enlightened thought. These three problematics take priority because it is still necessary, if perhaps banal, to establish that no historian can reduce to a single epistemic order the diverse experiences of colonial modernity or capitalist postmodernity. Theoretical work at historically singular sites requires painstaking, patient, indecorous deconstruction, just as writing about scholarly strategies requires acknowledging the degree to which one is oneself historically and intellectually a subject in the late-capitalist world. ⁴

Much of what I will discuss below is figured in the 1993 Chinese film, Women of the Lake of Scented Souls [Xiang hun nü]. Somewhere in the Chinese countryside, two women meet face-to-face. Xiang Ersao is a small producer of sesame oil, married at puberty to a man she does not like. Xiang has two children: an older, retarded, epileptic son by her husband and the clever, disobedient daughter who is Xiang’s lover’s child. The other woman, Shinya Sadako, is a manager in a Japanese transnational corporation that wishes to import “authentic” sesame oil. Shinya comes to Xiang’s village and tours the little factory where Xiang, her assistant, her son, and often her daughter labor to crush the oil out of sesame seeds. Both Xiang Ersao and Shinya Sadako are women. But they do not share a common language. Even when Xiang visits Shinya in the city where Shinya and a corporate superior (a man whom she must service sexually) are headquartered and the two women meet face-to-face in the world that transnational capital has built in the People’s Republic of China (hereafter PRC), they cannot directly convey to each other the forces constraining their different lives.

In one particularly affecting scene set in a glitzy international hotel, Xiang tells the uncomprehending Shinya about the tragedy of her forced marriage and the consequent suffering that she, Xiang, still endures. Shinya sits uncomprehending. Incredibly, in Xiang’s view, Shinya does not understand Chinese. The two women share little except differing patriarchal oppressions and perhaps a facility for calculating profit and loss. Vernacular language difference, difference in relation to a common colonial history, and difference in relation to present geopolitical disparities are all dimensions by which the film situates each woman. Differences make it impossible for the women to convey to each other the constraints shaping them. Indeed, neither woman can even see the duress under which the other must work. Still, neither woman is a projection of the other, and neither directly requires the other as a condition of her own self-constitution. Nor is either woman speechless. Rather, Shinya and Xiang meet in a dynamic, unequal relation to a more or less “Asian” transnational economy. None of us stand outside this economy. Indeed, there is no outside to it. Xiang, Shinya, and I (a viewer) confront different conditions of existence, hold powerfully unequal positions in relation to one another, and speak different languages of oppression, and yet we are nonetheless present in the same world.

National Formation in Late Capital

What is the relation of late capital and Asian regional or national formations to the question of gender and political development? This is a central concern in global development circles. It is also a critical conceptual question. Conventionally sequestered in cultural studies is something called “transnationalism” or “transnational studies.” As a theoretical project that purports to diagnose general questions of colonization, decolonization, and economic globalism, this scholarly domain claims a supporting historiography rooted in colonial relations particular to the Atlantic basin and historically European colonial holdings. This subspecialty has already coalesced. Its self-referential quality has led Priscilla Wald judiciously to note in a recent review article that at one level, “transnational” has simply become a name for the attempts of some progressive U.S.-based scholars to reenvision their own relation to the rest of a world largely unknown to them. This may very well be true. At the same time, this scholarly field is where the question of national formation in global capital is openly broached and the dilemma of the “transnational” seriously explored. The generalizing claims of the project probably rest as much on what it precludes (i.e., east “Asia,” subcolonialism and subimperialism, semicolonialism, intra-Asian oppression, Japanese colonialism, the U.S. informal empire, the twentieth century, and so on) as on what it presumes to be normative (culture, cultural flows, transnational corporations, British colonialism, postcolonialism, the nineteenth century, and so on). But staying for the moment with its claim to normativity, the analytic contours of the transnationalism project help me clarify a certain irresolution of the relation of national formation in a transnational of late capital.

Let me make this point using an argument that area specialists have recently put forward. Preoccupied with similar questions, economists working in the U.S. on Chinese economic reform take a different view from transnational theorists who work in the realm of cultural imaginaries. In late 1995, ten leading Anglophone academic economists offered in the China Quarterly a new paradigm for scholarship that they call the model of “the transitional economy.” They argue that a new regional focus (it boils down to China in East Asia) should supplant the earlier model of economic growth predicated on the flow of development capital from the West to the East, from the North to the South. These economists also suggest that previous, normative economic development theory presumes Eastern European, postsocialist market economies as its underlying model when it applies earlier development theory to East Asian economies. Yet even in the new frame that Lardy, Naughton, Sicular, and Walder call “Asia” (Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and China; sometimes with the addition of India, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines), Chinese economic development trajectories still prove anomalous by every previous statistical empirical and historical register. Indeed, Lardy, Naughton, Sicular, and Walder all suggest that the transitional economy of Chinese communist market reforms should be accepted as a model in its own right precisely because of the anomalous and exceptional nature of the reforms. They argue that anomaly, in the shape of “the transitional economy,” necessitates new vocabularies, new modes of theoretical extrapolation. ⁵

I am not suggesting that this “transitional economy” is an adequate theory of the interface of state and transnational corporate capital, or transnational capital, in “Asia.” The value of these economists’ initiative is, rather, twofold: first, their initiative constructs the relation between late capital and the nations of “Asia” as tense; second, I can borrow this tension between global capital and national formation when I think about gender and political development. In this regard, Naughton is most useful for the way that he uncouples the sign “macroeconomic” from the concept of “the nation” (nation being the measure of comparison in transnational studies, the signifier in an unequal relation of signifier and sign system in the historian’s explanatory framework). Naughton’s proposed conceptual model of “transitional economies” actually eschews “nation” and stresses instead comparatibility among different qualities-capitalist and noncapitalist, finance and production, banking agents and State Operated Enterprises-that join and unjoin in specific, limited, sometimes eccentric ways. In other words, rather than reducing economic agents to a condition of similitude or to a status as functional elements within a bounded nation state, Naughton seeks to compare across various other institutional forms. Consequently, Naughton is able to argue that while Chinese Communist Party policies may prove in the long term economically wrong-headed in relation to the power brokers of late capital, and although the Chinese state itself is the site of competition for capital and resources among its own agencies, still the present situation shows the effects of embodied, activist, conscious planning. There is agency there. ⁶

The economic trajectory of reform in the PRC is not accidental, nor is it a simple effect of the operations of globalized and amorphous capital. A relatively novel economic agent-a corps of finance planners-achieves limited stability and monitors its own shifting political perimeter, borrowing money, for instance, that it invests in its own reserves of foreign exchange in order to stabilize currency prices and ground its domestic reform. Naughton thinks that “China” is generating viable, predicative economic theory out of a model of political economy that is exceptional in the study of transnational economics. What in Eurocentered theory would be considered hopelessly eccentric economic behavior because European states are presumed powerless against late capital (his example is the former Yugoslavia) must, he argues, be balanced against the persistent overall successes (deferring for the moment what success means) of the Chinese economic reforms of the nineteen-seventies, nineteen-eighties, and, it appears, the nineteen-nineties thus far. Again, I am primarily interested in the fact that Naughton presupposes the importance of a tension between late capital and nation formation. He poses the conceptual question “what is the appropriate way to think about this economic relationship?” in acknowledgment of the fact that the problem on the horizon is larger than his ability to conceptualize it. ⁷

