Rachel Lee On Margaret Cho

Rachel C. Lee's 2004 essay on Margaret Cho's I'm the One that I Want one-woman show, memoir, and film brings up several issues significant to racial/cultural criticism: the raced and gendered and sexualized body in space, racial and bodily abjection (à la Kristeva), affect and politicized knowledge, transnational subjectivity and the immigrant, (diva) citizenship, camp, queerness, and the role of disavowal and pleasure in "whiteness." Analyzing the formal characteristics (e.g. bending at the waist in the bow) and historical/racial (though maybe not always intended) citations of Margaret Cho's stand-up comedy and writing, she argues that Cho critiques the liberal naïveté of color-blindness and "white civility" in American society through a performance style that can't be pigeon-holed as either straight diva (of color) pedagogy or (white) queer camp. Not only does she present us with superb close-reading of Cho's performance, but she also provides an interesting narrative of Cho's early childhood and professional experiences (which she does by comparing Cho's memoir with what made it into the show and what didn't). The essay ultimately considers the implications of Cho's work on Asian American women's sexuality and political and personal belonging, as raced and hypersexualized beings.*

Lee's scholarly works are always, always so chock-full of ideas and terms that they're difficult to sum up. This particular essay, titled "'Where's My Parade?': Margaret Cho and the Asian American Body in Space" (The Drama Review 48.2 [Summer 2004]: 108-132), is a brilliantly argued piece that speaks to cultural studies (particularly pop culture studies), Asian American and ethnic studies, American studies, whiteness studies, gender and women's studies, sexuality studies, performance studies, and literary studies. Methodologically, it moves from spatial theory to psychoanalytical theory to critical race theory (i.e. racial formation) to performance theory to postcolonial theory and back and forth, all adding up to a materialist feminist critique that demonstrates the theoretical and political usefulness of relationality (perhaps à la Barthes's "intertextuality" or maybe even Deleuze and Guattari's "rhizome"). The versatility of her mind sometimes boggles mine, but she also awes and inspires me. The writing is occasionally difficult to penetrate, but it is worth the trouble, I assure you. She has a knack for elegant turns of phrase, clarifying while not simplifying the most complicated and thorny ideas. In particular, I found most provocative and new her argument about the relationship between racialization and "fat," produced by what she calls American nativist "fantasies of scarcity" in the national scene (see excerpt below).

Here are some (long) excerpts to tell you what's going on in the essay (it isn't easy to pick out excerpts because Lee doesn't write in convenient sound-bites):

