Abstracts
Transborder Participatory Democracy: Problems and Prospects
A significant aspect of Muto’s vision is summed up in his idea of “transborder participatory democracy.” This asserts the “right of the people” to control any decision that affects them, no matter where those decisions are made. It describes a world order distinct from a world government or federation based on states. “Not a state, but the people themselves” become the chief global actors.
This approach has proved prophetic of the many transnational social movements and campaigns of the era of “globalization.” In particular it foreshadowed the emergence of the World Social Forum process. But it also raises significant question. For example, who are “the people” and how are they constituted? How can anything so general find concrete expression? How can serious differences among “the people” be addressed? How is the sovereignty of specific nations and peoples affected by this approach? How does this approach relate to efforts to establish international rules law and rules that can hold states, corporations and international institutions subject to democratic controls?
Muto addresses such questions in part by a focus on the process of constructing “the people.” For example, he has proposed that a major focus of the World Social Forum process should be dialogue and the negotiation of common principles precisely among those who represent different constituencies and concerns, rather than those who already share issue orientations. I will explore this approach to see how effectively it can address the challenges of transborder participatory democracy.
Reflections through a local lens on Muto’s Ideas of Alternative Practices: A Hong Kong Perspective
This paper discusses Muto’s views on alternative practices through reviewing the actual implementation of several community projects in Hong Kong and mainland China. Many of these community projects are informed by visions and notions of alternative practices of a “Muto type” – constructing a new democratic communal experience at once local and international that will contribute to a transformed socio-cultural structure/relation that is non-statist and non-capitalist in nature. Through scrutinizing the effectivity of these projects in local contexts, we hope to facilitate a dialogue with Muto on his notions of “transborder alliance of people/hope”, “alternative development” and “new social movement”.
On internationalism and transnationality: Some reflections on meanings in transborder civil activism
Transborder / transnational civil activism – or ‘internationalism’, as it has historically been termed – has historically played, and continues to play, crucial roles in developing and promoting regimes of universality, such as human rights, peace, ‘the environment’, and social, economic, and environmental justice, and through this in the defence and promotion of democracy. We are intensely witnessing this in our own times, both in the very visible series of ‘global civil actions’ that have taken place in recent years around issues of trade, debt, and world governance (Seattle, Washington DC, Prague, Gothenburg, Genoa, and elsewhere), and war (the worldwide demos on February 13 2003), and also in the work of issue-based organisations such as Amnesty International and Greenpeace over the past several decades. It is equally taking place, though less visibly, through the work of the hundreds and perhaps thousands of transnational civil alliances that are currently active across the world. And we are also witness to the gradual but persistent crystallisation of more specific, major ‘world’ institutional civil initiatives such as PP21 and the World Social Forum. All this is also paralleled by the emergence of equally transnational but ‘uncivil’ and/or insurgent alliance, and where this is a subject by itself.
This is of course not a new phenomenon, with the early civil campaigns dating back to the first half of the 19th century, including the work of Marx and Engels. But there are some who argue that the phenomenon we are witnessing today – which Muto Ichiyo has conceptualised as transborder participatory democracy, and Jeremy Brecher and his colleagues see as ‘globalisation from below’ – has reached the stage where it is tending to restructure world politics as we know it. One key dimension is that these initiatives have grown to such a scale that they now both constitute and represent struggles over meaning, in terms of cultures of politics. Certainly, they are contributing to a much more ‘messy’ democracy than we have known so far, from the global to the local.
However significant (and celebrated) such action might be, both in history and more contemporarily, much remains to be understood in terms of what actually happens in such situations. The entering and negotiation of transnational space has its own dynamic and compulsions. Among others, these compulsions include such civil actors needing to negotiate the powerful currents of state and national politics and geopolitics, and also to communicate across cultures at several levels. On the one hand, the intersections of these dynamics and currents with the perceptions, struggles, rights, and aspirations of more ‘local’ peoples and conditions – and, at the other end, of those who believe it is they who legitimately represent state-nations – seem to lead some actors to sometimes strategically use to their advantage ‘national’ and other more local and domestic identities and categories, as well as geopolitical realpolitik. On the other, some actors seem to try to transcend these more conventional identities and take on new ones – which I tentatively term ‘transnationality’ – but then to use both. Ideology and instrumentality both come into play. ‘Transnational’ becomes intensely rooted in the national. To the opposite of transforming power relations, they seem to be only further concretised, and caste and class hegemony strengthened. And the ‘civilisation of globalisation’ seems to be the globalisation of certain very particular norms of civilisation. Meaning seems to sometimes be inverted in the course of this turbulence. All this throws up complex challenges and paradoxes in terms of core issues of civil and political praxis, such as ‘Who legitimately represents the people ?’ - and indeed, what is representation, who are ‘the people’, and whose world is it, anyway?
