ISBN: 978-80-244-6582-1 | ISBN online: 978-80-244-6583-8 | DOI: 10.5507/ff.25.24465821

Embodied Entanglements

Gender, Identity, and the Corporeal in Asia

Halina Zawiszová (Ed.), Giorgio Strafella (Ed.), Martin Lavička (Ed.)


Ideas on the (human) body, gender, and identity lie at the core of many socio-political issues and cultural trends in Asia today, while also inspiring innovative research on artistic expression from Asia's past. By focusing on socio-political as well as cultural issues from diverse geographical and historical contexts, this book highlights complex links and interactions that bind these three interpretative axes. How do bodies become conduits for the expression and negotiation of gender and other identities? What do the lived experiences of women and LGBTQ+ people in Asia reveal about biopolitics, normative expectations, and value systems in different societies? How does art reflect the representation and fashioning of gendered bodies and ambiguous identities? Cutting across the quotidian and the avant-garde, activism and art, violence and pleasure, as well as the intimate and the political, this book sheds new light on Asian cultures and societies, spanning India, Indonesia, Japan, mainland China, Taiwan, and Thailand, affirming thus the region's significance in broader debates on biopolitics, gender, and human dignity.

1. edition, Published: 2025, online: 2025, publisher: Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, Kříľkovského 8, 771 47 Olomouc


Contents

Mapping Society onto the (Gendered) Body: An Introduction

Giorgio Strafella (A.), Halina Zawiszová (A.), Martin Lavička (A.)

DOI: 10.5507/ff.25.24465821.01


This chapter introduces the topics and issues addressed in this volume. It shows how the chapters weave together the themes of gender, identity, and the corporeal by examining a variety of lived experiences and cultural expressions in India, Indonesia, Japan, mainland China, Taiwan, and Thailand in historical contexts ranging from antiquity until today. It also highlights the contribution of this volume to wider debates on issues such as the performance and construction of gender identities, misogyny and homophobia, biopolitics, and feminist and LGBTQ+ activism and also how they relate to recent studies and collections on these subjects.

Virtual Fashion and Identity in Japan: Counterculture in an Age of Global Transparency

Liudmila Bredikhina (A.), Agnès Giard (A.)

DOI: 10.5507/ff.25.24465821.02


This chapter investigates babiniku fashion practices in Japan as a kind of countercultural action. Babiniku are a group of virtual YouTubers (VTubers). VTubers are known to be entertainers using 3D or 2D computer-generated avatars to create online content without exposing their physical features to public scrutiny. Babiniku are typically male VTubers who “incarnate” feminine characters for online performance activities. The most popular ones adopt a “cute” (kawaii) appearance and wear girly outfits, seemingly conforming to stereotypical gender norms and expectations. Ambivalent as it may be, fashion plays a significant role in babiniku VTubers’ strategy. We hypothesize that animating and customizing feminine avatars enable certain men to reshape their identity and challenge social expectations related to self-presentation. Virtual bodies and fashion can be deployed as resources to play with gender norms and elude the contemporary imperatives of authentic self-modeling. This study is based on long-term participant observation and key-informant interviews since November 2019. a virtual fashion shop was opened on the Japanese website Booth to investigate fashion consumption and creation in May 2020. We also surveyed 24 Japanese VTubers using a feminine avatar for the purposes of this paper.

Constructing the Ideal Face: The Japanese High School Girls’ Makeup

Keiko Aiba (A.)

DOI: 10.5507/ff.25.24465821.03


While at least half of Japanese high school girls wear makeup, the reasons why they do so have remained understudied. Having reviewed perspectives of feminist authors and other studies on makeup use, this study interviewed 32 female high school girls in a private co-ed high school in Japan to investigate why they engage in the practice. Many reasons mentioned by the students indicate that they feel pleasure in using makeup to move toward their “imagined self.” Some girls, however, engage in makeup because they accept the norm that makeup is a form of etiquette for adult women. This study, therefore, also considers this norm’s effects on those girls who cannot use makeup for physiological reasons and those who do not want to wear makeup at all.

Waria and Marriage in Malay Muslim Society in Indonesia

Novidayanti Novidayanti (A.)

