{"id":32004,"date":"2013-07-01T02:12:24","date_gmt":"2013-07-01T02:12:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=32004"},"modified":"2013-07-01T02:12:24","modified_gmt":"2013-07-01T02:12:24","slug":"naked-bodies-bodies-of-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=32004","title":{"rendered":"Naked Bodies, Bodies of History"},"content":{"rendered":"

Naked Bodies, Bodies of History<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Hyphen Magazine: Asian America Unabridged<\/a>
\n2013-06-27<\/p>\n

Jenny Lee<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cShe mimics the speaking. That might resemble speech. (Anything at all.) Bared noise, groan, bits torn from words\u2026From the back of her neck she releases her shoulders free. \u00a0She swallows once more.\u201d<\/p>\n

So begins the story of the halting diseuse<\/em>, or female storyteller, of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha\u2019s genre-defying text Dict\u00e9e<\/em>, first published just over three decades ago in 1982. Organized in nine parts named after the Greek Muses, Dict\u00e9e<\/em> has been described in mythic terms \u2013 a Korean Odyssey<\/em>, a rewriting of the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women<\/em>, a theatrical ritual, a shamanistic exorcism. \u00a0Above all, however, Cha\u2019s work interrogates history<\/em>, refracting the history of Korea in the twentieth century through the themes of exile, the displacement of colonized bodies, and the lost \u2013 and resurrected \u2013 bodies and voices of women…<\/p>\n

…I must have had Dict\u00e9e<\/em> on the brain, because I thought of Cha\u2019s work again a few weeks ago when I dropped by the DePaul Art Museum to see the exhibit War Baby\/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art<\/em><\/a>, curated by DePaul and San Francisco State University professors\u00a0\u00a0Laura Kina<\/a> and Wei Ming Dariotis<\/a>. The exhibit is part of a larger project that features visual media produced by nineteen artists who hail from the rapidly expanding community of 2.6 million Americans (and counting) who identify as Asian American plus one or more ethno-racial groups. While the exhibit blurb explains that the show \u201cexamines the construction of mixed heritage Asian American identity in the United States,\u201d this actually doesn\u2019t do justice to its ambitious range, which not only investigates the historical origins of these identities (U.S. wars in Asia, colonialism, transnational adoption, the 1967 Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia<\/em> outlawing laws against interracial marriage) but breaks down insidious present-day theories about \u201cpost-racialness,\u201d while also featuring work by a younger generation of artists who seem to stay out of the conversation completely. \u00a0<\/p>\n

In an interview<\/a>, Dariotis revealed that the title of the exhibit was inspired by her own experience fielding annoying questions about her background (which, incidentally, is Chinese, Greek, Swedish, English, Scottish, German, and Dutch). According to Dariotis, people would inquire whether her parents \u201cmet in the war.\u201d \u201cAnd I always ask myself, ha, I was born in 1969, we were not at war with China in 1969. Where did they get this image?\u201d Dariotis\u2019s story highlights persistent mainstream assumptions about mixed-race (if not mixed-ethnic) Asian Americans of a certain age as either\/or \u2013 that is, either the product of military personnel and Asian women, or free-love hippies indulging in illegal interracial sex. If Young Jean Lee\u2019s Untitled Feminist Show<\/em> offers a critique of the sexualizing of women\u2019s bodies, War Baby\/Love Child<\/em> draws attention to the cultural sexualization of specifically Asian (and mostly female) bodies through the bodies of their mixed-race offspring…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Naked Bodies, Bodies of History Hyphen Magazine: Asian America Unabridged 2013-06-27 Jenny Lee \u201cShe mimics the speaking. That might resemble speech. (Anything at all.) Bared noise, groan, bits torn from words\u2026From the back of her neck she releases her shoulders free. \u00a0She swallows once more.\u201d So begins the story of the halting diseuse, or female […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,24,16,1196,8,20],"tags":[10610,3972,15067,15066,15069,41,10606,15068,42],"class_list":["post-32004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-arts","category-asia","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-albert-chong","tag-debra-yepa-pappan","tag-hyphen-magazine","tag-hyphen-magazine-asian-america-unabridged","tag-jenny-lee","tag-laura-kina","tag-mequitta-ahuja","tag-theresa-hak-kyung-cha","tag-wei-ming-dariotis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32004\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}