I propose to explore some parts of this terrain in my presentation, drawing on history and using this as a background, by looking more particularly at some celebrated experiences of transnational civil campaigns from Asia, to try and draw lessons for the struggle to build other worlds.
Towards “Numberless International”: Rethinking our solidarity works in 80s and 90s
- 1. International Solidarity Movements in Japan in 80s and 90s. Its character and political and social situations.
- 2. How Pacific Asia Resources Center (PARC) committed to solidarity work during those times.
- 3. What was the main argument on newly born international NGOS and solidarity movement.
- 4. People’s Solidarity under the globalization time.
Lost in transsexualism: Ha, RiSu and their outcome as belle of TV
This essay focuses on the question how Ha, RiSu a TV star and singer, can survive and incorporate ‘them’self into such a perpetual and everlasting system of patriarchy, intersexual love, and ties of blood. How can the people’s mind, which has ruthlessly and heartlessly rejected so many sexual minorities, be so generous with Ha, RiSu? This essay tries to reveal the hidden codes posed by Ha, the transsexual who has dogmatically practiced the famous aphorism of de Beauvoir, “one is not born a woman, but becomes one”, and unknowingly occupied our living room without any struggle nor resistance.
The safety-valve for protecting Ha from severe public opinion under not so weak influence of the confucian patriarchism, is the system of generally accepted ideas of ‘feminity,’ beauty, and inter-sexualism. It would be true that Ha can win popularity partly from the fact that Ha is more feminine than any other women, more sex-appeal than any other female stars. The attractive looks of Ha reinforces the thought that just a transsexual like Ha has perfectly restored the long-lost conception of feminity which today’s women have forgotten away. All these contribute to clarifying the boundaries between genders.
Ha’s trade-mark is the fact that ’she’ is the ‘him’ who was a man. ‘She’ has deleted his body as he was, deleted ‘his’ status as the successor of patriarchal power over his kinship, and replaced them with new kind of the belle. It explains why Ha’s past can be so easily and eagerly consumed even by the androcentric society. Ha is not a minority because Ha was a man before that transsexualism and Ha has won the prestige of the belle.
From these, the task of protecting guard of the system of intersexualism has covertly been given to Ha. Ha has changed his body from male to female in order to love a man, which plays a role of propaganda of the commandment that, at any cost, one should have a sexual body opposite to that of the other whom he/she want to love.
Nevertheless, it should not be denied the meanings of the existence of that transsexual. Ha really wanted to change his ‘perfect’ body as man into a ‘ deficient’ body of woman. Ha’s choice to abandon the status of succession of the partriarchal right and power, has so much implication in deconstruction of gender society.
Ha has set up just a starting point of plastic sexuality, but, has not arrived at its final goal. All that Ha has achieved is just that Ha has positively incorporated into the androcentric society at the cost of ‘his’ body, and reinforced the patriarchal system of intersexualism: the revolution of transsexualism with no revolution of sex cognizance shall be dangerous to make so much conservative results.
What Ha has not gotten is the recognition of his/her real sexuality, without which his/her great step toward another identity of ‘them’self come to be lack of authenticity. Because the future Ha dreams shall be the present of all of the women in the world, Ha’s feminity can start to be re-formulated just from the point of newly recognising all the represssion and oppression imposed to the women.
Gender Embodiment and Trans Subjectivity in Taiwan
“A soul trapped in the wrong body” is a common description employed by trans subjects to explain their unusual condition. While the body-soul imagery may help illuminate the awkward situation of trans subjects by graphically presenting the often contradictory feelings and images that trans subjects have to negotiate as they move through social space; the simple graphic of the body-soul imagery also tends to obscure the manifold differences (in gender, age, socio-economic status, facial features, body shape, etc.) among trans subjects, differences that may very well affect the credibility of their claim to “a soul trapped in the wrong body,” as well as further refracting the meaning and persuasiveness of such an imagery itself. More importantly, the imagery conceals the daily effort of ‘doing’ gender in everyday interactions that all of us engage in. Ironically, the efforts of “doing gender” by Taiwanese trans subjects are now increasingly hampered by a conjunction of developing gender parameters that continue to circumscribe the cultural understanding of such trans efforts, often leading to mis-interpretations quite inhospitable toward trans subjects. This paper will not only try to demonstrate the specificity of Taiwanese transgender existence and its effect on the subjects, but also look into the dynamic strategies they have forged in face of social prejudice and limitation. The sense of agency that has developed as trans subjects manage their social existence is in fact injecting new variables that may actively affect our gender system and our gender culture as a whole.
Transgender World in Modern Japan
This paper aims to overview the four existing categories of the contemporary (modern) Japanese transgender world. Among these categories, I elucidate the transgender community developed in Shinjuku, Tokyo, particularly the quasi- heterosexual romance relationships in the community.