The question of the tense relation between national formation and late capital in “Asia” is open. It forms a horizon that no inquiry into gender and political development can avoid addressing. Several recent studies have acknowledged this. For instance, the question that I think Tamara Jacka addresses in her Women’s Work in Rural China is: “What domestic policy reforms and thus, what relations of nation formation to late capital are affecting the courtyard sector of the Chinese domestic economy and the women working in it?” In Harriet Evans’s single-country monograph, Women and Sexuality in China, the lives of its subjects can only make sense within the designation of the nationally bounded “market economy.” And this does not begin to address the scholarship being generated within the various national formations that go to make up “Asia.” ⁸

Bodies in Political Economy

A second concern tosses the wrench into a study like Naughton’s straightforward political economy, however. Here the questions are as follows: “How does political economy address bodies?” and “How are ‘Asian’ bodies gendered in the political economy literature?” It is one thing to call for attention to economic specificities and to see economic agency within globalizing capital. Such a move alleviates the historically reductionist view that capitalism requires no agency beyond itself. It is quite another thing to situate agency in bodies with attention to gendering forces there. The problem is that one cannot tenably conceive of a body “as such,” despite the fact that the historiography of the relation of bodies and capital formations is extremely rich. ⁹

The primary problem, as Laura Hyun Yi Kang has ably argued, is that in body politics-which is to say labor-political economy cannot be extricated from discursivity. Kang begins precisely from the “spectacular signifier” of the Asian female laboring body-a discursivity, in other words-working in the specific places that she calls “transnational sites of exchange and exploitation.” These are places where laboring agents are visualized and materialized into “diversity” or sorted into differently racialized, gendered, class-positioned, and sexualized subjects. Kang is particularly interested in following out when what she figures is the “Asian”-ness of workers becomes “proper to the labor demands for transnational capitalist growth and international political harmony” as a consequence of carefully crafted, exploitative labor markets and oppressive images (404). This is very useful in that it unifies into a single analytic focus representations and economic practices. However, because Kang’s first objective is to trouble racist and classist representational strategies using a strategic subject called “Asian/American women,” her essay leaves unaddressed the question of what notions could be developed that do not require a primary mediation through signifiers of “American.”

Two well-known texts that begin to address this issue are Aihwa Ong’s Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia, published in 1987, and Ching Kwan Lee’s “Factory Regimes of Chinese Capitalism: Different Cultural Logics in Labor Control,” which appeared a decade later. Each text is valuable because it offers ways of conceptualizing the political economy of specifically coded or gendered bodies. The question that Ong raises replicates in a political-cultural frame a question similar to the one I pose above using Barry Naughton’s discussion of the agency of Chinese economic planners in the model of the “transitional economy.” I extract from Naughton’s discussion of banking a discomfort over what in theory is normative (Eastern European-modeled monetary theory of the relation of late capital and national formation) and what anomalous (China’s conjuncture with late capital was seen as “eccentric”). Naughton’s response to the normative/eccentric equation was to call for ways of acknowledging the shifting relation of national formation and late capital while at the same time rewriting the relation of case and theory.

Twelve years ago Ong asked a similarly unsettling question about the relation of bodies and the conditions of work in the era of late capital: “What are the implications of a global production system in which relations of gender and of race are critical for the expansion of economic and symbolic capital?” (151). She answers that no “inherent logic in capitalist relations and labor resistance” can be said to exist historically since the particular relation of transnational corporations and national or domestic formations will always condition the “specific strategies that are worked out to best mobilize flexible labor” (152). Her study emphasizes the need for specific ethnographies of the politics of embodiment; it is this proposal that most interests me for my present purposes. Ong depicts the class sexuality and class bodies of Malay, female line-workers as this specificity was “asserted by different groups in the political arena” (180). She claims that a political nexus was producing what she called “biological objects, docile bodies and sexualized subjects in in [sic] transnational companies” (178).

Precisely how useful this approach to the question of embodiment and productive relations proved to be can be read through a recent study examining the relation of Hong Kong “Chinese” capital and Shenzhen “Chinese” workers. Ching Kwan Lee’s “Factory Regimes of Chinese Capitalism: Different Cultural Logics in Labor Control” makes the important point that difference is part and parcel of flexible, regulative labor regimes and that the relation of bodiliness and gendered bodies to capitalist political economy is opportunistic rather than simply specular, in the sense of Kang’s spectacular signifier. Specifically, she finds that the bodily practices of laborers differs drastically in a single Hong Kong corporation that operates two production systems in two different labor markets and two different systems of commodity relations-one in Hong Kong and the other across the border in Shenzhen. Lee argues that it is the labor market in female-gendered workers that constitutes the appropriate frame for scholarship seeking to grasp the relation of gendered, raced, and classed bodies and political economy. In other words, class body, race body, gendered body are not extricable from location. The class body in the Hong Kong-based factory undergoing long-term industrial decline is produced as female, proletarian, middle-aged, docile, and familial; across the border in the boom town of Shenzhen, it is female, rural, teenaged, sexual, and entrepreneurial.

Peripheralizing Feminism in Event of Enlightenment

In her celebrated 1986 article, “Under Western Eyes,” Chandra Mohanty opens a vastly difficult question. How, she asks, should women in neocolonial living conditions and women of color living in racial formations in the developed nations be properly represented in feminist scholarship? I still teach this article and it still has the power to shake my students. Nonetheless, Mohanty’s position has allowed a certain confusion to persist. It appears to suggest that there are particular, culturally appropriate means of representing women in the developing world but no way to transmit that particularity across racial, cultural lines. There is thus no negotiating the boundary between what Mohanty terms “western feminism” and what she has recently recuperated as “Third World Feminism.” Singularity is particularity, and that particularity is by default cultural in Mohanty’s initial formula. In my language, Mohanty tends to preclude the critical conceptual possibilities of singular claims emerging out of historically disparate enlightenment heritages. Perhaps it is because she is preoccupied with the gendered subaltern. It may also be that Mohanty does not concern herself with the specters of “western feminism” in Third World Feminisms or the irreducible heterogeneity of modern history. ¹⁰