DOI: 10.5507/ff.25.24465821.04


Islam and Malay customs and traditions (Adat Melayu) are significant components of Malay society in Indonesia, as “Malayness has widely been equated with Islam” (Long 2013, 143). The intertwining discourses of Islam and Adat Melayu are expressed through the society’s philosophy of life, i.e., customs are based on shari’a, and shari’a is based on the Holy Quran. Although there is a premise that the local society is ideally committed to living in harmony with minority groups and maintaining good mutual relationships with male-to-female transgender individuals, or “waria,” the discourse of transgenderism and sexuality in Jambi remains at the bottom of public discussions, especially in the context of Islam and Adat. “Incommensurability between religion and desire” (Boellstorff 2005, 575) exaggerates the position of waria in society when their sexual orientation is brought into public discussion. This chapter examines the legal institution of heterosexual marriage from the perspective of waria in Malay Muslim society in Jambi. It is based on field observations and in-depth interviews with waria interlocutors. The aim is to explore how waria articulate this form of relationship with the opposite sex while engaging in same-sex relationships.

Intersectionality in Japanese Schools: The Experiences and Struggles of LGBTQ+ JET Teachers in Rural Japan

Kazuyoshi Kawasaka (A.), Ami Kobayashi (A.)

DOI: 10.5507/ff.25.24465821.05


The Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme started in 1987 to promote grass-roots international exchanges and has accepted thousands of college graduates from overseas every year. For investigating LGBTQ+ JET teachers’ experience in rural communities, this chapter will apply the concept of intersectionality. By doing so, we aim to shed light on minority groups that have hitherto been invisible in previous research. By applying the concept of intersectionality, we will explore the narratives of LGBTQ+ JET teachers and analyze intersectional experiences caused by a) nationality and working conditions; b) race, gender, and sexuality; and c) regional differences. This chapter presents how race, alongside the characteristics of Japanese rural areas, interacts with their sexualities and gender expressions, shaping their experiences and human relationships.

“Queering Misogyny” in the Context of Marriage Equality: A Proposed Approach to Understanding and Resisting Necropolitics and Epistemic Violence against Women and LGBTQINA+ Persons in Thailand

Verita Sriratana (A.)

DOI: 10.5507/ff.25.24465821.06


Thailand is not the “queer h(e)aven” imagined by many. Under Prayut Chan-ocha's regime, LGBTQINA+ rights activists were arrested for participating in peaceful protests under the Emergency Decree imposed on March 26, 2020, which was extended nineteen times until October 1, 2022. The 2021 Constitutional Court ruling against marriage equality reveals that misogyny is the backbone of discrimination, necropolitics, and epistemic violence against women and LGBTQINA+ persons. A queer feminist/feminist queer framework, this research contends, can demonstrate how misogyny is transposed to the realm of anti-LGBTQINA+ discourses. At the time when this chapter was revised (between August 2023 and March 2024), the parliament elected Srettha Thavisin of the Pheu Thai party as Thailand’s 30th Prime Minister, ending Prayut’s regime and three months of political deadlock where the Move Forward Party’s Prime Minister candidate was blocked by the junta-appointed senate. In December 2023, four draft bills on same-sex marriage were passed in their first reading, leading to the formation of a committee to merge and consolidate the four bills into one for further debate and votes during the year 2024. The parliament’s recent rejection of the Act on Gender Recognition, Title, and Protection of Gender Diversity, proposed by the Move Forward Party, can be seen as a setback to Thailand’s marriage equality prospects, which remain uncertain under the new coalition government formed with the junta allies.

Coming out as Everyday Life Activism: “Displaying” Gay Father Families in Taiwan

Jung Chen (A.)

DOI: 10.5507/ff.25.24465821.07


In 2019, Taiwan became the first country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage. LGBTQ+ reproductive rights are still, however, yet to come. The only feasible way for gay men to have biologically related children is to travel abroad for transnational third-party reproduction. Gay fathers have encountered multiple obstacles when embarking on the journey towards fatherhood, including unfriendly attitudes towards LGBTQ+ communities and misunderstandings concerning queer families. This chapter explores how gay fathers in Taiwan have navigated their coming-out strategies and made sense of their actions as “implicit activism.” The data came from in-depth interviews with 53 gay fathers and fathers-to-be, and participant observation. This study has two contributions. Firstly, it elucidates why and how gay fathers have been more willing to reveal their queer identity to families, compared to gay men without children, and delineates their coming-out experiences and strategies. Secondly, this study argues that the practices of “displaying gay-father families” in everyday life can be understood as activism that facilitates the visibility of gay-father families. This chapter examines gay fathers’ lived experiences from a non-Western perspective and re-conceptualizes the meaning of “coming out” in the Taiwan context through the approaches of “family display” and “everyday life activism.”