Nationalism in J-pop
In long post war popular music hisory, there has been very few of political messages in popular music. Most of songs have been love songs, even in alternative rock and punk scene. Exceptional case of these main tendency has been dominated by leftist or anarchist oriented political songs. Especially protest songs in student uprising era in late 1960s to early 1970s had strong influences to the public. Several songs got high rank of hit chart.
Above exceptional era in post war popular culture, apolitical has been dominant nature of pop music in Japan. However recent years, the basic characteristics seems to become changing. I feel nationalism consciously and unconsciously oriented pop music has come. In case of conscious nationalism, one of significant influences seems to come from hip-hop culture. Hip-hop is an ethnic minority culture in US. But by imported and accepted by Japanese young generation as dominant ethnic group, its meanings such as friendship, respect feelings to relatives, friends and neighbors, or aggressive hostile to white culture are transformed their original meanings into exclusive sense to the others and accelerative message to nationalism of Japanese.
In case of unconscious nationalism in J-pop, it has more moderate style of nationalism by using a kind of simbol of nation. As outstanding cases in recent J-pop scene, several songs treating Sakura(cherry tree) largely make high up in hit chart. Sakura is not only just a name of tree but one of official national flowers (another one is the chrysanth which is a royal insignia). All of these songs on the subject of sakura seems to contain nothing of clear nationalist messages. But I will try to suggest that one of significant way of construction of Japaneses nationalism is nationalism embedded in nature. Comparing with the Woods in Meiji Shrine as an artificial nature for constructing nationalistic memory, there have hidden messages of nationalism in these J-pop. Also I will discuss how significant these songs have been got hit-chart for estimating nationalism in mass mentality of Japanese. Finally I try to suggest how to create counter culture against nationalism in Japan or what kind of sub culture such anti-nationalist scene have.
The Emerging (National) Popular Music Culture in China
Before the emergence of the modern sense of popular music in China, the uses of music in China have been instrumental in serving political purposes for the state. Theresa Tang, the Taiwanese popular singer, was banned for a long period of time in China, for Tang (which is the same surname of Deng Xiaoping) might have an overriding popularity over the leadership. Modern form of popular music began to enter China through Hong Kong and Taiwan, the two very political locales in which we could observe China’s political economy through the reception of their music in mainland China. Ideologies of the Chinese authorities reflected in different levels of music production, distribution and consumption. Since the mid-1980s, while the production of local music was controlled by semi-party organizations so as to limit the ideology, music entered through Hong Kong was strongly censored. The legal distribution rights and the publication right of the music had been under the rein of the Chinese authorities until the 2004. While, on the institutional level, there were many official and non-official music awards which reflect the acceptable ideologies of the authorities, various fans club were so politicized. By means of in-depth interview, participant observations and reception studies of fans, the author investigated all these levels of flow of Taiwan and Hong Kong popular music in mainland China. The paper argues that the Chinese authorities, have through various strategies, are able to manage and produce a kind of popular culture in mainland China, which is conducive to and resonant with their national ideologies.
Taiwan’s Alternative Popular Music Scenes and Their Localizing Anglo-American Practices
Debating about Anglo-American ‘influences’ in the popular music developed in the third world countries has shift its critical edge from ‘cultural imperialist’ thesis to various explanations, given that various evidence has shown that generic developments vary in relation to their ‘localized’ practices. In this paper I try to offer Taiwan’s case of different ways of ‘using’ or ‘incorporating’ Anglo-American genres so as to argue that what has be popularized within mainstream music business and international markets describing these developments under the ideology of ‘western styles with strong local flavours’ is problematic.
In so ding, first, this paper outlines the postwar historical development of popular music styles. It is followed by the analytical framework of social conjecture under which the coming of ‘College folksongs’, indie music’ are impetrated as localized (be it creative or imitating) power struggles within the terrain of mainstream (or mainstreamization of ) music industry and ideology. Third and with concluding remarks, the extent to which the global（or more precise, unequal） flow of music genres (and mediascape) has helped to shape a distinct set of ‘national’ or ‘regional’ genres is carefully evaluated.
By locating various ways of incorporating and developing from Anglo-American music genres within Taiwan’s alternative popular music scenes, I hope Taiwan’s case can serve as an exchange with other countries’ contexts in relation to their distinct music developments. Whereas J-pop, K-pop or Cantopop have gained, to some extent, their naming position in delineating certain ‘national trends’ within international music markets, whether it is appropriate to say that Taiwan’s Mandarin pop has gained certain market and cultural power as to be labeled ‘M-pop’ is at issue implied from my paper. And I hope by attending this panel, problems of ‘localization ‘ in music practices can be discussed critically in the cross-societal perspective.
Problematizing the Popular: The Dynamics between Pinoy Pop Music and Popular Protest Music
When applied to culture, the term “popular” has long been a contentious term in the Philippines as in other colonized countries.
On the one hand, there is popular culture created by the people themselves and disseminated by them within and outside their communities and popular social movements. No individual owns a song or cultural product, and people are free to create their own based on their traditions or to adapt and change the lyrics of other groups and even of what is popularized by the colonial/neo-colonial/ globalized culture industry.
