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Confessions of the (ethnic) narcissist: Intermedia in diaspora

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 8; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14746681003797971

1474-6697

Ani Maitra,

Diaspora, migration, transnational identity

Abstract This essay attempts to examine the ethico-political implications of ‘ethnic narcissism’ through an analysis of Harjant Gill's video Milind Soman Made Me Gay (2007). Drawing on Rey Chow's theorization of the ethnic writer's autobiographical turn in diaspora and to psychoanalytic theories of narcissism, the essay plays close attention to Gill's use of intermediality to think through a queer diasporic politics that both deploys and undoes identity politics. If homosexuality (and narcissism) continues to be racialized in certain forms of nationalist discourse in the US, the essay suggests that we look at Gill's narcissistic, queer performance as something that makes possible an ethnically aware self-expression as well as the articulation of the failure of an ‘authentic’ ethnic identity. Notes 1. The two key works in this direction would be CitationDavid Eng's Racial Castration and CitationAnne Anlin Cheng's The Melancholy of Race. 2. CitationLeo Bersani's theorization of ‘impersonal narcissism’ in his recent book Intimacies would be an exception. However, narcissism, here, takes its cue from a reading of psychoanalysis that confines itself to sexuality, and is not interested in issues of post-coloniality and race. 3. CitationJasbir K. Puar discusses this link between terrorism and racialized homosexuality in Terrorist Assemblages. 4. To describe the second level, Chow draws upon the work of Frantz Fanon and Homi K. Bhabha. She succinctly summarizes and critiques the poststructuralist turn that Bhabha's notions of ‘mimicry’ and the ‘split’ subject gives to Fanon's theories of the colonized psyche. Chow rightly concludes that this post-structuralist, psychoanalytic model cannot concretely identify who benefits from these openings, fissures and ambivalences. In other words, what seems to be missing from Bhabha's theory is the specific context of the diasporic and/or postcolonial subject's experience. For her analysis of both the first and second levels of mimeticism, see Chow 103–27. 5. I use the term ‘ethnic’ being fully aware of the tension within the prevalent notion of ‘ethnicity,’ its simultaneous claims for the ‘universal’ and the ‘particular.’ What I am emphasizing, here, is the more powerful force of ghettoization at work in the concept. Chow herself comments on the contradiction between the shift in the modern use of the concept of ethnicity (from minoritizing exclusion to universalizing inclusion) and the actual violence that marks the term's political deployment. See Chow 24–30. 6. See in particular, Chow's reading of the last piece in CitationHongo's book – John Yau's ‘A Little Memento from the Boys.’ See Chow 147–52. 7. ‘Queerness,’ here, is a shorthand for the politics of non-heteronormative. ‘Queer of colour’ and ‘queer-diasporic’ are terms I use to emphasize the interarticulation of ‘race’ and ‘homosexuality,’ and the dominant whiteness of canonical ‘queer theory.’ 8. Abandoning J. L. Austin's favourite example ‘I do’ – a performative in the ‘first person singular present indicative active’ and tied to the context of a heterosexual state-sanctioned Christian marriage – Sedgwick chooses the performative ‘Shame on you!’ to explore the (queer) performativity of a ‘debased’ emotion like ‘shame’ through her analysis of the Prefaces of Henry James. It is important to note the difference in the strategies used by Butler and Sedgwick to arrive at performativity. Sedgwick attempts to tease out that moment of bouleversement by questioning Austin's definition of the performative utterance and turning to a blatantly more injurious and humiliating instance. Butler, however, sees compulsive repetition as itself being destabilizing and failing to secure the identity of the speaking ‘I.’ See Sedgwick Citation1–16; CitationButler Bodies that Matter. 9. Etienne Balibar uses the term ‘fictive ethnicity’ for that formation that is imposed on a group of people by the nation-state. Ethnicity is ‘fictive’ in the sense that the imposition or construction is sutured over by representations of linguistic, racial and/or religious ‘unity.’ See Balibar Citation96. 