Tag Archives: Anne Allison

Woman All Over

Posted on by

Women are beaten time and time again into submission, but they always return, or if one women is eliminated, another takes her place. Whatever it is these women stand for, men and their phallicism are fairly powerless in its presence.”
—Anne Allison, Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan

Allison in the above quote is referring specifically to Japanese erotic manga of the 1980s and 90s, but her point certainly fits Junji Ito’s horror manga as well. Indeed, Allison’s quote is basically the plot of every one of Ito’s Tomie stories. In the first of these, “Tomie”, from 1987, the titular heroine, a bewitching high school girl, comes on to her teacher, Mr. Takagi, on a school trip. Another student confronts her, and in the scuffle she falls off a cliff and dies. Takagi then orders all the boys to take off their clothes and cut her body into pieces while the girls look out and make sure no one interferes. The boys then dispose of the pieces of her body. Shortly thereafter, though, Tomie miraculously reappears at school — causing several of her murderers to lose their minds.

This is the prototype for all of the Tomie stories. Tomie, it turns out, is a cancerous monster. Her beauty corrupts men, who love her and then attack her, chopping her into bits. Each piece then regenerates (more or less gruesomely) into a new Tomie. As Allison says, Tomie is always murdered and diced and always returns.

In her book, Allison argues that Japanese families during the 1980s and 1990s were strongly matriarchal. Men worked long hours and traveled even longer hours to work; as a result they were effectively absent from the home. Women were in charge of shepherding children through the complicated and rigorous Japanese school testing regime. The mother-son bond then was supposed to function as a lever to propel children into their place in Japan’s resurgent advanced capitalist society. Rather than an Oedipal dynamic, in which boys symbolically reject the mother to join the world of the father, Allison suggests that in Japan boys see mothers as symbolic of the (still very patriarchal) culture. Resentment against hierarchy and limits often manifests not as competition with men, but rather as resentment against women. Allison argues:

The real stress in all this might be less on teh breakage and more on the display: the show of aggression used as a device to ensure the continuity ofa relationship rather than to sever it…. Such “devices” are found in mother-child relations in Japan, where children are indulged in a degree of aggressiveness (hitting, slapping) against their mothers….

Again, it’s not hard to see how this maps onto Ito’s Tomie stories. Tomie is the constant target of sexual and physical aggression — and of physical aggression as sexual aggression. But all of that aggression is her fault; she is the instigator — the uber-feminine manipulating and devouring men.
 

 
In the ero-manga Allison discusses, men get to dominate women in ways which, while not perhaps entirely convincing (those pesky women keep returning!) are still clearly meant to be provisionally satisfying and empowering. In the Tomie stories, the anxieties are the same, but the outcome is (at least from the standpoint of the male ego) significantly bleaker. In “Painter”, for example, the erotic male gaze — surely a major site of aspirational male empowerment and dominance in ero manga — is brutally and explicitly reversed.
 

 
The painter has created a series of portraits of his girlfriend; by gazing at her and commodifying her, he has attained fame, fortune, and dominance. One look from Tomie, though, and that gaze is flipped; suddenly it is not him who has the commodity, but the commodity who has him. At her hypnotic instigation, he jettisons his former model and becomes obsessed with capturing Tomie’s beauty on canvas. He tries and tries and tries, but Tomie — like the education mother, both inspiration and task master — taunts him with his failure. Finally, he succeeds:
 

 
What he has captured is, precisely, an image of the commodity — Tomie as bifurcating product — as monstrous excess thing. Woman’s biological reproduction is conflated with capitalism’s artificial reproductive parthenogenesis. The feminine is nightmare proliferation; the object that subjects the gaze.

Reversing the gaze is often seen as a feminist move; a way to turn the patriarchy’s weapons against it. Tomie does certainly enjoy her power over men (at least the bits of her power that don’t involve her being chopped up into bits.) But overall, the feminine/capitalist uber-mommy isn’t exactly envisioned by Ito as empowering for women. When Tomie’s kidney is implanted in another women, for example, the other woman turns inevitably into Tomie. And another girl who encounters Tomie eventually ends up like this.
 

