TV Dinner in 24 Languages (1980) FUSE May 1980 v4n4, 188-191 REPORTS: Television

Writings by Richard Fung

photo caption: At MTV it's mostly studio interviews and movies; documentaries are too costly.

Whenever one of my housemates is station hopping on the converter I can always pinpoint Channel 47. It's not because the language spoken isn't French or English since we usually do this with the sound off. No, I identify the station by those cinemascope productions shown without the corrective lensyielding aliens, which resemble well-known movie stars grown unhealthily thin. Other signs include movies in shades of washed sepia and magenta, or badly lit studio interviews against backdrops of travel agent posters. But Channel 47, Multilingual Television (M.T.V.) is not just any Canadian station. Producing programs in 24 languages, it is one of the most significant creatures of the era of Multiculturaljsm in Canada, an era whose other achievement has been to alter the meaning of the word 'ethnic' to exclude Anglo-Saxons.

TV Dinner in 24 Languages How 'Multiculturalism' created Multilingual Television - separate but not equal time.

In much-publicized contrast to the 'melting-pot' philosophy of the United States, the Canadian government through 'Multiculturalism' encourages each ethnic group to preserve its own traditions in food, clothes and, one suspects, occupations and social status. It facilitates this mainly by allowing grants for 'ethnic' folk dancing festivals and the like. When presented in the right manner this policy might appear even progressive, but so do Bantustans when described as 'Separate Development' by white South Africans. In fact, the effect of Multiculturalism is to place each minority into neat, easily manageable cagesand you know who's running the zoo. Except for one French station, all the other channels on my thirty-channel converter are in English, aimed at an Anglo-Saxon audience. The faces on these channels with the exception of the odd Sanford and Son or Adrienne Clarkson are all white.

Many ethnic minority Canadians look toward M.T.V. for employment as hosts, producers or technicians. It is already a job ghetto. Like its programming policy squeezing twenty-four languages into one channel, M.T.V. jams many ethnic groups into its small staff. In the multi-million dollar world of television this is the tiniest of crumbs to Canada's minorities. But it is one that will nevertheless be used to justify keeping mainstream television white and English, in front and behind the cameras. Even the community stations have been heard to respond "Greek? I'm afraid M.T.V. is already doing programming for you." This reply reflects the fact that most people see minority groups as being internally homogeneous. Stressing the ethnic factor downgrades class difference. The majority of immigrants whose first language is other than French or English are workers often in low paying jobs. Besides concerns of employment or unemployment their most pressing considerations include things like orientation to public services, immigration policy for sponsoring relatives and racism. Presumably, they are the most likely viewership for Multilingual television. But instead of focusing on these very real issues, 47 intoxicates its transmissions with nostalgia for homelands that exist only in tourist brochures. It doesn't work because most of us know that we came here looking for a better life.

It is true that M.T.V.'s lack of funds precludes the production of costly documentaries. But constraints of money alone do not force the type of programming seen on channel 47welldressed heads and torsos shimmering against chroma-keyed backgrounds of foreign cities. Neither is this blandness the responsibility of the overworked and underpaid staff.

Multilingual Television is a business venture run for profit. It seeks to produce what sells but it doesn't sell to a subscriber. It attempts to make its money like most broadcast TV stationsselling advertising space. At present much of 47's commercials come from the same car sales rooms and stereo manufacturers that buy time on mainstream anglophone stations. But M.T.V. is also prying open the unexplored treasure-box of Metro Toronto's non-anglo small businesses, a group previously unable to afford TV commercials. Unlike large corporations whose P.R. departments might be quite distanced from the executive offices, the small restaurant owner or shopkeeper will directly decide whether he or she will support a programme aimed at his or her particular ethnic group. In order not to alienate potential sponsors, producers and hosts will ensure that shows are not controversial. If they don't, they will soon find themselves on the job market.

What's left is a medium that portrays a hybrid world as distinct from the real world. A no-risk environment where violence, sex, bodily functions and what is deemed 'politically subversive', (the real world) have been eliminated.

The discrepancy between TV characters and real people is one we have come to expect on Network Television in Canada. Despite the lack of polish this gap is the common denominator of most Third World Television as well. Programming in Turkey, Trinidad or on Toronto's MTV have a uniformity that derives from similar economic and political constraints, and from the fact that TV personnel everywhere take their cue from the large production centres. In all these situations, Television, more through the process of production than direct censorship, shows us the hybrid as the real world. We see our society through the distorting circus mirror of the ruling class: All the Blacks, Italians and Philippinos on MTV are well fed and well groomed. Here there are no Chinese garment workers, Native car-wash attendants, Portuguese cleaners or West-Indian domestics. And most of all, there is no political anger. In North America, television educates us to be passive and invites us to 'celebrate' our 'good' fortune at being so luxuriously duped. Canadians who speak neither French nor English have so far been denied this form of social control through television. Multilingual TV remedies this 'neglect.

Asians Gay and Proud (1980) The Asianadian v. 2. N 3 Winter 1979-80, p.30.

To overcome these barriers non-white lesbians and gay men have organized. "When will the Ignorance End?" was the theme of the first National Third World Gay Conference held in Washington, D.C., October 12 to 15. Sponsored by the National Coalition of Black Gays, it brought together 627 men and women to talk, sing, dance, to learn from each other, to discover our history, and to organize. An Asian caucus was formed by lesbians and gay men with Japanese, Indonesian, Indian, Chinese, Malaysian and Filipino backgrounds from the US, Canada and the Caribbean. The workshop themes included Immigration, Asian American gay research, children of interracial marriage, social/sexual revolution (focus on Cuba), Chicano identity, gays in the black family and others.

Non-white gay and lesbians face a double-edged sword: the racism of the general society as filtered into the gay community and the sometimes-vicious sexism and homophobia of our own "ethnic" communities. These two factors alone have kept us isolated. The latter has prevented many from participating fully in our own community or if we do, it enforces a secretiveness that leads to cultural schizophrenia.

ASIANS: GAY & PROUD by Richard Fung

The conference coincided with the National March on Washington for lesbian and gay Rights and on Sunday October 14, about 200 delegates marched from the conference site at Howard University through the black community and Chinatown to meet the mammoth demonstration.

The Asians, marching for the first time as a group, followed the Native American contingent and preceded the Latin Americans.

At the 200,000 strong rally, Asian spokeswoman Noshika Cornell, reminded the crowd of America's bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima and it's ruthless exploits in South East Asia. She also cautioned lesbians and gay men against fighting one form of oppression while perpetrating another.

Eyes on Black Britain (1988) FUSE WINTER 1987.88 n48, 25-28. Interview

For Asian gays, this Conference was very important for setting up a network of information and political support, for giving us the energy to struggle in our communities and for doing all this in the context of a third world movement.

Eyes on Black Britain: an interview with ISAAC JULIEN THE PASSION OF REMEMBRANCE DIRECTED BY MAUREEN BLACKWOOD & ISAAC JULIEN Sankofa Film and Video Collective 16 mm, Colour, 1986 Whenever oppressed groupswomen, people of colour, gays and lesbiansmanage to get across to media, a priority has always been to correct stereotypes that have been perpetuated about us. We want to reach out with "our" positive images in replacement of "their" negatives ones. But in rectifying stereotypes, we have often found ourselves trapped in the terms of dominant discourse. We have implicitly accepted "their" terms for constructing "our" positive images. As a result of this thinking, many gay films meant for the mainstream market downplay the representations of problematic issues like drag or outdoor sex. Because the dominant media portrays Black peoples as criminal and savage, we must bend over backward to promote our wholesomeness. Witness the recent editorials in Toronto's Contrast which characterize AIDS and homosexuality as white afflictions. In many oppositional films, the protagonists are constructed as victim-heroes. Among the oppressed there may exist personal tensions but never political contradictions. The Passion of Remembrance, produced by Britain's Sankofa Film and Video Collective, and co-directed by Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien, is a rare bird in independent Black cinema. Its subjects are precisely those thorny issues so often overlooked by a narrow vision of the anti-racism struggle. by Richard Fung

Providing a third layer of meaning, a Black female speaker in a spatial-temporal vacuum reevaluates the Black movements of the Sixties and Seventies from a feminist point of view. She remembers how women were relegated to a secondary role and confronts a Black male speaker with the accusation, that they were fighting' 'for their rights to be men." Through the juxtaposition and interaction of these three layers, The Passion of Remembrance manages to raise a range of issues which the mainstream of the Black movements has been very reluctant to address: gender, sexuality, and generational conflicts between Black British youth and their immigrant parents, The Passion of Remembrance is the first Black feature film from Britain since Burning an Illusion* in

The Passion of Remembrance is constructed in three separate layers. First, narrative segments revolve around the Baptistes, a Black working-class family in contemporary England. Maggie, the daughter, goes to gay clubs and has gay friends. This brings her into conflict with some members of her Black study group, and also with her father. Maggie works in video; at points in the narrative she plays her tapes, which then become the footage we, the audience, are watching. It is made up of solarized images of demonstrations and celebrations: the riots in Brixton mixed with gay rights marches. This documentary footage of resistance forms the second layer of the film. It is also used as a kind of parenthesis for the various events in the story. It underlines how personal conflicts are informed by larger social struggles.

Co-director Isaac Julien was in Toronto for the Grierson Documentary Seminar, where Passion was screened, and for a special benefit for Sistervision: Black Women and Women of Colour Press, and Grassroots: International Conference for Lesbians and Gays of Colour (upcoming in Toronto '88). This interview was conducted in Los Angeles in the Spring of 1987 at the L.A. International Lesbian and Gay Film and Video Festival. INTERVIEW Richard Fung: How did Sankofa come together, how did you actually meet each other? Isaac Julien: We met each other really through one woman called Nadine Marsh-Edwardsshe was at college with Martina Attille and Robert Crusz. I was at St. Martin's School of Art and Maureen Blackwood was at Polytechnic of Central London. From there, we decided to form a Black film workshop, and to make an application for a franchise to the television union, the A.C.T.T., and for financial support to Channel 4 and the Greater London Council (which has now been abolished).

1983. It represents along with films such as Handsworth Songs** a new wave in Black British filmmaking. Heavily informed by film theory, these works deal with complexities as well as struggling to find a language in cinema that can represent a Black British experience.