10. On the notion of resistance through iteration, Butler writes: ‘performance as a bounded ‘act’ is distinguished from performativity in so far as the latter consists in a reiteration of norms which precede, constrain, and exceed the performer and in that sense cannot be taken as the fabrication of the performer's ‘will’ or ‘choice’; further, what is ‘performed’ works to conceal, if not disavow, what remains opaque, unconscious, unperformable. The reduction of performativity to performance would be a mistake.’ See Butler 234. 11. For a discussion of this defining aspect of intermedia, see Spielmann Citation133. 12. I am borrowing the phrases that Chow uses specifically for Hongo's collection, because the larger context of her analysis is the immigrant artist's turn toward herself. See Chow 142–52. 13. I am, here, alluding to Rosalind Krauss's famous dictum: ‘The medium of video is narcissism.’ Krauss reaches her conclusion through her analysis of self-reflection and encapsulation in contemporary video art. She makes a distinction between narcissistic ‘reflection’ in video and the ‘reflexive’ turn in contemporary painting, sculpture and film. Gill's narcissism, I will argue, disrupts this reflection/reflexivity binary. See Krauss Citation50–64. 14. Chow 145. 15. Around 4000 Sikhs died in the anti-Sikh riots that broke out in India after her Sikh bodyguard assassinated Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. It has now been proved that members of the ruling Congress party were involved in organizing the riots. Model and Bollywood actor Milind Soman and his co-star Madhu Sapre faced obscenity charges (under Section 292 of the Indian Penal Code) for appearing nude in an advertisement for a brand of sports shoes in the mid-nineties. The same law was frequently used with IPC 377 (the law that, until recently, criminalized ‘unnatural’ sexual acts including anal sex) to harass and arrest homosexuals, sex-workers and outreach workers in India. Defendants in the Matthew Shepard case used ‘homosexual panic’ to justify the murder of Shepard in Wyoming in October 1998. His assailants, Russell Arthur Henderson and Aaron James McKinney, finally pleaded guilty. Shepard's murder brought to the fore inconsistencies in ‘hate crime’ legislation at the state and federal levels in the United States. Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh gas station owner, was murdered by Frank Roque in Mesa, Arizona on 15 September 2001. Roque, as Gill's video reminds us, shouted, ‘I stand for America all the way’ as he shot Sodhi, apparently mistaking him for a ‘Middle Eastern’ because of his turban. Legal scholar Muneer Ahmed has shown how media representations in the US sought to rationalize Sodhi's murder in the context of ‘nationalism’: ‘To borrow from criminal law, the hate crime killings before September 11 were viewed as crimes of moral depravity, while the hate killings since September 11 have been understood as crimes of passion’ (108). In other words, Sodhi's murder did not provoke the same ‘hate crime’ outrage that Shepard's murder had. See Ahmed Citation101–15. 16. The (m)other need not be the biological mother, but any one who takes on the role of the care-giver and nurturer. See Green Citation73. 17. Fanon's turn to the ‘mirror stage’ is worth remembering: For Fanon, writing in the context of racism in the colonial Antilles, the identity of the ego is not grounded in specularity alone, but inextricably tied to a conscious and acute awareness of the corporeal black body marked by visible phenotypic difference. See Fanon Citation161. 18. Reading Totem and Taboo alongside ‘On Narcissism,’ David Eng convincingly argues that there is a marked affinity between Freud's account of homosexual narcissism and the ‘stalled mental life of savages.’ That is to say, in Eng's argument, Freud's anxiety around racial difference manifests itself as homosexuality that the socialized subject must overcome. See Eng 9–12. 19. Freud, here, is specifically talking about the male homosexual. See Freud ‘On Narcissism’ Citation80. I must hasten to add that the essay, even as it pathologizes homosexuality, also hints at the inevitably narcissistic nature of the human psyche. ‘Secondary narcissism,’ in Freud's view, is the desperate attempt of every ego to recapture its primary narcissism. 20. In this video, Soman plays a suitor to an ‘oriental’ princess (played by Chinay herself): clad in just a dhoti, Soman comes out of a box marked ‘Made in India,’ and impresses the princess with his looks and his chiselled ‘Indian’ physique. 