Editor's Letter

Dear Readers,

You can't imagine how excited we are to share this new issue with you. After 6 months of review and revamp, the e-newsletter has metamorphosed to "Draft" – an e-magazine that aspires to publish intriguing articles, with more depth, breadth and thematic focus. Draft will publish two issues every year in June and December, in both English and Chinese.

The theme of this issue is "Body x Space", and the physical body in

particular is our subject of interest. What does the body mean to us? How has it been conceptualised historically? And how has it been represented? In this issue, you will find diverse discussions on these topics as each of our writers takes on a wonderfully distinctive perspective and approach on the subject matter. In Feature, Ng Yi-Sheng takes us on a stroll through the pages of English poetry in Singapore, exploring the different images of body in Singapore letters. In Columns, Low Zu Boon, Vanessa Ho and Chris Yeo each extends the contemplation on body in the respective fields of film, gender studies and philosophy, offering myriad perspectives on conceptualising body.

In Theatre A-B-C, Nelson Chia introduces the Suzuki Method of Actor Training and its relationship with the body. Last but not least, in our new segment "Open Call", Suriyani analyses the bodies in three of Li Xie's theatre works. Open Call welcomes any literary and/or visual works relating to the theme of the issue, so if you want to write to us, simply email draft@dramabox.org and talk to us!

And as if we don't already have enough reasons to grin from ear to ear – we are delighted to have our friend, Lin Weidong, who can make absolutely everything beautiful through his lens, to take photographs for the ezine. We hope

that the visual would intrigue you just as much as the text.

Till December!

Yours,

Kate, Wang Fang
Co-editor

Listen: I'm the wrong author for this essay. Drama Box asked for an article about the body in Singapore literature, but I can't promise anything resembling an authoritative, objective summation of the matter.

I'm not an academic, you see. Rather, I'm an active member of the literary community, opinions prejudiced by friendships and feuds with fellow poets, playwrights and publishers. Furthermore, I'm from a generation of almost exclusively Anglophone Singaporeans. I've heard about the use of the body in the Chinese-language essays and fictions of Quah Sy Ren, Yeng Pway Ngon and Lee Chee Keng, but I haven't the skills to read them untranslated. I can only speak of the relatively newer tradition of Singapore literature in English.

Given these facts, why did I agree to the commission? The answer is simple. This is a subject that fascinates me: I myself

am a writer who delights in the body in all its forms: as a vehicle of sensuous metaphor, as a subject for thematic exploration, as an instrument for performance in theatre and spoken word.

In addition, I'm a reader. I've spent over half my life consuming the literary output of other Singaporean writers. This is an opportunity to pause for a while, gather my library together, and try to make sense of it all.

I. The Body Wants

Perhaps I should begin with my own career. As a gay male writer, I'm occasionally pigeonholed because of my sexuality. I don't resent this. Quite the contrary – I've even tried to build this label into a movement, organising an annual queer literary evening called ContraDiction, co-editing an anthology titled GASPP: a Gay Anthology of Singapore Poetry and Prose (2010). That volume includes acclaimed writers like Johann S. Lee, Ovidia Yu,

Cyril Wong, Jason Wee, and the unapologetically explicit Koh Jee Leong:


I delight in the erotics of writing like this. It provokes visceral reactions in readers,

ranging from arousal to disgust. It shatters social taboos and stereotypes of Singaporeans as sexless, disempowered office drones. And it spits in the fact of governmental dictates that the body should be a locus of communitarian productivity, interpreting it instead as a locus for individualistic desire.

Nor do queer writers have a monopoly on erotic literature in Singapore. You'll find male-female sexuality described with satisfying panache in Vinita Ramani Mohan's novella Parvathi Dreams About His Sex (2012), Huzir Sulaiman's monodrama The Weight of Silk on Skin (perf. 2010), Pooja Nansi's poetry collection Stiletto Scars (2007) and Richard Lord's (ed.) The Best of Singapore Erotica (2006).

The body's erotics have also afforded writers with a rich resource for metaphor. This is evident in Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral (perf. 1995), an ensemble performance work by the intercultural playwright-director Kuo Pao

Kun. One celebrated scene imagines a disturbingly paedophilic method of castration that parallels the destructiveness of Singapore's nanny state:

Body writing is not always political, but it tends towards such themes. To highlight the body's ecstasy is to praise freedom; to illustrate its agony is to decry oppression. Grown mainstream in Singapore writing, these devices still retain the potential to shock, to inspire, to transgress.

II. The Body Hides

But as you probably know, Singapore literature wasn't always a repository for libido. Just look at the work of our "nation-building" poets: pioneering men and women of letters like Edwin Thumboo, Arthur Yap, Robert Yeo, Lee Tzu Pheng and Kirpal Singh.

These voices, emerging in the 1950s, '60s and '70s. They weren't the first Singaporeans to write in English, but they were among the first to do so with a nationalistic intent, each trying to craft a distinctly Singaporean voice from the colonial tongue. They held sway not only as writers but also as editors, publishers, academic researchers and instructors of a nascent literary movement. (All of them were, at some point or another, professors in the NUS English Department – a symptom of the elitist, exclusive positions of the English language and a writing career then.)

The oeuvre of the nation-building poets is often considered the foundation of

Singapore literature in English. So it's curious how bereft it is of corporeal references. The body appears fleetingly, almost incidentally, in their poems, often in the form of dead metaphors amid a sea of abstract nouns:


For context, it's worth considering the politics of English literature instruction: how in the colonial era, Dickens and Austen were taught as part of a course of indoctrination. Young, upwardly mobile natives of the Empire were

primed to absorb British values, to appreciate the sophistication and superiority of British culture over their own.

As freshly independent, decolonised intellectuals, Thumboo and his contemporaries could have chosen to rebel against the prim, structured literary style of their British forebears. And indeed, there were experimental forays in voice and form, as can be seen in Arthur Yap's attempts to poeticise Singlish in "2 mothers in a h d b playground" and Kirpal Singh's deceptively artless "They Say".

When it came to the body, however, they were conservative. They did not revel in earthy, carnal imagery, as did other postcolonial poets like Aimé Césaire of French Polynesia and Okot p'Bitek of Uganda, whose Notebook of a Return to the Native Land and Song of Lawino respectively entranced the literary world on their publication.

Did Singapore's writers restrain

themselves on grounds of personal taste? Or were they, on some level, influenced by the government's moral crusade against "yellow culture" – the nominally Western-imported decadence that had resulted in Singapore becoming a haven for drugs, prostitution, rock-'n'-roll and other forms of fleshly pleasure? Images of lust, fleshly pleasure and pain, might have made this new literature appear less "civilised" in the eyes of both local and foreign institutions. Bodies belonged in the streets – not on the shelves of the NUS Library.

III. The Body Counts

There were, however, some pioneer writers who dwelt on the body's imagery. One early example would be Lloyd Fernando, best known for his novel Scorpion Orchid (1976). Set in 1950s Singapore, the story follows the lives of four young university men of different races, all passionately involved in a struggle for a workable multicultural democracy – and more than one of them

in love with the same lower-class woman.

Here there is sex, though represented discreetly; here there are sensuously detailed descriptions of the mass of humanity present in the streets of pre-independent Singapore:

Unlike poetry, the genres of fiction and drama almost necessarily involve bodies – their narratives are, after all, populated by characters, and are propelled forward by characters' desires.

Thus, when our fiction and drama scenes exploded in the 1980s and '90s, there was no shortage of bodies on show. There were the oppressed bodies of working class men and women in Catherine Lim's short story collections Little Ironies (1978) and Suchen Christine Lim's Rice Bowl (1984). There were the comedic bodies of fumbling adolescents in Michael Chiang's play Army Daze (perf. 1987) and Adrian Tan's teen novels The Teenage Textbook (1988) and The Teenage Workbook (1989). There were the contested bodies of queer people, as in Russell Heng's transgender monodrama Lest the Demons Get to Me (perf. 1989) and Johann S. Lee's gay novel Peculiar Chris (1992).

These disaparate representations of the body shared a common purpose. They

documented Singapore's human geography: its diversity, its frequent deviance from official stereotype. They held up a mirror to a newly awakened audience of readers that was hungry for an image itself.

They were, in a sense, ethnographies. But they were also testimonies: personal testaments that the traumas and travails of various communities in Singapore actually existed.