Nursery Rhymes, Rituals, and Cultural Trauma: A Connotation of the “Chair Maiden” in Taiwan

Yu-Yin Hsu (A.), Kuan-Wei Wu (A.)

DOI: 10.5507/ff.25.24465821.08


The purpose of this study is to analyze the custom of Chair Maiden, a child psychic divination ritual, through local records collected by folklorists in Taiwan since the 1930s. We suggest that the origin of this custom was to deal with collective traumas from similar experiences, mainly through rituals of warning and healing. To achieve self-healing, those participants who invoked the spirit of Chair Maiden also brought their personal traumatic experiences and confusions into the ritual activity, seeking recognition and answers. In Taiwan’s rural towns, similar customs were practiced by young unmarried girls before the 1970s. There are five parts to the study. In the middle three parts, we conduct an inductive and qualitative analysis of the relevant rural stories, local nursery rhymes and ritual practices separately, using theories of cultural trauma. With a different attitude of resistance to power or abuse, the young participants were able to share their voices safely and have a friendly network for a reunion on certain days. Chair Maiden, not just a children’s game or a folk psychic divination activity, represents collective traumatic injuries and hegemonic resistance among younger generations to release social pressure.

Narrating Women’s Bodies and Violence: Testimonies of Sexual Violence Victims in Japan

Chiara Fusari (A.)

DOI: 10.5507/ff.25.24465821.09


Rape myths and sexism fuel victim-blaming tendencies and the stigma around sexual violence resulting in victims’ silence and shame. As demonstrated in recent years by the #MeToo movement, victims’ voices play an important role in spreading awareness about the reality of sexual violence and showing how widespread the problem is. This chapter investigates how victims’ stories and testimonies can contribute to challenging dominant narratives about sexual violence in contemporary Japan. What alternative narratives do they present and how can they be politically relevant to bring about change? To do so, an analysis of three case studies of women, who went public with their experience of sexual violence and became advocates and activists themselves, has been conducted. Analyzing the memoirs of the three women, this chapter shows how, by reclaiming their voices, victims not only can empower themselves, but also contribute to placing the issue on the public agenda.

Like Snow Like Mountain: Narrating Gender Violence in the Era of #MeToo Activism

Daniela Licandro (A.)

DOI: 10.5507/ff.25.24465821.10

Like Snow Like Mountain (2022) is a short story collection by the emerging Chinese woman writer Zhang Tianyi (1984–). The collection explores women’s embodied experiences of pain, physical and emotional, paying special attention to harassment and violence. In the era of #MeToo movements, Like Snow Like Mountain emerges as both a testimony of women’s suffering and a critical intervention into discourses and practices of gender violence in post-socialist, neoliberal China. Drawing on gender theories, feminist approaches, and literary studies, this chapter interrogates the collection’s contribution to understandings of gender violence and the relationship between women, violence, and agency in the backdrop of #MeToo activism. The analysis of representations of sexual harassment and the figure of the battered woman shows how Zhang’s fiction destabilizes gendered dichotomies such as public/private, passivity/agency or victim/perpetrator, underscoring the intersection of gender-based violence and other forms of inequality formed along gender, sexual, age, class, and racial lines.

Becoming-Simulacra: Textualizing Murderous Women in Heisei Japan (1989–2019)

Fengyuan Zhen (A.)

DOI: 10.5507/ff.25.24465821.11


During the Heisei era in Japan (1989–2019), depictions of murderous women became widespread in literature and media. Despite being a minor percentage of reported crimes, murders committed by women, exemplified by Kijima Kanae’s case, gained significant media attention and inspired numerous fictional and non-fictional works. Influenced by Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulation and simulacra, this study views media-constructed images of murderous women in the Heisei era as simulacra detached from accessible reality. Analyzing selected writings based on Kijima’s crimes, the chapter argues that instead of revealing the truth of the crimes or the “essence” of female criminality, these texts generate a hyperreality devoid of “truth.” The “truth” is utilized by Heisei authors as perspectival interpretations to engage with discourses surrounding gender and sexuality, the monstrous potential of human beings, and social issues, such as consumer culture, the expanding cyberspace, and the shift in the gender division of labor, which concerned the general public in Japan during the Heisei era.