21. The ‘South Asian’ body is also highlighted when Gill interviews dancer Daniel Phoenix Singh in the video. As Singh speaks, the ‘cutaways’ underscore his svelte, muscular body as we see him perform in front of the camera. Singh's presence in the video could also be compared to that of a character like ‘Beauty’ in Isaac Julien's Looking for Langston. In other words, the exhibitionistic body in Gill's video could also be seen to aim to construct, ‘from scratch,’ an ethnic model of what constitutes the ‘homo-erotic’ and the ‘homosexual.’ The body, here, is not crushed by its refusal to emulate whiteness. Neither does it fear existing as a ‘bad’ copy. 23. See Frecerro Citation85. 22. By ‘imaginary’ relationships, Lacan means relationships that are based on the image of the self. The ‘other,’ seen as a rival, is thus perceived to be either ‘similar’ to or ‘different’ from the self. 24. In ‘Friendship as a Way of Life,’ Foucault writes, ‘Homosexuality is not a form of desire but something desirable. Therefore, we have to work at becoming homosexuals and not be obstinate in recognizing that we are.’ See Foucault 136. Moreover, in ‘The Hermeneutic of the Subject,’ Foucault writes that the care of the self ‘has a function of struggle. The practice of the self is conceived of as permanent battle. It is not simply a matter of shaping a man of valour for the future.’ See Foucault Citation97. 25. On mimesis as a ‘reflection’ of reality, Pierre Macherey writes: ‘The mirror is expressive in what it does not reflect as much as in what it does reflect. The absence of certain reflections, expressions – these are the true object of criticism.’ See Macherey Citation143. 26. Here is the description of the video on the website of Gill's production company: ‘Milind Soman Made Me Gay … employs a unique mix of visual elements along with voice over narration to juxtapose memories of the filmmaker's past against stories of three gay South Asian men living in the diaspora.’ See http://www.tilotamaproductions.com/FILMS.html 27. In an (yet unpublished) article and in response to a review of the video, Gill writes: ‘To deny Theron a voice within the context of this documentary was also an intentional decision that I made as a director. Even though there is an undeniable and tense sense of racial hierarchy within the mainstream depictions of gay and lesbian life in the US, I didn't want the viewers to conclude that gay South Asian men lack agency.’ (CitationGill ‘How Milind Soman Made Me Gay’ 6). 28. Deborah P. Britzman points out that to ‘queer-read’ would entail realising that ‘the relationship between knowledge and ignorance is neither opposite nor binary.’ Knowledge and ignorance, Britzman argues, mutually implicate each other, structuring and enforcing particular forms of knowledge and particular forms of ignorance. See Britzman Citation154. 29. Tim Dean, for instance, critiques the tendency of feminist psychoanalysis to privilege sexual difference. Yet, for his own theory of sameness, he ‘questions the plausibility of discussing men's and women's homosexualities as if they could be comprehended within the terms of a single conceptual model.’ See Dean 121. 30. I am, here, referring to Spivak's deconstructive reading of the myth of Narcissus in her seminal essay ‘Echo.’ While Spivak ultimately reads Echo (the nymph that Narcissus spurned) as the subaltern woman in the global ‘south,’ I borrow her initial formulation of Ovid's Echo (who is completely missing from psychoanalytic appropriations of the myth of Narcissus) as the potential for deconstruction and différance. See Spivak Citation17–43. 31. Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon define ‘homohistory’ as being opposed to the history of the ‘homos,’ and invested in possibilities of anachronism and a movement beyond sexual identity. See Goldberg and Menon Citation1609. 32. I was unable to cite the lyrics of the song because of copyright issues. However, my paper summarizes the stanza that Gill includes in the video. The lyrics of Hunter's song are available at http://www.justsomelyrics.com/1660451/Alberta-Hunter-You-Can%27t-Tell-The-Difference-After-Dark-Lyrics. Lilian Faderman writes that Hunter married in 1919, so that people she knew stopped seeing her as a ‘bulldiker.’ Pretending to be ‘bisexual,’ Faderman writes, was apparently an easier solution in the sophisticated circuits of Harlem. See Faderman Citation75.