These trends weren't absent in the world of poetry. The nation-builders, too, created biographical sketches of citizenry in verse with some physical detail, as in the case of Edwin Thumboo's "Bitter Ballad" and Robert Yeo's "Boys in Jungle Green". Yet it was only the generation that followed them that would begin to examine the body as a site for autobiographical confession.

Witness the work of Leong Liew Geok. As a baby boomer and an NUS English professor, she was a contemporary of the nation-builders in age and career.

But as a comparative latecomer to the literary scene, she exhibits the voice of a new generation of poets, as seen here when she describes a vist to the gynecologist:

There's a strong political subtext present here, with the natural fertility of a woman's anatomy contrasting with the cold order of pragmatic society, complete with a reminder of the government's old birth control campaigns. But this is not a protest poem. This is, first and foremost, a notation of what the female body experiences in Singapore today. The body's voice simply wants to be heard; it demands to be counted.

IV. The Body Embodies

But Singaporean bodies cannot remain

simply bodies. As stated before, the body's potential for metaphor is too great to go untapped – and in a newly independent, culturally insecure nation like our own, one particular metaphor inevitably prevails.

Over and over again, in our literature, we see the nation of Singapore itself mapped onto the body. At times, it is specific sections of our geography that are personified:

But more often it is the soul of Singapore that comes under scrutiny. For instance, in her satirical short story collection O Singapore (1989), Catherine Lim presents us with characters whose physiques embody the worst of our national culture.

In "The Malady and the Cure", the civil servant Sai Koh Phan is so repressed by government campaigns that his body becomes wracked by agonising knots of pain – a condition he can only treat by visiting Malaysia, where he spits and litters to his heart's content. In "Goonalaan's Beard", the opposition politician Goonalaan vows not to wash or shave his beard, prophesying that it will reveal the true nature of Singapore's citizenry. The resulting profusion of vermin, fighting and mating and fattening themselves amidst his discoloured hair, ends up ruining the country's vision of itself as a noble, upright society.

This dystopian vision of Singapore becomes more personalised still in the writing of Alfian Sa'at. In his iconic protest poem, "Singapore You Are Not My Country", the poet both harangues the nation and becomes the nation, bearing the patriotic marks of the flag on his face like the scars of torture:


In his play sex.violence.blood.gore (perf. 1999), he once again toys with the dualism of Singapore, which is both government and governed, which is the bodies of both abuser and abused. In the concluding scene, when the audience has supposedly perished, the soul of Singapore manifests itself in the form of a porn star named Annabel Lee:

a conflation of the names of gangbang legend Annabel Chong and founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew.

Annabel Lee's life parallels the story of Singapore as ruled by the PAP – born in 1965, growing from rags to riches, embracing international attention and modern technologies, ruthlessly destroying all competitors through lawsuits. Yet, in the wake of the online sex marathon which establishes her undying fame, she reveals a last, paradoxical confession: "Let it be known, my fellow Singaporean, that Annabel Lee is a virgin."

The corrupted body and the untouched body: these serve Alfian as touchstones to explain how Singapore has been spiritually tainted, yet retains a core of purity for anyone who chooses to reimagine her.

V. The Body Ascends

I began this essay with the intent to discuss Singapore literature in all its

forms, historic and current. But the truth is, the notion of our "national" literature has become very hazy of late.

Increased immigration and emigration have made it difficult to pin down the definition of a "Singaporean writer". Furthermore, many a writer chooses not to write about nationhood. The country now has the semblance of a literary canon, and a sizeable literary scene. There's consequently less pressure to use literature to answer questions of who we are as a nation, or to comment on the culture that surrounds us; hence more freedom to tackle the concerns of the individual.

So as a closing chapter for this article, I feel it's necessary to note how bodies are used not simply to explore politics, but also spirituality. The mortal physique is, on occasion, invoked as a conduit to higher, more mystical realms:

This is a trope that spans generations of local writers. In his novel Sayang (1983), Gopal Baratham depicts the sexuality and disease-ridden agonies of an ordinary family, later revealing them as allegories of the Holy Family of Christianity: Jesus, Mary and Joseph. In his book-length poem Satori Blues (2011), Cyril Wong discourses on the blissful oblivion of Zen Buddhist philosophy, amidst imagery of religious and political martyrs, one-night stands and orgies.

Strange, perhaps, that a thing as raunchy, as sensuous as the body

should be so linked in our literature with the spirit. But perhaps this is in the nature of the body itself: it provides us with an icon so universal and polysemous, at once so familiar and strange, that it must be used to speak of higher things.

In this essay, I would like to take this albeit casual image as an entry point to contemplate how the body (or bodies) are figurated within Ho's films. Through this, I shall attempt to illustrate a particular aesthetic framing, what I would like to term a somnambulistic veil, which he utilises to dissipate the territorial boundaries of bodies, and with it transcendent ideals of the self, hierarchical systems, and the distinction between subjects and objects, into a reality whereby there are only decoded flows and concatenations of bodies, both human and inhuman.

With the image Ho provided, one can imagine how it would have felt within such a situation. Far from the frantic rhythms of the city and high above the ground movements below, the sound of moving traffic being reduced from a reverberating echo into silence as the afternoon heat casts a shroud of lethargy over the body. Our pulse must have slowed down into a crawl within such a sensorium. On the outset, this conjures an image of a body

momentarily quietened, disabled, disconnected, having lost its sense of everyday consciousness. However, having experienced the highly affective atmosphere of HERE, as well as his other films such as EARTH (2009) and The Cloud of Unknowing (2011), there must be something stirring within this image that transcends the stasis it seems to evoke. To illustrate this intensity that seems to reveal itself with stillness, I would first like to take a momentary detour to discuss the potential of a musical refrain into (and with) silence as its absolute yet unattainable end point.

The German composer Jakob Ullmann once mentioned about his repertoire of quiet compositions, 'You cannot compete with the noise of the world. The less loud music is, the better I can hear it.' This also brings to mind one of the most significant events in modern composition, John Cage's performance of 4'33 – a score in three movements whereby the performer is instructed not to play any instrument. What we have is

a performer, sitting in silence, giving rise to the collective perception of ambient and incidental sounds.

When listening to music, we have come to anticipate the delivery of a constructed sound narrative, and this very anticipation becomes an imprint of what it means to listen to music, what we define as the experience of music. It becomes so internalised that silence, either incidental or plotted as a strategy, becomes an antithesis to the experience. A musical narrative makes our body feel lighter as it propels us through pathways plotted by the composer. On the contrary, silence weighs heavy on our consciousness as we perceive an impending stasis in the air.

This shroud of inactivity forces us to encounter the unconsciousness of music, the abstract idea of 'silence' underpinning all sounds, the compositional plane lying behind all musical strata that makes music possible in the first place. On the other

hand, the inevitability of sound and impossibility of silence as demonstrated by Cage also force us to become conscious of a reality that is being negated every time we get absorbed in musical narratives. We realise that there is no silence per se, but a perpetual web of sound of varying intensities. What we might conceive as silence is in reality, either a slowing down of sound, or the absence of what we might be expecting to hear, filled in with the presence of incidental sounds.

When we register an acute impending 'silence' amidst musical absorption, we first become aware of ourselves in the act of listening, the exact point of our body in space, the nervous tension of having to face the reality of our body as it is without distractions. In a concert hall, we turn to one another with a look of confusion. However, if we were able to transcend the violent shock of impending 'silence' and to simply sit and be immersed in it the same way we would with a musical note, a whole new world, a world that is always there,

opens up to our perception. Interiorly, we feel, perhaps we even hear, our heart beating, the sound of our blood coursing through our veins, the tingling on our skin in contact with the fluctuating air temperature around us. Exteriorly, we hear the breathing of the person beside us, the buzzing of electrical circuits, the movement of the air, and the multiplicity of events surrounding us at every moment. With the absence of musical structure, there is no hierarchical and exclusive organisation of sound, and we listen to them as the unfolding of immanent processes.

As the reverberations of these events affect us, we become aware of the commonality of what is inside and outside our body, just as this commonality then illuminates itself as a relationality of forces moving in, out and throughout body. Could we perceive our body as a sound event? We get an uncanny feeling that what was once exterior has entered our body as a certain force. As our consciousness registers and receives this force, it

ripples through the circuitry of our body, compelling us to move, to act. It triggers emotions that we cannot categorise. We feel that the composition of our body has been transformed in a molecular level.