A Lady’s Reckoning: Torture, Eroticism, and Salvat ion in the Noh Play Shikimi Tengu

Dunja Jelesijevic (A.)

DOI: 10.5507/ff.25.24465821.12


The Noh play Shikimi tengu, written at the time of shifting conventions in Noh playwriting, focuses on the karmic retribution of the infamous Genji monogatari antagonist Lady Rokujō. Her suffering and potential redemption is framed by the motif of tengu—humanoid-avian creatures, variedly likened to goblins, monsters, or demons—mirroring narratives of Buddhist masters tested on their understanding of the doctrine or punished for their conceit. The following essay explores how these two narratives (one implicit, one explicit) converge in the play and create a unique discursive schema to address the religious and social underpinnings of the play in unexpected ways, complicating the notions of Buddhist salvation within the Noh. Namely, while exposing (and punishing) Rokujō’s female sensuality and corporeality is supposed to bring about rejection of the material and corporeal desire, it seems to elicit a voyeuristic pleasure at the punishment that she gets. In this reading, Shikimi tengu ultimately challenges and subverts both the exercised Noh’s theatrical conventions and the salvific project of its ritual and textual foundations.

The Body as Lens and Testimony: The Bodily Experience and Cultural Identity in the Song Stories of Traveling to Foreign Lands (960–1279 CE)

Li-wen Wang (A.)

DOI: 10.5507/ff.25.24465821.13


This paper focuses on “Gao Yan,” a classical short story describing an eventful foreign journey in the Song period, to explore how the body displays information about foreign lands and the potential socio-cultural factors that form such bodily perceptions. First, the body is a lens for perceiving the “abnormal” environment through various sensory impressions, including climate, foreigners’ body odor, and observation of customs. Second, the body functions as a testimony of suffering by displaying physiological changes such as scars, injuries, and complexion. Third, the growing consciousness of the Central Lands in the Song period is key to shaping these corporal experiences; this implies a set of cultural concepts and resonates with the prevalent anxiety regarding the Sino-barbarian dichotomy, stressing the Central Lands’ moral-cultural superiority. Apart from seeking novelty, bodily experiences play an essential role in fictional narratives which transform the strange world into an understandable order based on Confucian orthodoxy.

Archaeology and Onmyōdō: Human-Shaped Ritual Objects Associated with Purification Rites and Curses

Marianna Lázár (A.)

DOI: 10.5507/ff.25.24465821.14


This chapter examines human-shaped effigies (hitogata) and a unique type of ritual pottery characterized by human faces (jinmen bokusho doki) from ancient Japan in the context of Onmyōdō, a tradition of blending elements from Daoism, esoteric Buddhism, and Shintō. Hitogata were used in purification and exorcism rituals by ritualists, acting as symbolic surrogates to absorb and remove defilements, thus restoring harmony. Based on specific archaeological finds, historical records, classical literature, and secondary sources, the study explores their origin, characteristics, and function in both state and private rituals. Additionally, jinmen doki are examined for their role in roadside rituals and spirit pacification, connecting the living with the spiritual realm. The research investigates their iconography, distribution, and ritual use, reflecting continental cosmological beliefs and Onmyōdō practices. By exploring the similarities and differences between these objects, the paper demonstrates their significance in ancient ritual practices, many of which were conducted by onmyōji practitioners.

The Shiny Body of the Good Soldier: Identity and the Corporeal in Shen Jingdong’s Art

Giorgio Strafella (A.)