The uneven emergence of colonial modernity was a historic event of global scope and dimension. Enlightened thought, humanism, or what Balibar refers to as the “line on which we think” about the conditions of colonial modernity includes feminist concern at what Li Xiaojiang has called the “scandal” of Reason’s masculinist homogeneity. This is to say that feminism, reductively speaking, is a globalized style of political thinking that emerged out of the “workshops” of colonial modernity in nineteenth-century Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Moslem Orient. These “workshops” conditioned the practices and ideologies of feminism. Gayatri Spivak, Billie Melman, Anna Davin, Emily Apter, and countless other scholars have long established that European feminist thinking has from the start been saturated with indelible traces of race revulsions rooted in colonial modernity. (Anglophone debates over race in feminism in the 1980s recapitulated this history, reestablishing its terms in our own time.) Foundational heterogeneity is also a point that the Subaltern Studies historians have argued in their critique of metropolitan intellectual history, as they have persistently uncovered singular, situated Enlightened communities in “Asia,” as elsewhere. So the doctrines of Enlightenment exist as historical event because of the fraught economic and political intercourse-Spivak’s “enabling violence”-of imperialisms, subimperialisms, and the various forms of colonial and semicolonial occupation. ¹¹

The tension of spectral feminisms to the doctrines of Enlightenment as event depends on how event is defined and used historiographically. This rests on whether nineteenth- and twentieth-century Enlightenments in East Asia are admitted as genuine claims on rationality, humanism, science, and rights, or dismissed as derivative. If, as the subalternists and post-Marxists are doing, one grasps Enlightenment as a long-term, global historical undertaking, then Enlightenment is nothing if not heterogeneous. Accepting common lineages and horizons should stifle the impulse to distinguish too rapidly what is “not western” and what is “western.” However, to situate feminisms in a common temporality called “colonial modernity” will not resolve the question of how these doctrines and practices actually operate in any given situation-the question, in other words, of their singularity. For that one needs to look carefully at the spectral or already contaminated quality of the thinking that specific feminisms claim for themselves and to elaborate logics that make sense of the unequal relations of feminist writing projects, each taken on its own terms.

A refusal to consider the nature, extent, and duration of the event of Enlightenment is to persist in ideological formations that have placed Europe at the center of history. Neocolonial theories of gender in development are embedded in these sorts of ideological formations. Yet Euro-Enlightenment cannot actually provide a homogeneous ground of theoretical stability and veracity. The Habermasian public sphere is not a datum in European history, nor should it be transmuted into a normative universality through the magic of theoretical production, a norm against which the specificities of the Other can be measured. ¹² Analogously, the relations of signifier and signified in theoretical work should not be allowed to remain intact precisely because the relation of event and abstraction in critical concepts must be reworked each time theoretical work expands to a new regime of scholarship. What happens when the tension of presumed norm and eccentric specificity is left untouched is too predictably familiar: chauvinism or nativism on the one hand, reductionist use of “theory” to authorize European dominance on the other (Russo). ¹³

Alternatives

So far this general argument has held that theoretical work is historically explicable, which is to say that it should be understood in terms of its presuppositions. This point appears in Sabine Lang’s recent critical evaluation of the German women’s movement. A lack of awareness of the political deconstruction of structural logics, Lang argues, has led the movement to a dead end where all thinking about gendered political development engages with one and only one predicament: select either dependency on the state or the alleged autonomy of a subject called “women.” This disabling either/or choice (the essential determination or essential freedom of the subject “women”) is a version of an older, normalizing political philosophy logic that sets into play a fictive tension between state and civil society. Lang suggests that continued thinking within this dead-end, worn-out ideological formation has deleterious practical effects. In Lang’s view, that is, the effort to dig out the structuring logics in political argument is, like the effort at describing enabling conditions and problematics, both “theoretical” and useful.

Lang’s argument in fact exemplifies the political stakes in theoretical work. Only in critical reflection on the ways that theory works in the movement can German women and their allies (German men, non-German women and men, transgendered subjects, etc.) make strategic decisions about the movement’s next step. The singular social and discursive formation that is “the German women’s movement,” like the other singular social and discursive formations reviewed here in passing, are irreducible to the terms of either similitude or global feminism. Yet they obviously share a historical horizon with other kinds of women’s movements (national, international, subnational, transitive, and so on), other sorts of economic trajectories, other conceptualizations. In what follows I propose a way of framing one proper historical subject for histories of gender in contemporary “Asia,” the subject “women in transition.” The section begins with the question of relational logics, takes up the historiographic relation of evidence and historical narration, and ends with film evidence of the irreducible subject “transitional women.”

Thinking towards Relational Logics

sexual difference has no absolute value and is inferior to the praxis of every subject.

(Trinh 103)

Much has been written in recent years about the relation of something called “women” to the state/nation. One stream in the literature suggests that women or the body of the woman always stands in oppositional relation to the state and patriarchy. Another argues that in the past the state/nation had overtaken autonomous women’s movements and ruined them by compromising their freedom of choice. The point here echoes the issue noted earlier in relation to Barry Naughton’s theoretical concerns in mainstream political economy. He founds his theoretical contribution on heterogeneity. In his economics words like “nation” and “economy” signify not a substance but a plethora of discrete relations among disparate entities. In scholarly terms, his interest (at least in the article I discussed) is not in generalizing from heterogeneity into more stable formations, but rather in seeing what can be done with anomaly. This strategy leads Naughton in the direction of a social science return to the drawing board where he revises the operative relation of theory and model, generating a new model and thus enabling new “theory.”

How might this work for the women’s movement? Might it produce gendered forms of political life? In much writing about “women” in the People’s Republic of China and outside it, the case is made that the state’s withdrawal from active concern with the conditions of women’s work, reproduction, and legal and cultural representation has damaged equity claims and diminished the quality of many women’s lives. This argument is so ubiquitous in PRC second-wave feminism that it has the status of a truism. One can make analogous, yet different arguments about the destruction of the welfare state in the late-capitalist world-Great Britain and the United States, for example. The 1997 edited volume Transitions, Environments, Translations includes several essays reiterating this point (Scott et al., eds.). Contributors concede that without state domination in official women’s movements, women’s civil rights may be compromised even while women are freed to establish transnational connection with one another.

Arguments like these make me anxious. It is not so much that they are untrue: certainly political development is unthinkable in the absence of political representation. Also, I agree with those who begin to worry when the state withdraws welfare legislation and abandons women’s movements to the sop of global sisterhood. The illusion of unmediated access to the other woman that lies at the center of many international feminisms is, of course, also profoundly problematic. But even this is not my major reservation. Most troublesome is the binary quality of the “choice” being alleged: either state politics or the compensatory populism of nongovernmental organizations, either failed socialism or late capitalism. This simple binary denies the existence of what I have argued is a common historical horizon where historical ensembles persist in relations of tension and indebtedness. Moreover, it oversimplifies the complex relations that are inherent to a formulation like “late capital in national formation” or “body in political economy.” As suggested earlier, the very question of nation formation in the late-capitalist world drops out of the analytic picture when political economy fails to attend to the manner in which its own governing categories are assembled. The simple binary of choice that considering Lang’s essay has raised initiates a condition in which there is only one subject left. That subject is undifferentiated “women,” and “women” is a simple subject with a simple choice to make. In other words, the voluntarist question of “choice” is hypostatized to the status of a false division between either state dominance with political representation or NGO freedom and international human rights.