'Round about the advent of Channel 4 in 1981, there was the Independent Film Association and a number of Independent filmmakers and film workshop collectives, working on either political fronts or agitprop or avant-garde films, who made institutional demands to 'Channel 4. (Channel 4's basic mandate was to cater to alternative media. unrepresented voices, etc.to do what other channels weren't doing.) And within that, there was a workshop agreement drawn up between the A.C.T.T. and independent filmmakers and workshops to enable collectives of filmmakers to form workshops which would involve an integrated practice. They would do distribution, exhibition and production and the people that worked in those workshops would be the producers and would be the owners of the materials produced. But although Channel 4 funds several workshops up and down the country, Black workshops weren't really involved in that kind of negotiated decision and institutional demand-making. However, after the '81 riots, the institutional response was that there should be Black workshops. So, in a sense, we were encouraged to apply. Richard Fung: Other than yourselves, I know of the Black Audio/Film Collective. Are you the only two Black workshops? Isaac Julien: No, there's Retake Film/Video Collective, there's the Ceddo Film and Video Workshop, Star Productions. and Asian Film Workshops based in Lon-don. And then there are other workshops in the regions such as The Black Film/Video Workshop in Wales; Macro which is based in Handsworth, Birmingham; and Liverpool Black Media Workshop. Isaac Julien: All the Black workshops are different. For example, Retake is a Black workshop drawing on the Asian experience. Ceddo produces documentaries in a more traditionalist mode. Black Audio/Film I suppose is concerned with a similar preoccupation as Sankofa in terms of dealing with form and finding a film language that would express the Black experience. I suppose really what does make us different from the other workshops is our make-up around gender and sexuality. Sankofa consists of three Black women and myself, a Black gay man. Although there are workshops that have women and gay members, these issues have been a central political starting point for us. Richard Fung: Were you all born in Britain? Isaac Julien: Martina Attille is the only member that wasn't. Richard Fung: How would you characterize Sankofa in a way that would differentiate it from the other groups?

Richard Fung: Is that something that holds you together as a group?

Isaac Julien: Negotiating one's identity around being a filmmaker is something that is not really meant for Black people to do. One realizes that the technologies of cinema are usually in terms of racism, in terms of sexism, in terms of who is in control of that technology. So, to negotiate your identity as a Black filmmaker around making experimental films is doubly problematic in terms of formulating strategies, in terms of speaking to your own communities and other communities of interest. One struggles on several fronts around notions of what sort of films Black filmmakers should be making and what kinds of films audiences desire, and what the filmmaker desires to make himor herself. And so there are several things that have to be fought and weighed and played with.

Richard Fung: One of the things that I find most exciting about your work, is that you deal with all the pressing questions of political content and take up issues of form and film language. The codes of traditional cinema have been used to interpret and regulate our lives but when oppressed people take up the camera, we often reproduce this language. It's almost as if it's seen as inappropriate for us to experiment.

Isaac Julien: Well, yes, because we all definitely see ourselves as part of British society and we want to challenge notions of Britishness and Englishness in terms of its definition around white ethnicity. We want to disrupt those notions of Englishness that have been traditionally propagated by films such as Chariots of Fire, etc.

I think the exciting thing for us is that we can take any form of film we like and use it to our advantage. If somebody wanted to make a documentary film that drew from an experimental style or wanted to use techniques that drew from avant-garde films around the '70s and the '80s or even wanted to look at mainstream cinema and use those kinds of narratives, I think that all those options are open because if one looks at how the Black subject is placed within cinema, one can see there has never really been a film language that has ever involved us in any progressive mode. So for me there aren't really rules that hold as such and I find that an exciting thing. Isaac Julien: Well, I think that the discussions that we've had have been with Black communities of interest and other practitioners working within the same area that we're working in. We've now been able to come to a notion that people are really dissatisfied with films that show Black people in a very one-dimensional way, i.e., in riots, comedies, or you know, the stereotypical ways that Black people have been constructed in the cinema. So, we were concerned with not duplicating the approaches that have been made by other Black filmmakers and we took our context by looking at other films such as Blacks Britannica, Burning an Illusion, and Pressure. We also looked at independent film work in America, and the Black Diaspora. Richard Fung: But do you ever feel a responsibility to communicate more broadly? Is there a tension between formal experimentation and political effectiveness?

Richard Fung: The other thing is that when people talk about a film relating or not relating to the Blackor, in my work, to the Asian- community, there's a problem in how it posits one community with only one level of relating. You don't always have to be going for the same level, you can choose parts of that community to relate to, and to speak to, at a time.

We came to the conclusion that if we were to start negotiating our identities within the cinema that we'd have to somehow start to negotiate a film language that would actually try not to reproduce dominant ideology but would reproduce our desires and our politics. We also wanted there to be politics of representation within the work that we produced. Now I think it is a very delicate position when you do that without having dialogues with communities of interest. I think in Sankofa we've always tried to state that we speak from rather than for the Black communities and we try to express that work either in terms of autobiography or in terms of narrative oral traditions.

Isaac Julien: Well, I think that when we talk about communities and speaking from the communities, we stress the "ies" and the several communities within one community, that it's not a monolithic community. I think that one of the problems that Black filmmakers inherit is the desert of representation around the Black experience. I think that our audiences, Black audiences, also feel

Isaac Julien: I think there's heterosexism in the Black communities and there is racism in the gay communities, depending on where you place yourself. As a strategy I thought it was very important to bring things back home, to be able to talk to the communities that I was part of. And in a sense, for the Black communities, and other communities of interest, to address issues and political agendas that to me were very important in order for those communities to move forward. If those communities were going to survive, they'd have to be able to start negotiating different identities, negotiating the multiplicity and plurality of identities that existed within them: that's what I feel we're doing in The Passion of Remembrance. There had been a lot of silences, lots of absences. The woman in Passion is calling Black male leaders into question, absolutely. Richard Fung: Did you get flack from the Black press for doing that in a way that goes beyond the Black communityfor "hanging dirty linen in public"? Isaac Julien: Not as much, no, in fact people probably honed in a lot more on the homosexuality. Richard Fung: How did that manifest itself, how did people react to that?

Richard Fung: Whether it be from a feminist, gay or anti-racist position, many activist films tend to fall into a kind of victim-hero representation. Passion focuses on the problematical, the neglected spaces, yet it ironically constructs a more total picture by doing that.

that scarcity of Black representation, and the emotional desire to see those images is very strong. And to see them in a way that can be pleasing for every-bodythat is really quite an impossible task for any filmmaker. There probably will always be people that will be disappointed with what you do, because there are only one or two films that relate to us at anyone time. Also there's a kind of history of discontinuity in Black filmmaking, so the burden of representation is very much a kind of baggage that is inherited within a Black filmmaking tradition. There are also advantages to that. We have to be aware of what we make and who we're making it for, but I think we have to be very honest as well, that we actually make things for ourselves.

Isaac Julien: Well, some people reacted in a fairly positive way and others in not so positive a way. But the fact that it was being discussed was what was important. We were saying we weren't invisible members of that community, that we were there and we had always existed in that community, and that we were finding a voice and putting ourselves in a political agenda. Richard Fung: The film does transgress many political orthodoxies. For instance, the family in Passion is treated with a lot of warmth. There's been a very anti-family sentiment within both the white gay/lesbian and the white women's movements.

Isaac Julien: I think that the critique around patriarchy has always been very Eurocentric and that Black families, when they're being policed and coerced by the state, when Black men are being bumped off in prisons, in police stations and when on the other, the social, side of the state, where women come more into contact with this kind of coercion around family care, around medical and health issuesthere have been several fronts where the Black family is more or less oppressed. Richard Fung: It's interesting that whereas they fight, and there are tensions within the family, there's still a basic understanding that they are "a family." The mother is also quite a strong charactershe's the one that confronts the father on his homophobia,

Isaac Julien: Also, we wanted to produce and construct a family that was notnot that it was not a problematized space, 'cause I think that things are problematized within that space - but not a pathological Black family which has been a stereotypical representation both in Black films and in white films that include the Black family, both documentary and fiction. That was also very important.

Richard Fung: The scene where Maggie and her friend put on make-up is also strikingly unusual in a political film.

Isaac Julien: Well, feminism and politics and lipstick are compatible, and I think that for a long time those things haven't been seen as compatible. I also think that for young Black women to find pleasure in their own bodies, by dressing up, by stylizing themselves and going out and dancing, is very important and has been a political discourse of resistance for Black people as well, I suppose it's making all those statements. At the same time it's making statements about the generation thing, you know, women getting dressed upstairs, getting ready to go out and the men downstairs the kind of clash that happens between the different kinds of attitudes.

Richard Fung: On the other hand, there's a real stridency to the Black female speaker in Passion. She might almost be read as arrogant. She says, "I don't have the answers and if I did you wou1dn't understand them." How do you react to such a reading! Isaac Julien: I think there are several kinds of readings of the film. I do think, also, that the male speaker is guilty of not ever having listened to what Black women have to say. There's only a certain "position" that they have occupied within the movement.

Basically he's asking the woman for political direction, but before he can ask that of her there has to be a kind of exchange where she is able to make him accountable, and I think that's very importantthat she makes him accountable. I also think that people are not really very used to seeing women, especially Black women, in roles that are very strong, that actually have the upper hand, We see men in filmsbe they avant-garde films, experimental or art filmstalking and nagging all the time, we're far more used and conditioned to seeing men talk all the time. Isaac Julien: For me, after the woman talks about negotiating between complexity and confusion and they toss a coin and it comes up "heads"which means that things are complexhe then says that he has wasted enough time playing and he will find his own way home; he turns around, looks at her once, and once is enough, and then walks away. So, it's an ambiguous ending for me. He walks away and she's left in a sense, but in the last image you don't see him totally disappear as the screen fades to black. You have to be honest about where you see your political position at this particular moment in time, He had to think about what she had said, and though he was trying to find his own way home, he won't really find it unless theyunless wefind it together.. Richard Fung is a Toronto video producer who works in film and video distribution. *Burning an Illusion was a 1981 UK production directed by Menelik Shabazz (colour. 107 min.). **Handsworth Songs was produced in 1986, UK. by :he Black/Audio Film Collective, directed by John Akomfrah, producer Lina Gopaul. Everyday People (1989) (Fuse Magazine, Fall 1989) Most Western images of China are produced by people relatively unfamiliar with the people and the country they are shooting. With few exceptions, what we get are public images of ancient artifacts and political meetings, or else the peering eye of the voyeur. Paul Wongs new feature-length videotape Ordinary Shadows, Chinese Shade offers a different vision a private China that is particularly accessible to overseas Chinese. Shot on home Video 8, the use of which is not restricted in China, Ordinary Shadows, Chinese Shade is in many ways a home movie. Yet this is a home movie made by an experienced and inventive video artist with a superb eye, both as a cameraman and documentary maker. Wongs position in the tape can best be described as a participating observer. One is always aware of his particular relationship to the people he is shooting. As a family member who speaks the local dialect, Wong and his camera move with ease through the villages. People send messages back to relatives in Canada: I would like to use your house for one or two years. My sons need it to house their staff. As a trusted outsider, he is used as a witness to peoples dreams and to their pain. A physician finds Richard Fung: At the end of the film, after all this struggle, the man walks away leaving the woman alone. What does this signify for you?

