（這是我2007年11月29日受邀至1982年美國「女性主義性辯論」的聖地－－紐約哥倫比亞大學Barnard Center for Research on Women－－參與Toward A Vision of Economic and Sexual Justice會議時發表的主題演講，實況錄影在此。同場的另一位演講人是著名的左翼作者／記者Naomi Klein）
It is a great honor and pleasure to be here at Barnard Center. Many of us in other parts of the world had been touched by the Scholar and Feminist Conference that sparked the sex debates here 25 years ago, and it is truly inspirational to finally visit the historic site.
This evening I would like to begin by describing two significant developments that I believe have created brand new sets of conditions as well as power deployments for both economic and sexual struggles in East Asia and maybe in other parts of the world too. The first has to do with the “crisis of (social) reproduction” that now faces late capitalism; the second has to do with the “emergence of governance” that constitutes so-called democratization in many national contexts. I shall try to demonstrate that these two related changes have so profoundly altered the nature and the field for struggles in the economic realm as well as in the sexual realm that any discussion we hold at this time cannot afford to overlook their ramifications.
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The crisis of capitalist reproduction that I am interested in has a lot to do with the reproduction of adequate subjects as competent bearers of the system, more specifically the reproduction of class positions through education or other mechanisms so that, for example, children of the middle-class would be competent and diligent enough to inherit their parents’ class standing, and children of the labor class would remain content with their future status of labor and readily accept whatever discipline and domestication that come their way. Yet as we observe most visibly in the last wave of economically better-achieved Asian states including Japan, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan; such class reproduction is now facing an increasingly acute crisis, brought on by the capricious movement of globalization. Japanese author Kenichi Ohmae’s ominous theory has won tremendous following in Asia when he described the economic aspect of this crisis as the rapid descent of the middle-class into frustrated lower middle class through a long trail of sagging salaries and precarious employments in so-called M-shaped societies.[1] With growing uncertainty and a volatile future, no enduring order seems to remain for steady social reproduction. Increasingly out of jobs and out of prospects, the sinking middle class displays what Habermas has termed a “motivational crisis” with a pervasive sense of anxiety and pessimism over the future.
If adults find themselves no longer able to count on future prospects, neither do they find any consolation in their children’s performance. The proliferation of neologisms in Asia that describe the disappointing work performance of the post-baby-boom generations partially crystallizes such adult reaction and frustration. For instance, the term “freeter” zeroes in on young people’s preference for the freedom and flexibility of part-time or temporary jobs over steady but enslaving full-time jobs; and “the strawberry generation” satirizes young generation’s obsession with personal appearances as well as their lack of resilience/perseverance in face of difficulties and pressure. In a way, such neologisms are economically framed expressions of adult anguish as they gradually lose hold of the reproduction process.
As such anguish seeks an outlet and a culprit, it locates it conveniently in the sprawling global fashions and lifestyles that are inserting many unexpected variables into local youth cultures. If American pop culture has brought individualism and attitude to Asia, now Japanese or Korean pop cultures are captivating Asian populations through culturally much more accessible forms. Surprisingly, these cultural representations are also quite explicit and matter-of-fact about gender and sexual diversities, illustrated by the omnipresence of adulteries, homosexuality, SM sex, incest, gender crossing, and other marginal sexualities in Japanese mangas (comics). During the same period of time, the advent of the internet also made a wealth of sexual information and, more importantly, sexual contacts readily accessible, helping youngsters range way beyond the circle of relations closely monitored by parents and teachers. As the status competition among teenagers draws upon such cultural resources, and as the tabloid media thrive on sensationalized reports of such developing trends, parents and teachers are increasingly alarmed about the possibility of so-called gender/sexuality deviances (for example, homosexuality, extreme bodies and sexualities, occasional sex work, etc.) and their class implication.