This is the trap. The binary trap is very useful in disciplining academic work: it is absolutely easier to think in binaried pairs. As Derrida has shown, according to Gayatri Spivak, the trap is also both ideological and politically fruitless, to say nothing of repetitive. What happens if rather than accept a binaried form-either state dependence or voluntarist, free market “choice”-a different logical relation for the enterprise is proposed? In a different relational logic of historical scholarship on the Chinese women’s movement, the movement could be seen as relatively autonomous by default, since the state has withdrawn from some enforced equalities, but it could also be seen that this “autonomy” exists only in relation to a still hegemonic politics, which is to say that in the last instance state-inflected forms prevail. Would that formula only apply to the singular subject of the Chinese women’s movement? Possibly not. But formulating general laws and universal lexicons is not the task of historians. The relational and provisional logic of both autonomous by default and only in relation to the state might open up a way of thinking about that subject called “the Chinese women’s movement” that does not require positivist guarantees from universalist theory. Scholarship on an ill-defined entity-unstable, contingent, unfinished, a women’s movement specific to a time and a place-would focus on how relational and provisional singular entities (subjects gendered in certain ways, specific institutions and organizations, interlocking logics, specific bureaucratic initiatives, local internecine battles, etc.) operate in a field of unfathomable complexity.

Relational logics like this open up the archives of empirical record, including the archive on theoretical work (which must be considered an empirical or social fact). Relational logics articulate rather than define geopolitical entities. They describe entities as these come into being-they operate a politics of predication-rather than positively fixing stable, substantial artifacts like “women,” “individuals,” “nations,” or even “agencies” into which people come, out of which they exit, having left that other formalist fiction, “context,” wholly undisturbed. It is precisely in the politics of predication that the answer to my question-“What are proper historical subjects of gender histories in contemporary ‘Asia?’”-resides.

History, Incongruence, Specificity

Historical consciousness is at once the consciousness of history . . . that “there is history rather than nothing,” and a consciousness that is itself specifically historical, an effect of, and subject to, the vicissitudes of history.

(Haver 47)

In the face of the problematics returned to at each point so far in this essay (late capital, flexible bodies, critical intelligibility), history writing that employs relational logics and foregrounds a politics of predication proves quite valuable. The question that Ong poses-“What are the implications of a global production system in which relations of gender and of race are critical for the expansion of economic and symbolic capital?”-is transvalued into a question that is inestimably useful to a historian: “What are the implications of situated singularities (gender, race, national formation, etc.) for writing incongruent, though not incommensurate histories, and how would those histories conjoin inherited convention, historiographic heritage, and specific desires?”

A diffuse version of this question is surfacing in a significant part of the U.S. theory community around the question of how to overcome provincialism in Anglo-American scholarship. ¹⁴ But what postcolonial theorists underestimate is the limitation that historiography poses on history writing. More even than simply the conventionalized narratives and rhetorical forms that history as a discipline sets out as its method, historiography is a cumulative entity. ¹⁵ Sedimented scholarly common sense rooted in reverence for the historical fact constrains what can be argued, because the simple movement of precedent magically grants narrative certain powers. Historiography, often a truism subject to respectful repetition, endeavors to make facts authoritative, to stabilize them.

Let me use as example an influential short article collected in Lim Teck Ghee’s Reflections on Development in Southeast Asia. In this article, “Outlines of A Non-Linear Emplotment of Philippine History,” Reynaldo Illeto argues against simple historical teleologies. Illeto declines to continue the thoroughly developmental narrative of traditional European Marxism. This is now a standard move in progressive historiography. Illeto, however, makes several further illustrative points about historical narrative. First, he argues that the motive power of history resides in large-scale events like disease outbreaks and epidemics and in the response of authorities or empowered people to treat (and in treating, to colonize) the diseased. History’s motive power, then, does not rest simply in the hands of singularly powerful individuals or even magically empowered groups or classes of individuals. Rather, it rests in mobilized collectivities. Second, for an event to be considered at all (i.e., to be event-like in a historical narration), some data is necessarily suppressed; Illeto’s examples are the unacknowledged importance of seditionary movements to both the consolidation of the Spanish colonial state and the Philippine-led ilustrado, anticolonial nationalist reforms. Third, he argues that “development” is never embedded in the logic of history but is rather a particular historiographic account of the imaginary forward movement of “history” in which this “history” obscures and rests on the continued repression of the motive force of material events like sickness, criminality, mass affect, bodily expression, and so on (154). ¹⁶ In the ensuing years (the essay is a decade old) many have reargued these points.

Of most value here is Illeto’s claim that the subjects of historical narratives are not necessarily individuals and that not all events are historical. ¹⁷ He delivers this lesson through specification of a tension between developmentalist historiography and a historically singular anticolonial event. Historiographically dense and reflexive, heavily evidenced, and tightly argued, there is presently much writing about anomalous historical events that seeks relief from historiographic platitudes, platitudes that continue to forward neoimperialist agendas. ¹⁸ Arguably, this is work that Gayatri Spivak has performed for feminist philosophy over the last decade: she insists that the task for gender history is still pending. What remains open is how to write these histories in light of singularities that are not the expression of essences. One way, suggested here, is to grasp singularity through the matter of the subject in question. How do as yet unpredicated historical subjects arise to predication at one moment or another to take the stage as agents? A nonhuman subject like Naughton’s “transitional economy”? A subject-category like “Chinese women”? What would research into the history of “Chinese women,” the subject of the women’s movement in China, look like? How would research on “Chinese women” differ from “women in transition,” a pan-Asian subject? What processes bring subjects into historical and political predication?

Historians are working at this problem, and this is not an appropriate place for a literature review of that work. However, to illustrate the point that much is to be gained working in a tense relation of history and theory, I would recommend Frank Dikötter’s Sex, Culture and Modernity in China as an example of how even unsuccessful research projects can be subverted into addressing a question germane to the project. Dikötter’s volume is itself a polemic against the colonial paradigm in historiography. It seeks to establish the independent existence of a parallel historical development in China and Europe on matters of sexual science. And its primary evidence is a massive archive of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing on eugenics. Primarily a content summary of specific publications, Dikötter’s volume describes the normalizing of modern sex, the discourse of demography, and how sexual disease, hygiene, and adolescent sexuality became particular topics of discussion in sexual science.