Ordinary Shadows, Chinese Shade is composed of several movements, loosely organized so that they frustrated expectations for linear progression. The first segment shows Wongs relatives in Canada talking about China. Their image is inset into slow-motion footage of Vancouvers Chinatown, specifically images of the dragon dance. In visual terms, this sequence economically suggests the relationship of ritual re-enactment to the affirmation of cultural identity. In searching out the past as a way of dealing with the present, one could say that the staging of the dragon dance is fueled by the same desires that motivate Wongs trip to China.

a sympathetic ear for the politically motivated abuses suffered by her family. A restless young woman confesses to her desire for an overseas boyfriend.

Films About Interracial Relationships (1991) Festival of Festivals, Toronto. September 10-19, 1991. Films About Interracial Relationships by Richard Fung (Fuse, Winter 1992)

Ordinary Shadows, Chinese Shade does not have the analytical rigour of the Long Bow films by Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon Hinton was born and raised in Beijing but neither does it fall into the traps of exoticness and otherness common in so many pieces about China. Wongs tape searches out human connections it is a tape about people.

Ordinary Shadows, Chinese Shade vigilantly avoids a simplistic, digestible reading of China. The tape is, after all, only about a very tiny corner of that vast reality. Even so, within its small geographical range, the footage moves from village to city, from rice fields to discotheques, and from poor peasants to the new bourgeoisie. Wong also attempts to undermine the fetishization of the documentary image by placing the written English translation in the centre of the screen, rather than as subtitles on the bottom. The viewers attention is directed to the fact that reality is mediated through the process of shooting and translation. However, other distancing devices are less effective. The inconsistent use of matting one image into another is sometimes unnecessarily distracting. Similarly, the sequence on the Cultural Revolution, a snappily edited montage of political slogans and Mao memorabilia, is aesthetically engaging but raises expectations for a political analysis that the piece is not capable of delivering.

At its most successful, the tape transcends the narrow lenses that have framed Western views of China clichd images of mystery, exotica and politics. These are images outstanding for the ordinariness they capture: pigs peeing, chickens being killed for a banquet. A lengthy sequence of a bicycle accident, in which a crowd of onlookers swears and trades accusations, underscores the vast array of images of China that are not usually shown.

The second and most interesting, segment of the tape is verit footage of time spent in southern Guandong province, particularly in the villages of Taishan home to most early Chinese immigrants to North America. For many Chinese viewers, this footage would be a bit like watching a tape about going to the supermarket. But for anyone familiar with China only from Western representations, this footage is something of a revelation.

It used to be that if you wished to cause a real stir, if you wanted to test the liberal tolerance of a film or television audience, you would depict an interracial relationship. And it still works; ask Madonna. The corollary is that if you wanted to stay within the line and you had non-white characters, you either had to find them one of their kind or else make the character celibate. (Even as a child, I noticed that the Bill Cosby character in I Spy was alone, while his white counterpart, Robert Culp, was forever having affairs). In this context, any film or TV show that did cross the colour line was liberal and a work of conscience. A positive portrayal of interracial sex became the ultimate progressive statement on race.

Now what was assumed here, and what was always assumed, was that you the producers and you the audience, are white. No else mattered politically or economically. It never occurred to ask how black or Native or Asian or Latino people might see the issue. Besides, the liberal framework had no analysis of systemic power and therefore no room for the depiction of what might be seen as coloured prejudice. People of colour had to be shown as victims, not as subjects. And, in any case,

it was taken for granted that they would simply be grateful to have some amorous (white) attention thrown their way. Now, with the highly touted Black Wave in American film, all this is beginning to change. At the end of Spike Lees Jungle Fever (1990), the films protagonist, Flipper Purify, is firmly returned to his kind and his community, contrite after an affair with his white secretary. He was just curious about white, he tells her, explaining the unilateral breakup. Despite a modifying subplot (the Italian store owners budding affair with his black customer), a standard Lee device, the film is pessimistic about the possibility, or even the desirability of black-white relationships. My reading of the film is that Flippers eventual rejection of the white woman is the condition upon which his status as hero is constructed within the film.

It is precisely this assumption about race and sexuality that the colour of someones bedmate is taken as an indicator of their politics that British filmmaker-intellectual-activist, Isaac Julien, challenges in his most recent feature film, Young Soul Rebels (1991). The film asserts not only the possibility and the pleasure but especially the fact of interracial relationships. Set in 1977, during the royal jubilee and a period just before the birth of the autonomous black culture that Britain has since become known for, the film follows two soul boys, Cris and Caz, in uncovering the circumstances around the murder of their friend, TJ. Julien successfully subverts established stereotypes about the relationships of race, gender and sexuality in the mainstream, and also in the Movement. Chris is half-white, the softer of the two, heterosexual, and becomes involved with a successful black woman. Caz is dark-skinned, unapologetic, gay, the more active of the two (in terms of the films structure), and forms a relationship with a white, anti-racist punker. Although Young Soul Rebels is as consciously strategic in its character development, casting, structure and plot as Jungle Fever, Juliens purpose is the opposite to Lees. The effect of Young Soul Rebels is to disrupt the notion that skin shade, sexual orientation, or racial-sexual preference determines a persons sense of black identity or political commitment. And the film celebrates the transgressiveness of interracial sex, not from a liberal white point of view (as in Guess Whos Coming to Dinner?) but against the tenets of black nationalism. There is only so much that can be dealt with in any single film, and Young Soul Rebels is not principally about interracial sex. At the same time, the film is sure to elicit resistance from some viewers because it does not address the reasons why there is a demand for the representation of black-black relationships in the first place, especially in a gay context. This may be rooted in essentialist politics to be sure. But one does not have to espouse determinism to recognize that racialized notions of beauty and the desirability, and questions of power also inform individual taste. These matters cannot simply be dismissed as they involve longstanding historical issues.

In Black Skins, White Masks (Grove Press, 1967, p. 47), for example, psychiatrist and revolutionary intellectual, Franz Fanon, makes the following observation in the chapter on The Woman of Colour and the White Man: The number of sayings, proverbs, petty rules of conduct that govern the choice of a lover in the Antilles is astounding. It is always essential to avoid falling back into the pit of niggerhood, and every woman in the Antilles, whether in a casual flirtation or in a serious affair, is determined to select the least black of the men.

Fanon was writing specifically of his native Martinique, and his statement is rather sweeping even then. But judging from Curacao director Felix de Rooys Ava and Gabriel (1989), his analysis holds a general truth for the Caribbean under its various forms of colonial rule. The unofficial language of Curacao is Papiamentu, which is a sort of naturally evolved Esperanto, consisting of an admixture of Portugese, Spanish, Dutch and English mixed with African languages. From the polyglot nature of the society, one can devise that this is a racially mixed populace. Yet what de Rooy demonstrates with utter clarity is how, in the colonial context, colour equates with power even in this seeming melting pot. It is the late 40s. Ava is a young teacher of mixed race, engaged to be married to the white police major, Carlos. This opportunity for upward mobility is derailed when Ava is chosen to model for a painting of an Antillan Virgin Mary, destined to grace the local church. Ava falls in love with the

black Surinamese painter Gabriel, much to the chagrin of her mother and the fury (and sheer disbelief) of her fianc.

The second installment of a trilogy, which includes the prize-winning Almacita di Desolato (1986), Ava and Gabriel is a loose restaging of the Christian messiah myth, with Ava as the mother of Jesus and Gabriel as the archangel of the Annunciation. But while spirituality is a major theme in the film, its breakthrough lies in the insightful depiction of the social and political forces that inform everyday life in the Caribbean. The predicament of Avas and Gabriels mutual attraction and the eventual tragedy that befalls Gabriel because of it, is framed by an elaborate set of intermingling sub-plots. Balancing Avas engagement to Carlos is Gabriels flirtation with Louise, the (white) wife of the governor. Gabriels eventual rejection of her in part leads to his downfall. There is also a gay relationship which is effectively treated and furnishes further observations on class, colour, and sexuality. However, particularly significant is the contextualizing narrative of the resistance of the Catholic church hierarchy and the local white elite to the heretical and subversive image of a black Virgin.

The cinematic representation of interracial sex as threatening, in fact, goes back to the beginnings of Hollywood itself, with D.W. Griffiths negrophobic Birth of a Nation (1915) and his (ostensibly) sinophilic Broken Blossoms (1919). In the former, an epic glorification of the birth of the Ku Klux Klan, the evils of miscegenation are most clearly embodied in the character of Lynch, the films villain, a mulatto. In Broken Blossoms, a film about bigotry which was meant to foster liberal (white) tolerance for Asians, the Chinese hero like Lynch, played by a white actor is portrayed as sympathetic, only in so far as his love for the tragic, white heroine can be established as chaste and unconsummated. Since that period of early Hollywood, television and mainstream Western cinema have continued to depict miscegenation as threatening, but also, increasingly, as tragic or even, optimistically, as a (defeatist) strategy for overcoming racial conflict. Yet the topic is rarely taken up from the perspective of experience rather than as metaphor.

In her autobiographical film, the ironically titled Coffee Coloured Children (1988) British filmmaker Ngozi Onwurah developed a personal lexicon of images to evoke the pain and confusion of growing up the child of an English mother and a West African father in racist Britain. In Onwurahs most recent work, The Body Beautiful (1991), the starting point is her mothers mastectomy. Featuring Madge Onwurah as herself, with actresses playing Ngozi at different stages of her life from the innocent malice of childhood to the self-absorption of young adulthood and a fashion model career the film is an unabashedly emotional, though never sentimental, confrontation with the conflicting feelings of guilt, resentment, admiration, embarrassment, and love that constitute the mother-daughter relationship.