When such economically-induced frustration gets deflected unto disciplinary problems with the younger generation, another power shift takes place. Parental power, as the embodiment of pre-modern authority and domination, had been on the decline in the early years of nation-building in Asia when the state aimed at minimizing cultural differences through modern mass education and social integration. But now parental power is widely sought by conservative Christian groups that hope to mobilize parent collaboration and support in casting a legitimate surveillance net over all social space in the name of none other than “child protection.” Helping to foster the protectionist mentality, moral panics and demonization of sexual diversity flare up regularly with the help of the mass media, followed by urgent demands for better protection measures. In quite a few East Asian states, a continuous string of legislations has been put into place in recent years, spearheaded by conservative Christian NGOs, to ensure that social space is purified, all bad influences removed, for the sake of the precious children born to this age of critically low birth rates. And when the parent imaginary looms large and obligates every adult to live by such protective duties, the companion imaginary of the “child” as innocent and vulnerable and non-sexual is applied to everyone under the age of 18 as UN has decreed. As protective middle-class parents are recruited to purity campaigns to vigilantly hound down all kinds of bad (in particular, sexual) influence that threaten children’s well-being, such socially-constructed anxiety and hysteria pose insurmountable obstacles to sexual autonomy and sexual justice for the young.
Incidentally, one aspect that seems to be missing from almost all of the thought papers prepared for tomorrow’s colloquium is exactly this aspect of child and teenage sexuality as part of our basic conceptions of sexual justice. While “children’s liberation” had received much discussion in the 1960s and 70s, and the historical construction of childhood was critically examined to a certain extent; this progressive effort seems to have been replaced by a new social consensus on the asexuality and vulnerability of children in the face of rampant sexual predators. Necessary measures for their close protection are thus proposed at the price of infringement on basic freedoms of information, speech, and communication. Of course we can discuss whether sexual justice entails rights of the young to sexual information and sexual pleasure, but at least there should be room to utter such ideas for debate. Yet in many parts of Asia, such ideas are not only unthinkable but now even relegated to criminality for they are considered to be damaging to the hearts and minds of the young. Obviously, the backlash against the realization of an enlightened and diversified sex culture is well underway. Viewed in this light, how subjects are produced since the early years of their lives to be equipped with the right emotions, personality, or sexual inhibitions to become good citizens, bearers of the capitalistic system, or believers of the free market economy has become an urgent issue that warrants our attention as we ponder the intersection of sexual justice and economic justice.
Rising parental power and the concomitant infantilization of all social space, real or virtual, also demonstrate that in addition to disasters that create clean slates for the spread of capitalism in various areas, which Naomi Klein has eloquently described in her new book, the reproduction of capitalism in many national contexts still relies upon or makes uses of certain traditional cultural values, familial structures, gender roles and relations, and various traditional forms of social control wherever necessary so as to facilitate its operation. In other words, capitalism does not always stand in opposition to tradition; in fact, it has become somewhat good at adapting and appropriating traditions as it developed—traditional gender division of labor and traditional hierarchical structures of domination within the family or inbetween generations make up ready examples. If we hope to pose any real challenge to the prevailing economic order, then we can not lose sight of the important question of reproduction in realms generally relegated to the personal, the familial, and the sexual.
The fact of the matter is, it is often changes in the sexual realm and struggles for sexual freedom that cause profound disturbances in traditional social relations and cultural formations. Issues such as surrogate mothering, homosexual marriage, right to abortion, premarital sex, female sexuality, teenage sexuality, sexual permissiveness, and pornography all have raised sharp controversies exactly because they pose serious challenges to traditional practices of motherhood, family, chastity, and various forms of social control—all related to the biological or social reproduction of subjects. Of course sexual openness also benefits capitalistic reproduction in the way it spurs desire and consumption, or, as Herbert Marcuse says, provides temporary but limited ventilation for sexual repression. Yet, because of their potential and fundamental threat to traditional mores and values and forms of social control, as well as their interruption of the continued reproduction of repressed docile subjects, liberalizing tendencies in sexuality have always been deemed dangerous by the state. While actual measures taken to curb such developments vary from one national context to another, nation-states do tend to side with sexual conservatism when sexual practices and values diversify at the pace they do these days—which explains the increasingly acute contradiction between sexual openness and sexual regulation that we are witnessing now in many countries. In the US, consensual sex between adult strangers may not constitute a crime; but in Taiwan, strangers seeking one night stands or SMers seeking kindred spirits through the internet have become prosecutable for dissemination of messages deemed pornographic.
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I have already alluded to the important and aggressive role conservative Christian NGOs have played in Asia’s new democracies in this whole process of reinstating parental power so as to ensure proper reproduction of subjects through intense regulation of all social space in the name of child protection. The question remains: if Christianity is but a minor religion in most Asian states, how did these religious NGOs achieve such positions of influence with the state? Well, I propose it takes place within a historical context, a context of democratization, and this is where we need to turn to the second issue, the emergence of “governance” or more precisely, “global governance,” in East Asia.