Once we step away from Dikötter’s narrative recounting of content to ask what the subject “women” looks like in the material archive he describes, the value of the study is immensely clarified. The nineteenth-century pseudoscience of sexuality in both Europe and China, as elsewhere, rested on a grid of race teleologies and sexualized taxonomies. It presupposed the intercourse of colonization projects ongoing in South Asia, Southern Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. In the early-twentieth century, these racialized sexual “sciences” circulated through the colonized social matrix of the emergent Chinese urban elites. In the course of imagining their future, Chinese elites, particularly intellectuals, seized on the subject “women” and mobilized it into a sexed, universalized, pseudoscientific, foundational category. This “women” rested on newly minted metaphors of similitude that linked the reproductive lives of individual Chinese women to the anatomized body of universal woman globally. As Mrinalini Sinha has also pointed out in her analysis of “Indian women,” and as Dikötter’s evidence suggests, the particular differences within the universalized category “women” could only be articulated in terms of skin color and nationality and almost never in terms of class, sexual, or other forms of heterogeneity; relations to centers of governance; or rates of social adherence to the normativity of the new femininity. The point is that the historical evidence Dikötter presents regarding eugenics and female physiology is more valuable than he appears to realize, but only as a colonial archive. ¹⁹

Obsessive attention to reproductive physiology and the normalizing of sex psychology in the subject “modern Chinese women” (what I had termed for convenience’s sake “nüxing” or “women the sexed subject”) gave elite theorists a woman who had advantages over other subject forms for several reasons. And this is where it is necessary to stress that the universalization of biological “women” actually registered a convergence of history and value, i.e., all over the world people are all the same because they are all born of “women.” This makes reproductive bodiliness a material conduit of demographic nationalism. The normalization of the sexed body of “women” in China also reshaped sexual codes and further advanced a normative, scientific discourse of heterosexuality. ²⁰ So one could easily argue that the universalizing and modernizing work of eugenics-a subspecies of colonial, modernist pseudoscience-actually contributed to the inscription of agency into the body of the individual sexed by means of the category “women.” Not only that, but once theorized, sexual desire exceeded all containment. Both latinate penis and latinate vagina in this particular subdiscourse could be quantified and even brandished as metaphor. Which is to say that in the written language of Chinese eugenics, the medical terms penis and vagina served as metaphors of modernity. And when eugenics condensed all desire into sexual desire and lavished so much attention on its hydraulic possibilities, the subject in whose name modernity might be effected-women-became an alternative subject form and conceivable as a mass agent (albeit one in grave need of rescue, renovation, recasting, etc.). Eugenics is not, of course, the only arena where the subject “women” was broached and solidified among urban elites in China. However, it is a good illustration in one particular theory stream (e.g., sexual selection in social evolution) of how that theoretical, universalizing impulse connected itself to an active agent, the subject “women,” during the early stages of Chinese colonial modernity.

Photorepresentation and the Subject “Women in Transition”

Up to this point, my analysis has situated and unsituated “women.” The value of this exercise has been assumed, and I have also refused to generalize about an alternative positivity or to make claims about the metaphysics of the historical fact. At each turn, I have suggested that the political deconstruction of “women” (as “women” has been predicated at various sites in the globalizing economy) must be undertaken, but that this operation must also extend into the arena of historiography itself. Moreover, I have argued that critical histories must not repudiate heterogeneity or reduce to a commonality those singularities embedded in the empirical archives. ²¹ Of course, what counts from one day to the next as “the empirical record” is determined by forces of various kinds: victory in war, the imperialist adventure, triumphal economic development, the pervasive drag of common sense. These contingencies far exceed matters of narrativity. What constitutes history are singular subjects and irreducible, incongruent specificities that may neither be reduced to a common denominator nor excluded from consideration when uncritically mobilized into story form. History is never “just narrative.”

Having been so far concerned with the problem of singularities in historical narratives, I turn now to an analogous problem in cinematic narrative, finding in film representation a privileged source of the predication not of “women” per se, but rather of another irreducible subject I call “women in transition.” In shifting to cinematic narrative, I am raising two additional points: first, that the recuperation of “women in transition” in cinematic narrative is an embedded reserve of information about political experience; second, that as the Beijing film critic Dai Jinhua argues, the rise of the sexed subject women is most obvious in the archive of cinematic narrativity. The Sinophone films that I review here are not exemplary. They are not feminist films. They do, however, construct, suggest, enable, constrain, and position viewers-and thus historians-in significant ways. This is because historians, like ordinary people, possess a “consciousness that is itself specifically historical, an effect of, and subject to, the vicissitudes of history.”

I raise the question of these films in order to consider how an anomalous, gendered subject-“women in transition”-is positioned in the anomalous economic and discursive shift that popular films are addressing. I also wish to argue that these gendered subjects may be what Claudia Pozzana calls singular subjectivities, what Benjamin calls truly historical (as distinct from historicist) monads. This is not a discussion of “women” per se, though it is quite adequately a “feminist” analysis. Rather, it is an attempt to locate subjects as they are predicated in cinematic narrative and then hold them in focus as proper subjects of gender history, resisting the temptation to reduce “women in transition” to the binaried terms of social science description (i.e., all gendered subjects are in the last instance either women or men; “women” is only comprehensible in the matrix of heteronormativity, in relation to men; this holds universally in time and space for our species, etc.). The point is to engage anomaly and to constantly redraw the relation of subject to teleology, subject to “context,” and subject to media. It also proposes that gendered subjects are both irreducible and legible, just as the differences that separate people like Shinya Sadako, Xiang Ersao, and me (beyond the fact that I am alive and they are celluloid!) are both irreducible and tangible reminders of our contemporaneity in late capital.

How does cinematic predication of gendered subjects work? How does film bring into presence as historical event a moment of truly political importance? A good example is the work of Taiwan auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien, whose City of Sadness [Beiqing chengshi] deals in particular with photorepresentation and historical memory. City of Sadness and the second of Hou’s great masterpieces, Dust in the Wind [Lianlian fengchen], predicate a singular, supra-individual subject, a local proletariat longing for political emancipation; these films also show the conditions for its emergence. Woven into the intricate plotting of “City of Sadness” is a family saga and a lesson about the importance of writing history, not just witnessing it or hypostatizing historical memory. Hou is concerned with how historical actors are represented photographically. A key figure, Wenqin, is the longest-lived of four brothers and a deaf-mute photographer; he is also the Benjaminian modernist for whom photorepresentation is a trope of historical truthfulness.

In the process of the political predication of a local proletariat, City of Sadness also encodes some of the most moving (and thus perhaps most pernicious) clichés of masculinist history practices. And I raise it here primarily to suggest how much scrutiny complexly gendered political predication requires. Hou’s film is a parable. It is one chapter in his vision of the historical singularity of the local Minnanyu-speaking people’s social habits and those habits’ persistence in Taiwan during the colonial era of 1895–1990. Dust in the Wind, the equally allegorical sequel to City of Sadness, tracks the rise of the Taiwanese lumpen proletariat during the Taiwan economic miracle by tracing the character of a farm boy who, despite the love of a woman, fails to become a masculine man due to Guomindang occupation and political oppression.

City of Sadness lays out the preconditions of this emasculation. The film tracks the fate of a joint patriarchal or family subject. Each of four sons is murdered as the Japanese colonial government withdraws in 1945 and the brutal Chinese Nationalist troops arrive in 1949 to occupy and recolonize the island. Consistent with the law of the psychic fantasy of Woman, the only female figures in the film are mothers and whores. The plot is set in motion when a prostitute betrays a local Taiwanese gangster. At the conclusion of the film, all the progenitors are dead. What is left are women and sons.