We find that our skin, the boundary of our body, is merely an interface to the exterior that is bridged every time a sensation ripples through it. We realise that there is no clear inside or outside, that our body is made up of blocs of sensation. If we had any sense of self, it is one that is trembling and mutating.

In Ho's films, a refrain from the 'noise of the world' through the perception of an impending weight of silence becomes a means to reawaken the sensations of our immediate reality that are dormant due to the categorical stratification of our perception. He does so through a particular aesthetic framing – a somnambulistic veil, which casts its shroud in three layers: over the bodies which populate his films, the cinema screen and ultimately, with the cinema screen as an extension to our

perception during the act of viewing a film, our very material bodies as spectators.

Foremostly, it is a force. As with a gravitational pull, it is a sense of weight that makes us feel our bodily presence in its most primitive state. In certain shots within HERE, such as the foliage through the doctor's window and into the

darkness of an underground opening, the camera lingers longer than expected. The emptiness of the image coupled with the murmur of low-frequency sounds makes the spectator conscious of his/her act of perceiving the scene, as the rousing intensity extracts sensations lying dormant in our bodies. In EARTH, there is a scene in which a head, disembodied by a surrounding

shroud of darkness, throbs up and down. It is then revealed that a disembodied hand is pressed against the head, seemingly manipulating its movement. Its facial features, which seem to convey a restless sleep, becomes contorted and ultimately made redundant as it is reduced to that of a mere body part and its function in relation to the body, as propelled by the neck.

In Deleuze's book on the painter Francis Bacon, he makes a stark contrast between the face and head: "The face is a structured, spatial organisation that conceals the head, whereas the head is dependent on the body, even if it is the point of the body, its culmination. It is not that the head lacks spirit; but it is a spirit in bodily form, a corporeal and vital breath, an animal spirit." The face is the subject as a human 'I' that Bacon dismantles by deforming it with his brushing and rubbing techniques, allowing the head, as flesh, to emerge as sensation. The somnambulistic veil enacts a similar deformation of the face

through an opaque layer. Just as a veil obscures the wearer's facial features into a blurry lattice, a somnambulistic veil casts a shroud that dissolves the rigid contours of our body, the face of our constructed lives. In a long durational scene of foliage in HERE, the face of nature, the categorisation that we might give to such an image which sets it apart from our selves, first departs from the linear temporal movement of cinema as it fixates into a still pictorial surface. It then becomes cinema once again, not by re-enacting its temporality, nor re-objectifying nature as a particular representation, but by crafting gently throbbing micro-differentiations in texture and shading which potentiates cinema as a diffusion and circulation of chaotic movements which we experience as sensation.

The somnambulist harbours a different kind of consciousness. The ego is asleep and the somnambulist acts instinctively through the gaps of intellect and representation. The veil is somnambulistic so far as it obscures the

consciousness of the familiar, the fullness and clutter of the mundane, and enables us to instinctively experience the 'unconscious' of our mediated reality, the impossibility of silence, the perception of unfamiliar and uncanny molecular forces that constitute an immanence. While the veil silences the all too human form of consciousness and its impetus to stratify the world and contemplate it from a distance, it brings forth a more direct form of consciousness that plunges into into the pulsating forces of the world. It amplifies the stray sounds that populate the abstract notion of silence; it magnifies the events unfolding around us at seemingly ordinary moments.

In HERE, we embark on a refrain from the acceleration of the city into the meditative heaviness and slowed down atmosphere of an asylum. In contrast to the frantic pacing of the protagonist's car journey through the city which bookended the film are the mysterious spaces of the asylum where the physical and mental intensities of various

patients, coupled with the amplified microscopic fluxes of nature, make up a collage of bodies, expressed as aphorisms in the absence of a clear filmic narrative. We could very well attempt to unpack the meaning of each gesture through a semiotic lens, and contemplate what each character represents. The absence of any clear markers and narrative makes it entirely open to interpretation and we can construct layers of meaning onto the film. However, the film really starts to make 'sense' when we let go of our intentions to find meaning and receive its call to our senses and our nervous system; to let it affect our bodies just as we are made aware of its presence. Rather than fullness and audibility, we hear its affects through a whisper, all the more intense when close to our ears.

EARTH frames an array of bodies pinned down by the debris of an unknown catastrophe. The film starts off with the assemblage of corpse-like bodies and objects lying dormant. It then gradually reawakens, firstly in the air,

then with the slightest movements, isolated body parts, from the trembling of a finger to the opening of an eye. The sense of weight is prevalent as the bodies wrestle with a monolithic force pinning them down. The slightest gesture is made with immense vigour, just as the camera patiently moves around the bodies, capturing the slightest details and movements with precision. Neither alive nor dead, awake nor iasleep, the bodies move in a ghostly yet sentient manner as each molecular movement ripples through the assemblage, affecting each component. Soon the mass of bodies come alive as each body senses the presence of the other, not as separate entities, but within a haze, as an interconnected whole pulsating as a multiplicity of affects. The intensity of EARTH is made possible by the conjunction of the particular scharacteristics of painting with the temporal continuity of film. The scene begins as a static image, where the logic of film itself is affected by a weight pinning down its expected temporality. The movement of the camera then

guides the eyes through the scene, as we would move our haptic gaze around a large painting. As the bodies start to move, it is almost as if a painting has started to breathe and come alive before our eyes, just as an actual painting should when we let it affect us.

The Cloud of Unknowing takes places in a potent and familiar example of the stratification of community into compartmentalised spaces – the HDB block of flats. The murky cloud-like whiteness engulfing the whole screen at the start reveals the silhouette of a human figure, named as 'the spectator' in the ending credits. As he walks out of the HDB block and a camera zooms in to a close-up of his ear, we are brought into separate flats where we are introduced to various characters, each immersed in a particular activity that becomes more intensified by the second. 'The drummer' slowly builds up a heavy rhythm that induces the environmental sounds of thunder; 'the gardener' peers into her flat where vegetation, mud and water streams have

overgrown concrete; 'the arranger' moves around inspecting and rearranging an excessive array of suspended light bulbs as his breathing gets heavier; 'the listener' listens to song fragments and static emitting from her transistor radio and television as the camera pans through timeworn family photos and decomposing food and objects; 'the reader' is deep at work in his library which animates itself; and 'the dreamer' sleeps as his bed consumes him. In the meantime, a man named 'the cloud' walks into what looks like an underground sewage room, an invisible space underlying the HDB flat. He sheds his clothes and even his skin colour, and just as he readies himself in a stance, hardening into a statue, the momentum of each character's activity reaches an intensified and frantic pace. Then 'the cloud' lets out a guttery growl as a cloud of smoke emits from his head – bringing to mind the 'fluid' or 'ethereal medium' believed to be residing within bodies according to animal magnetism theories.

The piercing growl reverberates and

travels in tune with the cloud that cuts and moves through every flat as an amorphous entity. The residents gaze in awe and shock as the sublime cloud engulfs their bodies. Much like the whiteness of a canvas, and silence as the canvas for sound, the cloud is an ephemeral force that is able to pass through. It is couched in every body.

Returning to the image of the filmmaker looking out the window of a HDB flat – this typical situation, extracted and reframed in HERE, does seem apt as an explanation to his artistic impetus, in the sense that the purpose of art is to distance ourselves from the territorialisation of society and our lives. The very distance brings us closer to silence, which provides the space for the construction of a frame, a window that enables us to perceive what has been made imperceptible in everyday life. It is a matter of making audible and visible the plurality of material and bodily forces and their relations that are constantly being negated and stratified by the deadening contours of our everyday

consciousness – the order imposed by our ego, the construction of reality that posits defined, stable and constant identities and categorisations upon things. By coaxing the movement into a different sensorium, Ho's films reveal a world in which being, as Nietzsche has foregrounded, is becoming. He frames and amplifies the expressiveness of the reality behind the reactive contours of our consciousness; not a fantastical realm of dreams, or the unconscious mind of an individual, but the potential for us to adopt a wider and more egalitarian form of consciousness that reveals a world of forces and flows between a multiplicity of bodies, both human and inhuman, that we fail to perceive on an everyday level.