 
Women’s power for Ito, then, isn’t something that women themselves control. Rather, it explodes from inside of them, distorting their flesh and sending their severed gobbets across the landscape. Female-as-symbol is constantly bursting out of female-as-body, leaving behind a gaping corpse in the shape of a vagina dentata.

That maw is not so much women as feminized capitalism, a beautiful endlessly proliferating fissure. In one of the stories here, Tomie is a high school’s ethics officer, and that seems oddly apropos. She circulates, a fungible locus of power which reinscribes the same social roles over and over, men and women all welded into an organic, replicating mass by the remorseless workings of pleasure, image, violence and desire.

Politics, Pleasure, and Time

Posted on by

Usually when you think about the politics of art, you’re thinking about ideology. Nadim Damluji’s recent post in which he questioned the representations of arabs in Craig Thompson’s Habibi is a case in point. So are Jeet Heer’s comments from a while back about Eisner’s use of racial stereotypes. Another example is Alyssa Rosenberg’s recent post where she argues that the movie In Time articulates a surprising and pointed critique of capitalism. I was more skeptical about In Time,, but either way, in instances like these, the political charge of a work comes from the point it’s making, either intentionally or otherwise. The politics of art is what the art says.

There’s another way of looking at politics in art, though. Recently I read this pdf by Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna titled “Does Movie Violence Increase Violent Crime?” Like the title says, the paper is a study of the effect of violence in film on violent crime rates. Here’s the abstract:

Laboratory experiments in psychology find that media violence increases aggression in the short run. We analyze whether media violence affects violent crime in the field. We exploit variation in the violence of blockbuster movies from 1995 to 2004, and study the effect on same-day assaults. We find that violent crime decreases on days with larger theater audiences for violent movies. The effect is partly due to voluntary incapacitation: between 6 P.M. and 12 A.M., a one million increase in the audience for violent movies reduces violent crime by 1.1% to 1.3%. After exposure to the movie, between 12 A.M. and 6 A.M., violent crime is reduced by an even larger percent. This finding is explained by the self-selection of violent individuals into violent movie attendance, leading to a substitution away from more volatile activities. In particular, movie attendance appears to reduce alcohol consumption. The results emphasize that media exposure affects behavior not only via content, but also because it changes time spent in alternative activities. The substitution away from more dangerous activities in the field can explain the differences with the laboratory findings. Our estimates suggest that in the short run, violent movies deter almost 1,000 assaults on an average weekend. Although our design does not allow us to estimate long-run effects, we find no evidence of medium-run effects up to three weeks after initial exposure.

What Dahl and DellaVigna found was that the movies had an important effect not through what they said, but through the amount of time they took up. People who are seeing violent movies are, presumably, people who are disproportionately interested in violence (i.e., for all intents and purposes, young men.) If these people interested in violence are watching a movie, they are not committing acts of violence. Moreover, they are not drinking, and therefore are not priming themselves to commit more, and more violent acts of violence. The ideological content of the film may be anti-capitalism or racism or the null-set; in terms of actual violent acts committed, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is butts in chairs.

Another example of this dynamic is discussed in Anne Allison’s book Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan. Allison talks at length about the Japanese obento, a lunch which mother’s prepare for their children in nursery school. The obentos are extremely elaborate; the dishes are to be aesthetically and nutritionally balanced. Moreover, children at school must eat all of their obento, and must do so within a prescribed time period. Mothers, therefore, work to make the obentos attractive and easy to eat. Food is cut into small, easily eatable pieces and is often shaped into cute figures (smiley faces, ducks, crabs, worms) which will entice the child.

As Allison notes, this is an extremely time-intensive process.