On the other hand, there is pop(ular) culture mass manufactured by an industry, with a distribution system so organized to ensure the products become popular among its targeted consumers – the unindividuated masses. Who decides what will be popular or a “hit” are not the people but the producers. And in the Philippines, it was the American pop industry that dictated the trend. Especially in the pop music industry, the American top 40 ruled the air waves. To be “in” was to be a consumer of foreign (American) labels. This was so until the mid 1970s.
My paper will look into and analyze the phenomenon of what was then called “Pinoy” (slang for Filipino) pop music and its dynamics with the nationalist movement which produced the popular protest songs created under Martial Law. Launched by a rocker, Pepe Smith, who extemporized on his rock instrumentalization by infusing it with Filipino lyrics, the song “Ang Himig Natin” (Our Own Music) generated interest among the youth on this new seemingly incongruous mixing of Western rock with Filipino lyrics and spawned other bands and performers to create Pinoy pop music for a suddenly hospitable industry and audience.
At about the same time as Pepe Smith, a group of activist poets to migrate to song writing and performing in order to reach out to a vaster audience. Like the Pinoy pop musicians, they too used as vehicles for their protest songs Western rock, Beatle inspired, and the Vietnam protest folk music of the 1960s. But unlike Pinoy pop songs which did attempt at social criticism but on topics that were “safe”, the protest songs produced during Martial Law articulated the bitter experiences of unjust political detentions and summary executions; the plight of workers, farmers and urban poor. Unlike Pinoy pop songs which were aired in mass media and performed in concert halls, the popular protest songs were sang in the streets, demonstrations, school auditoriums, and communities.
The contemporary Pinoy pop and rock musicians owe much to the rich music production of the 1970s and the 1980s. But new challenges have emerged – foremost of which is how to battle the inanities churned by the present music industry and the apathy of those who have folded their banners because the dictatorship is gone though the social problems remain.
Mainstreaming Asian Pop: Thai youth and K-pop consumption”
Ubonrat Siriyuvasak and Shin Hyunjoon
‘Asian pop’ is an emerging category for today’s youth in many Asian societies. These ‘Asian pop’ cultural products include a wide range of media artifacts from film, music, television drama, comic book, magazine, website, fashion, etc. which feature prominently in the lives of urban youth in the major metropolitan centers of Asia. This paper looks at how young people in Thailand fall in the same trend with their Asian neighbours in the region with a special focus on K-pop. The popularization of J-pop, Taiwanese-pop and more recently, K-pop, is welcomed by the cultural industry as a sign of border crossing, and not least, a major step towards expanding its Asian market. The growing consumption and mainstreaming of Asian pop will be problematized by the notion of cultural MacDonaldization / standardization on the one hand. But on the other hand, the paper will explore how Thai youth consume K-pop in the process of cultural appropriation vis-à-vis their ‘national’ cultural formation in the changing socio-cultural contexts.
New technology, New Art and DiY Culture
The paper explores political and cultural possibilities of new digital technology, by looking at some of contemporary Japanese artist works. It also examines a new economy which develops among young people, in particular, DiY (Do it Yourself) business. Some of radical political (anarchist) groups have launched to organize DiY type business, establishing global DiY networks through internet, selling their own art works, fair trade goods, cultural products such as T-shirts, independent journals, books and CDs. The paper tries to analyze new relationships between politics and culture, capitalism and technology which are emerging in 2000s.
Hawking in the Creative City: Cultural Citizenship and The Politics of the Creative Class in Singapore
Singapore is a leading country in the Asia-Pacific region transforming its cultural industry into creative economy by capitalising on how knowledge can be marketed through the convergence of arts, technology and business. Creative innovation is the most striking phenomenon of the emergence of Singapore as a postmodern and global city, where informational capitalism has resulted in creative industries with new consumption patterns and identities that harness the place-branding of ‘New Asia’ as a form of creative capital and a strategy of regional economic dominance.
This paper critically examines how ‘culture’ is governed in such a creative economy. It problematises the emergent creative class and argues that a return to the practice of hawking can be useful site to rethink the cultural citizenship of a creative future. Case studies include Singapore Tourism Board’s 2004 Uniquely Singapore campaign and Rice Rhapsody (Kenneth Bi, 2004).
History as legacy and project against neocolonialism: A discussion of anti-Japan cyberculture in China
In this paper, I would like to explore the role of the internet in the formation of China’s popular response and resistance to the emergence of global neocolonial imperialism. Since the mid-1990s, the internet has become a dynamic force in China’s cultural landscape, where an extraordinarily increasing number of websites, electronic bulletin boards and chat rooms have been created to boost a new form of social communication and cultural interaction among ordinary Chinese citizens on a virtual network. What is especially dramatic in the development of China’s internet culture may be the emergence of Chinese-language online political forums, which are established and appropriated by the Chinese counter-public to express and develop a nationalistic resistance to Western new imperialist aggressions, as a result of the 1999 bombing of the Chinese embassy by a U.S.-led NATO warplane in Belgrade, and the 2001 airplane collision with a US spy plane over the South China Sea.