Democratization—understood as elections based on universal suffrage, competing political parties, accountability of governments to governed, the rule of law, and basic civil liberties—has been more or less under way in Asian states since World War II. Whether these political arrangements truly empower the people and promote equality and justice is of course a different matter, which I will not go into this evening. Yet in the age of globalization, when both political and economical pressures from powerful nations or powerful international organizations can no longer be overlooked by the sovereign state, when the saturation and proliferation of information channels create such social heterogeneity that it upsets existing social order and social homogeneity, when formal channels of socialization such as the family and the school falter in their power of influence, the state likewise faces a legitimation crisis as it is exposed as cumbersome and incapable of responding efficiently to such dramatic changes. In order to rein in teeming social energies, the state learns to franchise its rule to cooperating NGOs or collaborating corporations, which in turn not only help consolidate state rule but also improve its international standing. The formation of the complex network of formal and informal institutions, mechanisms, and relationships, between and among states, citizens and organizations has thus effected a reconfiguration of political institutions and processes into what is known as “governance.”
Scholars of international relations are elated about the seeming shrinking of state power as they celebrate the rise of “governance” and the expansion of global civil society; in China, governance is even heralded by liberals as the ideal that would reform the Communist regime. Sadly, as NGOs take up franchises from the state and eagerly enter the scheme of governance as consultants or decision-makers for government policies, many of them are also gradually absorbed into the bureaucratic structure. Rather than being organizations of social transformation or at least social critique, NGO activism and feminist careerism have become increasingly disciplinarian, leading to stagnation of movement energy in many Asian countries ranging from India to Japan. Conservative NGOs, in the meantime, have enjoyed great success in turning themselves into the long arms of the state in the creation and execution of policies, legislations, and strategies that purify and rigidify social space, real and virtual. The enumeration of terms such as Gongos (government organized NGOs), Bongos (business organized NGOs), Gingos (government interested NGOs), and Bingos (Big NGOs which epitomize the professionalization of NGOs) signals a growing sensitivity toward this developing diversity and complexity within civil society and the symbiotic relations developing between the state, the corporations, and certain parts of the civil society.
When governance brought forth the diversification of the civil society, social activism for marginal issues suffers. What is being described as economic justice in the new liberal democracies is basically distributive justice, far from any socialist aims geared toward transformations in the productive realm. In actuality, such distributive justice is often expressed through the institution of welfare policies that do not necessarily form any coherent, full-scale measure to deal with structurally engrained economic injustice, but are only limited to remedial measures that mitigate some of the hardships faced by marginalized populations. Furthermore, as such welfare policies are always mediated through active negotiation with the state by representative NGOs, there is not only the problem of adequate representation but also the common problem of bureaucratic and strategic needs of the NGO institutions themselves overriding the true needs of the subjects for whose benefit the NGOs were created in the first place. Furthermore, in order to fit in with government regulations of spending and accountability, as well as to command respectability in image and appeal, NGOs tend to incline toward mainstream values and issues, making even distributive justice hard to achieve.
The professionalization of NGOs may end up defusing whatever limited radical impulse there had been, but the entry of conservative Christian NGOs into the government power circle of governance proves to be even more devastating for struggles for sexual justice. Development projects aimed at promoting population management, disease prevention, and maternal and child health end up intentionally or unwittingly shaping ideas about what constitutes “normal,” thus acceptable, sexual practices and identities. Much like US Christian NGOs that launched boycotts of liberal-minded or gay-friendly media programs or industrial corporations, Taiwan’s conservative Christian NGOs call upon big corporations to pull their ads from popular TV programs and tabloid newspapers that are more liberal in exploring changes in sexual values and practices. In 2006, city legislators associated with the Exodus International, an international Christian organization that advocates “freedom from homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ,” threaten to pull government funding from the annual gay festival in Taipei because city funds should not be used to “promote homosexuality.” Worst of all is of course the numerous international agreements on measures directed at (sex) trafficking, pornography, sex work, child pornography, pedophiles, internet content monitoring, etc. that aggressive Christian NGOs and their collaborating allies are helping to put into place. Such international protocols constitute the strongest justification for comparable if not more rigid local legislations that make struggles for sexual justice all the more difficult.