It is of course through their bodies that these two women are connected. Yet, it is their bodies, as carries of racial and sexual meaning, that separate them as young and old, beautiful and disfigured, and black and white. This is summed up most eloquently towards the end of the film as the two women lie naked, side by side, on the mothers bed. The voice of the daughter explains that a child is made in the image of both is mother and its father. Yet, in a world which sees solely in terms of black and white, she is regarded only as her fathers daughter; but it is her mother who has shaped her thinking. Though she draws on established cinematic codes, mixing them freely as she goes, the effect of Onwurahs filmmaking style is one of freshness. Not only does she take up topics not often treated in film and there are few of those but her approach is sometimes daring to the point of challenging even progressive orthodoxies. The Body Beautiful, for example, features one of the most trangressive sex scenes I have ever seen on film. As the two women relax in a snack bar, the camera takes up the look of the mother as she watches a handsome, young black man. This transposes into a fantasy sequence in which the mother and man are naked, making love in a dreamscape of gossamer curtains, with the character of Ngozi orchestrating and at times inhibiting the action.

The fantasy sequence is at once an affirming presentation of Madges sexual desire and a depiction of aching nostalgia: for being desired, for youth, for her breast, and for her estranged husband. I find this scene exhilarating for its bravado and at the same time profoundly unsettling because it foregrounds those sensitive issues of power surrounding the cinematic gaze. Many viewers will no doubt raise the question of who has been more victim of cinemas fetishization black men or white women and therefore who has more of a right to represent their own fantasies in their own terms. (Remember the controversy that surrounded A Winter Tan (1987)?

Jungle Fever, Young Soul Rebels, Ava and Gabriel and The Body Beautiful each takes up the issue of interracial sex in distinct terms. Their filmmakers work at varying levels within the industry, in separate countries, and with very different aesthetic and political concerns. In a highly publicized incident at Cannes, for example which Isaac Julien says is basically a fabrication of the press the filmmaker (who won the critics prize there) supposedly refused to pose for photographs with Spike Lee, saying that his films were sexist and homophobic. However, what these films have in common whether they highlight the oppressiveness, the celebratory, or the ordinariness of interracial sex is that they take up the question differently than it has ever been asked before in commercial cinema. Looking for My Penis (1991) 1991. In Bad Object-choices (Eds). How Do I Look? Queer Film & Video, pp. 145-168. Seattle: Bay Press Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn by Richard Fung

Several scientists have begun to examine the relation between personality and human reproductive behaviour from a gene-based evolutionary perspective... In this vein we reported a study of racial difference in sexual restraint such that Orientals > whites> blacks. Restraint was indexed in numerous ways, having in common a lowered allocation of bodily energy to sexual functioning. We found the same racial pattern occurred on gamete production (dizygotic birthing frequency per 100: Mongoloids, 4; Caucasoids, 8; Negroids, 16), intercourse frequencies (premarital, marital, extramarital), developmental precocity (age at first intercourse, age at first pregnancy, number of pregnancies), primary sexual characteristics (size of penis, vagina, testis, ovaries), secondary sexual characteristics (salient voice, muscularity, buttocks, breasts), and biologic control of behaviour (periodicity of sexual response, predictability of life of life history from onset of puberty), as well as in androgen levels and sexual attitudes.

This passage from the Journal of Research in Personality was written by University of Western Ontario psychologist Philippe Rushton, who enjoys considerable controversy in Canadian academic circles and in the popular media. His thesis, articulated throughout his work, appropriates biological studies of the continuum of reproductive strategies of oysters through to chimpanzees and posits that degree of "sexuality"interpreted as penis and vagina size, frequency of intercourse, buttock and lip sizecorrelates positively with criminality and sociopathic behavior and inversely with intelligence, health, and longevity. Rushton sees race as the determining factor and places East Asians (Rushton uses the word Orientals) on one end of the spectrum and blacks on the other. Since whites fall squarely in the middle, the position of perfect balance, there is no need for analysis, and they remain free of scrutiny. Notwithstanding its profound scientific shortcomings, Rushton's work serves as an excellent articulation of a dominant discourse on race and sexuality in Western societya system of ideas and reciprocal practices that originated in Europe simultaneously with (some argue as a conscious justification for ) colonial expansion and slavery. In the nineteenth century these ideas took on a scientific gloss with social Darwinism and eugenics. Now they reappear, somewhat altered, in psychology journals from the likes of Rushton. It is important to add that these ideas have also permeated the global popular consciousness. Anyone who has been exposed to Western television or advertising images, which is much of the world, will have absorbed this particular constellation of stereotyping and racial hierarchy. In Trinidad in the 1960s, on the outer reaches of the empire, everyone in my schoolyard was thoroughly versed in these "truths" about the races.

Historically, most organizing against racism has concentrated on fighting discrimination that stems from the intelligence-social behavior variable assumed by Rushton's scale. Discrimination based on perceived intellectual ability does, after all, have direct ramifications in terms of education and employment, and therefore for survival. Until recently, issues of gender and sexuality remained a low priority for those who claimed to speak for the communities. But antiracist strategies that fail to subvert the race-gender status quo are of seriously limited value. Racism cannot be narrowly defined in terms of race hatred. Race is a factor in even our most intimate relationships.

Second, within the totalizing stereotype of the "Oriental," there are competing and sometimes contradictory sexual associations based on nationality. So, for example, a person could be seen as Japanese and somewhat kinky, or Filipino and "available." The very same person could also be seen as "Oriental" and therefore sexless. In addition, the racial hierarchy revamped by Rushton is itself in tension with an earlier and only partially eclipsed depiction of all Asians as having an undisciplined and dangerous libido. I am referring to the writings of the early European explorers and missionaries, but also to antimiscegenation laws and such specific legislation as the 1912 Saskatchewan law that barred white women from employment in Chinese-owned businesses. Finally, East Asian women figure differently from men both in reality and in representation. In "Lotus Blossoms Don't Bleed," Renee Tajima points out that in Hollywood films: There are two basic types: the Lotus Blossom Baby (a.k.a. China Doll, Geisha Girl, shy Polynesian beauty, et al.) and the Dragon Lady (Fu Manchu's various female relations, prostitutes, devious madames). . . . Asian women in film are, for the most part, passive figures who exist to serve men as love interests for white men (re: Lotus Blossoms) or as partners in crime for men of their own kind (re: Dragon Ladies)." Further: Dutiful creatures that they are, Asian women arc often assigned the task of expendability in a situation of illicit love. . . . Noticeably lacking is the portrayal of love relationships between Asian women and Asian men, particularly as lead characters.

The contemporary construction of race and sex as exemplified by Rushton has endowed black people, both men and women, with a threatening hypersexuality. Asians, on the other hand, are collectively seen as undersexed. But here I want to make some crucial distinctions. First, in North America. stereotyping has focused almost exclusively on what recent colonial language designates as "Orientals"that is East and Southeast Asian peoplesas opposed to the "Orientalism" discussed by Edward Said, which concerns the Middle East. This current, popular usage is based more on a perception of similar physical featuresblack hair, "slanted" eyes, high cheek bones, and so onthan through a reference to common cultural traits. South Asians, people whose backgrounds are in the Indian subcontinent and Sri Lanka, hardly figure at all in North American popular representations, and those few images are ostensibly devoid of sexual connotation.

Because of their supposed passivity and sexual compliance, Asian women have been fetishized in dominant representation, and there is a large and growing body of literature by Asian women on the oppressiveness of these images. Asian men, howeverat least since Sessue Hayakawa, who made a Hollywood career in the 1920s of representing the Asian man as sexual threat have been consigned to one of two categories: the egghead/wimp, orin what may be analogous to the lotus blossom-dragon lady dichotomythe kung fu master/ninja/samurai. He is sometimes dangerous, sometimes friendly, but almost always characterized by a desexualized Zen asceticism. So whereas, as Fanon tells us, "the Negro is eclipsed. He is turned into a penis. He is a penis," the Asian man is defined by a striking absence down there. And if Asian men have no sexuality, how can we have homosexuality?

Even as recently as the early 1980s, I remember having to prove my queer credentials before being admitted with other Asian men into a Toronto gay club. I do not believe it was a question of a color barrier: Rather, my friends and I felt that the doorman was genuinely unsure about our sexual orientation. We also felt that had we been white and dressed similarly, our entrance would have been automatic.

Creating a space for Asian gay and lesbian representation has meant among other things, deepening an understanding of what is at stake for Asians in coming out publicly. As is the case for many other people of color and especially immigrants, our families and our ethnic communities are a rare source of affirmation in a racist society. In coming out, we risk (or feel that we risk) losing this support, though the ever-growing organizations of lesbian and gay Asians have worked against this process of cultural exile. In my own experience, the existence of a gay Asian community broke down the cultural schizophrenia in which I related on the one hand to a heterosexual family that affirmed my ethnic culture and, on the other; to a gay community that was predominantly white. Knowing that there was support also helped me come out to my family and further bridge the gap. If we look at commercial gay sexual representation, it appears that the antiracist movements have had little impact: the images of men and male beauty are still of white men and white male beauty. These are the standards against which we compare both ourselves and often our brothersAsian, black, native, and Latino. Although other people's rejection (or fetishization) of us according to the established racial hierarchies may be experienced as oppressive, we are not necessarily moved to scrutinize our own desire and its relationship to the hegemonic image of the white man. In my lifelong vocation of looking for my penis, trying to fill in the visual void, I have come across only a handful of primary and secondary references to Asian male sexuality in North American representation. Even in my own video work, the stress has been on deconstructing sexual representation and only marginally on creating erotica. So I was very excited at the discovery of a Vietnamese American working in gay porn.

Although a motto for the lesbian and gay movements has been "we are everywhere," Asians are largely absent from the images produced by both the political and the commercial sectors of the mainstream gay and lesbian communities. From the earliest articulation of the Asian gay and lesbian movements, a principal concern has therefore been visibility. In political organizing, the demand for a voice, or rather the demand to be heard, has largely been responded to by the problematic practice of "minority" representation on panels and boards. But since racism is a question of power and not of numbers, this strategy has often led to a dead-end tokenistic integration, failing to address the real imbalances.