Porn as we know it today, started out as a social event – it was screened at fraternities and homosocial activities, and as such, heterosexual men have since become its biggest consumers. In other words, porn was shaped by what heterosexual men like to see. However, as a medium that actively seeks to represent pleasure (and sex), and one that aims to arouse its audience into pleasure-seeking activities, porn has a very narrow definition of female pleasure. While male orgasm and pleasure is easy to represent on screen vis-à-vis erection and ejaculation, many theorists have noted how female pleasure resists photographic framing. In particular, women's ability to fake orgasms – a skill that men do not possess, led pornography to come up with various other ways to visually represent female pleasure. The representation of female pleasure on screen is displaced onto facial expressions: the transcendent glazed-over eyes, lips glistening and slightly

parted, head thrown back or a smiling or ecstatic face dripping with semen.

However, in recent times, there is the proliferation of a sub-genre called 'squirting' or 'female ejaculation'. In this essay, I will be exploring whether the onset of this genre represents a shift in hardcore mainstream pornography to represent genuine female pleasure.

The phenomenon of female ejaculation has been very controversial. Many people refuse to admit that it exists; others claim all women can ejaculate; and yet others claim that acknowledging the female's ability to ejaculate is to try and define female pleasure by the standard of male pleasure. Secondly, ejaculation in porn has always been reserved for men in the form of the money shot – a close up shot of penile ejaculation. With the discovery and introduction of female ejaculation, does this disrupt the way porn is shot?

Pornography is an attempt to visually represent sexual pleasure, and to

convince its viewers of that, there are certain conventions it adheres to. To whatever extent that hard-core pornography would like us to believe it is portraying real and factual sex acts, the sex we see in pornography is highly mediated and choreographed – it is a performance done by professional actors for the sake of the camera. As such, I begin by delineating the significance of one such convention – the money shot, then go on to describe female ejaculation in pornography. I then make a comparison between the ways female ejaculation and male ejaculation are shot in pornography, with the end goal to understand how female ejaculation is represented.

The Money Shot

Ever since the success of the film Deep Throat (dir. Gerard Damiano, 1972), the 'come shot' or 'money-shot' – a close-up of penile ejaculation – has now been widely accepted as an indispensable scene to have in hard-core pornography. Stephen Ziplow first wrote

in his 1977 The Film Maker's Guide to Pornography, that quite simply, 'if you don't have the come shots, you don't have a porno picture.' It is called the 'money shot' because it is the scene that costs the most money to produce – male porn stars are paid more for this scene, and it is also the scene that the audience allegedly most want to see. It is useful to note the extent to which directors go to produce this scene: sometimes the male porn star we see throughout the film is not the one who is involved in the money shot. It is a scene that is shot and re-shot until the perfect 'squirt' is achieved. However, this is one convention that can be difficult for the male porn star, for he has to pull out of his partner at a moment of intense pleasure. There have been many stories from the industry where male porn stars could not accomplish the money shot. This contradiction exposes the difficulty of visually representing sexual pleasure even though pornography claims to have the visual evidence.

The money shot was not always the way

it is now. Taking the silent stag films to be the earliest form of hardcore pornography, it was the 'meat shot' that dominated the screens – close-ups of genital action that are not regulated by any sense of narrative. It was only with the rise of the hardcore feature – in particular, Deep Throat – that the money shot assumed the narrative function of signalling the climax of a genital event. As such, it is important to interpret the money shot in order to understand the telos of pornography: I take my starting point as the fact that the money shot is often taken to be an image of masculinity.

The act of ejaculation brings a certain velocity to the image on screen; the expulsion of the fluid signals a certain finality and climax to the video. It forges narrative through the way it demarcates a before and after. It is the temporality of ejaculation that led Richard Dyer, in his discussion of the similarities between heteroporn and gay male porn, to write that '[t]he goal of the pornographic narrative is coming; in filmic terms, the

goal is ejaculation, that is, visible coming.' The significance of this is that the 'sense of an ending' delivered by the come shot, then, may likewise implicate the establishment of masculinity as a putative triumph, accomplishment or goal.' This is enhanced by the fact that most come shots are received by a woman's face (the 'facial'), and lesser but still prominent are other parts of her body such as her breasts, buttocks and lower back. Furthermore, it is assumed that the consumer will meet the climax of the male performer in such a way that his masculinity is simultaneously affirmed.

In his book Images of Bliss: Ejaculation, Masculinity, Meaning, Murat Aydemir puts forth an argument that semen is potentially threatening to masculinity due to its formlessness, and formlessness both lowers and de¬hierarchises the penis. Similarly, Calvin Thomas in delineating what he calls male production anxiety, argues that 'nothing is allowed to come out of the male body except in the name of

violence and domination.' It is as such that the money shot not only shows penile ejaculation but also frames in it images and icons that will re¬masculinise the male actor. This is the function of the woman's body which receives the semen: 'to guarantee the heterosexuality of the erotic visual exchange between the male sex worker and the male spectator.' This need to 'guarantee' heterosexual masculinity firstly elucidates the precariousness of it, and secondly, shows how pornography as a genre is regulated by rules that stipulate what may and may not be shown. These 'conventions' can then be seen to be a kind a 'protection,' ones that forbid male-on-male action in heteroporn, celebrates the 'fake' girl-on-girl 'warm-up' number, and most importantly, it is the mechanism that raises the money shot to the status of an icon.

Lastly, Linda Williams notes the 'male obsession with measurable evidence of pleasure' in the same vein Simon Taylor, in a discussion on Jackson Pollock and

Andy Warhol, writes how 'young boys are known to measure their virility by seeing who can urinate furthest and longest.' It is this quality of male ejaculation that 'conforms to the general importance of the visual in the way male sexuality is constructed orconceptualised. In order to convince, masculinity must be foregrounded, produced into visibility, exposed.' Yet, despite all this, in heteroporn the money shot is an image that tries to cover up an inadequacy of pornography: its inability to represent the female orgasm.

Female Ejaculation/
Squirting

Similar to the money shot, squirting is a way to show this 'involuntary confession of pleasure' even if it does not always coincide with an orgasm. So in this sense, it is merely a visual technique (on top of a biological phenomenon) to signal to viewers the pleasure of the porn star. It would thus seem that it has a similar function to the money shot, yet, the way it is shot (close-up versus a

variety of shots) is different, it does not have the same (exclusive) narrative function as its male counterpart, and it has not been established as a convention in heteroporn.

Female pleasure has never been important – both in terms of reproduction, and in male pleasure. However, despite that, society (and porn) has a fascination with female bodies, and by extension, female pleasure. Since the likes of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Kinsey, and William Masters and Virginia Johnson, female sexuality has come under scrutiny. We can trace a general trend of women's 'newly discovered' erogenous zones beginning with Freud's proclamation that the primary site of female pleasure is the vagina and not the clitoris. Kinsey, Masters and Johnson and Anne Koedt then marked the second shift back to the clitoris in the seventies, arguing that 'the vagina is not a highly sensitive area and is not constructed to achieve orgasm. It is the clitoris which is the centre of sexual sensitivity and which is the

female equivalent of the penis.' This 'discovery' was thought to be quite revolutionary as the clitoris is an organ that has no other function except that of pleasure. About a decade later, with the publication of the book The G-Spot – And Other Discoveries about Human Sexuality in 1982 by Alice Kahn Ladas, Beverly Whipple and John D. Perry, the G-Spot was brought into the limelight. This created a new wave of debates around female sexuality, especially female ejaculation.

There are currently three camps on the existence of female ejaculation. The first two camps are based on science: one says a female scrotum (otherwise known as the G-spot) exists, and the other argues that it is nothing more than urine. The third camp consists of sexologists who claim that most, if not all women, have the capacity to ejaculate and proceed to suggest ways to do so. Interestingly, female ejaculation in pornography has also been hotly debated by porn stars themselves – about who has the 'real' squirt and who

does not. My study is not to prove which of them are right, although I somewhat favour the third camp. Rather, it is on this premise of how female pleasure is debated – and sometimes even negated – that I would like to examine squirt porn.

The porn industry quickly cashed in on the discovery of the G-Spot and female ejaculation with the film The Grafenburg Spot (dir. Mitchell Brothers, 1985), the first feature length hard core film that showcased female ejaculation. (It was later revealed that the female ejaculation scenes in this film were faked – the actresses had water soaked douches in them.) Ever since, there has been a proliferation of squirt porn as a sub-genre. It is thus that I would like to ask: how is female ejaculation represented on screen, and by extension, does it indicate a shift to more 'female-friendly' porn? Does it celebrate it, or does it merely reinscribe patriarchal norms? I will examine how male ejaculation is shot and how female ejaculation is shot in porn and then go on to elucidate the significance of the differences.