The interpenetration of the state and the civil society under governance arrives with other new technologies of power which may be potentially quite detrimental to marginal issues and subjects. A process of “deliberative democracy” has been introduced in some Asian states in recent years as a participatory method of policy-making that is arbitrated through public deliberation by a select but supposedly neutral citizenry. Procedure-wise, deliberative democracy seems to embody the essence of the democratic spirit where reason reigns, and the end result could include certain progressive ideas. The problem is, in the state’s own precarious status of legitimacy, it shifts its duty to uphold the rights and benefits of the minority to this mechanism of collective deliberation. Consequently, basic freedoms now need to be renegotiated, while the final result of the process can still be mitigated. In Taiwan, laws governing artificial insemination and surrogate mothering were subjected to the procedure of deliberative democracy and the initial conclusion was quite liberal, yet eventually the state legislation excluded lesbians and gays who wish to have children. In Hong Kong, faced with articulate progressive scholars and increasingly liberal censorship officers, ultra conservative Christian groups now demand that the definition of “indecency” be determined not by experts and professionals, but by opinion polls to be conducted among the general public every two years so as to reflect “true contemporary community standards.” Conceivably, deliberative democracy will be invoked most often when sex-related issues rise to controversy level, when only sexual stigma can effectively put an end to liberalizing impulses. In essense, deliberative democracy may in spirit be a new form of democracy that gravitates toward so-called “people’s reason,” but in its actual execution, it has the potential to become a new form of social exclusion that threatens social/sexual freedom.
Incidentally, nowadays, it is the NGOs on the right that are quite adept in using the language of multiculturalism, tolerance, and mild liberalism when they advocate their conservative agenda. Protectionist language is employed to chastise parents who do not live up to ideals of middle-class child rearing practices; feminist discourse on objectification and exploitation is liberally applied by the Christian groups to criticize positive female sexual assertiveness and any open expression or representation of sexuality. Actually, the right wing seems to have no more gripe with discourses on economic justice; but when it comes to advocacy of sexual justice, right wing groups flip over in anger and terror. How are we to understand this odd phenomenon? Well, perhaps the conservative Christian groups quite aptly grasped the deeply engrained cultivation of bodily sensations, feelings, emotions that constitute the material basis of agency and against-the-grain action. Perhaps, justice is not only the way our society is organized, but more importantly the way our character and emotions are constituted. After all, the belief in and feelings about justice need a material base too, not necessarily an “economic” base, but a “material” base that happens to have a lot to do with our very material bodies and their very material experiences with sexuality that are severely circumscribed by the given social environment. It is here that the impact of governance demonstrates its extreme potency: it aims to not only formulate the most intricate forms of social control, but also to constitute the very subjects for its rule.
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So far I have tried to explain how economic globalization has brought on its own crisis of reproduction and how such crisis is being deflected unto social control in the sexual realm in particular. I have also tried to demonstrate how global governance has opened up the door to state-NGO collaboration to the extent that transformative impulses are defused and sexual repression is institutionalized in the legal realm. Both tendencies have created dire consequences for economic and sexual activism. Yet in many parts of the Third World, or even in parts of the United States, there are other social forces that are so powerfully nested in profound social contradictions, sedimented through convoluted histories, that their activation instantly dominates any given political scene and overwhelms causes in sexual justice and economic justice. Furthermore, the democratic spirit of “rule of law,” now interpreted by conservative forces as “rule by law,” has greatly broadened the scope of criminality to include almost all social presences of sexuality. In the last part of my talk, I would like to bring in these two important and influential side effects of Asian democratization for our consideration.