In this paper, I will take the recent anti-Japan protests as my case study, which were originated from the internet and are profoundly interwoven with the narratives about the past history of Japanese imperialism in Asia, the historical memory on the Nanjing Massacre and the anti-fascist War of Resistance against Japan, and Japan’s postwar role as US ally against China. These historical narratives are produced and circulated tremendously on the internet, and have cultivated what may be called as the “anti-Japan cyberculture” in the age of postmodern Empire. Against Empire’s attempt to suspend and even erase history, the internet functions well as an apparatus, a machine for the production of and intervention into history. The internet allows the multitude to take hold of time and construct new temporalities for its own sake.
The role of the internet as a history-making machine is an important aspect of contemporary imperialist conjuncture. In the analysis of the historical discourse about Japan, I want to propose an argument that the anti-Japan cyberculture may be seen as a kind of China’s indigenous local response to neocolonial globalization. Such a response, far from being coincided with Francis Fukuyama’s notion of “the end of history,” should be better seen as China’s postcolonial resistance through the appropriation of the past. In the region of East Asia, history is somehow yet to finish: on the one hand, history is appropriated by the imperialists and fascists to secure the status quo; on the other, history is intensely contested and re-invented by the multitude to intervene in the naked show of force – the past may serve in a critical appreciation of the present. If the present global neocolonial logic is to keep the multitude outside of history in order to fix the state of affairs perpetually, the endless flow and exchange of cyber-historical narratives may open up a new way of introducing culture and overcoming modernity. History, this paper suggests, is not a finished or end product but rather sustains the legacy for the imagination of a new democratic project.
Theorizing Subaltern Spectatorship in East Asia
In this paper, I will discuss the specificity of the Korean cinema in its relation to fascism. Through such an inquiry, I hope to critically intervene in a debate centering around Im Jihyun’s conception of ‘Mass-Dictatorship 大衆獨裁論’. His conceptualization is very useful for understanding the origin and formation of colonial modernity in East Asia. But however, in itself, it cannot accommodate the multi-layered histories of the region. By way of amending the critical apparatus, I will also discuss the subaltern histories (Dipesh Chakravarty) in Korea, tracing them through the intractable gaze and the counterveiling subaltern spectatorship of Korean cinema from Arirang (Na Unkyu, 1926) to Old Boy (Park Chanwook, 2004), The President’s Last Bang (Im Sangsu, 2005), and Blood Rain (Kim Daeseung,2005).
Poetry, Peking Opera, WuXia: Aesthetic Perspective and Imagined State-Images in Chinese films
Both nationalism and ethic identity have been forces of resistance against first imperialism and then globalization throughout the semi-colonial and post-colonial eras of modern Chinese history. In part a legacy from traditional Chinese literature, Chinese cinema has internalized and rearticulated these modes of communal self-definition and defense.
Contemporary films such as Farewell, My Concubine (1993) and Hero (2002) evince a lineage from earlier cinematic practices: the socialist melodramas of the 1930s, and the YiJing(意境) films of the late 1950s-early 1960s that synthesized state ideology and specatorial aestheticism. , The combination of Peking Opera and Chinese national identity in Farewell My Concubine proposes that Chinese history has been influenced by the aesthetic meaning of Peking Opera, a Chinese nationalistic performance tradition. In this process, the Chinese people are solicited to “recognize” a timeless Chinese state-image enduring thoughout the contradictions and reversals of modern Chinese history. Imperial peace in Hero ), on the other hand, seems to throw off traditional Chinese culture and history, substituting in its place an Yijing cinematic calligraphy. In sum, the two films instantiate a “Chineseness” in its imperial, and its globalized modes, respectively.
The A-semiotics and the A-history of Dictatorship
A-semiotics is a term through which Gilles Deleuze cited cinema as the very representational medium that calls into question the direct causal relationship between the image and thing represented. Rather than a semiology, Deleuze, in his two seminal volumes on cinema, proposed that pure semiotics of signs and images can be achieved through the “moving” images of cinema. What I am hoping to do in this paper is to read the two films, The President’s Barber (Hyojadong ibalsa,2004) and The President’s Last Bang (Kuttae ku saram dul, 2005) as texts where the “pure semiotics” and what I call “a-historical” tendencies intersect, overriding the possibility of a coherent organization of history within the Symbolic.
The two films are inspired by definite and concrete historical events that took place during the military dictatorship of Korea. Yet, I will propose that their historical register is beyond a sense of a interpreting or re-interpreting actual events that once took place, but one that call for the death of thesemiotics and thereby proposing the impossibility of representing the Truth.
