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Always As Though for the First Time”: Embodiment, Mediation, and Speculation in Contemporary Transnational Narratives

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Always As Though for the First Time”: Embodiment, Mediation, and Speculation in Contemporary Transnational Narratives UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE “Always as Though for the First Time”: Embodiment, Mediation, and Speculation in Contemporary Transnational Narratives A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature by Regina Yung Lee December 2013 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Margherita Long, Chairperson Dr. Heidi Brevik-Zender Dr. James Tobias Dr. Sherryl Vint Dr. Yenna Wu Copyright by Regina Yung Lee 2013 The Dissertation of Regina Yung Lee is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation is the result of a concerted group effort to push one new thought from my head onto the following pages. I could not have accomplished it alone. Research for this dissertation was partially funded by a doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am grateful to the Department of Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages, the University of California, Riverside, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute for their generous support of my work. I am extremely grateful to the members of my dissertation committee for their support and example, their mentorship and encouragement, and their careful readings and thoughtful responses throughout this project. I am especially grateful to my dissertation chair, Professor Margherita Long, for her intellectual clarity and passionate love of the text, beacons and exemplars during this long and arduous process. An earlier version of chapter 1 of this dissertation was published as “Legitimacy and Legibility: Rereading Civil Discourse Through Feminist Figurations in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Cordelia’s Honor.” From Lois McMaster Bujold: Essays on a Modern Master of Science Fiction and Fantasy © 2013 Edited by Janet Brennan Croft. Series Editors Donald E. Palumbo and C.W. Sullivan III by permission of McFarland & Company, Inc., Box 611, Jefferson NC 28640. www.mcfarlandpub.com. Chapter 3 of this dissertation is republished by permission of the publisher. It will be published as “As Seen On the Internet: Recapping Online Interaction in English- iv Language K-Drama Fandoms” in The Korean Popular Culture Reader © 2014 Edited by Kyung Hyun Kim and Youngmin Choe by permission of Duke University Press, 905 W. Main St., Suite 18B, Durham, NC 27701. Chapter 4 of this dissertation is published with the permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing. It was previously published as “No Place Like Home: Minor Transnationalisms and Sinophone Centers in Jia Zhangke’s The World” in Intermingled Fascinations: Migration, Displacement and Translation in World Cinema. 2011. Edited by Flannery Wilson and Jane Ramey Correia by permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing, PO Box 302, Newcastle Upon Tyne, NE6 1WR United Kingdom. My enduring gratitude to the colleagues in the department, across UC, and scattered throughout the world, who have supported and encouraged me through formal and informal, digital and embodied means. Lastly, to my family: thank you. You have helped me more than you know. I love you more than I can say. v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION “Always as Though for the First Time”: Embodiment, Mediation, and Speculation in Contemporary Transnational Narratives by Regina Yung Lee Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in Comparative Literature University of California, Riverside, December 2013 Dr. Margherita Long, Chairperson This project asks how a feminist subject can exist in the world without either being annihiliated by its givens, or persisting in an obsessively reactive state. What would norms look like in a set of relations not build on singularity as exclusion? I posit that philosopher Luce Irigaray’s concept of sexual difference joined to the concepts of speculation and the novum can provide a way out of this relentless binarization. My five chapters are experimental sites designed to explore and adapt this speculative model, using the relations of body to body, especially in mediatory and affiliated relations, to infer something about this difference. Each chapter is a speculative engagement with that text’s struggle for control of feminine embodiment as it relates to linguistic access and agential futurity. The chapters of my dissertation converge upon the woman’s bodily mediation of communication and conveyance of information, as the ground of becoming from which difference can but does not always emerge. Reading these texts through the lenses of feminist theory provides a clear rendition of the stakes for women as the focal points for these technocentric exchanges. The concept of the feminine body as a medium appears in theorists such as Deleuze and Guattari, specifically in the becoming-girl as the becoming through which all others must pass. Feminist theorists and philosophers engage intensely vi with the becoming-girl, seeking other readings of and alternatives to the vanishing of the woman’s body out of agential action into mediation. I analyze the face on the screen, the unseen translator, and the laboring fan in terms of that vanishing, even as the labor of these women remains visible but intangible. Luce Irigaray discusses this vanishing as symptomatic of a larger suppression and invisibility of women’s bodies from within language and social discourse. Through centering on a theory of speculation as opening a way toward newness, I develop readings of my transnational texts to posit ways to avoid hysterical reactivity in favor of genuinely innovative feminist response. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Experimental Sites. 1 Chapter 1. Legitimacy and Legibility: Rereading Civil Discourse Through Feminist Figurations in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Cordelia’s Honor. 14 Chapter 2. Wavering Presences: Mediumship, Embodiment, and the Becoming-Woman in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. 56 Chapter 3. No Place Like Home: Minor Transnationalisms in Jia Zhangke’s The World (世界). 91 Chapter 4. As Seen on the Internet: The Recap as Translation in English- Language K-drama Fandoms. 125 Chapter 5. “C’est moi qui te formerai dans un premier temps”: Language, Mother Tongue, and the Fugue in Nancy Huston’s Prodige polyphonie. 157 Envoi: Kaleidoscopic Movement. 189 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 3-1. 97 Figure 3-2. 99 Figure 3-3. 120 Figure 4-1. 150 ix 0. Introduction: Experimental Sites. This project asks how a feminist subject can exist in the world without either being obliviated or annihiliated by its givens, a set of conditions into which it comes into existence, or persisting in an obsessively reactive state. To accomplish this, I require a method for relation across difference, in which at least two subjects may thrive, which does not reject one for another, or present one only in terms of another. Building a world in which newness and difference come into being and persist without mental and physical grief ought not to be an unimaginable vapor dream. But it remains one. Thus, I offer speculation as a methodological tool for locating or imagining ethical relations across differences, an initial step toward bringing them about. A speculative mode reads text and event through the subjunctive what if, instead of the indicative what is. Using this idea of speculation, I read my texts for events, relations, or occurrences which engender or facilitate bifurcations between expectation and wonder, leading to unsuspected but generative outcomes. My chapters record the processes of searching out, finding, and contextualizing these outcomes, and discuss what is at stake in their unexpectedness as well as in the outcomes themselves. Thus, instead of reflecting back what has already been said, thought, or done, the speculative method I propose allows consideration of events and circumstances in terms of what might be: possible, emergent, not yet known. 1 My dissertation sets the grounds for difference within ethical relation firmly within the realm of the speculative, not because of its impossibility, but because of its importance as a primary site for the exploration of the amazing or astounding, of the wondrous. The resulting document is perhaps more anthology than book; however, my chapters connect through their central concerns with speculation, futurity, and embodiment. These speculations radiate out like the spokes of a wheel: each does not necessarily touch the others, yet all are interconnected with each other through the central hub or node. In this endeavor I am supported by several seemingly disparate concepts, which track onto the disparate but connected subjects of this dissertation. There is the turbulent link between affective and material presences, especially as presented through maternal and other affiliative lines. The links echo those of linguistic and subjective presences, which provide another approach to articulating something deeply felt but not yet knowable. These intuitive presences circumvent the ties between linguistic entry and maternal corporeality through reformulating the approach between affiliated subjects as not a return, but a discovery of each other. A critical necessity for speculation as I use it here is found in the science fictional notion of the subjunctive as the mode of speculation. Samuel Delany’s early nonfictional text, “About 5750 Words,” indexes the subjunctive mood as inherent to the speculative mode, necessary for the creation of any alternate within textuality itself. Novelist Ursula Le Guin provides a further gloss on the subjunctive’s relation to speculation when she 2 calls the
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