Below the Belt (1985, directed by Philip St. John, California Dream Machine Productions), like most porn tapes, has an episodic structure. All the sequences involve the students and sensei of an allmale karate dojo. The authenticity of the setting is proclaimed with the opening shots of a gym full of gi-clad, serious-faced young men going through their weapons exercises. Each of the main actors is introduced in turn; with the exception of the teacher, who has dark hair, all fit into the current porn conventions of Aryan, blond, shaved, good looks. Moreover, since Sum Yung Mahn is not even listed in the opening credits, we can surmise that this tape is not targeted to an audience with any particular erotic interest in Asian men. Most gay video porn exclusively uses white actors; those tapes having the least bit of racial integration are pitched to the specialty market through outlets such as International Wavelength. This visual apartheid stems, I assume, from an erroneous perception that the sexual appetites of gay men are exclusive and unchangeable.

In examining Sum Yung Mahn's work, it is important to recognize the different strategies used for fitting an Asian actor into the traditionally white world of gay porn and how the terms of entry are determined by the perceived demands of an intended audience. Three tapes, each geared toward a specific erotic interest, illustrate these strategies.

Having acted in six videotapes, Sum Yung Mahn is perhaps the only Asian to qualify as a gay porn "star." Variously known as Brad Troung or Sam or Sum Yung Mahn, he has worked for a number of different production studios. All of the tapes in which he appears are distributed through International Wave-length, a San Francisco-based mail order company whose catalog entries feature Asians in American, Thai, and Japanese productions. According to the owner of International Wavelength, about 90 percent of the Asian tapes are bought by white men, and the remaining 10 percent are purchased by Asians. But the number of Asian buyers is growing.

A Karate dojo offers a rich opportunity to introduce Asian actors. One might imagine it as the gay Orientalist's dream project. But given the intended audience for this video, the erotic appeal of the dojo, except for the costumes and a few misplaced props (Taiwanese and Korean flags for a Japanese art form?) are completely appropriated into a white world.

The tape's action occurs in a gym, in the students' apartments, and in a garden. The one scene with Sum Yung Mahn is a dream sequence. Two students, Robbie and Stevie, are sitting in a locker room. Robbie confesses that he has been having strange dreams about Greg, their teacher. Cut to the dream sequence, which is coded by clouds of green smoke. Robbie is wearing a red headband with black markings suggesting script (if indeed they belong to an Asian language, they are not the Japanese or Chinese characters that one would expect). He is trapped in an elaborate snare. Enter a character in a black ninja mask, wielding a nanchaku. Robbie narrates: "I knew this evil samurai would kill me." The masked figure is menacingly running the nanchaku chain under Robbie's genitals when Greg, the teacher, appears and disposes of him. Robbie explains to Stevie in the locker room: I knew that I owed him my life, and I knew I had to please him [long pause] in any way that he wanted." During that pause we cut back to the dream. Amid more puffs of smoke, Greg, carrying a man in his arms, approaches a low platform. Although Greg's back is toward the camera, we can see that the man is wearing the red headband that identifies him as Robbie. As Greg lays him down, we see that Robbie has "turned Japanese"! It's Sum Yung Mahn. Greg fucks Sum Yung Mahn, who is always face down. The scene constructs anal intercourse for the Asian Robbie as an act of submission, not of pleasure: unlike other scenes of anal intercourse in the tape, for example, there is no dubbed dialogue on the order of "Oh yeah. . . fuck me harder!" but merely ambiguous groans. Without coming, Greg leaves. A group of (white) men wearing Japanese outfits encircle the platform, and Asian Robbie, or "the Oriental boy," as he is listed in the final credits, turns to lie on his back. He sucks a cock, licks someone's balls. The other men come all over his body; he comes. The final shot of the sequence zooms in to a close-up of Sum Yung Mahn's headband, which dissolves to a similar close-up of Robbie wearing the same headband, emphasizing that the two actors represent one character.

To a greater extent than most other gay porn tapes, Below the Belt is directly about power. The hierarchical dojo setting is milked for its evocation of dominance and submission. With the exception of one very romantic sequence midway through the tape, most of the actors stick to their defined roles of top or bottom. Sex, especially anal sex, as punishment is a recurrent image. In this genre of gay pornography, the role-playing in the dream sequence is perfectly apt. What is significant, however, is how race figures into the equation. In a tape that appropriates emblems of Asian power (karate), the only place for a real Asian actor is as a caricature of passivity. Sum Yung Mahn does not portray an Asian, but rather the literalization of a metaphor, so that by being passive, Robbie actually becomes "Oriental." At a more practical level, the device of the dream also allows the producers to introduce an element of the mysterious, the exotic, without disrupting the racial status quo of the rest of the tape. Even in the dream sequence, Sum Yung Mahn is at the center of the frame as spectacle, having minimal physical involvement with the men around him. Although the sequence ends with his climax, he exists for the pleasure of others.

We now cut back to the locker room. Robbie's story has made Stevie horny. He reaches into Robbie's pants, pulls out his penis, and sex follows. In his Asian manifestation, Robbie is fucked and sucks others off (Greek passive/French active/ bottom). His passivity is pronounced, and he is never shown other than prone. As a white man, his role is completely reversed: he is at first sucked off by Stevie, and then he fucks him (Greek active/French passive/top). Neither of Robbie's manifestations veers from his prescribed role.

Richard Dyer, writing about gay porn, states that: although the pleasure of anal sex (that is, of being anally fucked) is represented, the narrative is never organized around the desire to be fucked, but around the desire (whether or not following from anal intercourse). Thus, although at a level of public representation gay men may be thought of as deviant and disruptive of masculine norms because we assert the pleasure of being fucked and the eroticism of the anus, in our pornography this takes a back seat.

Asian Knights (1985, directed by Ed Sung. William Richhe Productions), the second tape I want to consider; has an Asian producer-director and a predominantly Asian cast. In its first scenario, two Asian men. Brad and Rick, are seeing a white psychiatrist because they are unable to have sex with each other: Rick: We never have sex with other Asians. We usually have sex with Caucasian guys. Counselor: Have you had the opportunity to have sex together? Rick: Yes, a coupla times, but we never get going.

Although I agree with Waugh that in gay as opposed to straight porn "the spectator's positions in relation to the representations are open and in flux." this observation applies only when all the participants are white. Race introduces another dimension that may serve to close down some of this mobility. This is not to suggest that the experience of gay men of color with this kind of sexual representation is the same as that of heterosexual women with regard to the gendered gaze of straight porn. For one thing. Asian gay men are men. We can therefore physically experience the pleasures depicted on the screen, since we too have erections and ejaculations and can experience anal penetration. A shifting identification may occur despite the racially defined roles, and most gay Asian men in North America are used to obtaining pleasure from all-white pornography. This, of course, goes hand in hand with many problems of self-image and sexual identity. Still, I have been struck by the unanimity with which gay Asian men I have met, from all over this continent as well as from Asia, immediately identify and resist these representations. Whenever I mention the topic of Asian actors in American porn, the first question I am asked is whether the Asian is simply shown getting fucked.

Although Tom Waugh's amendment to this argumentthat anal pleasure is represented in individual sequence also holds true for Below the Belt, as a whole the power of the penis and the pleasure of ejaculation are clearly the narrative's organizing principles. As with the vast majority of North American tapes featuring Asians, the problem is not the representation of anal pleasure per se, but rather that the narratives privilege the penis while always assigning the Asian the role of bottom; Asian and anus are conflated. In the case of Sum Yung Mahn, being fucked may well be his personal sexual preference. But the fact remains that there are very few occasions in North American video porn in which an Asian fucks a white man, so few, in fact, that International Wavelength promotes the tape Studio X (1986) with the blurb "Sum Yung Mahn makes history as the first Asian who fucks a non-Asian."

True to the conventions of porn, minimal counseling from the psychiatrist convinces Rick and Brad to shed their clothes. Immediately sprouting erections, they proceed to have sex. But what appears to be an assertion of gay Asian desire is quickly derailed. As Brad and Rick make love on the couch, the camera cross-cuts to the psychiatrist looking on from an armchair. The rhetoric of the editing suggests that we are observing the two Asian men from his point of view. Soon the white man takes off his clothes and joins in. He immediately takes up a position at the center of the actionand at the center of the frame. What appeared to be a "conversion fantasy" for gay Asian desire was merely a ruse. Brad and Rick's temporary mutual absorption really occurs to establish the superior sexual draw of the white psychiatrist, a stand-in for the white male viewer; who is the real sexual subject of the tape. And the question of Asian-Asian desire, though presented as the main narrative force of the sequence, is deflected, or rather reframed from a white perspective. Sex between the two Asian men in this sequence can be related somewhat to heterosexual sex in some gay porn films, such as those produced by the Gage brothers. In Heatstroke (1982), for example, sex with a woman is used to establish the authenticity of the straight man who is about to

Homophobia, like other forms of oppression, is seldom dealt with in gay video porn. With the exception of safe sex tapes that attempt a rare blend of the pedagogical with the pornographic, social or political issues are not generally associated with the erotic. It is therefore unusual to see one of the favored discussion topics for gay Asian consciousness-raising groups employed as a sex fantasy in Asian Knights. The desexualized image of Asian men that I have described has seriously affected our relationships with one another; and often gay Asian men find it difficult to see each other beyond the terms of platonic friendship or competition, to consider other Asian men as lovers.

be seduced into gay sex. It dramatizes the significance of the conversion from the sanctioned object of desire, underscoring the power of the gay man to incite desire in his socially defined superior. It is also tied up with the fantasies of (female) virginity and conquest in Judeo-Christian and other patriarchal societies. The therapy-session sequence of Asian Knights also suggests parallels to representations of lesbians in straight porn, representations that are not meant to eroticize women loving women, but rather to titillate and empower the sexual ego of the heterosexual male viewer.

From the opening shot of painted lotus blossoms on a screen to the shot of a Japanese garden that separates the episodes, from the Chinese pop music to the chinoiserie in the apartment, there is a conscious attempt in Asian Knights to evoke a particular atmosphere. Self-conscious "Oriental" signifiers are part and parcel of a colonial fantasyand realitythat empowers one kind of gay man over another. Though I have known Asian men in dependent relations with older, wealthier white men, as an erotic fantasy the house boy scenario tends to work one way. I know of no scenarios of Asian men and white house boys. It is not the representation of the fantasy that offends, or even the fantasy itself, rather the uniformity with which these narratives reappear and the uncomfortable relationship they have to real social conditions.