Japanese National Universities in the Age of Neoliberalism
Japanese National Universities were transformed into so-called Independent Administrative Agency in April 2004. This new higher education system after the model of Bayh-Dole Act aims at re-vitalization of japanese national economy and has an intention to make Japanese universities into industrial innovation system. The “total war” of Government-Industry-University complex has been declared and has deep impacts upon administrations of university, cultures of both education and research. This report will treat foundations of this new higher education policy, transformations of university and social implications in the age of neoliberal knowledge-based society.
Knowledge production in a latecomer: Reproducing economics in Taiwan
Amid Taiwan’s social sciences, the economics field developed early and has the highest number of US-trained doctorates. There is also a high degree of consensus within the field that EconLit/SSCI publications are superior to domestic ones. Thus, publication in EconLit/SSCI journals has become the main criterion used in academic evaluations. As a result, the road that Taiwan’s elite economists have taken is that of participating in the global division of labor as individuals. Ironically, few have devoted themselves to studying Taiwan’s economic development, which has been considered a unique success story by others. Local knowledge production is not really “globalized”, for its global impact has been minimal. The local profession is fragmented, and has not served the local society well.
Science as an Ideology: SSCI, TSSCI and the evaluation system of Social Sciences in Taiwan
In this paper, I want to review the background and the history of Taiwan government to implement some policies to evaluate and enhance the performances of scholars in the universities and research institutes in Taiwan. It includes the prospect to bring some universities to be listed in the so-ccalled top 100 universities of the world, and in accordance with this prospect, the policy of spending a great proportion of the educational investment on a few so-called research universities and a few ‘blessed’ fields of sciences to enhance to the science productivity in a very short time, that is, before the next election of president. Moreover, I will focus on the social sciences to describe the introduction of SSCI and TSSCI for ranking and classifying journals and in almost every education-related institutions such as Ministry of Education, National Science Council, and universities, colleges, and departments, according to whether the papers published in these journals listed in the databases or not and the quantities of these papers to hierachize scholars. In conclusion, from this analysis I intend to specify some ideologies behind the policy-making processes. For example, the cult of science, especially natural science and accordingly the cult of the leading figures of natural science, such as the winner of Nobel Prize, or pseudo-natural sciences, such as engineering, and economics. In brief, the top-down discipline of the science fields reflects the myth of quantitative standards to objectively, that is, scientifically measure and discriminate the excellent from the poor. And besides, the priority attributed to the so-called international, however, essentially the foreign and eventually the American is what behind the policies and evaluation system of education performance of scholars in Taiwan.
The Colonization of Higher Education by Global Management Discourses and Systems: Impact on Academic Culture in Hong Kong
In this paper the recent changes in the governance of higher education in Hong Kong driven by global management discourses and practices are documented and criticallyexamined. With the systemic penetration of global economic rationalism, market-driven management ideologies, Hong Kong higher education has gone through structural changes which include funding-linked evaluative (termed ‘quality assurance’) policies and practices such as: Research Assessment Exercise (RAEs), Teaching and Learning Quality Process Reviews (TLQPRs), Management Reviews (MRs). Market ideologies, narrowly defined notions of performance, efficiency, accountability and cost-effectiveness have governed the cultural practices and life styles of academics and have significantly changed academic and intellectual culture in higher education in Hong Kong. The long-term consequences of these global colonizing processes will be discussed in terms of the narrowing of academic freedom, the colonization of the intellectual space, the intensification of competitive research output, and the colonization of knowledge production that erases local societal needs, indigenous knowledge and epistemologies. All these seem to work against the formation of an intelligentsia that can act as key players in the formation of counter discourses and counter publics in society.
Toward Globally Top, Locally Third-Ranked Universities
In South Korea, the universities have tried to become competitive by putting emphasis on global competitiveness. The main phenomenon regarding this movement in Korea is shown in the evaluation of the professors by SCI and SSCI, which has become institutionalized standard for university evaluation. Almost every university is following this model and as a result, the professors are more concerned with their own research but less about their teaching. The increase in research may not seem to be matter but since the professors are trying to publish their articles in the internationally well-known journals, they tend to focus on the topics of advanced countries not local issues for their research. The local situation where the professors are standing their foot on is being neglected. This session will try to asses the South Korean situation with a critical perspective.