• "Cho theatricalizes white civility--precisely what passes for whiteness everyday--by Orientalizing it, exaggerating the colored person's response toward such civility, and finally holding that civility suspect" (108).
• "I will be taking [the] repositioning of the body as a starting point to inquire how the Asian American performer, Margaret Cho, intervenes in public space through the stand-up comedy concert and how an intense public scrutiny of this performer's body affects her own efforts to seize public space through her stagecraft and writing. Here, I am interested in the affective dimensions of stand-up comedy and its suggestive implications for the public sphere practiced through entertainment--that is, how the public rituals that make one weep, laugh, rage, or shiver in fear enact encounters that place one within the sensate body" (109).
• "The fetish actively disavows the loss of what it substitutes for: it both holds erect that loss and staves it off. Stand-up employs an identical mechanism, holding up and staving off not loss, but return (presumably of something unwanted). I would note that the vertical axis is often overlooked in spatial analysis. [Lee is analyzing here the meaning of "stand-up" in "stand-up comedy."] This vertical movement is, in fact, not only how stand-up operates but a principal architecture that Cho maps as the bourgeois home" (113).
• "Through the explicit conveyance of historical traces [in Cho's memoir] such as her father's deportation [from the U.S.], Cho delivers in her act a lesson on transnational subjectivity: the formation of the immigrant, whose historical situation brings to crisis the contradictions between America's political and economic imperatives [i.e. equality for all versus capitalist accumulation]. Through such lessons delivered, Cho adopts a practice that Lauren Berlant calls 'diva-citizenship,' whereby subordinated persons perform an act of national pedagogy. Berlant uses Anita Hill's testimony before Congress as exemplary of diva citizenship, in which 'a member of a stigmatized population testifies reluctantly to a hostile public the muted and anxious history of her imperiled citizenship,' thereby implicitly challenging that public 'to change the social and institutional practices of citizenship to which they currently consent.' [...] The pedagogical function of these diva enactments distinguish them from the mere stylizations of camp, which Susan Sontag famously defined as refraining from a moralizing or adjudicating function--as 'wholly aesthetic.'
  [...]
  "Precisely through a practice that cannot be decided ultimately as either fully pedagogic or fully aesthetic, Cho discoordinates (she queerly mixes and matches) the colors of both straight diva citizenship and white queer camp" (114-115).
• "By putting Karl Lagerfeld [a famous gay fashion designer] preposterously in jail [in her joke], Cho dramatizes what happens legally through anti-sodomy laws, and makes the law ludicrous for its criminalizing of a minority identity, that of the homosexual. Moreover, her 'faggot' in jail foreshadows her own imprisonment in the family's basement, with Cho making explicit the cross-identification between her self and the profanity: 'fag.' She mimics [Lagerfeld]: 'I am fanning the flames of my faggotry,' but then qualifies her terminology: 'I love the word faggot, because it describes my kind of guy. I (beat) am a fag hag. Fag hags (beat) are the backbone of the gay community.' Her prison shtick establishes another claim of interdependence: fags and fag hags are the backbone of the straight community. Their abasement, the punishment and sequestering of these subjectivities, elevates heteronormativity to the parlor" (116-117).
• "In a quintessential enactment of national pedagogy, a concealed history is returned to the spectators, a history in which they already have taken part. In Americans' eager consumption of the television series Kung Fu [which starred not a Chinese actor but a white actor, David Carradine, in yellowface], Cho sees not the fostering of cross-cultural connection as much as the policing of borders within the nation, a strategy of keeping immigrant Asians comfortably distant (alien) from the adulation of mainstream audiences. The abject, here, does not narrowly bespeak the position of the Asian--as one might surmise--but refers as well to the status of knowledge regarding whiteness's pleasure in yellowface. [... The larger joke is] the continual efforts to expunge or make alien from U.S. liberal culture the segregation tactics still operative in the industry" (117-118).
• "By calling attention to yellowface, Cho reminds her audience both of segregation in casting and the fantasy-work regarding firm boundaries between self and other, subject and abject, white and yellow that are upheld by racial stereotyping. Time and again, members of the Hollywood infrastructure propose to Cho that her Asianness is, in fact, alienable--something she can excise and excrete, like bodily waste.
  [...]
  "In her memoir, Cho specifies the 'Asian thing' as the martial arts mystique most visibly performed by non-Asians, namely Steven Seagal. What 'puts people off' [...] is not the Asian as 'gimmick'--in fact, audiences love it when Steven Seagal or for that matter Keanu Reeves plays the 'instant' martial artist, with Asian moves virtually incorporated by way of micro-chip. Rather, the audience recoils from the gaze reversed: the Asian witness who watches and publicizes the audience's pleasure in this gimmick. I will call this pleasure 'whiteness'--the security of non-self-consciousness that seems like an innocence or ground state but which is, in fact, a back-formation garnered from the projection of difference (or lack) outward, onto a body other than the self. This pleasure proceeds not just from taking in (visually surveying) the other, but from the contrastive comfort of one's own invisibility, a cultivated obliviousness to one's own corpse [i.e., abjection] and its racial marking (as well as its gender, fatness, sexuality, nationality and so forth). The Asian thing, in this respect, might be said to be a 'turn on'--providing the white patron with the feeling of a salacious disengagement, a blind-eye to how satisfaction is accomplished by the Oriental bent low [as in a bow]. Cho makes visible this whiteness as something less than innocence, as pornographic solicitation, and that is what 'puts people off'" (118).
• "In her flaccid imitation of martial arts moves, Cho also deliberately performs badly the 'live action' Asian body on display for the pleasure of whites. This live body has historical precedents, for instance, in the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis where scantily clad Igorot [Filipino!] tribals displayed their fierceness for imperial onlookers. By performatively citing this history of ethnographic display, Cho spars with her manager's and, more broadly speaking, the American public's willed forgetfulness of the U.S.'s own history of imperial conquest and subjugation. That is, [her manager] suggests that Americans are innocently color-blind, preferring their entertainment devoid of racial specificity. Cho fires back that, on the contrary, America's entertainment spheres, from world's fairs to television to film, have delighted in the display, abasement, and reification of the live Asian body.
  