These remaining witnesses-the women and sons-cannot risk historical representation, in part because in Hon’s design, both the subjects of this blasted-out history and the historians are patriarchs, and all the men have been killed. Thus none of the survivors can properly represent the event in history. A mood of melancholic and inexpressible oppression saturates the film’s narrative. The male dead rest encapsulated in their photorepresentations. Snapshots are the last remaining physical, material reminder of a vast, silencing injustice. What keeps the possibility of a political emancipation alive for the spectator of the film, whose point of captation is the dead or castrated son, is the “photoknowledge” that Hou Hsiao-hsien pieces together through his fictional film narration. Nothing complex: just the message that magically present in the photographs of the dead men is an embedded history of intolerable injustices that could not be written or even spoken, but a history that in retrospect a man can witness and redress on behalf of his dead. When the conditions for the assumption of political manhood are once again present, history will again be writable from the evidence preserved in photorepresentations. The historian, or filmmaker in this case, is setting aside all possible ways of justifying past events and blasting into center screen this very real history of a weird monad: it is the historical subject of the emasculated but still masculine, subalternized ethnic subject of the true owners of the place, i.e., Minnanyu-speaking patriarchs. And as viewers, we are implicated in what might be construed as a hopelessly masculinist film representation; at the same time, what flashes up is, I would argue, exactly Walter Benjamin’s sense that if history is to be anything at all, it must be the constant effort to protect just these patriarchal dead.

Fourth Wave Chinese filmmaker Xie Fei’s Women of the Lake of Scented Souls presents an altogether different monad or gendered subject and consequently positions the historian somewhat differently. The subject at issue is definitely not “women, the subject of feminism.” This film does not draw on the wellspring of feminism, a development wellspring: it does not represent a utopic subject “women” or “modern Chinese woman” like the one that Dai Jinhua has celebrated in Chinese filmmaker Huang Shuqin’s feminist film, Woman, Demon, Human [Ren, Gui, Qing]. ²² Nor can this subject be read off as a variant of Gayatri Spivak’s theoretical trope, the “violent shuttling of ‘women’ between tradition and modernity” (128). The question of “tradition” is not an uncomplicated problematic for Chinese filmmakers, in any case, given the singular heritage of Maoism and revolutionary Maoist film practice. Xie Fei’s subject is, nonetheless, a historical specificity. Like Hou’s emasculated, patriarchal Taiwanese family subject, it too qualifies as a Benjaminian subject, a monad, “a specific life” that is blasted “out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework,” out of typicality into contemporaneity. Furthermore, though I am calling this subject “women in transition” to mark its contingency, it is the subject of a “present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop,” or better, has been brought to a stop (Benjamin 262–63).

Bringing historical time to a standstill is difficult. A historical present is never really “in transition,” never truly a moment in transition between the past and the future. That is because no one ever knows where the present is going, what the future will actually bring. No present, much less any present subject can ever fully explain itself in relation to ongoing processes, either processes half-understood, such as commercialization or global capitalism, or those so remote on the horizon that we ourselves are unaware of our own subject forms or the forces predicating us until the retrospective time of history writing emerges far in the future. Historians look instead to ways of reading the “contents of discourse.” As, for instance, H. D. Harootunian does in Things Seen and Unseen, the object is to find the operative constraints in the contemporaneity of discourses of the past. In the contents of the discourse, subjects are available that will remain unseen if universal, atemporal, or nomothetic categories are imposed; the difficulty of history writing resides in having to give up “extradiscursive forces” to seek out subjects that are prompted from within, shaped in “specific processes and practices of signification.” Which is, of course, to say with Foucault that the historian’s work is to decipher and decode constructions as they establish their own “categories of adequacy” in what Harootunian likes to call the “institutional conditions of existence” (5). ²³

Looking at Xie Fei’s film Women of the Lake of Scented Souls with questions of historical processes, institutional conditions of existence, and “women in transition” in mind, therefore, the importance of framing looms very large. ²⁴ Scented Souls is framed in several ways. You will recall that the story features the complex life of a rural woman, Xiang Ersao, who is sought out by a female agent of transnational capital, Shinya Sadako, and consequently becomes a successful rural entrepreneur. Xiang’s financial success gives her enough wealth and clout to marry off her son (in a painfully boisterous and tragicomic wedding banquet scene). But riches cannot forestall the betrayal she suffers when her lover of many years abruptly abandons her, probably for a younger woman. Scented Souls situates itself in an ideological frame, subtly working and reworking the “contents of the discourses” of the new capitalist-inflected “socialism with Chinese characteristics” that interests Barry Naughton and his China Quarterly co-authors. It is also very obviously a genre film, and therefore it shares a narrative frame with other ordinary mass or popular films about the era of economic reform. ²⁵

While national framing devices are obvious in Women of the Lake of Scented Souls, I find far more striking the fact that it falls just as easily into the category of the female bildungsroman appearing in East Asian films across national boundaries. In films from Taiwan, Hong Kong, diasporic or huaqiao corporate entities, as well as the PRC; in feminist and not feminist films; and in films directed, written, or conceived by both women and men, the female bildungsroman has similar coding so far as gendered social relations are concerned. These films are preoccupied with female subjects who get trapped in the production of surplus value. In their stories, labor is systematically gendered female, and, consequently, so is surplus value. A striking example is Hong Kong-British filmmaker Anna Hui’s 1990 Song of the Exile, the story of a transnationally situated daughter of a Chinese father and Japanese mother, which I will look at in slightly greater detail later. Briefly, the question posed in Song of the Exile is what a daughter will in the end produce-children or wealth, subordination in marriage or independence in work-once she adequately and self-consciously grasps the tragic historical determinations of her mother’s life.

The focus on a young Hong Kong schoolgirl’s sensitive flirtation with a Japanese tourist in Clara Law’s Autumn Moon places its protagonist at the brink in at least two respects: she is about to have a sexual encounter with a boy classmate, and she is about to leave Hong Kong to join her immigrant parents in Canada. The female bildung in this moody, intensely photographed film takes coherent shape within the tightly structured economic hallucination of Hong Kong, where commodity relations (same) condition female heterosexuality (difference). The troubled transit of the girl from home to elsewhere, Chinese and Japanese language to English, school to labor is developed in relation to a particular foil. The foil turns out to be the dying domestic economy, signified in now arcane knowledge of food preparation, mirrored in the domestic servitude of the girl’s illiterate, dying grandmother, whose occult knowledge of food culture will be left behind in Hong Kong. “The secrets of grandma’s cooking are more complicated than the atom bomb,” the young girl tells her friend, and because “they are her whole life,” on grandma’s death these secrets will vanish from the world. “Women in transition” belong, in Autumn Moon, to a world where fast food hamburgers are traditional fare and granddaughters do not cook.

In the PRC/Taiwan mass market genre film Maiden Rosé, generational difference of mothers and daughters is represented differently. The daughter’s father, scion of a brewer’s family before the Revolution, has hidden a precious bottle of the family brewery’s specialty somewhere in the wall of the family compound. This bottle is to be opened at the girl’s wedding party. Over the years of violent revolution in China, the virgin wine’s market value and its tastiness increase as it ages safely in the wall, but the secret of where the wine is hidden dies with the brewer. After great suffering, the mother and her alienated daughter finally locate the storage place and uncover the precious substance. This is the granddaughter’s story, however. A subject predicated amidst a new game called “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” she does not gamble on the wine’s excellence, but rather seizes the moment. Once the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is complete and women and men can begin to produce wealth again, she establishes a brand name for virgin wine and founds a successful restaurant business.