A Critical Analysis of the University and Academy Accreditation System in Korea
Nowadays ‘University Reform’ is one of the important tasks of Korean national government. President Roh nominated Mr. Kim, Jin-Pyo who was a Minister of Finance and Economy as a Minister of Education and Human Resources Development. Many people criticized that decision but President Roh answered that it was for the sake of ‘University Reform’. But what’s the meaning of ‘University Reform’? Unfortunately so-called ‘University Reform’ seems to be neo-liberal reform. The intellectual and historical tasks of university and the nature of academy are not sincerely considered. Already from about ten years ago, University accreditation and Academy evaluation have swallowed most of the universities and professors. And they raised many problems. Universities lie, and professors also lie in order to get higher rank in the accreditation and evaluation test. Democracy is dieing, and fundamental academies are also dieing. Long-term researches are withering away, and US-based practical researches have come into fashion. In this paper I intend to analyze the results and problems of neo-liberal University accreditation and academy evaluation system in Korea.>/p>
Migrant Worker’s Rights and Good Anti-Trafficking Campaign: the Experiences of Asian Sex Workers in Taiwan
Wang Fang Ping and Chang Jung-Che
The tide of globalization has moved sex workers across national boarders for better employment opportunities. As migrant labors, sex workers are unique in a way that their bodies as their main “means of production” in the sex business. In theory, this should give them a higher degree of mobility and independence than migrant workers of many other industries, who mostly remain dependent on their employers to provide them with means of production and petty salary. However, the lack of sufficient opportunities for sex workers to migrate and work legally in other countries has subjected them under the sway of the third party – smugglers, pimps and brothel owners. This, in turn, has made them easy pray to the exploitation and abuse of others, including the crime of “human trafficking”. This is evident in the case of Taiwan – a country that does not allow anyone to make a living by doing sex work, let alone migrant sex workers - which, reportedly, has been flooded by waves of migrant sex workers, and in particular, Chinese sex workers. The dual illegal status of migrant sex workers in Taiwan – “illegal” migrants and “illegal” sex workers - has made them particularly vulnerable to various human and labor right abuses. To deter these drastic situations, it is not sufficient to interpret them from an oversimplified “human trafficking” perspective – it cannot and must not be narrowed down to the question of how to catch “traffickers” and to rescue “victims”. It is important for the society to discuss openly and frankly on the future of our policy on the sex industry, and on our policy of migrant sex workers in the sex industry.
Moving bodies in the Korean-Style entertainment: the Case of migrant women in the Entertainment Sector of Korea
The recent trend of feminization of international migration involves a complex context in which people of different races and/or nationalities may trade emotional and sexual desires. The work carried out in what is known as the “care service” and the entertainment industry is not regarded as “labor” in the traditional meaning of the word, hence there is not much research on the living conditions and experiences of migrant women employed in these sectors in Korea.. Under the present circumstances in which elements such as emotion, care, intimacy, and sexuality are traded as international labor goods, I will discuss the experiences of migrant women working in the Korean entertainment industry. It was the 1990s when foreign migrant women first began entering the Korean entertainment industry. In 1999, as a way of alleviating restrictions on the performances of foreign entertainers, the Korean government replaced the permission system with a recommendation system, allowing a large number of foreign women to flow into Korea through an official procedure acknowledged by the Korean ministries of Justice, Culture and Tourism, and Labor, with the E-6 Art and Entertainment Visa. Having come to Korea to perform as dancers or singers, many of these women are instead placed in Korean night clubs and clubs in the US military base areas by Korea’s global “desire industry” system, consisting of the Korean government, migration agencies, talent management firms and the owners of entertainment establishments. Without abandoning the politics of situating them within the collective naming of “victims of human trafficking,” I wish to place their experience in the more complex context of Korea’s global sexual or cultural politics, that is, their experiences and voices will be heard as those of women interpreters standing at a “cultural intersection.” As women interpreters of the global era, they are subjects situated in the border zones where diverse cultures and languages intersect, and are incorporated into or resist multiple power relations. These are women who represent the body exploited in a world of desire and risk, emerging sexuality and dangerous male violence, material seduction and global capitalism (Gloria Anzaldua 1987) trying to find their way.
Becoming someone else: Migrant Thai Women from ‘Sex Workers’ to ‘Sexual Slaves’ in Changing Social Structures
This paper suggests a hermeneutic understanding of Thai women’s involvement in the global sex trade by bringing in the accounts of former/sex workers who have experienced domestic and international migration. Attention is paid to the interaction between macro- and micro- conditions and the women’s subjective perceptions surrounding the trade, with the substantive foci on: (1) the impact of modernisation on individual lives under Thailand’s national social engineering; (2) the gendered senses of social expectancy, obligation and responsibility congruent with the meanings of women’s sexuality; (3) the globalisation of culture, economy and migration. These issues are culturally and historically specific to the women in focus but they are also situated within a global social trend of modernity to late-modernity. Their experiences differ around each of the four issues depending mainly on the nature of their working conditions and networks of relations, at a particular time and place. Confronted with the ever shifting features of objective as well as subjective conditions of women practicing the trade over a duration of time, across a particular geographical span, the conventional feminist debates competing to universally define prostitution as either sex work or sexual slavery lose their conviction. Instead, this paper tries to extract what to avoid in order not to be enslaved and what is needed to be empowered with a grounded knowledge of the trade, hoping to become socially useful to those whom it focuses on.
