Author: alinashen

Final Reflections and Sex Worker Rights

Warning: Gushing ahead I have been watching and waiting for this class since last year, and I am so thankful and so thrilled. I was so invested in the Maddaddam world, and this course was the perfect outlet for speculative fiction, technology, cyborgs, and feminism. I love Slack, and all the conversations we have on it, from Ex Machina to veganism. The way that everyone just throws themselves into conversation, pulling up references from different classes, news articles, and various experiences was probably the most inspiring and unexpected part of this class. What an awe-inspiring and standard-setting semester. Have a great summer!

More specifically to my final reflections for the Twinery, I focused on Katrina Woo Woo, and through her, Oryx. In many ways, this is an extension of my final blog post about the fetishization of Asian (American) women. When thinking about how to interpret the roles of Oryx and Katrina Woo Woo, both sex workers and both typified as “Asian Fusion” by white men (respectively Jimmy and Zeb), I immediately thought of the sex worker movement. Some sex workers see themselves as empowered entrepreneurs, conducting business in a savvy and profitable way. They claim their autonomous and nuanced politics through transnational, feminist, and/or sex-positive analysis and organize around issues such as legalizing sex work and marking this work as distinct from a narrative of trafficking victimhood. This political stance is close to the way Oryx defines herself as an empowered and adaptable businesswoman despite Jimmy’s belief that she is the victim trafficked from Southeast Asia. For Katrina, the entrepreneur behind Scales and Tails, sex work is clearly a business that she shapes into an empire, amassing independence and power. Her origins also have ties to history. We first see Katrina in New New York as Miss Direction. In the 1800s, Chinese Americans residing in New York City were predominantly male, with Chinese American women comprising of wealthy merchant’s wives and sex workers. The role that Katrina creates for herself speaks to the power of reclaiming sex work as a business in the male dominated world of the Maddaddam Trilogy.

Katrina’s pet snake could be a reference to the biblical apple and Eve, particularly in one scene in which Katrina is both costumed as an apple with the snake. There is plenty of other significant folklore and cultural practices that involve young women and snakes, from Medusa to Brittany Spears. There is also a particular dance in rural Indonesia called the dangdut goyang, or snake dance. Recently, Irma Bule, an Indonesian singer who had danced with snakes for an extra five dollars, died from snake venom after performing for 45 minutes after she was bitten. She was a young woman from a rural community who performed in order to attract crowds, primarily during election campaigns, and was paid $20 per performance. The stories about her went viral, and Indonesian journalist Made Supriatma frames her story in the spirit of Katrina and Oryx as one of a fighter who “exploits what she can exploit to go on living.” (Time, 2016)

Recommended Reading

Kwok, Yenni. “Here’s the Real Story Behind the Indonesian Singer Irma Bule, Who Died from a Cobra Bite.” Time. [http://time.com/4286323/irma-bule-snake-bite-cobra-singer-dangdut-indonesia/] 8 April 2016.

This is the article that I reference and quote in my paper.

Katsulis, Yasmina. “Gender, Sex Work, and Social Justice: Sociologists for Women in Society Fact Sheet.” Arizona State University. [http://www.socwomen.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/fact_sum2008-sexwork.pdf] Summer 2008.

This article is quick because it is a fact sheet, but these are facts distinguishing sex work from trafficking.

Kempadoo, Kamala. “Globalizing Sex Workers’ Rights.” Canadian Woman Studies Vol 22, No. 3,4 [http://cws.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/cws/article/viewFile/6426/5614] 1998.

This article covers sex work through history, situates sex work within the neoliberal framework, and gives an overview of sex worker rights organizing and issues that these workers face. I have seen this article cited in a few other pieces about sex workers, gendered migrant labor, and transnational feminism. The piece is easy to read, and helps us imagine what migrant sex work organizing and empowerment must look like in the Maddaddam world, and the near future.

Katrina Woo Woo and Oryx: Asian American Film Tropes and Fetishization

I cannot get over the fact that there are two love triangles: Zeb/Katrina Woo Woo/Adam One and Jimmy/Oryx/Crake. This is disappointing in so many ways. Where to begin? The fact that Adam One and Crake both had such huge egos that they created their own cults based on their worldviews; Zeb/Jimmy are the same annoyingly misogynistic trope of man that becomes our narrator; Katrina Woo Woo and Oryx are mysterious (read: racialized) tropes and plot devices and used both as the object of devotion and also for their sexual prowess. Oh, Margaret Atwood! This is a transgression that just seems, frankly, overtly racist in a way that I didn’t want Asian Fusion to be. There better be an explanation for this! I wish to call upon the Crakers’ flying deity!

I’ve been doing a little bit of research on East Asian American (“Oriental”) film tropes, and I wanted to share some thoughts with a side of rant. There are two basic types of film tropes: Lotus Blossom Baby and the Dragon Lady. The Lotus Blossom Baby is submissive, “utterly feminine, delicate, and welcome respites from their often loud, independent American counterparts…often spoils from the last three wars fought in Asia.” [1] The Dragon Lady is often overtly sexual, using her appearance to seduce and manipulate to aid evil men. Is this familiar yet? These tropes are often tied to other gendered stereotypes, such as the mail order bride, or the evil seductress. These controlling images shape the way that the general public imagines the Asian American (often imagined and constructed to mean East Asian American) women. One of the most common reasons why scriptwriters would make these sexist, racialized characters is so that they are expendable. As in, thank you Oryx for becoming a vector for this deadly disease, and now I will use you to manipulate my friend into killing me so that I do not have to live this horrible nightmare that I created. And while we’re at it, thank you Katrina Woo Woo, you were great with the hideouts, and it would’ve been cool if you were Eve One but for my inability to prevent your death even though I (Adam One) has all of these seemingly powerful connections.