Even in the one sequence of Asian Knights in which the Asian actor fucks the white man, the scenario privileges the pleasure of the white man over that of the Asian. The sequence begins with the Asian reading a magazine. When the white man (played by porn star Eric Stryker) returns home from a hard day at the office, the waiting Asian asks how his day went, undresses him (even taking off his socks), and proceeds to massage his back. The Asian man acts the role of the mythologized geisha or "the good wife" as fantasized in the mail-order bride business. And, in fact, the "house boy" is one of the most persistent white fantasies about Asian men. The fantasy is also a reality in many Asian countries where economic imperialism gives foreigners, whatever their race, the pick of handsome men in financial need. The accompanying cultural imperialism grants status to those Asians with white lovers. White men who for various reasons, especially age, are deemed unattractive in their own countries. suddenly find themselves elevated and desired.

Asian Knights is organized to sell representations of Asians to white men. Unlike Sum Yung Mahn in Below the Belt, the actors are therefore more expressive and sexually assertive, as often the seducers as the seduced. But though the roles shift during the predominantly oral sex, the Asians remain passive in anal intercourse, except that they are now shown to want it! How much this assertion of agency represents a step forward remains a question.

In this tape Sum Yung Mahn is Brad, a film student making a movie for his class. Brad is the narrator; and the film begins with a self-reflexive "head and shoulders" shot of Sum Yung Mahn explaining the scenario. The film we are watching supposedly represents Brad's point of view. But here again the tape is not targeted to black, Asian, or Latino men; though Brad introduces all of these men as his friends, no two men of color ever meet on screen. Men of color are not invited to participate in the internationalism that is being sold, except through identification with white characters. This tape illustrates how an agenda of integration becomes problematic if it frames the issue solely in terms of black-white. Asian-white mixing: it perpetuates a system of whitecenteredness.

International Skin (1985, directed by William Richhe. N'wayvo Richhe Productions), as its name suggests, features a Latino, a black man, Sum Yung Mahn, and a number of white actors. Unlike the other tapes I have discussed, there are no "Oriental" devices. And although Sum Yung Mahn and all the men of color are inevitably fucked (without reciprocating), there is mutual sexual engagement between the white and nonwhite characters.

The gay Asian viewer is not constructed as sexual subject in any of this worknot on the screen, not as a viewer. I may find Sum Yung Mahn attractive, I may desire his body, but I am always aware that he is not meant for me. I may lust after Eric Stryker and imagine myself as the Asian who is having sex with him, but the role the Asian plays in the scene with him is demeaning. It is not that there is anything wrong with the image of servitude per se, but rather that it is one of the few fantasy scenarios in which we figure, and we are always in the role of servant.

Though the sequences I have focused on in the preceding examples are those in which the discourses about Asian sexuality are most clearly articulated, they do not define the totality of depiction in these tapes. Much of the time the actors merely reproduce or attempt to reproduce the conventions of pornography. The fact that, with the exception of Sum Yung Mahn, they rarely succeedbecause of their body type, because Midwestern-cowboyporn dialect with Vietnamese intonation is just a bit incongruous, because they groan or gyrate just a bit too muchmore than anything brings home the relative rigidity of the genre's codes. There is little seamlessness here. There are times, however, when the actors appear neither as simulated whites nor as symbolic others. There are several moments in International Skin, for example, in which the focus shifts from the genitals to hands caressing a body; these moments feel to me more "genuine." I do not mean this in the sense of an essential Asian sexuality, but rather a moment is captured in which the actor stops pretending. He does not stop acting, but he stops pretending to be a white porn star. I find myself focusing on moments like these, in which the racist ideology of the text seems to be temporarily suspended or rather eclipsed by the erotic power of the moment. In "Pornography and the Doubleness of Sex for Women," Joanna Russ writes

Are there then no pleasures for an Asian viewer? The answer to this question is extremely complex. There is first of all no essential Asian viewer. The race of the person viewing says nothing about how race figures in his or her own desires. Uni-racial white representations in porn may not in themselves present a problem in addressing many gay Asian men's desires. But the issue is not simply that porn may deny pleasures to some gay Asian men. We also need to examine what role the pleasure of porn plays in securing a consensus about race and desirability that ultimately works to our disadvantage.

Sex is ecstatic, autonomous and lovely women. Sex is violent, dangerous and unpleasant woman. I don't mean a dichotomy (i.e., two kinds or women or even two kinds or sex) but rather a continuum in which no one's experience is wholly positive or negative. Gay Asian men are men and therefore not normally victims of the rape, incest, or other sexual harassment to which Russ is referring. However, there is a kind of doubleness, of ambivalence, in the way that Asian men experience contemporary North American gay communities. The "ghetto," the mainstream gay movement, can be a place of freedom and sexual identity. But it is also a site of racial, cultural, and sexual alienation sometimes more pronounced than that in straight society. For me sex is a source of pleasure, but also a site of humiliation and pain. Released from the social constraints against expressing overt racism in public, the intimacy of sex can provide my (nonAsian) partner an opening for letting me know my placesometimes literally, as when after we come, he turns over and asks where I come from. Most gay Asian men I know have similar experiences.

In Canada, the major debate about race and representation has shifted from an emphasis on the image to a discussion of appropriation and control of production and distributionwho gets to produce the work. But as we have seen in the case of Asian Knights, the race of the producer is no

The barriers that impede pornography from providing representations of Asian men that are erotic and politically palatable (as opposed to correct) are similar to those that inhibit the Asian documentary, the Asian feature, the Asian experimental film and videotape. We are seen as too peripheral, not commercially viablenot the general audience. Looking for Langston (1988), which is the first film I have seen that affirms rather than appropriates the sexuality of black gay men, was produced under exceptional economic circumstances that freed it from the constraints of the marketplace. Should we call for an independent gay Asian pornography? Perhaps I am, in a utopian sort of way, though I feel that the problems in North America's porn conventions are manifold and go beyond the question of race. There is such a limited vision of what constitutes the erotic.

This is just one reality that differentiates the experiences and therefore the political priorities of gay Asians and, I think, other gay men of color from those of white men. For one thing we cannot afford to take a libertarian approach. Porn can be an active agent in representing and reproducing a sex-race status quo. We cannot attain a healthy alliance without coming to terms with these differences.

automatic guarantee of "consciousness" about these issues or of a different product. Much depends on who is constructed as the audience for the work. In any case, it is not surprising that under capitalism, finding my penis may ultimately be a matter of dollars and cents.

I would like to thank Tim McCaskell and Helen Lee for their ongoing criticism and comments, as well as Jeff Nunokawa and Douglas Crimp for their invaluable suggestions in converting the original spoken presentation into a written text. Finally, I would like to extend my gratitude to Bad ObjectChoices for inviting me to participate in How Do I Look? Discussion Audience member: You made a comment about perceived distinctions between Chinese and Japanese sexuality. I have no idea what you mean.

Simon Watney: I wanted to point out that the first film you showed, Below the Belt, presents us with a classic anxiety dream image. In it there is someone whose identity is that of a top man, but that identity is established in relation to a competing identity that allows him to enjoy sexual passivity, which is represented as a racial identity. It's as if he were in racial drag. I thought this film was extraordinary. Under what other conditions are Caucasian men invited to fantasize ourselves as racially other? And it seems to me that the only condition that would allow the visibility of that fantasy to be acted out in this way is the prior anxiety about a desired role, about top and bottom positions. This film is incredibly transparent and unconscious about how it construes or confuses sexual role-playing in relation to race. And the thrust of it all seems to be the construction of the Asian body as a kind of conciliatory pseudoheterosexuality for the white "top," who has anus envy, as it were. Fung: I completely agree. This film says too much for its own good by making this racist agenda so clear. Ray Navarro: I think your presentation was really important, and it parallels research I'm doing with regard to the image of latino men in gay male porn. I wondered if you might comment a bit more, however, about the class relations you find within this kind of work. For example, I've found a consistent theme running throughout gay white male porn of latino men represented as either campesino or criminal. That is, it focuses less on body type-masculine, slight, or whatever-than on signifiers of class. It appears to be a class fantasy collapsed with a race fantasy, and in a way it parallels the actual power relations between the latino stars and the producers and distributors, most of whom are white.

Richard Fung: In the West, there are specific sexual ambiences associated with the different Asian nationalities, sometimes based on cultural artifacts, sometimes on mere conjecture. These discourses exist simultaneously, even though in conflict with, totalizing notions of "Oriental" sexuality. Japanese male sexuality has come to be identified with strength, virility, perhaps a certain kinkiness, as signified for example by the clothing and gestures in Below the Belt. Japanese sexuality is seen as more "potent" than Chinese sexuality, which is generally represented as more passive and languorous. At the same time, there is the clich that "all Orientals look alike." So in this paradox of the invisibility of difference lies the fascination. If he can ascertain where I'm from, he feels that he knows what he can expect from me. In response to this query about "ethnic origins," a friend of mine answers, "Where' would you like me to be from?" I like this response because it gently confronts the question while maintaining the erotic possibilities of the moment.

Fung: There are ways in which your comments can also apply to Asians. Unlike whites and blacks, most Asians featured in gay erotica are younger men. Since youth generally implies less economical power, class-race hierarchies appear in most of the work. In the tapes I've been looking at, the occupations of the white actors are usually specified, while those of the Asians are not. The white actors are assigned fantasy appeal based on profession, whereas for the Asians, the sexual cachet of race is deemed sufficient. In Asian Knights there are also sequences in which the characters' lack of "work" carries connotations of the house-wife or, more particularly, the house boy.

But there is at least one other way to look at this discrepancy. The lack of a specified occupation may be taken to suggest that the Asian actor is the subject of the fantasy, a surrogate for the Asian viewer, and therefore does not need to be coded with specific attributes.