Excess of the Modern: Three archetypes of New Woman in Colonial Korea, 1920-1930’s
In this paper, I examined the multi-faceted and contradictory meanings of ‘New Woman’ on which politics of a colonial identity was projected, by reading various icons of New Woman — covers from <New Woman(新女子)>, a cartoon series, and Aginomodo(味の素) ads — from the 1920’s to the 1930’s,
The concept of New Woman in colonial Korea was produced and organized into three archetypes, ‘New Woman (Shinnyeoja)’, ‘Modern Girl’, and ‘Good Wife (Yangcheo)’. ‘Shinnyeoja’ –was the subject to enlighten(改造) Korea. The new woman carried over-determined meanings, rather than simply implied “feminist.” ‘Modern Girl’ and ‘Good Wife’ indicated two responses to emulating the Western/modern culture mediated by Japan. ‘Modern Girl’ represented the ‘bad side’ of the mimicry, which shows an ambivalent attitude toward the modern looks and sexuality. They were criticized for embodying capitalistic corruption, but at the same time, they were fascinating to many readers. On the other hand, ‘Good Wife’ was revived in the latter half of the 1920’s as a form of a new woman to represent a ‘good side’ of the mimicry.
These three archetypes and terms were all created originally in Japan between the 1890’s and the 1920’s, and neo-intellectuals in colonial Korea adopted them. These terms, however, were not simply translated from the Japanese version. The social agendas related to New Woman and the meanings attached to it were selectively accepted, appropriated, and re-generated. The New Woman discourses were a political substitute for the dangerous issues of national independence and class struggles. In the discourses, political issues were displaced by cultural issues and the New Woman was the field on which the nationalist politics of constructing ‘differences’ operated.
The representation of New Woman in colonial Korea reflects traumatic self-denial and uneasiness created by civilization discourse, -moralizing attitudes, displaced imagination, and an obsessive desire towards the Western/Japanese modernity.
Modern Girl, New Media in Early Chinese Film
This paper discusses the relationship between the female image in Early Chinese film and, in regard to the subject-construction of Chinese intellectuals and artists in the early twentieth century, the perspective of masculine desire presented with camera.
In Early Chinese film, the Modern Girl and the New Woman were two typical female images, on which the male intellectuals/artists, the “creators” of these female roles, projected their Self-imagination and subject-predicament.
Through analyzing the complicated interrelation and conflict between the gender and the class topic, I try to investigate the identification of Nation-state and the construction of modernity discourse in China in the early twentieth century.
The New Woman, the Modern Girl, and their Histories in Modern Japan
Ahn Minhwa
I will trace the emergence of the concepts of the "New Woman" and "Modern Girl" in Japan through several historical junctures, beginning with the representation of women in the melodramas of the 1920s-1930s, figures both oppressed by and resistant to the Japanese patriarchy of the time. I will also consider the complex relations that obtain between the "New Woman," the "Modern Girl" and the modernization of the period stimulated and conditioned by Western imperialism and materialism. For one thing, women who identified with either of these categories were exploited by Japanese imperialism, but in many cases also cooperated with it in order to authorize their own social identities as such.
In addition, I will point out that this kind of discourse on "New Woman" in pre-war period was not be separated from that of post-war period, which began with the occupation of the U.S.; that is, it has continued in the same vein until the 1960s. That is to say, the "modern girl" became a symbol of the "liberation of the body," which served the interests of the occupying American forces, and the "new woman" became rearticulated in the discourse of "women’s liberation among post-war feminists.
These post-war versions of "new women" and "modern girls" functioned not only to criticize Japanese militarism but also to remit the responsibility and trauma of the war. In the realm of cinema, especially in the so-called "Idea Picture," while such women were represented as the embodiments of democracy, they projected the pseudo-consciousness of the Japanese man as a victim of imperialism and also served post-imperialist agendas.
Fantasies that Matter: The Counterhistories of Bertha Pappenheim and Ito Noe
Through readings of the lives and careers of Bertha Pappenheim (1859-1936) and Ito Noe (1895-1923) I will attempt to draw out a conception of "New Woman" not as a homogeneous category but a name for a variety of very different practices that arise in opposition to and contradiction with specific sociocultural, national, and ethnic circumstances. Bertha Pappenheim is best known worldwide as the "hysteric" Anna O, who gave the emergent discipline of psychoanalysis its name, "Talking Cure."
Pappenheim went on to become one of the most influential feminists and champions for the rights of Jewish women in both Austrian and German history. The pathological fantasies that her doctor Breuer extracted from her "private theater" during her treatment gave way to the critical fantasies of her short stories and plays that were no longer personal symptom but analysis of the irrationality of the social order. Ito Noe, was a novelist, feminist, and anarchist whose experiments in extending the possibilities of human relationships incited trivializing scandals that in general have eclipsed their significance. I would like restore the political import and significance of the fantasies of both of these women.