In many of the squirt porn that I have seen, the conventions of hard-core heterporn are firmly in place. The first is that how heteroporn often begins with a girl-only number as a warm-up leading up to the 'main event' of actual male-female intercourse ending with the money shot. This is definitely still the case with squirt porn, although if anything, squirting starts even without the appearance of the male actor. In this sense, the 'warm-up' is more than just one as the 'main event' has already occurred.

Squirting usually starts early and continues throughout. Yet as much as squirting is the focus (and what consumers paid for), actual penile penetration and intercourse (oral, vaginal and anal; what qualifies it as hard-core pornography) is not visually compromised either. Instead, the usual sexual numbers seem to double up in that they now have a squirting purpose. For example, it is common to see clitorial stimulation in most hardcore videos, whether through the use of a vibrator,

fingers, cunnilingus or mutual masturbation, and these moves coincidentally make a woman squirt. Furthermore, the typical vaginal and anal intercourses are shown to result in female ejaculation despite common – but unjustified – claims to be unable to bring a woman to squirt. In this sense, there seems to be an extension to what normal sex acts (in pornography) achieve. The only compromise that is made is that usually the male actor will have to pull out of his female counterpart in order for her to ejaculate. Other times, this is more apparent when the male actor pulls out and steps out of the shot to let the other female take the squirt. This brings a momentary pause to the intercourse but rewards viewers with a squirt shot. This is reminiscent of how the money shot is filmed: the male actor has to temporarily suspend penetrative pleasure so that the camera can capture penile ejaculation. This is also apparent in squirt shots.

The squirting scenes are heavily inspired by its counterpart, the money

shot. In addition to the mid-air squirts that have nothing on the receiving end, there is a wealth of other squirt shots – the 'facial', on the butt-cheeks, in the mouth, or generally all over the body, as well as 'come-swapping' shots (come-swapping only happens between two females; squirt is rarely consumed or received by the male actor). Due to the velocity of the ejaculate and the amount of liquid expelled, these scenes tend to be more dramatic than the money shot. Furthermore, as a result of being part of this genre, these scenes occur multiple times throughout the video.

Squirt porn videos are much like their hard-core counterparts, but as part of this sub-genre there are additional twists and tricks to incorporate squirt shots. The focal length for the squirt shot is usually longer. This may be due to a desire to capture the entire squirt stream which is often longer than the male ejaculate. Furthermore, whereas the penis is easy to capture on screen, the female genitals are not quite so, and this seems to be compensated by shooting

more of the woman's body – her thighs and lower abdomen are usually included in the frame. This reminds us of the rationale from which the hardcore genre turned to the much more visible money shot – the technical difficulties in visually representing sexual pleasure. However, with the squirt genre, this seems reversed: squirting seems to trump the money shot, in that now it is possible to frame and shoot female pleasure due to its physical quality of it being more dynamic, dramatic, and visual. Furthermore, the position of the money shot in squirt porn has definitely been usurped – most videos in squirt porn end either with a shot of female ejaculation, or female and male ejaculation are shown to occur simultaneously.

It is also useful to note the variety of focal lengths used. The money shot almost always utilises a close-up of the penis and its ejaculate, squirt shots tend to come in a variety – from the full body medium shot of the 'squirter', to close-ups of the female genitals, to a close-up

of the (always) female body part that receives the squirt, to a full body shot of the receiver.

There is one last key point about squirting that I would like to make, recalling my earlier point about how pornstars themselves call out 'fake female ejaculation' scenes. There are generally two portrayals of squirting – one where the actress simply squirts copious amount of liquid, and another where the actress' body goes into convulsion, in a visible state of ecstasy. Actresses who achieve the latter often dismiss the former as fake. In any case, this gives another dimension to the idea of maximising the visibility of female pleasure, and it is the telos of pornography in general. Tim Dean rephrased Ziplow's statement into 'if you don't present the spectacle of a man submitting to the loss of bodily control, then you don't have a porno picture.' He then goes on to lament 'how the convention of aiming his ejaculate at someone else obscures the degree to which the man having an orgasm is

overcome by a bodily action that he ultimately cannot control.' This, interestingly enough, is not the case for the squirt sub-genre, as amongst the variety of shots invoked, one of them showcases the full body of the female porn star convulsing. Indeed, 'it is the female body in the grips of an out-of-control ecstasy that has offered the most sensational sight.' It is sensational perhaps because 'her performed convulsions signify the uncontrollable jouissance to which he, as a man, has no access (except through watching her).'

I have in this paper made a comparison between the money shot and female ejaculation shots in squirt porn. While I have shown to a certain extent that squirt porn foregrounds female ejaculation and thus female pleasure, it is important to note that as a sub-genre, it still stands firmly within the realm of mainstream hardcore heteroporn. On the surface, it may signal an attempt to place more significance on female viewers and female pleasure, but its

main consumers are still heterosexual men. Furthermore, there are conventions that squirt porn adheres to that reinstate notions of masculinity.

That said, this scientific, academic, and pornographic emphasis on female pleasure has given rise to alternative forms of pornography that seek to challenge the dominance of heteroporn and the ways it represents pleasure. One such troupe of pornography is the feminist porn troupe. The Feminist Porn Awards began in 2006 in order to recognize pornography that is created, directed, or produced by women or by people who are not traditionally represented in pornography (for example, people of colour and butch lesbians); depicts genuine pleasure; and expands the boundaries of sexual representation on film and challenges stereotypes that are often found in mainstream porn. Feminist porn has very successfully offered a new way of visually representing sexual pleasure that goes beyond conventions and regulations.

The body and its representation have become major concerns in the development of contemporary theories of art. Practitioners and critics alike have pointed out to discourses regarding bodypolitics, and have discussed in great lengths, ideas of, broadly speaking, the construction of identity with special attention to ethnicity and gender, the primacy and interiority of body, the politics of private property and the ownership of body, performativity and semiotics, ethical representation and the technical mastery of the idealised state of body.

These are meaningful ways we talk about the body and its implications. Most are, however, informed by a certain metaphysical outlook that can be traced to early descriptions found in philosophical traditions of the West. Thinking that the reality of things is of its unchanging essence, the ancient Greek philosophers had believed that an eternal element must reside in every person. To these ends, they had posited

an immortal soul. Consequently, all impermanence and change (a fact that can be observed in everyday phenomena) became relegated to the body. This body born out of the platonic type and then christened into mortal flesh puts forth mutually exclusive dualisms like mind-body, subject-object, internal-external, form-matter, private-public, self-world and so on. These distinctions allow us clear categorisation towards a tidy form of knowledge for analyses, or in other words, to divide and conquer. However, such dualisms ensure that the body is always set up against an other, which it must overcome. Naturally so, since the mainstream of dialectical reasoning demands the bifurcation of mutually exclusive entities as the first order of things, from which the body and the performance of it becomes an expression of the private, internal, authentic, authoritative, signified selfhood – a means to an end.

The body is the site of identity. As a site, it is a bounded space, its boundary

fencing off the singular identity differentiating it from what it is not. This boundary gives all substance its determination, a this, which is not that; a negation which is the parsing out of the one from the manifold – the self from the other. To be able to identify something is also to be able to identify what it is not and much of western philosophy rests on this basic premise of non-contradiction. Metaphysically, the western body, as a site, is a border erected against trespass.

For readers of Chinese, it is hard to miss the fact that the simplified Chinese ideogram used to indicate the body (ti, 体) is made up of two parts, the left is that of the human radical and the right is the character indicating "root" – literally, the root of a plant growing beneath the trunk of a tree/wood. This association to plant life and vegetative growth is very prominent in the way body is discussed in classical Chinese, and that should not come as a surprise in a largely agricultural society where the survival of the community depends solely on farming.

This theory of body stems from the organic structures of the plant and its reproductive features. Its key idea: the technique of vegetative propagation. This agricultural technique simply is the severing of a part of the plant, like a shoot or a scion, to be replanted in order to reproduce the whole of the tree. The plant is then able to multiply by means of division. By multiplication, the plant is able to regenerate the whole of itself asexually via a dismembered part. In the language of contemporary science, the mature child-plant is a sort of clone of the single parent, sharing similar traits. What is important to note here is that the scion or shoot already contains within it the whole of the parent plant, and given due course, the part will eventually mature into the whole. Conceptually, the whole is always present in the part.