Women spend what seems to be an inordinate amount of time on the production of this one item. As an experienced obento maker myself, I can attest to the intense attention and energy devoted to this one chore. On the average, mothers spend twenty-five to forty-five minutes every morning cooking, preparing, and assembling the contents of one obento for one nursery school child. In addition, the previous day they had planned, shopped, and often organized a supper meal with leftovers in mind for the next day’s obento. Frequently women discuss obento ideas with other mothers, scan obento cookbooks or magazines for recipes, buy or make objects with which to decorate or contain (part of) the obento, and perhaps make small food portions to freeze and retrieve for future obentos.

Obentos are very much an aesthetic product; Allison points out that mothers in Japan often express their creativity through the creation of elaborate, funny, cute, and beautiful obentos. But the sheer time and energy required to make the obentos — and more broadly, to shepherd children through the highly regimented and demanding educational system — is itself a form of social control. Allison reports one mother saying that “being a mother in Japan meant being a mother to the exclusion of almost anything else.”

Allison points out that the mothers she spoke to weren’t frustrated; they were devoted to their children, to being good mothers, and even to the pleasurable aesthetic frisson which inhered in creating beautiful obento’s. Similarly, movie-goers aren’t coerced into seeing violent movies; they go because they want to, because they enjoy it, and even because they’d rather see a violent movie than engage in actual violence themselves. Art is pleasurable, and people are moved by pleasure.

In particular, they are moved to spend their time, whether in watching a film or in making an obento or in typing out a blog post. Art manipulates, not just through its message, but through the energy and hours you devote to consuming it or creating it. In fact, you could say that art and its pleasure consume and create you, whether you be blogger or non-violent watcher or dedicated mother. Maybe the politics of art is not really meaning at all. Maybe it’s praxis.

The Drifting Roundtable: I Believe The Children Are the Future

Posted on by

This is part of a roundtable on The Drifting Classroom, and also part of the October 2011 Horror Manga Movable Feast.

My apologies for the dicey quality of the scans.
____________

“School is a totalizing [pre]occupation in Japan,” writes anthropologist Anne Allison in her 1996 monograph Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan.

Allison’s subtitle doesn’t mention either children or schools, but in some ways that only emphasizes her point. For Allison, the school in Japan in the 70s, 80s, and 90s was totalizing not just for students, but for society as a whole; you didn’t have to point to it specifically, because it was everywhere. In postwar Japan, Allison argues, “adult careers depend almost entirely on the schools children attend, which in turn depend almost entirely on the passing of entrance exams at the stage of high school and college.” The result is, according to Norma Field, a “disappearance of childhood in contemporary Japan.”

For Field (whom Allison quotes), the disappearance of childhood refers specifically to the manner in which children are saddled with the (literal) burdens of adulthood — the way that, as Allison says, children are forced to “pick up early the connection between their success as students in the routines of study and their future success as adults in the networks of work and social status.” Rather than adults being responsible for children, kids are, in this scenario, made to be responsible for adults.

Allison, however, complicates this relatively straightforward point. Reading through the book, it becomes clear that if childhood in Japan has disappeared, it is not just because children have been forced to become adults, but because adults determinedly cling to childhood — particularly, Allison argues, to the (often sexualized) ideal of intimacy with their mothers. Following the work of Japanese psychoanalyst Heisaku Kosawa, Allison suggests that the Oedipus complex does not adequately describe socialization in Japan. Instead, Kosawa proposed a complex based on an Indian myth known as the Tale of Ajase. In the story, Ajase and his mother, Idaike, both attempt to kill each other, fail, and then forgive each other. According to Allison, the differences between Oedipal and Ajase models are:

(1)the role played by the oedipal mother is primarily passive…whereas the role of Ajasean mother is active, not limited to or even focused upon (sexual) desire, and pivotal to the plot. (2) The father’s role is central in the oedipal model, and patricide leads to the boy’s inability to assume manhood. In the Ajasean myth, by contrast, the father barely figures at all and has no primary role in the son’s development to manhood. (3) The oedipal model is based on a clear-cut set of rules that operate on the threat of violence…. The Ajasean model is organized more along the lines of interpersonal relations that depend on mutual forgiveness and empathy. (4) In order to achieve manhood, the oedipal boy must accept the exclusiveness of his parents’ sexual bond and separate from both to establish himself as an individual, whereas the Ajasean boy needs to remain bonded with his parents, particularly his mother, but with the newly mature attitude of mutual respect.

