Inventing Gender and its Political Ramifications (which actually means nothing)

Thematically, I find myself with something of a surplus of possibilities with regard to the pieces Kelly and I were assigned to, The Essence of a Nation: Chinese Virtual Persons on the Net and Inanimate Alice. The most over-arching of these is one whose scope is large, opening itself up to numerous interpretations in this context: the issue of identity. Both obviously come from artists who identity at least partially as Chinese, but in the course of their lives have ex-patriated and whose work thereafter is made and sponsored from other countries.
Kelly and I have chosen to take one each of the pieces as our focal point, but at the same time, in this issue of identity, it is hard not to directly address the overlap in the two. Each addresses on both a personal and socio-political level the concept of how identity manifests itself in their work. Each comes from a particular political origin (though they approach this subject in quite different ways) and, more notably given this origin, are both female artists. The female in Chinese culture is so evident a subject for this identity question that it feels somewhat unnecessary to waste space discussing reasons.

My focus was Xiao Qian’s The Essence of a Nation, whose title itself draws attention to this question. The claim it makes is that the artist has created six separate personas through a series of images on which text is directly imprinted in what sometimes appears to be arbitrary placement but in other cases places visual emphasis on a particular detail of the photo. The title clearly makes the argument that these characters embody one would assume something political or at least social about her homeland, though none of them seem to have a dramatically political bent. The exception is perhaps being the artist who claims that Chinese linguistic characters are in and of themselves art, contrasted with the Western alphabet, which is only capable of forming words. What becomes interesting about this is of course that the entire piece is in English, and the reader is in fact being given these assertions in simple English over images of Chinese character-art held up by the “fictitious” artist. But I might be straying a bit off my initial point.
I am interested, though, in the way the gender issue plays into this whole schema. The artist establishes two notable platforms at the beginning of the piece. First, in describing her intent in the piece to create several fictional people, she includes herself as one of them, another persona created in conjunction with the others. And while manifestations of the artist in his/her work are essentially projected persona, this does so in a direct way, claiming that the artist is in fact creating herself, and separates herself only inasmuch as her section is not linked with the others at the top of the initial page (though it is in other locations).

Second, while discussing her process she says, “as a woman designing virtual persons, I only like to create men.” While she makes a number of allusions to the enigmatic nature of her own created persona, this seems notable inasmuch as she directly calls into question her own gender identity, describing herself as possibly non-gender specific or even a ghost (a different heading in fact claims that her name derives from a story about a beneficent female ghost). The lines are blurred as to her personal identity, but given the significance of being a woman in Chinese culture, this seems particularly notable.

I’ll go into this in greater detail in our presentation. But even this seems like a whole can of worms that may end up just making a big mess.

Stories too Powerful to Make Up

This is the line that jumps out of the middle for me about Six Sex Scenes. The language of the piece is so simplistic in its syntax and word choice that I begin to take it as a mere recounting of facts rather than a work of fiction, something that I can't really be sure of.

Diving in from the opening page, I get the impression that just that is happening: I am diving into a body of water made up of numerous disturbing images interwoven with seemingly innocuous (at least by comparison) reminiscence about frequently unpleasant childhood memories or recollections from the narrator’s relationship with Andy. The options offered through which to enter the text are both from the adult perspective of the character, and both are probably significant in their own ways: one, a quick recollection of an evening out with her boyfriend in which she effectively severs herself from him by fantasizing about switching orientations; the other, a therapy session with the two in which their slightly dysfunctional sexual relationship is tempered by the therapist’s assertion that they are relatively healthy. This is the first section I read, and this inevitably informed the rest of the text for me; it feels like a lens through which to view the rest of the piece. I can see, though, that entering through the other section could dramatically alter the reader’s initial perception of the piece.

After this, the reader swims between scenes through the embedded links, all of which remain internal and thus give the feeling of being lost IN something (differing from the Caitlin Fisher piece, in which new page tabs open up with different hyperlinks, thus making it more of a unraveling structure whose contents we can view fairly simultaneously). This creates a stronger sense of fluidity but, in concert with the content of the story itself, contributes to a feeling of being overwhelmed: by the sexuality of her relationships to her boyfriend and her father, and by the mere flow between sections. The “Home” link at the end of each line at the bottom permits the reader to exit at any time and reenter from a different place when ready to do so, but it implies that this is a last resort. Even when I reached the end of a thread, leaving me with this as my only option, I was left thinking I ought to backtrack instead, as one inevitably has to do in order to absorb the whole of the piece. Certain links are only available from certain pages, which requires a reader to eventually repeat pages in order to locate everything. I noticed early that a page suggesting an “Introduction” was lost in the middle, offering the possibility to make sense of the muddle the author creates in our minds, perhaps a means of organizing the images or disclaiming the assertions made in particular about her childhood relationship with her father. I found myself waiting to come back to this page hoping that this was the case. The “Introduction,” though, was in fact her meeting with Andy and thus more a transition between the dual worlds in the piece. So at the end I am left wondering about a comment made by the lady who does her family’s laundry when she is a girl, that stories are simply too powerful to make up. And attempting to apply this casual assertion to the whole of the piece, leaving me with the question: is this the narrator or a character talking? Is this piece fictional slices of a dysfunctional character or a life whose content is too powerful to make up?