What is particularly interesting is that the “Lotus Blossom,” Oryx, is aiding Crake in spreading a deadly vector while Katrina, the Dragon Lady, is helping Adam One spread pacifist resistance. I wonder if we are supposed to read Crake or Adam One as an imperialist technocrat, mirroring the U.S. military forces and their paternalistic treatment of indigenous people while invading a country like Vietnam or imagining “Oriental” mail order brides. I would love to know what other people make of these tropes. It seems too perfect (dragon lady, lotus blossom) to be a coincidence. What I want to know if whether Atwood unconsciously internalized these tropes to give her main guys more texture and love interests at the expense of the objectification and fetishization of Asian American women, or whether there is another plan here.

Is this another use of a variable (still not okay if it is) to show nuanced contrast between Crake (technocratic, controlled development) and Adam One (pacifist, spontaneous development)? For example, Katrina Woo Woo opened her own business and freely (it seems) used her power to help Adam One. On the other hand, it seemed like Crake specifically employed Oryx under him, and her economic independence comes from doing his work. The other variable that I reflected on was gaming and how Maddaddam/Crake and God’s Gardeners used games to make up the rules/learn the game. Also, I am reading on world development theory as it formed in China under Sun Yat-Sen (autocratic, nationalist). The Maddaddam and God’s Gardeners eerily mirror the factions in development theory, although in this case there are no countries or imagined race wars. This would be great to chat about!

[1] Tajima, Renee E. “Lotus Blossoms Don’t Bleed: Images of Asian Women,” pub. Making Waves: An anthology of Writings By and About Asian American Women. [http://www.samfeder.com/PDF/Making Waves_ Renee E. Tajima.pdf] 26 February 2010.

 

Minecraft, Blood and Roses, and Gamifying Genocide

Last year, my eleven-year-old cousin showed me the wonders of Minecraft. I was bamboozled. I even have the Facebook Status (a rarity) to prove it:

My eleven year old cousin introduced me to Minecraft tonight and took me through the world she literally created. She taught me how to shear wool, build a home, and mine for materials. She even had some analysis of the app economics (“It’s worth the seven dollars”). Can’t tell if it’s impressive or terrifying. Are we connected to things by the money we spend on them? Or by the virtual pickaxe we used to make it?

Minecraft, a world-building game with such a large fandom that I have seen this videogame in MoMA, obviously made it to the New York Times earlier last week. The piece shaped the game as not only a product of our culture, but as a producer of it. Minecraft is given credit for molding a child’s sense of logic, discovery, 3D imagination, and even the basics of coding. All things that the next generation needs to survive the impending takeover of Google compounds. Different from easy to manipulate computers and programs, Minecraft is refreshingly full of bugs and problems. In fact, these intentional blips reportedly end up encouraging players to fix the problem themselves.

With the advent of websites that literally allow you to gamify your life (see link below), we have to face an added dimension to the virtualization of everything. Online gaming and computer games are usually best in moderation, as practice or for leisure. It’s all fun and games until it’s not. When we tie gaming and games with social development, in place of or prioritized over social interaction, or rely so heavily on gaming that our relationship becomes one of addiction, something scary happens. And increasingly, as children (at least most of my cousins) are growing up weaned off of the iPad, the first point of contact to the technology is often in the form of a distracting video game.

While there is undoubtedly much research into the psychology and neurology of such a dependency, I will leave it to speculation in this blog post. Just something to think about the next time your sibling/child/parent fails to respond to your attempts at conversation in favor of a riveting RPG or perhaps SimsCity, needing “just five more minutes.”

In Maddaddam, we see Crake as young Glenn, who is shaped by the traumatic events of his family and species, but is given one of his first tastes of autonomy through gaming. Specifically, through Zeb’s life lessons and idle Blood and Roses gaming. There is no other way that Glenn can technically take control of his life, especially as Zeb leaves him. Although this fixation on extreme environmentalism to the point of brushing off individual human lives could have come first from the “real world” and was reflective onto the games, it was definitely magnified and honed by playing games like Blood and Roses. On the other hand, the Maddaddam group manipulated Extinctathon to create their own web of communications. It is worth thinking about their specific differences in using these games.

While I am writing about excessive gaming from a negatively biased point of view, we can also think about the relationship between humankind and online gaming in the context of our readings this week. Tsing names fungi as the ultimate metaphor for resistance, evading domestication for years, and Harroway talks about the blurring of lines between human and nature, and debunking human exceptionalism so we cannot point to a single enemy for our social woes. Glenn almost merges with the videogame, letting his worldview intertwine tightly with that of the game (trade you 1,000 babies on fire for an Eiffel Tower). Maddaddam resists “domestication” under the videogame, twisting it instead to work for them. There is no negative or positive connotation here, and in some ways, Tsing and Harroway describe similar phenomena. Humankind still interacts with and eats fungi even if we have not domesticated it, and perhaps blurring this line and resisting exceptionalism is it’s own form of resistance.

I would like to start the conversation here: About a reflection of not only how we use literal online gaming but “make up rules” of games in daily life, or even how dependent we are on our devices to tell us how to see the world. And what filter are we forced to screen our perceptions through? For example, someone may store their entire calendar in their phone, or be unable to look away from the screen, even during a conversation with someone in the “real world.”

And finally, with regards to Maddaddam and Crake: There is a difference between living by the rules of the game, and making up the rules of the game to suit your lifestyle. And that difference is the one between powerlessness and direct autonomy over your own time.

Links:

The Minecraft Generation: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/magazine/the-minecraft-generation.html?_r=0

Gamify Your Life: https://habitica.com/