Tom Waugh: I think your comparison of the way the Asian male body is used in gay white porn to the way lesbiansim is employed in heterosexual pornography is very interesting. You also suggested that racial markers in gay porn tend to close down its potential for openness and flux in identifications. Do you think we can take it further and say that racial markers in gay porn replicate, or function in the same way as, gender markers do in heterosexual pornography? Fung: What, in fact, I intended to say with my comparison of the use of lesbians in heterosexual porn and that of Asian male bodies in white gay male porn was that they're similar but also very different. I think that certain comparisons of gender with race are appropriate, but there are also profound differences. The fact that Asian gay men are men means that, as viewers, our responses to this work are grounded in our gender and the way gender functions in this society. Lesbians are women, with all that that entails. I suspect that although most Asian gay men experience ambivalence with white gay porn, the issue for women in relation to heterosexual pornography are more fundamental. Waugh: The same rigidity of roles seems to be present in most situations. Fung: Yes, that's true. If you notice the way the Asian body is spoken of in Rushton's work, the terms he uses are otherwise used when speaking of women. But it is too easy to discredit these arguments. I have tried instead to show how Rushton's conclusions are commensurate with the assumptions everywhere present in education and popular thought.

Fung: On the last point I partially agree. That's why I'm calling for an independent porn in which the gay Asian man is producer, actor, and intended viewer. I say this somewhat halfheartedly, because personally I am not very interested in producing porn, though I do want to continue working with sexually explicit material. But I also feel that one cannot assume, as the porn industry apparently does, that the desires of even white men are so fixed and exclusive. Regarding the first part of your question, however, I must insist that Asian Americans and Asian Canadians are Americans and Canadians. I myself am a fourth-generation Trinidadian and have only a tenuous link with Chinese culture and aesthetics, except for what I have consciously searched after and learned. I purposely chose not to talk about Japanese or Thai productions because they come from cultural contexts about which I am incapable of commenting. In addition, the fact that porn from those countries is sometimes unmarked racially does not mean that it speaks to my experience or desires, my own culture of sexuality.

Audience member: I'm going to play devil's advocate. Don't you think gay Asian men who are interested in watching gay porn involving Asian actors will get a hold of the racially unmarked porn that is produced in Thailand or Japan? And if your answer is yes, then why should a white producer of gay porn go to the trouble of making tapes that cater to a relatively small gay Asian market? This is about dollars and cents. It seems obvious that the industry will cater to the white man's fantasy.

Isaac Julien: With regard to race representation or racial signifiers in the context of porn, your presentation elaborated a problem that came up in some of the safe sex tapes that were shown earlier. In them one could see a kind of trope that traces a circular patterna repetition that leads a black or Asian spectator to a specific realm of fantasy. I wonder if you could talk a bit more about the role of fantasy, or the fantasy one sees in porn tapes produced predominantly by white producers. I see a fixing of different black subjects in recognizable stereotypes rather than a more dialectical representation of black identities, where a number of options or fantasy positions would be made available.

Fung: Your last film, Looking for Langston, is one of the few films I know of that has placed the sexuality of the black gay subject at its center. As I said earlier, my own work, especially Chinese

Characters [1986], is more concerned with pulling apart the tropes you refer to than in constructing an alternative erotics. At the same time I feel that this latter task is imperative and I hope that it is taken up more. It is in this context that I think the current attack on the National Endowment for the Arts and arts funding in the United States supports the racist status quo. If it succeeds, it effectively squelches the possibility of articulating counterhegemonic views of sexuality.

Greg Bordowitz: When Jean Carlomusto and I began working on the porn project at Gay Men's Health Crisis, we had big ideas of challenging many of the roles and positionings involved in the dominant industry. But as I've worked more with porn, I find that it's really not an efficient arena in which to make such challenges. There is some room to question assumptions, but there are not many ways to challenge the codes of porn, except to question the conditions of production, which was an important point raised at the end of your talk. It seems to me that the only real way to picture more possibilities is, again, to create self-determining groups, make resources available for people of color and lesbians and other groups so that they can produce porn for themselves.

Just before I left Toronto, I attended an event called "Cum Talk," organized by two people from Gay Asians Toronto and from Khush, the group for South Asian lesbians and gay men. We looked at porn and talked about the images people had of us, the role of "bottom" that we are constantly cast in. Then we spoke of what actually happened when we had sex with white men. What became clear was that we don't play out that role and are very rarely asked to. So there is a discrepancy between the ideology of sexuality and its practice, between sexual representation and sexual reality.

Fung: I only partly agree with you, because I think, so far as is possible, we have to take responsibility for the kinds of images we create, or re-create, Asian Knights had a Chinese producer, after all. But, yes, of course, the crucial thing is to activate more voices, which would establish the conditions for something else to happen. The liberal response to racism is that we need to integrate everyonepeople should all become coffee-colored, or everyone should have sex with everyone else. But such an account doesnt often account for the specificity of our desires. I have seen very little porn produced from such an integrationist mentality that actually affirms my desire. It's so easy to find my fantasies appropriated for the pleasures of a white viewer. In that sense, porn is most useful for revealing relationships of power. Jos Arroyo: You've been talking critically about a certain kind of colonial imagery. Isaac's film Looking for Langston contains not only a deconstruction of this imagery in its critique of the Mapplethorpe photographs, but also a new construction of black desire. What kind of strategies do you see for a similar reconstructing of erotic Asian imagery?

Fung: One of the first things that needs to be done is to construct Asians as viewing subjects. My first videotape, Orientations [1984], had that as a primary goal. I thought of Asians as sexual subjects, but also as viewing subjects to whom the work should be geared. Many of us, whether we're watching news or pornography or looking at advertising, see that the image or message is not really being directed at us. For example, the sexism and heterosexism of a disk jockey's attitudes become obvious when he or she says. "When you and your girlfriend go out tonight. . . ." Even though that's meant to address a general audience, it's clear that this audience is presumed not to have any women (not to mention lesbians!) in it. The general audience, as I analyze him, is white, male, heterosexual, middle-class, and center-right politically. So we have to understand this presumption first, to see that only very specific people are being addressed. When I make my videotapes, I know that I am addressing Asians. That means that I can take certain things for granted and introduce other things in a completely different context. But there are still other questions of audience. When we make outreach films directed at the straight community the "general public"in an effort to make lesbian and gay issues visible, we often sacrifice many of the themes that are important to how we express our sexualities: drag, issues of promiscuity, and so on. But when I made a tape for a gay audience, I talked about those same issues very differently. For one thing, I talked about those issues. And I tried to image them in ways that were very different from the way the dominant media image them. In Orientations I had one guy talk about talk about park and washroom sexabout

Fung: If I understand your question correctly, you are asking about the prognosis for new and different representations within commercial porn. And I don't think that prognosis is very good: changes will probably happen very slowly. At the same time, I think that pornography is an especially important site of struggle precisely for those Asians who are, as you say, economically and socially at a disadvantage. For those who are most isolated, whether in families or rural areas, print pornography is often the first introduction to gay sexualitybefore, for example, the gay and lesbian press or gay Asian support groups. But this porn provides mixed messages: it affirms gay identity articulated almost exclusively as white. Whether we like it or not, mainstream gay porn is more available to most gay Asian men than any independent work you or I might produce. That is why pornography is a subject of such concern for me. Centre The Margins (1991) In Russel Leong (Ed.), Moving the Image: Independent Asian Pacific American Media Arts, pp. 6267. Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center & Visual Communications, 1991. Centre The Margins by Richard Fung

Lei Chou: I want to bring back the issue of class. One of the gay Asian stereotypes that you mentioned was the Asian house boy. The reality is that many of these people are immigrants: English is a second language for them, and they are thus economically disenfranchised through being socially and culturally displaced. So when you talk about finding the Asian penis in pornography, how will this project work for such people. Since pornography is basically white and middle-class, what kind of tool is it? Who really is your target audience?

I think, however, that to talk about gay Asian desire is very difficult, because we need to swim through so much muck to get to it. It is very difficult (if even desirable) to do in purely positive terms, and I think it's necessary to do a lot of deconstruction along the way. I have no ready-made strategies; I feel it's a hit-and-miss sort of project.

being a slut, basicallyin a park at midday with front lighting. He talked very straightforwardly about it, which is only to say that there are many possibilities for doing this.

Both Asians and gay people are used primarily as signsas simple shorthand when the director wants to conjure up a particular atmosphere or induce a certain reaction from the audience. Asians can invoke mystery, humour or danger. A gay character can be loathsome, ridiculous, bizarre or pathetic. With the increasing impact of the Asian American and the gay and lesbian movements, we are now witnessing an increasing use of gay as well as Asian characters, especially in television. Unfortunately, while these characters integrate the "1ook" of the program, they are seldom the center of the story. Or else their portrayals continue as extensions of long-circulating stereotypes and associations in the dominant culture. Early European accounts of Asia were filled with horror and fascination with the apparently libertine nature of sexual relations. Sixteenth-century Italian missionary, and scholar Matteo Ricci bitterly wrote of China:

When I look at mainstream Western movies and at television, I see that the imaging of gay people and of Asians is mutually exclusive. In other words, I see (a few) gay men and lesbians and (a few) Asians but I don't see gay or lesbian Asians. At the same time, there is a great deal of similarity in the way that the two groups figure in popular media.

That which most shows the misery of the people is that no less the natural lusts they practice unnatural ones that reverse the order of things: and this is not forbidden by law, nor thought to be illicit, nor even a cause for shame. According to cultural historian Jonathan D. Spence, Ricci's outrage simply reflected a Jesuit preoccupation established by "the Apostle of the Indies" himself, Francis Xavier, who, in 1549 wrote of the Japanese Buddhist clergy that "the priests are drawn to sins against nature and don't deny it, they acknowledge it openly. This evil furthermore is so public, so clear to all, men and

women, young and old, and they are so used to seeing it that they are neither depressed nor horrified."

In early Canadian law, precautions were taken to protect white women from the unbridled libidos of Asian men. In 1912, the Saskatchewan legislature disallowed the employment of white women in businesses owned or managed by the Chinese. This was followed by similar legislation in Ontario and in British Columbia. As Asian American activist Stephen Gong describes the career of Sessue Hayakawa, the imaging of the Hollywood silent-movie star relates to this early vision of Asians as sexually unmanageable and threatening. In contemporary popular consciousness, there continues an association, especially of Southeast Asia, with sexual commerce and accessibilityfor the foreigner, at least. Most recent mainstream cinema, however, owes more to another seemingly contradictory discourse; one that finds its rationale in Eugenics and has its most current distillation in theories such as those of psychologist Philippe Rushton. According to Rushton, Asians are more intelligent and less sexual than whites, who are in turn brighter and less sexual that Blacks. Sexuality is measured by a wide variety of variables such as penis size, frequency of intercourse, and fertility. Rushton's methods are shoddy as his conclusions arc racist, yet teaching at one of Canada's most prestigious universities, his course has become framed as a struggle for academic freedom and he has gained supporters on both sides of the border.