__________________

You don’t have to read far into Kazuo Umezo’s 1970s horror manga Drifting Classroom to find the Ajase complex. In fact,the opening sequence of the manga is a pitched battle between the protagonist, Sho, and his mother. His mom wants Sho to be more responsible about his schoolwork. Sho wants to stay focused on childish things. The most telling sequence, perhaps, is this one.

That’s castration fear, no doubt — but it’s a castration fear centered on the mother, not the father. And, moreover, it’s a fear not of being unmanned, but of being forced to become a man at knifepoint. Sho’s mom has thrown out his old, banged up marbles. She’s cutting away his childhood and,simultaneously, his intimate relationship with her. He reacts less like an angry son and more like a spurned lover…as indeed, does she.

Sho races off to school. He insists he’ll never return; his mom tells him never to come back. And they both get their wish. His school building, with Sho and all his classmates inside it, vanishes into a post-apocalyptic future, never to be seen again. The teachers quickly go insane and murder each other, and the sixth-graders, with Sho leading them, are left to take on the adult responsibility of caring for the little ones and preventing civilization from sliding into the abyss.

The link to Allison’s analysis of childhood in Japan couldn’t be much clearer. What you learn in school determines your future prospects; so what Sho and his classmates learned in school determines their fate in the future.

Indeed, often the post-apocalypse seems designed as a kind of corporate team-building exercise — a series of arbitrary hoops providing for sequential infantilizing achievements. The students face difficulty after difficulty; find water, choose a leader, jump over deadly ravine, overcome personal differences, learn to remove an appendix, kill deadly mutant starfish. The adult future, like the childhood past, is an eternity of adrenalin-fueled testing.

In part, this is definitely meant to be a nightmare vision — even, perhaps, a critique. As Otomo (one of the sixth-graders) shouts late in the series, “They all did this! Our parents and our friends! They gobbled up everything and left nothing for the future.”

The complaint is couched in ecological terms, but the imagery suggests other meanings. Otomo’s eyes are sunken and his mouth gapes like a death’s head; he looks prematurely aged. Behind him the school fence looms like a cage. It’s not just the world that has been exploited and used; it’s the kids themselves. Trapped and harnessed, their childhood is the price for Japan’s post-war economic miracle; it’s their labor that overcomes the apocalypse.

Umezu’s revulsion at what Japan does to its children powers the manga’s most viscerally disturbing episode. After eating mutant mushrooms, many of the children begin changing. First they start worshiping a hideous idol.

Then they change physically. In perhaps the books most chilling line, one girl who is making the change tells her classmate, “You were my best friend. But in our world there’s no such thing as friends.”

Tenderness and intimacy are replaced by a staring eye; the Panopticon banishes love. Umezu later reveals that the mutant creatures are literally humanity’s children; abandoned twisted abortions. Cast out of the family, they have neither love nor loyalty; even language has become, as they say, only a ritual. They communicate instantly in a kind of hive mind,and when they find that one of their fellows has hidden something from them, they fall upon it and kill it instantly. The children/mutants turning into these creatures stand bent over in rows in a perfection/parody of regimented good behavior. The monsters are, in short, an apotheosis of biopower — shaped to meet the exigencies of their society, self-watching, self-regulating. One of them even boasts that they are superior to humans because they learn more quickly. They are the children of the future; the ideal nightmare progeny of Japan, the test-takers who made themselves over as the test required, and then crawled out to conquer the world.

The mutants are certainly one vision of Japanese children, but they’re not the only one. If some of the kids worship their one-eyed watcher, others worship a less terrifying authority — mother.