The point is that given the extremely motile conditions of late capital in “Asia,” modes of production are fundamental elements of the institutional conditions of existence and therefore are, not surprisingly, ideologically present in the political predication of subjects in the female bildungsroman. ²⁶ (This does not address why the female bildungsroman is so prominent transnationally in Asian films.) In addressing these films of “women in transition,” one is confronted with the problem of grasping the subject form without reducing it to the status of mere data in the global “system” of late capital. How is it possible to retain a historical understanding of this monad, which the discourse of “transitional economy” returns to so repetitively, and at the same time eschew historicist or reductive explanations in the effort of accounting for it? What is encoded in this monad that appears over and over in these films? What specificity is at stake?

“Capital,” Gayatri Spivak points out in her matter-of-fact way, “is antiessentializing because it is abstract as such. The essence of nations, cultures, et cetera, are deployed by capitalisms for the political management of capital” (13). What is useful in the Marxism of Gayatri Spivak is the confusion of subjects and objects, culture and economy: what gets to be a subject and how it gets that status is unclarified. The question of indeterminacy requires that each subject be specified as a subject of something and, furthermore, that the question of the production of human beings through the vaginas of women be moved to the center of any inquiry into global exploitation or gendered oppression. The part of Spivak’s argument that I want to draw on here comes when she comments on Marx’s claim that once capital is fully developed, a “capital logic emerges to give birth to capital as such.” Spivak suggests that this “moment, as Marx emphasizes, entails the historical possibility of the definitive predication of the subject as labor power” (161).

We know that there is a courtyard sector in China’s “economy in transition” that affects both the general status of women, as measured by any number of indices of oppression nationally, and the division of labor globally, because it acts as a reserve labor pool. It would be quite a simple maneuver to illustrate the economics of that sector in a reductive reading of Women of the Lake of Scented Souls. For instance, in Scented Souls, Xiang Ersao sets a tragedy into motion when her eyes light on the disciplined, laboring body of an impoverished girl named Huanhuan. Xiang decides to buy Huanhuan for fifteen hundred yuan, or the cost of a cow, and marry her off to Xiang’s son Duanzi. The only reason Huanhuan is for sale in the first place is that the drive to capitalize the courtyard sector has led the girl’s mother to invest unwisely and to incur a huge debt. Reading the film to illustrate economic realities like the risks involved in microlending would be a good reading of the film. But it would not address my concerns with the historical possibilities that are predicating subjects, the types of subjects that are surfacing to visibility in the contemporary archive, or the ways these subjects behave.

Let me turn, then, from Women of the Lake of Scented Souls to another important film, Zhou Xiaowen’s comedy Ermo, that helps me to address this matter. ²⁷ As in many of the films cited here, characters in Ermo watch videotapes and television. Ermo’s heroine is fixated on film image. Indeed, the movie’s plot concerns the effort of this rural woman to purchase and control film representation. Self-willed Ermo, not unhappily married to an old, kindly, but impotent political cadre, gets involved in a torrid sexual affair with a virile young truck driver, Blindman. Blindman lives next door and intuitively grasps the young woman’s libidinous drive to make money, though even he is shocked at the lengths to which she will go to attain her end. Ermo channels all of her life force into her peculiar quest: she wants to buy the largest television in the county. Unlike the example I gave of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s City of Sadness, where Hou effects the quality of the division of time in still photographs of dead people, Ermo is an example of what I am calling “woman in the transitional economy” or “women in transition.” It is not a coincidence that the subject “women in transition” in new cinema enfolds and invaginates itself: each female figure exists in relation to the filmic flow of representations of women from somewhere else.

Ermo is obsessed with images of women from elsewhere. Though in part she wants simply to outdo her neighbors’ consumption possibilities, she also seeks futilely to control and specularize the images appearing on her huge television set. In order to buy the set, she sells virtually everything she has except her sex and her child: not unlike any worker, she sells not only her labor power, but also sells her leisure time, certainly her self-respect, and in some extraordinarily charged scenes, pints of her own blood. Just like Ermo, the polyglot and pan-Asian female subjects of Song of the Exile, Autumn Moon, and Maiden Rosé are obsessed with fractal images of women in transit. Mothers are obsessively important to daughters, but these mothers turn out to be foreigners and speak unintelligible languages, worshiping their own dead at local shrines far from “home” (Song of the Exile). Daughters become visible in ideological order through complex geometric relations of female generational conflict (Maiden Rosé); transmigration; or the frustration of the youth with the aged, female other (Autumn Moon). Even Shinya Sadako claims to have had a Chinese grandmother!

If the monad that Ong’s study blasted out of the history of capital was a female, spirit-possessed, Malaysian production line worker, what sort of subjects are Xiang Ersao, the successful rural entrepreneur, and Ermo, the foolish peasant worker and consumer? They are both instances of “woman in transition.” This historical monad, woman in transition, is an irreducible, tangible, gendered ideological subject. Its predecessor is Maoist Woman, a political subject predicated first in the PRC but widely disseminated throughout the world. Woman in transition is partly a lovingly rendered nostalgic portrait of the productive labor of rural women. But this immediate, contemporary filmic moment in time marks ten years of “development” from the moment measured in Aihwa Ong’s Malaysian ethnography. Now that the PRC is not only the centralized focus of “East Asia” in rhetorical terms, but also the bulwark of neo-Keynsian investment policies during a time of extreme global capital volatility, the flexible labor market is mediated in vastly different ways. The gendering of “Asian” laborers and its articulation into transnational capital has also changed, just as it is bound to change again under shifting conditions of the global financial crisis.

Ermo is a comedy. Although all of the markers of “women in transition” are present (women rather than men are the producers of surplus value; the female agent engages in profitable and self-directed actions, though not actions that will ever emancipate her from the obvious political oppressions she experiences; the heroine is in transition between the old, decrepit political order of egalitarian Maoism and the shimmering narcissism of contemporary women’s consumption power; and so on) the film positions the viewer to enjoy Ermo’s dilemma. As in Women of the Lake of Scented Souls, the bodies of women produce surplus value but cannot reproduce biologically. Human reproduction is strictly regulated, while women’s productivity is increasingly sexualized. In a hilarious, painful (and yet unspeakably carnal) scene, Ermo gets up after just a few hours of sleep to labor on an archaic, wooden noodle machine and create products to sell for pennies by the roadside. Labor also eroticizes Xiang Ersao’s gaze (and through her our own) as she dwells enviously and proudly on her virgin daughter-in-law’s exquisite form. The specificity at stake here, however, is neither the body of women, nor sexuality, nor even the hackneyed truism that women produce the surpluses routed back into capital accumulation-though of course all these thematics and parables are present in the PRC films.