DOI: 10.5507/ff.25.24465821.15

Like several other young Chinese artists between the mid-1980s and the early 2000s, Shen Jingdong experimented with conceptual and performance art before achieving critical and commercial success with paintings and sculptures. In Shen’s paintings since the early 2000s, the bodies of people and animals turn into shiny, smooth, and bright-colored “characters” inhabiting empty spaces. In recent portraits by Shen, the smooth surface of these bodies and faces is often damaged by wounds and violence – both represented in painting and physically enacted on the canvas. This chapter examines Shen Jingdong’s early conceptual and performance works in relation to the origins and transformations of his portrait paintings. Drawing also on Sinophone art criticism, intellectual history, and interviews with the artist in his studio, this chapter argues that Shen’s early conceptual and performance art not only prefigured the language and iconography of his portraits, but also introduced two key themes that underpin them, i.e., the transmutation of the body and the issue of personal identity. As a result, the fragile and increasingly tortured bodies of Shen’s characters come to represent extensions and evocations of the artist’s avant-gardist experimentation. This study contributes in this way to our understanding of Shen’s art while shedding light on the legacy of post-Mao avant-gardist trends in contemporary Chinese art.

Yang Fudong: In Search of the Lost Ying/Yang Balance

Christine Vial Kayser (A.)

DOI: 10.5507/ff.25.24465821.16


The photographs, videos, and installations of the famous Chinese artist Yang Fudong (杨福东, b. 1971) combine a mastery of light and grain that bears a strong Western influence with a sense of melancholia for the Chinese past. These images have been interpreted as a reaction to the consumerism, individualism, and materialism that have overtaken Chinese culture since the 1990s, when Yang started his career. Critics suggest that the artist is looking for an alternative model based on inner harmony and withdrawal from the world, inspired by the poetic spirit of the literati. Despite the importance and special status of women in his art, his work has been approached as ungendered. This chapter argues that Yang’s acknowledged taste for Chinese literati tradition takes onboard an allegiance to the modern Confucian doctrine of the 1990s, in which each gender has a specific social role. I posit that his representation of beautiful women attempts to address the crisis of masculinity in contemporary China, which emerged at a time when the economic power of women was growing, and an affirmative feminist movement was on the rise. I also acknowledge that the prevalence of white and its association with water, snow, and silence in some of the series is a possible indication that the feminine is a way to retrieve a Yin/Yang balance, a Daoist concept, also present in New Confucianism. I attempt to trace the intellectual and spiritual genealogy of this apparent contradiction throughout this essay.

Stylish and Bold: A Critical Analysis of the Trope of the Modern Girl in Indian Cinema in the Late Colonial Period

Sutanuka Banerjee (A.), Lipika Kankaria (A.)

DOI: 10.5507/ff.25.24465821.17


This chapter examines the distinct trope of the Modern Girl, which became apparent in Indian cinema in the early twentieth century, taking into account the discursive construction of feminine modernity from the interwar period to the end of colonial rule. The Modern Girl, who became a heuristic device and represented the desires and anxieties of an emergent modernity on screen, had transnational connections, thus opening an interesting area of research that unravels the intersection of capitalism, consumerism, and individual agency as evidenced by global trends and sartorial representations of the sitaras (“stars”). The chapter relies on films, documentaries, archival resources, and secondary material sources to explore the relevance of gender and modernity in the Indian context. It includes the discourse analysis of such representations to highlight a complex web of spatial, cultural, and temporal mediations.

Labor, Marginalization, Taiwanization: Mapping the Embodiment of the Being-Woman in Post-Martial Taiwan Through Wu Mali’s “Stories of Women from Hsin-Chuang”

Roberto Riccardo Alvau (A.)

DOI: 10.5507/ff.25.24465821.18


This paper examines Wu Mali’s (吳瑪悧) “Stories of Women from Hsin-Chuang” (新莊女人的故事) art project within the socio-political framework of Taiwan during the so-called “Taiwanization” (本土化) period during the 1990s. Starting from Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, the analysis explores how Wu foregrounds the embodied experiences of marginalized women workers in Hsin-Chuang, a key-textile industry hub near Taipei City. By centering the narratives of these women, the project challenges traditional gender norms and exposes the exploitative labor conditions as well as critiques the gendered social structures and systemic inequalities faced by these workers during “Taiwanization.” It is a nuanced project which addresses feminism in post-martial Taiwan, as well as intersects the issue of capitalism as a colonizing practice, and as an exploitative system of Taiwanese identity. All these elements converge, simultaneously, to depict a fragmented Taiwan which, precisely in the fracture of its rupture, finds the threads for its healing.