When I say “worship”, I mean literally worship; the kids set up a bust of Sho’s mother as an idol to remind them of home and watch over them. And she does a fairly good job; at various points in the manga, Sho calls to his mother for help, and back in the past, she hears him and figures out ways to get him the aid he needs. Once, she secretes a knife in a hotel wall so that, in the distant future, Sho can find it and use it to kill a murderer. In another incident, she hides antibiotics in the body of a dead baseball player. Sho finds the guy’s mummified remains and is able to stop an outbreak of the plague among the school kids.

Sho’s reconciliation with his mom recalls the Ajase myth; the tension between mother and son is resolved by guilt (Sho’s mom feels really, really bad that the last thing she said to him was that he should never come home), grief, and reconciliation.

It also, and not coincidentally, echoes the idealized Japanese relationship between a mother and a student. In Japan in second half of the twentieth century, Allison says, men were largely absent from home, working long hours, engaging in de-facto-required after-work socializing, and commuting extended distances — sometimes up to three hours one way. With the husbands out of the picture, mothers were expected to stay home and devote themselves to their children’s (especially their sons’) education. It was up to mothers to fit boys to become the next generation of (productive) workers and (absent) fathers.

Allison argues that mothers did this in two ways. First, they enforced and extended the behavioral regime of school — insisting, for example, that children had to maintain a school-like schedule even over the summer, and pressuring them to work hard at their studies, as Sho’s mom does at the beginning of the manga. At the same time, though, Allison said, women also “offer the child a measure of emotional security and intimacy with which to survive these demands.” This can take the form, Allison says, of “treats, indulgences, and creative pleasures.” Thus, at the conclusion of the manga, Sho receives from his mother what is essentially the world’s biggest care package, an orbiting satellite filled with gifts, a mother’s love sent forward in time to make the future bearable for her man-child.

Mother’s love, then, makes schoolwork not just work, but pleasure. Turning one’s life into school isn’t (or isn’t just) an early separation from the mother (as in the first fight scene between Sho and his mom.) It’s also a profound union with the mother. When Sho is in the school in the future, he is separated from his mom, but his bond with her is, at the same time, more perfect, more blissful, more full, than it has ever been. He holds her affections now more than ever. His father (like Ajase’s father) is completely superfluous.

In her book, Allison talks at length about the prevalence of mother/son incest urban legends in Japan. These always take the same form; a son, studying for his exam, is distracted by sexual thoughts. His mother, to help him focus, decides to begin an affair with him. Both mother and son enjoy the affair immensely — and the boy does well on his exams. These stories, Allison says, proliferated especially in the late-1970s, not long after Drifting Classroom was published. Given that, the scenes in the book which feature Sho’s mom and Sho’s classmate, Shinichi, conspiring together secretly in a hotel room take on a very suggestive air. Sho’s mom is helping Sho succeed at school by disguising herself and then going off to form an (intimate) bond in a hotel room with Shinichi, Sho’s double. School and sex and mother and the future are all wound together in a productive cathexis of anxiety and pleasure.

On the one hand, then, Drifting Classroom rejects Japan’s totalizing preoccupation with school. It condemns the society which makes of its children little adults, laying waste to the present the better to build a wasted future. But the flip side of the cleansing nightmare is a less pristine daydream. The terror, the grief, the piles of dead children, each more imaginatively mangled than the least — this is not the price of pleasure, but the pleasure itself. The forced adulthood and the hardship are the path to, and therefore inseparable from, the intimate love of mother.

In the last pages of the manga, Sho’s mother looks through the window and declares, “We have to work for a brighter future…a future where our boy is so brave…and where he’ll grow up strong and survive….not here, but somewhere in the future.” As she says this she sees her son and his friends running amidst the stars, through heaven. In some sense, it’s a happy ending, a tribute to the power of a mother’s love to illumine even the most terrible future. But it has a darker edge as well. For surely the manga shows that, in Japan as in the U.S., when we erase our children’s present the better to love their future, school — and not just school — will be horror.