Modern democracies are chronically enmeshed in the regular spasms of democratic elections. In many Third World nations, and maybe still so in some parts of the United States, elections can churn up such strong emotions that the hostility fanned up by competing political parties may take years to appease. As much as labor groups and sex rights groups hope to further their causes in such political mobilization, they hardly ever achieve comparable leverage; instead, ethnicity readily enters the picture and steals the scene. Blatant discrimination and abuse of alien labor is characterized as an ethnic issue, justified by all the ethnic prejudices, and totally eclipsing the class dimension. In the face of severe economic hardship, even when presented with allegations of the president’s long history of corruption and conspiracy, numerous Taiwanese voters still proclaim: “We will vote for A-Bian [the president’s nick name] even in starvation,” or “Loving Taiwan despite an empty stomach is true love for Taiwan.” Such statements and the emotional strength that utters them defy any analysis that considers the economic as the determining factor. In fact, supporters lend themselves easily to the belief that Taiwan’s economic depression is a result of China’s deliberate bullying or individual Taiwanese entrepreneurs’ greed, rather than from globalization and its consequent marginalization of Taiwan. The ruling party’s manipulation of ethnic identity in relation to nation-state passion has thus weakened and marginalized class analysis and class thinking; and the emotionally charged issue of ethnicity can be invoked at opportune moments to divide and polarize any social movement. As ethnicity-based nation-state building still operates as the core issue in many new liberal democracies, the obstacle it poses for other social causes certainly calls for more attention as we ponder the connection between economic struggle and sexual struggle.
If “ethnicity” as it is mobilized by nation-state politics is a formidable force to be reckoned with in our pursuit for justice, then the newly expanded scope of “criminality” constitutes a second formidable force that works to frustrate our actual struggle. Global economic shifts have exacerbated the daily survival of the economic underclass, leaving them fewer recourses than suicides, bankrupt credit, or destitution. Inability to stay economically afloat easily slips into bad credits and a large increase in debt-related prosecutions, and sex work—whether in one’s own country or through illegal stay in other more ludicrous countries—often becomes the only viable, but criminal, exit. Moreover, for them and for everyone else, the overall social context is worsening. Global protocols of governance, propagated by international NGOs and their branches in various nations, are sweeping across the globe to encourage new legislations that would treat all sex work as human trafficking, all internet sexual exchanges as sexual predation, all adult publications or videos as pornography, and all of the above are now considered criminal acts. When the Taipei city government revoked the licenses of prostitutes in 1997, it effectively created hundreds of criminals, making what had been honest state-protected-and-regulated sex work into prosecutable crimes. Since the child-protection laws in Taiwan were modified to cover internet information in 1999, more than 20,000 criminals have been created because they posted messages deemed “hinting” at sexual transaction, which includes one-night-stand invitations or straight-forward sexual solicitations by sexual minorities. Plastic-wrapped and marked-for-adult publications sold in Taiwan’s only gay bookstore were seized in 2003 and the owner convicted of dissemination of obscenity in 2006 despite continued protestation by gay groups. Sex-positive campus publications by students of Hong Kong Chinese University were subjected to prosecution in 2006 because complaints of indecency have been filed against them by conservative Christian citizen groups. The legal grid on sexual information and values has grown so tight that sexual dissidence posted on the internet could be prosecuted, and academic research into marginal sexualities are subject to severe scrutiny. I know this through firsthand experience when more than a dozen conservative Christian NGOs banded together and took me to court in 2003 for including difficult material and liberal views in my sexuality studies online databank. The final verdict was “not guilty,” yet it is symptomatic of the trend that contestations in sexual values and mores no longer take the form of rational debates or discussions; instead, marginal or minority views are to be censored by the iron fist of litigations. At this historical moment, it may be highly instructive to explore the intersection of economic justice and sexual justice by looking into this process of how the economic and sexual underclasses are relegated to criminality, much like the political dissidents had been prosecuted under martial law.
Finally, a few days ago at dinner with some activist friends, I told them about my trip to New York and our topic for discussion here. I asked one of them how she would view the issue, and her answer was quite sobering. Here is what she said:
“I am not sure how to think about economic justice or sexual justice. But when I hang around the economically disadvantaged transgender sex workers who are both frank and at ease talking about the sexual services they provide and the way they make it through their daily lives in this world of gender dimorphism, I wish the leftists and the feminists and the predominantly middle-class transgender group would have the humility to sit down and listen and learn. Class positions and non-conforming gender/sexual identities are not abstract ideas. Real people facing real problems occupy such nodal points of limitation and oppression. When even their mere existence and identity as transgender sex workers is considered criminal and prosecutable on many counts, obviously there is a lot more to be done on both the economic and the sexual fronts.”
And I leave you with that thought. Thank you.
[1] The Impact of Rising Lower Middle Class Population in Japan (Kodan-sha Publishing Company, Japan, 2006).
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