  "If the pleasure of whiteness relies in part on the rendering of Asianness both low and alienable--as something that even the Korean American woman must execrate--Cho's performance troubles whiteness by dramatizing the ill effects of this execution" (117-118).
• "Particularly in Cho's account of the network's struggle with her weight [during her short-lived mainstream sitcom, All-American Girl], one sees the effects of a covert demand that Cho make her Asianness a 'thing' [to be excreted from her body]. The producer, Gail, tells Cho, 'The network is concerned with the fullness of your face. They think you're really overweight. [...]'
  [...]
  "Though Cho never makes [the] connections explicit, the charge of her wide Korean face taking up too much space (on-screen) conjures up images of scarcity in the service of xenophobia. Too many hungry foreigner (immigrants) will crowd out national space, and there won't be enough room. Thus, at the same time that famished North Korean bodies are amply photographed and broadcast in North America, Cho is made to starve herself to fit the screen. 'Fat' only names the body scapegoated by those with fantasies of scarcity. I say fantasy of scarcity to identify the context in which Cho is produced as 'fat': a panicked American imaginary creates a notion of Korean excess out of extreme Korean hunger, due to a skewed sense of the scarce staging ground of America.
  [...]
  "After construing her as 'overweight,' the network executives implemented a Taylorized system--an assembly line of trainer, dietician, doctor, and food delivery person--to produce ostensibly a slimmed-down body. Yet, more significantly, the network producers incited a new, and quintessentially Hollywood, category of the abject, fat: flesh that is now coded as waste, either to be lifted or starved away. Impossibly, Cho's body, itself, becomes a terrain of segregation" (119-120).
• "A sitcom featuring straight white male comic, Drew Carey, a former military man with a buzz cut that accentuates his ample form, displaces All-American Girl. Cho tells her audience, '(My) show was canceled and replaced by Drew Carey, because he's so skinny (beat). I actually love Drew Carey but I can't watch his show, because they have all of our old furniture.' Cho directs her political anger not toward the particular white body, Drew Carey, whom she admires, but toward the structure of whiteness that racializes the Asian American female (but not white male) body as too 'fat.' Whiteness emerges as a corporeality costumed--its hiddenness is its stage presence" (122).
• "When Cho concludes her show by recalling her life with her new pooch, we see how she makes the avoidance of race ludicrous:

  I stopped drinking and I got better. And as I got better, my dog got better. He's the greatest and we walk everywhere together. And people talk to you a lot more if you have a dog. Because I was walking the dog, and this homeless guy jumped out and said, "That dawg gonna wind up in a pot o' rice." (Long beat, as Cho mugs an Emily Post-like shock at the impropriety.) And he probably wouldn't have said that if I was by myself.

  "This final joke turns on the pathetic nature of liberal ignorance--its pretense of naïveté. The disavowal of race--the return to color-blindness [in Part 3 of the show] after the moment of racial awareness [in Part 2]--is only possible for 'infantile' (or inebriated) spectators, those so outside the boundaries of intelligence and sobriety (or mature, noninnocent knowledge) that they cannot 'get' the joke. Racial oppression slyly punctuates this final section of the show, performed in/as the avoidance of race" (124).
• "Cho makes monstrous [the] profligate currency in Asian American female flesh, even as she insists that a counter-investment in prudishness (in the clamping down of 'the compulsory order of sex/gender/desire') is not the answer. She wonders, in effect, where might be the space of political belonging in which to perform the full citizenship of the Asian American woman" (124-125).
• "Through the sensate body and its leakiness--its inadequate partitioning according to geopolitical, gendered, or domestic(ating) principles of space--Cho both stages her own ambiguous body and comments on the political compulsion to disavow the erotics and slippage of the body in order to speak publicly, rationally, and abstractly. In essence, Cho returns this fully sensate body to the audience, rendering political knowledge through affect, critiquing the boundaries that set apart historical knowledge from bodily pleasure, and mocking not just the alienation of racially and sexually marked subjects from the proper (civilized) representational field, but also the mechanism of this alienation itself" (125-126).

* After reading the essay, I wish I'd seen the filmed version of her I'm the One that I Want show. It sounds hilarious and amazing. I think I'll try to see it sometime in the near future.