What we can derive from such a theory is that parts and wholes are one and the same, although their somatic boundaries are different. The Chinese conception of body lies in the key idea of the indeterminacy of boundaries,

leading to a kind of schizophrenia, which I will elaborate further at a later point. The boundaries shift depending on where the practical functioning occurs but crucially, the part is never self-standing outside the whole and the whole always includes its parts; an effect on the part is an effect on the whole and vice versa. I term this the synecdochical relationship between parts and wholes. As the literary device goes, it is not that the part becomes the whole over time. Rather, the parts and wholes come into existence(s) at the same time. Thus, we avoid the question of a temporal priority. However, they are not merely synchronous. Conceptually, they are one and the same.

A helpful metaphor raised by the Huayan Buddhist patriarch Fazang (法藏) is that of the house and pillar. That the pillar as being a part of the house already contains within it the whole of the house; just as pillar is already present in the concept of the house. There is no house without the pillar, roof, floor and wall. Conversely, there is no

pillar without the house, no roof without the house, no floor without the house, and no wall without the house already in its conceptual entirety. To exist is to exist in some context, which already assumes being part of some bigger whole.

"Pillar" as a concept only makes sense in the context of a house, since a pillar that is absent of the house context is only "a plank of wood" or "a slab of concrete". It makes no sense to say, "pillar" if "house" is not already assumed on a conceptual level. And the same goes for the concept of "house" which contextually already assumes all the parts that constitute it. If not, we cannot meaningfully say "house" in a coherent fashion, and should resort to saying, "bunch of wood or concrete put together" instead of saying "house". It is not to say that we can never talk about a house without pillars, for modern houses do not in fact have pillars; the idea is that this concept of house (without pillars) is not the same concept as the one (with pillars) we were talking before, although we refer to both as "house". Out of

convenience, we designate the same name to both these houses. Similarly, the roof which belongs to the house without pillars is not the same roof as the one belonging to the house with pillars. It does not change the claim that things exist in strict contextual relationships between parts and wholes, and that is the distinctive status of body and identity in the Chinese point of view.

The cosmological story as recounted in classical Chinese texts details how the myriad of phenomena in the world is distilled from a single primordial identity, the supreme ultimate (taiji, 太极). This, in turn, is broken down to parts in various degrees, only to coagulate back into a single whole. Significantly, the moral of the story is not that there is a prime mover or the big bang at the beginning of a causal chain of effects. Neither is it the story of a perfect plan of creation before time began, but a mereological story of parts and wholes. Given such a system of strict relations, there is no room for the self-determination of independent entities. If the body is the

site of identity, then this identity must be thoroughly justified with recourse to both the parts it is constituted by and the whole of which it belongs to. Identity is never a self-standing fact brought upon by one's own brute will, neither is it a definition imposed by hegemony or the status quo but an organic shifting of one's boundaries depending on one's positioning within a larger context, whether is it the family, the community, the society or all of humankind.

A father is also a son. Since the distinct state of the Chinese conception of body is exactly the indeterminacy of boundaries, the shifting of context guarantees that one's identity is never fixed. Instead it is to be renegotiated at every situation. This results in the overlapping of multiple identities in a state of perpetual schizophrenia. Modern medicine calls this a clinical disorder, the economist calls it an anomaly, the logician calls it a contradiction, but let us call it the reality of bodies. We are always playing a multiplicity of roles and functions in our

lives, putting on multi-facetted personas like that of Avalokitesvara. Any brute and unyielding fixation of one's identity is doomed to break down at some point, in some sense, the body as we know is neither permanent, eternal nor universal. It is subject to change, to growth and decay, but most importantly, the body does not fix itself to the human frame, it is the process of becoming.

Contrary to the discussion of the body as bounded substance, once we understand that the boundaries are supple, body ceases to be the marker of being, but is that of becoming. And since the body is in a state of flux, then product is always in the process of transformation, a work-in-progress. To be is to become, or we can equally flip the rhetoric on its head to say that the state of being is becoming and that processes are all products. Ontologically, there are no two things, but only a single continuum. The world-affirming existentialism of Chinese Buddhism culminates exactly in this point, where the initial dualisms of

instrumental and ultimate, Samsara and Nirvana, cease to be two conflicting ontology but in their interdependence are already one. Since there is no getting to Nirvana without going through the sufferings of Samsara, and more importantly, without Nirvana, there would be no suffering in Samsara. And so the famous Mahayana saying goes, "Samsara is Nirvana and Nirvana is Samsara".

Any alteration to the part is an alteration to the whole. Similarly, ultimate values cannot persist once instrumental values are subject to change, then all final goals are radically transformed depending on the choices taken – the grail was always just the journey itself. What should come out of this is not just that ultimate ends are thoroughly dependent on instrumental means, but that instrumentality itself is therefore ultimate and seen through the lens of continuity, an end in itself.

Confucius warned his students that the exemplary man is not a vessel or tool.

This is not simply a rejection of instrumental values since the word "器" (qi) very much like the English translation "instrument" or "tool" does not merely suggest that it is a means to an end, but more precisely, it takes its name from an artifact made with a very specific functionality and purpose inscribed in its destiny from the very moment of its creation. The old master gives caution to the single purpose-driven narrow-mindedness that he takes to be unnatural, which inhibits the spontaneity of activity and growth, a recurring theme that will be taken on by his follower Mencius and subsequent Daoist thinkers. What this is contrasted to is a more expansive humanism that takes the body's healthy functioning as ends in itself and not means towards benefit and gain. It is not that we should maintain a healthy body so that we may achieve greater goals with it, but that the healthy functioning of body already contains the attainment of the goals. Once more we see that instrumentality when understood in a broader, more encompassing way already contains all

its ends, as parts is to wholes. Although in attaining the ideal body there is nothing we cannot achieve, yet we must not let the fixation of any one goal be the sole motivation towards cultivating the body lest the possibilities of body is narrowed turning it into a mere tool. As the Daoist saying goes, "attending unconsciously, and yet nothing is left undone."

In the middle ages, the perfected state of the body portrayed in Western representation is one that reflects sacrifice and salvation. The body as a shell must exude courage and resolve under persecution like armour for the soul. Since the Scientific Revolution, the idealised body has become increasingly machine-like; the contorted anatomy replaced by the erect figure, its form reflecting the shadow of the edifice behind it. Now, in this technological age we inhabit today, the representation of bodies has become more like streamlined silhouettes, sharpened and burnished as though practice and maintenance has become the indication

of success. The Chinese conception of body does not attempt to be useful like an armour, neither does it pretend to be efficient like a machine. Although we are never given exact accounts of the perfected body of the sage, the ancient Chinese thinkers do come to certain consensus about the effects of attaining the perfected body. They agree that in that state of healthy functioning, the body would conduct all its activities in a spontaneous manner. It allows one to renegotiate its identity at every moment without a final finish line at the end of the tunneled vision.

As a constantly evolving subjectivity, the body, as I have previously concluded, is the process of becoming, and like a pivot it never comes to a stop, a freewheelin' wanderer of sorts. To linger on the analogy a little longer, we will see that the pivot is paradoxical in important ways. The pivot is the most important of all instruments, without which even the simplest task of walking is impossible. But yet it is the most useless of all instruments. It does not sway left neither

does it prefer the right, it does not bend at the top neither does it have a heavy bottom. It is the most useless instrument with no feature or functionality and yet it is in its very uselessness that it is prized as the most useful of all instruments. A pivot with a purpose biased towards one side ought to be thrown away. In its purposelessness, it becomes an end in itself for itself. We can then say that the perfect body is a useless body.

But what is a useless spontaneity if not an activity absent of conscious rationalisations? Any discussion of body is incomplete without saying something about consciousness. Consciousness as the primordial act of other-ing is always conscious of the two, the self and the other. Being conscious of oneself as an internal and private being, mind and body is torn a sundered. When mind disavows its own self in an act of self-alienation it treats the body as a temporal outgrowth, a mortal cyst – and worse – a tool. The objectification of the body distances us from the world twice removed by which all our activities

become an attempt at setting up resistance against that which is not I. Consequently, as I have suggested before, one spends a lifetime to master the body by honing it into the perfect instrument, a medium to mediate between self and world.