Surfacing into representation, rather, is a subject “women in transition,” a more revealing indicator separate from and irreducible to the questions that I introduced earlier in this paper. The subject is not universalizable, it is not “women.” It is not hedged around with qualifiers (e.g., Chinese women, Asian women, women of color, etc.), because it is itself a contingent, momentary, irreducible entity. Li Xiaojiang, the PRC statist feminist critic, would probably call the formation “Oriental Woman.” ²⁸ Dai Jinhua, a feminist-Marxist and cultural nationalist film critic, might include these representations in what she calls the tragic beauty of “Chinese women.” I accept both of these names and am cognizant of the complex theoretical foundations situating Li and Dai as theorists of gender and modernity. And I dare say that Li and Dai might even agree with the part of my formulation that stresses the degree to which “women in transition” is a subject disconnected from earlier gendered codes and immediate conditions. I would also add that “women in transition” is defined partly by its failure to achieve stability and is consequently a subject of painful frustration.

In Ann Hui’s Song of the Exile, the middle-class protagonist, Huiyin, is British-educated in media and communication studies. After travelling to Japan with her Japanese mother and witnessing firsthand the great tragedies of “Asia’s” immediate past, Huiyin negotiates a way of moving to Hong Kong, where she is able to support herself and her life project of representing subaltern workers in television journalism. Her single life of economic sufficiency and political integrity is possible only after she has reconciled the mysteries of her heritage (her mother is Japanese and living in China, her father a Chinese refugee living in Hong Kong) and the difference that marks her distance from her mother. You are not your mother’s daughter, this mother tells Huiyin at one point in an angry conflict after Huiyin’s father’s death: “Strange, your body came out of mine. But you are so different from me.” Huiyin has little sense of her mother’s internal conflicts, which arise from her belief that she violated sexual chastity and sexual loyalty to her patriline and nation of origin: her mother understands her Japanese army veteran brother’s rage at her marriage to a Chinese soldier as anger at her infidelity to the nation. Only slowly does Huiyin begin to recognize these older, emotionally fraught national modalities. And it is not just because she is young and feckless. Huiyin confronts the frustration not of disloyalty to nation or patriline, but of not knowing how to employ herself or what to expect in exchange for her work. Despite all of her strenuous efforts, she cannot grasp what even her immediate future is or will bring. She is a monadic subject caught up in processes of transition into an unknown beyond.

Returning to a PRC text, Xiang Ersao is, in Scented Souls, wholly unfrustrated in the project of creating wealth. Making money is almost laughably easy for her, and if anything, the state and its representatives are only too happy to abet her in capital accumulation. Still, Xiang Ersao is, like Huiyin, caught in transition. Already standing in the future era of plenty and rewarded labor, she still cannot stop her own compulsive need to cast her hand-selected daughter-in-law into a version of the hell she herself knows all too well-the hell of a bad marriage and frustrated sexual desire. Xiang and her daughter-in-law are versions of the same subject caught in the frustration of a transition that the film narrative depicts as economic transition or reform. The new economy eccentrically predicates “women in transition” while also mobilizing constraints on the emergence of women into social satisfaction, and it does so as wilfully as it mobilizes surplus value.

The Sinophone films I have mentioned most likely attend to female agents of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” because of the limitations the state has imposed on family size in the PRC. The crotch shot of Ermo sitting on her kang with a mound of small-denomination banknotes flowing as though out of her vagina makes my point. So does Xiang Ersao’s effort to purchase a daughter-in-law whom she can breed to create her own worker in the new political economy and her own grandchild, someone to inherit the fruits of her labor and intelligence. Is this moment simply “the historical possibility of the definitive predication of the subject as labor power?” And is this subject in transition a hopeful figure as well as a tragic one? After all, in the concluding moments of the film, Xiang Ersao realizes that her idiot son cannot impregnate her daughter-in-law. Xiang’s fantasy of woman-to-woman transfer of wealth is forestalled. There is no class of women for itself, no possibility of a feminist subject here.

Xiang says to Huanhuan that she will provide a dowry and a divorce so that the girl can marry properly, and yet the girl’s response, to no one’s surprise, is that no man will have her now. Xiang herself and now her daughter-in-law are both inemancipatable. Neither the Maoist state of political mobilization, nor the socialist capitalism that will make both women wealthy in accordance with their talents can alleviate the suffering that Xiang has revisited on Huanhuan. Caught between a brutal husband and a retarded son, the mother-in-law has only a daughter-in-law to love, and yet the erotic possibilities fade as the transitions are forestalled, one at a time: no procreative sexuality; no recreational sexuality; no second chances; no relation other than the strictly subordinated mother and daughter-in-law bound together, yet forbidden to create anything but capital together.

“Women in Transition,” Concluded

I want to return briefly to the question of gender and development. Obviously, I have balked at the teleology implied in the notion of development. But not absolutely. Along the route of this political deconstruction I have neither rejected nor embraced “development.” There are two reasons why I prefer to reimagine the problem historically, looking for the categories of adequacy implicit in evidence of gendered relations within institutional conditions of existence. First, considering scholarship in light of national formation in late capital, bodies in political economy, and the globalized historical heritage of competing claims on enlightened thinking (the implicit terms of feminism) forestalls the discourse of gender in development without at the same time having to engage it in its existing form. Second, neoliberal feminist scholarship is not sufficient to the questions on the horizon. Within the restructuring of the world economy, neoliberal feminism thinks about household management of poverty, international human rights, environmentalism, and the woman citizen’s special needs. These are thoroughly appropriate matters to consider. But often this sort of feminism is too closely congruent with the interests of the structural adjustment policies of states and global agencies, and it obscures the linkage of development to exploitation and self-exploitation. This linkage is figured in Xiang Ersao’s “choice” to misuse the wealth that her own skill and articulation into the global economy provides by forcing an impoverished and defenseless girl into marrying a retarded boy.

The stakes for scholarship are the significant issue. What sort of analytic work is possible that eschews developmentalism and yet works within the regional language of late capital that is now the everyday idiom of Asian boom/bust cycles? What are the implications of the apparent fact that the singular subject “women in transition” undoes older Marxist analytic divisions (male social production versus female social reproduction, for instance) because the laboring subjects who produce the wealth are all female? This is not just the case in the films narrativizing recent history in the PRC, where socialism is frequently figured in an impotent or worthless male character. ²⁹ The pan-Asian female bildung is also cast this way, as a singular economic subjectivity predicated as labor power. In this light, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s preoccupation with patriarchal cultural transmission seems deeply nostalgic in a world where transmission of any kind except capital seems very uncertain.

The “evidence” I have provided to detail the subject of “women in the transitional Asian economy” is cinematic representation. ³⁰ Here the warning Spivak sounds in her “Scattered Speculation” comes into play: the sort of critique that ignores the centrality of female production and the relation of the developed and developing worlds echoes through the mindless division of labor between cultural studies and economic studies. To build on her point, a feminism that ignores contemporary history and the problems that the historiographic heritage imposes becomes, in the last instance, part of the problem. The question is how to make valuable, singular subjects like “transitional women” into subjects of normalizing feminisms that grasp analytically the great transformation now underway in “Asia.”