In the 17th century, the French Enlightenment philosopher René Descartes had distinguished between the mind and the body as separate ontological realms, the former pertaining to consciousness from which he is able to ground his own existence upon, henceforth setting up the great divide between mind and body that will continue to plague philosophers long after him. This discussion never ever took place in the Chinese context. Chinese philosophers never had to deal with the incommensurability of mind and body because they did not in the first place assume the disembodied experience. Consciousness was always supposed to be a bodily process and the Chinese character used to indicate the cognitive faculty 心 (xin, heart, or

heart-mind) is very telling of how mental processes were understood. This is the same character used to indicate the heart, a living, beating organ that is both the central faculty of perception and cognition and also the source of sentiments and instincts. An integrated organ that employs a multidimensional approach, including feelings and sentiments, rational calculation and bodily experience towards any encounter without discriminating rationality as the higher faculty to which the rest must yield.

The key to the cultivation of natural spontaneity lies within this integration of all the parts in a holistic system of relations. When mind and body are one, then mind (which is also body) no longer needs to be conscious of itself, and one is finally able to act with an unconscious attending, letting the body react without obstructing the natural flow, as Mencius describes, to ask oneself, "Why should I help the child falling into the well?" "What's in it for me?" Instead, one is able to react to multifarious situations

“Contrary to the discussion of the body as bounded substance, once we understand that the boundaries are supple, body ceases to be the marker of being, but is that of becoming.”

presented at any one point with dynamic creativity, while encompassing a greater amount of differing perspectives without needing to fixate on any one of them. In so doing, the position of one's identity from moment to moment, expanding and contracting, is constantly negotiating the boundaries of the body.

A final word on the matter, some of these ideas I have laid out above about the body are not themselves new and I am well aware that similar conclusions have been derived through other ways of thinking about the body. I am not here denying alternative proposals, neither am I claiming to reveal apodictic facts about our bodies, but only to give a comprehensive survey of what I take to be a running thread in mainstream Chinese thought towards a conceptualisation of the holistic interpretation of body as discussed by some thinkers of the tradition. To be precise, these thinkers I have selected as my resource do not represent the whole pantheon of Chinese intellectuals, and neither do they apply

to contemporary scholarship from China. These belong to a very specific time in the history of Chinese thought from antiquity through the flourishing of Buddhist thought in the Tang dynasty, culminating in the syncretism of Neo-Confucianism during the Song-Ming period, developed independently before the intermingling of ideas from the West, except, apart from Chinese Buddhism which I take to be deeply concerned over the status of the body and which I have cited to some extent.

The Suzuki Method of Actor Training was developed by Tadashi Suzuki together with his company The Suzuki Company of Toga (SCOT) around the 1970s, when he decided to move his theatre company from Tokyo to the mountain village of Toga in Toyama, Japan. It is a training system that uses a series of physical exercises (known as "disciplines") to cultivate certain very important aspects of the actor's body. In this short article, I shall attempt to articulate the method's focus on the actor's body, and its development of the "invisible body".

Culture is the Body

In his seminal article, "Culture is the Body", Tadashi Suzuki differentiated two types of energy — animal energy produced by humans and animals and non-animal energy such as electricity, petroleum and nuclear power. He asserted that a society sustained by animal energy is quite different in characteristics to one sustained by

non-animal energy. The latter, which is modern and industrialised, is often thought of as more civilised. However, in the opinion of Suzuki, "a civilised society is not necessarily a cultured one... a cultured society is one in which the perceptive and expressive abilities of its people are cultivated through the use of their innate animal energy. Such animal energy fosters the sense of security and trust needed for healthy communication in human relationships and the communities they form" (para 1).

In other words, culture, according to Suzuki, resides in the body that produces animal energy rather than man-made entities that are used to build civilisation. When we apply this differentiation to theatre, we realise that most of contemporary theatre is modernised and relies heavily on non-animal energy in almost every aspect of its production. In comparison, traditional performances such as Noh theatre, while also modernised to a certain extent, maintains a higher reliance on animal energy in most aspects of its

production.

For Suzuki, the shift towards non-animal energy is in fact detrimental to the art of theatre. He explained that when automobile replaced walking, when computer replaced the need for direct seeing and hearing, and "when modernisation has severed our natural organs from our essential selves, entrusting an increasingly larger portion of their workload to non-animal energy," the consequence is a dramatic downsizing of the potential of the human body and its various functions, and the weakening of the communication between people that is based on animal energy. This trend, he regretted, "has also taken its toll on the expressive skills of the actor" (para 6).

In an effort to address this situation, Suzuki strived "to restore the wholeness of the human body in performance, not simply by creating variants of such forms as the Noh and kabuki, but by employing the universal virtues of these and other pre-modern traditions." He

believes that by "harnessing and developing these enduring virtues," we create an opportunity to "re-consolidate our currently dismembered physical faculties and revive the body's perceptive and expressive capacity." It is only by having a commitment to do so that we may "ensure the flourishing of culture within civilisation" (para 6). The above points, in a way, sum up Suzuki's views on the loss of animal energy, the dismembering of our human faculties from the body, the destructive effect of such conditions on the actor's art, and the value of certain virtues of pre-modern theatre in recovering this loss. More importantly, they provide us with an understanding of Suzuki's emphasis on the actor's body in his method of actor training.

“...culture, according to Suzuki, resides in the body that produces animal energy rather than man-made entities that are used to build civilisation.”

The Invisible Body

In articulating his theory of acting, Suzuki outlined three important factors in his article "A Fundamental Technique and Theory of Acting" that constitute the actor's art. They are, firstly, to have a point of view, secondly, to have an audience or a sense of the "other" and lastly, to have an awareness of the "invisible body". The actor's point of view refers to the fundamental essence of acting in which actors convey the desire to make people re-evaluate what they see. The "other" refers to the audience or from the actor's perspective, the sense of an observer. The "invisible body" refers to the primary physical functions that his method of actor training attempts to develop.

As mentioned, the Suzuki Method of Actor Training is carried out using a series of physical exercises (known as disciplines). Its objective is to develop three crucial aspects of the actor's body. They are 1) energy production, 2) breath calibration, and 3) centre of gravity

control. These three aspects are also the fundamental, key physical functions of any human beings because "as soon as we have problems with any one of them, it becomes difficult to maintain our health and participate in modern society." According to Suzuki, this is due in part to the fact that these particular functions exist in an inter-dependent relationship – "the more energy the body produces, the more oxygen it needs, which in turn intensifies the breathing. When the breathing intensifies, it challenges the body's balance, or centre of gravity control" (III, para 1).

However, in spite of their importance, these functions do not generally receive a lot of attention. Hence, they are collectively referred to by Suzuki as "the invisible body". It follows, therefore, that the main objective of his training system is to firstly, "grow our capacity in each of these functions independently", and more importantly, to "deepen and fortify their interrelation." If we are able to expand our capacity in producing energy, in taking in oxygen and

maintaining our centre of gravity, more variety of movement will be available to us. This, in turn, increases the stability and sustainability of our lives (III, para 1).

When applied to theatre and to actor training, Suzuki explained that

[t]hrough disciplined, integrated development of these three parameters, the body gains strength and agility, the voice acquires range and capacity and an awareness of the "other" grows. Such work develops the expressive potency needed to transmit the actor's point of view. It follows, then, that the core requirements for the art of acting lie in disciplines created to deepen an awareness of these three crucial, interrelated, "invisible" phenomena (III, para 1).

In other words, the Suzuki Method of Actor Training is created to target the cultivation of physical attributes that are crucial but often neglected by actors on stage. Following this thought, I find it

useful to then regard the embodied skills – pure movements and steps in traditional theatre, characterisation work and delivery of lines in modern drama, etc. – that we may acquire in order to perform in a particular style or genre as elements of the "visible body". While this skill-based body is unique to the kinds of performances that the actor does, the "invisible body" however, is one that is universally necessary for all actors if they were to transcend beyond the regurgitation of skills. In short, a truly powerful actor is one that possesses substantial capability in both the "visible" as well as the "invisible" body. It is the fluid control of energy, breath and centre of gravity (and hence stability, gravitas, and presence in performance) that allows the actor to gain range and become truly creative on stage. For that reason, it is asserted by many who practise the Suzuki Method that although its methodology is often misunderstood by many as merely rigorous physical work, it is in fact a training system that addresses the art of acting in an undoubtedly direct way.

Works Cited:

Suzuki, Tadashi. “Culture is the Body.” and “A Fundamental Technique and Theory of Acting.” Suzuki’s Philosophy of Theatre. Tadashi Suzuki. Suzuki Company of Toga. Web. 2009. http://www.scot-suzukicompany.com/
en/philosophy.php

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir declares: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." To her, gender is a social construction. But her argument implies cognition and agency, an entity that is able to obtain or select a certain social gender. In theory, then, this entity is also able to choose an alternative gender. Beauvoir is clear that one only "becomes" a woman through cultural enforcement. In her theory, the body is thus a situation. Judith Butler believed that if the body was indeed a situation, we would be unable to communicate with a body that has not been culturally interpreted. The body becomes a passive medium, one that is circumscribed and sculpted by the social body and by cultural meanings; or it becomes a tool, through which the will to usurp and define is manifested.

It is worth considering the degree to which the body is shaped by the markers of social gender. How can we think about the body in a new way, so that it is no longer passive and circumscribed, and neither a medium

nor a tool?

Historically, the body has propelled society and culture, and also been subject to their restrictions. Because of the social construction of gender, the body has become the repository of certain metaphors and meanings. Autonomous individuality is subsumed within a larger social whole, and authentic desires must often be repressed. Li Xie's work – particularly The VaginaLOGUE, News Busters and House of Sins – presents a different type of body, one that is placed in Singapore, a society full of markers of gendered culture. Using different perspectives and de-gendered performance strategies, she seeks to inspire reflections and provoke dialogue about the body.

1. The VaginaLOGUE: Eliminating the irrationality of the disciplined body

French philosopher Michel Foucault has cited a practice of 17th-century Europe: Each city had a proportion of its population sequestered in state-sanctioned quarters. The quarantined

included the insane, the ill, the promiscuous, the blasphemous, and unfit parents. Foucault described this social phenomenon as "irrational", and believed that these quarantined bodies were irrational bodies.

Religious and political authorities differentiated between the rational and the irrational, from a position of "rationality". This made "rationality" a position of power, and became the basis of a system in which the rational imposed surveillance of and control over the irrational. From a planar perspective, is it possible to observe where the boundaries between the centre and the fringe are drawn in this exclusionary construction based on a system of surveillance?

In The VaginaLOGUE, "the vagina" is originally part of the body. But society imposes various reasons, superstitions, myths, traditions, systems, and these symbols of "rational" power are internalised, "rationalising" "the vagina" into a dirty, cursed, unlucky, functional

symbol of the irrational body. When placed in the linguistic context of Singapore, related metaphors and correspondences seem to surface in this text. Just as "the vagina" is part of the body, so "the citizen" is part of the body politics. When both are marked as "irrational", they are deprived of the right to expression and choice.

As an irrational element within a rational entity, "the vagina" seems to serve as a metaphor for Singapore's extensive and long-term system of inculcation and guidance for its citizenry. This "rationalised suppression" has led to complete submission. "The vagina" is, in fact, not irrational. Rather, as Foucault says, it has undergone the long-term "rationalisation" of social regulation and been deemed "irrational". This is a metaphor for a citizenry that has been tamed within the state, and consequently – as I see it – left without the right to or possibility of self-expression, much like the vagina. This is not so much a case of being afraid to speak out, but rather of losing familiarity

with one's nature due to a long period of neglect. Paradoxically, we are not saddened by this, but rather feel that it is reasonable for men (the state/collective) to speak.

In the play, Hua Mulan may wear a soldier's armour, and become integrated into the patriarchal framework and bodies of the same nature (the state/society/the system/the rational/the reasonable). But to cater to this system, a woman (the irrational), whose othered body is in possession of a vagina, must conceal herself when confronted with this body's menstrual cycle. The play's stance about the mixed emotions tied to female physiology seems to be established on this tension.

Hua Mulan takes her father's place in the army and accomplishes great feats in battle. But what kind of body is truly socially acceptable? A body with a vagina that cannot fulfill its reproductive function, but possessing the courage to wage war - is this body acceptable within the system of "rationality"? In The

VaginaLOGUE, the answer is evidently no. In a highly gendered society, the body can no longer be interpreted using gender; the political metaphor includes the overall linguistic structure of the text. What we must think about is this: To whom does the body belong? To the individual, or the state? If both have claims of ownership, then how should the boundaries of respective ownership be drawn? Paradoxically, the marginalised female/body does not seek a sense of belonging. Rather, it single-mindedly searches for a way to reasonably exist and be integrated within a monolithic entity.

2. News Busters:
The de-mystification and
de-gendering of the social body

In his theories about the theatre, Antonin Artaud, the creator of the Theatre of Cruelty, proposed the destruction of the body. This did not mean the demolition of a house or the wrecking of an object. What he had in mind was a process based on strict methods of discipline. His suggestion of "a body without organs", while obscure in its phrasing, was actually clearly thought out. He believed the body and the organs were separate, independent entities. By "organs", he meant a system, a format, a process, a way of restricting and invading the body. The subject of resistance and protest should thus not be the body, but rather the organs. I believe News Busters possesses elements of Artaud's theory of the destruction of the body. The community becomes a metaphor for organs. The play's enactment in community venues is a sort of formless dialogue with the organs' systems, formats and processes,

allowing members of these communities to begin contemplating the possibility of impossible things. This fulfills one of the philosophical tenets of the Theatre of Cruelty – the contemplation of impossible things.

Artaud focused on the deconstruction and subversion of classic adaptations. News Busters' form of subversion lies in its performance venues, content and format.

News Busters kicked off its tour of community spaces in 2005, enacting social and political issues that resonated with its audience. Most of the performance venues in 2005 were high-traffic shopping malls and heartland town centres. According to my personal experience of some of these performances, the stage was not clearly separated from the audience area. Some spectators sat on the ground, while others stood by the road or observed from surrounding HDB blocks. The aim of regulating community spaces is to layer the personal realm (personal

and familial identities) with the public realm (national and communal identities), producing a sense of happiness after a process of beautification. News Busters' form of performance is akin to "invading" the social body's organs, disrupting the conventional conception of the community and introducing a new way of thinking and a new form of awareness.

By using the format of Newspaper

Theatre, Li Xie encourages community residents – regardless of whether they stay abreast of current events or not – to show their concern about society and engage in discussion, using these performances to demystify current events. News Busters turns the idea of a communal safe space on its head. It seems to be trying to open up the notion of "impossibility" in the communal consciousness, and to explore the other side of being subject to homogenisation and systematisation.

3. House of Sins:
Reinstituting desire in the body

House of Sins was another instance of Li Xie's exploration of gender themes. In this play, almost every cast member takes on a role belonging to a gender that is not their own. Peter Sau plays the character of the mother, for example, and Goh Guat Kian, who usually plays maternal characters, plays a young man.

The father figure in this play is a typical office worker who loves his wife and son, and provides for his family. The wife is gentle, docile, and virtuous; the son is obedient and courteous, and a three-time recipient of the Outstanding Teacher Award. When this apparent model family enacts a House of Sins, various scenarios bring to light deeply repressed desires that have been deemed sinful and held in check by social morality.

The concept of gender parody operates on the premise that there is no authentic original to imitate; the parody itself is

authentic. As Butler puts it, gender parody exposes the constructed nature of gender, which is itself a facsimile without an original article. This constant shifting results in the fluidity of identity, and implies the possibilities of redefinition and recontextualisation.

Thus, the dominant culture and a gendered society cannot prescribe a natural or intrinsic gender identity. Perhaps the form of Li Xie's gender parody cannot completely overturn the stereotypical notions of "desire" in a society structured by conventional gender roles. But gender parody becomes a strategy that places the tamed body in a context where redefinition is possible. Desire is thus possibly liberated from a regulated, repressed body.

The body is not only a propelling force for shaping society and culture, it is also subject to social regulation. Because of socially constructed conceptions of gender, the body has become the carrier of various metaphors and meanings. Its

autonomy is subsumed within the social collective, and its authentic desires are suppressed. Foucault believed that the body mediates between the family and society, and is contained within the political realm and the citizenry. This is why, he said, the body is subject to power relations that directly control, conceal, train and torture the body, forcing it to execute duties, organise rituals, and send signals.

In a gendered society, how do we locate our authentic body and identity? In these three plays, Li Xie presents various "bodies" and examine how they exist in a Singapore full of markers of gendered culture, using various perspectives and de-gendered performance strategies to inspire dialogue and reflection about "the body".