So if Hollywood cannot bring itself to represent Asians with sexual drive, how can we expect the representation of homosexual drive? A gay or lesbian Asian character would require more investment in character and writing that would detract focus from the white protagonist. Even Mishima (1985), a film about an "avowed" homosexual, managed to effectively skirt the issue. For their part, Asian filmmakers working in North America have not successfully managed to raise the question of homosexuality either. In the selective world of feature filmmaking Wayne Wang has consistently attempted to deepen the representations of Asians on the large screen. Whether it is the negotiation of the adult couple to sleep together in the face of parental supervision in Dim Sum (1984) or the central theme of impotence in Eat A Bowl of Tea (1989), sexuality is a discernable focal point in all of Wang's films. Except for a well intentioned but formulaic reference to lesbianism in the experimental drama Life is Cheap (1990), however, gay characters have not peopled his Chinatown landscape thus far.

Renee Tajima has written about the figuring of East Asian women in Hollywood, as falling into a dragon lady/lotus blossom dichotomy. In fact, Asian women have long been featured in Western representation for the pleasure of the white man's eye. Asian men, on the other hand, have not often been portrayed in sexual terms at all. Asian male characters tend either to be brainy wimps or else martial arts ascetics. The one commonality of both men and women is that neither is represented as sexual agentdesiring as opposed to desirable (or undesirable), the subject in the cinematic gaze.

In The Displaced View (1988), Sansei director Midi Onodera probes the more subt1e effects of the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II. Her innovative docu-fiction moves between the perspectives of three generations of women in one family. The third generation character is a lesbian, but since the word is never used and there are no dramatized sequences which illustrate her sexual orientation, it is left somewhat up to the viewer's acuity to decode the clues in the spoken text. In "Then/Now" (1989), Onodera's made-for-T.V. drama, the relationship between a Japanese Canadian woman and her father is temporarily torn apart by her need to set her own terms on their relationship. This includes her career as a writer and her love for a woman. Unfortunately, censorship from the upper echelons of the network bureaucracy deleted or distorted almost all of the lesbian reference, so that the actual nature of the relationship between the two women remains an enigma. At this time Onodera remains perhaps the only Asian lesbian filmmaker in North America who deals with the issue of her sexuality in her work. There are at least several reasons for the virtual absence of gay and lesbian Asians on the North American screen. Assuming that gay Asian representation would come primarily from gay Asian producers (though this is not necessarily so), it must first be recognized that there are relatively few Asian producers in North America in the first place. Some, like Los Angeles independent

filmmaker Gregg Araki, touch on sexual politics without specific Asian reference; others do not address questions of sexuality at all. The fact that both Midi Onodera and I work in Canada probably has a great deal to do with the overtly homophobic climate in the United States, carried from Reagan in to the Bush years and characterized by a hysterical attempt on the part of a right wing, both radical and established, to prop up what they see as a shifting status quo. Since to make films or videotapes about gay or lesbian subject matter is to invite scrutiny of one's own sexual orientation, at least one of the major factors for the absences relates to the general issue of "coming out" for gays and lesbians of color. In the context of North American racism, families and communities can have particular significance for Asians in affirming identity. So, while white gays and lesbians can avoid personalized homophobia by separating from their families or formative communities and still see themselves reflected in the society around them, their Asian counterparts do not always share this mobility and often find their sexual/emotional and racial/cultural identities in conflict. Generally, the more one is dependent on one's ethnic community, the more difficult it is to come out and risk losing support. This of course puts more of the burden on immigrants and Asians without financial mobility, especially those with less facility in English.

This process became apparent to me in producing Orientations, a 1984 videotape on gay and lesbian Asians, for which a major hurdle was finding a range of people who were willing to appear on camera. Middle-class, educated, young, North American-born men were easy to convince, but the working-class, older, immigrant men (and especially women) that I knew, felt that they had too much at stake to risk exposure. Of course the absences in the tape reinforce a false image of who gay people are. If asked to articulate the reasons for the relative lack of gay and lesbian visibility in most Asian communities (and in saying this I realize that there are exceptions), many people would say that the communities are too traditional to deal with this issue. I have heard this cited by gay people as a reason for not coming out, by parents for not telling the rest of the family, and by our "leaders" for protecting the communities from discordin other words enforcing censorship.

The notion of the "traditionalness" of the Asian communities has also been used as a reason for gay and lesbian Asians not to come out. However, from my decade of working with gay and lesbian Asians, the proportion of rejection and acceptance for those who do choose to come out to their families is not significantly different to those for white people. Yet whereas white homophobia is not interpreted to say anything about whiteness, there is a way in which Asian homophobia is assigned meaning. I am not implying that the fears, hatreds and anxieties that Asian communities feel about same sex love (or sex) are not sometimes "different" from those of European cultural background. The first concern for my own mother for instance, who is herself third generation Western born, centered around who would take care of me when I got old, a Confucian preoccupation. I do feel, however, that the idea that the homophobia of an Asian is somehow "worse" than that of a white person, or that it says something about Asianness, feeds into a racist discourse. In a similar analysis, both Angela Davis and bell hooks have deconstructed the notion among white feminists that the sexism of black men is again somehow more significant than that of white men. The notion of Asian societies and overseas communities as "traditional" also fixes them as static and unmoving. In the racism and flux of Western society, it is the tendency of emigrants and their descendents to look towards the homeland for spiritual affirmation and constancy. In our need to

Behind the Mask, an AIDS educational videotape aimed at the Asian Pacific communities, is very comprehensive ethnically and linguistically, as well as in its representation of the various issues at stakeexcept for homophobia. In fact, while it features interviews with obviously gay people, the tape never mentions the "g" word once! Right from the start, the AIDS epidemic has been represented as a "gay" disease. In order to reach out to heterosexuals, it has been deemed necessary to banish the gay reference altogether. This does nothing to displace the fact that AIDS is taboo precisely because it is associated with homosexuality, but it does not reinforce the notion of homosexuality as shameful and unspeakable. There is no way out of this impasse without confronting the demon of homophobia head on. Sidestepping the issue fails to take into account that one cannot transcend homophobia any more than one can transcend racism.

assert identity we eliminate complexity, homogenize and fall back on totalizing and essentialist visions of "home." Not that one should ignore history or acquiese to the Eurocentrism of North American culture. But there are always dangers of romanticization in any recuperation of other times or places. Further, the invocation of tradition as an excuse for not confronting homophobia in the Asian communities, implicitly suggests the fallacy that homophobia is absent from European tradition and "mainstream" contemporary society. The fact that middle-class white lesbians and gays may have a certain amount of mobility to avoid direct confrontation with homophobia, should not he taken to mean that they do not experience oppression, or to discount the actual effects of the gay and lesbian liberation movements.

Ironically, it is from Asia itself that we have seen the few representations of Asian gay characters in cinema; in Macho Dancer (1988) from veteran Fi1ipino director and political activist Lino Brocka and The Outsider (1936), based on the Taiwanese novel by Pai, Hsien-Jung and in the Thai films such as The Last Song (1986) and I am a Man (1988). Problematic because of their coyness or their sometimes oppressive morality, these films nevertheless acknowledge a homosexual presence in the societies in which they are made.

It must however also be acknowledged that the notion of tradition is contested ground. Gay and lesbian Asians are also quick to point out the existence, indeed the sometime celebration, of same sex love in Asian history. But to what extent the dalliances of samurai and page described by Saikaku Ihara, the Chinese legends of the cut sleeves and the shared peach, or the many Amazon romances relate to cruising down the Castro, Church and Wellesley or the Michigan Women's Music Festival, is a hotly debated topic in gay academia.

In my own video work in the area, I have seen the most important task as the representation of gay and lesbian Asians as subjects, both on the screen and especially as the viewer. I believe that it is imperative to start with a clear idea about audience. This in turn shapes the content of the piece. Many Asian or gay and lesbian tapes and films are still guided by notions of "positive images." To the extent to which positive images are a response to negative stereotypes, it is a limited strategy in that it takes its cue from what the white man or what the straight man thinks. Reaching out with alternative images for a mainstream is valuable but we can become so obsessed with how others might interpret what we have to say that we can cast our own Asian or gay audience into passivity. In the process of making work for an intended audience that is gay and Asian, I have felt myself freed to touch on issues that are neither important nor attractive to other communities (the socalled mainstream) but of pressing interest for many gay viewers. How do we want to take up drag or role playing? Must we always talk about race in relation to white people? How do we relate to our Black, Latino and Native American brothers and sisters? How do we relate to other Asian men and women in sexual or emotional terms: is integration always the ideal? I do not think that it is possible to create innocent images of Asians either; to ignore the overbearing history of Hollywood and of television, we must somehow learn to place ourselves at the centre of our own cultural practice, and not at the margins. (Re)creating ourselves in our own terms requires constant reevaluation of the master narratives that have bracketed our lives. For this we need to understand the history and language of images, we must grasp this language and make it our own. Working Through Appropriation (1993) FUSE SUMMER 1993 V. XVI n 5+6, 16-24

Working Through Appropriation by Richard Fung

Whereas cultural appropriation is an area of sensitivity in many arts communities, we recommend that the Canada Council develop guidelines which are sensitive to the complex issues surrounding cultural appropriation including differing needs of communities, the need for written permission in certain instances, the need to maintain respect for cultural tradition, the importance of

FROM 1990 TO 1991, I was a member of what eventually came to be called the Advisory Committee to the Canada Council for Racial Equality in the Arts. When first convened by the director of the Council, the committee lacked a clear mandate. After intense discussion amongst ourselves, however, the members agreed to focus on the issue of systemic racism at the Council. This, in itself, was a miraculous feat given that we were a group of nine artists, writers, and performers with widely varying backgrounds, experiences and practices, and sometimes profoundly differing political perspectives as well. By the end of our term, we had developed a series of recommendations relating to twelve aspects of Council functioning, including human resources, communications and board appointments. The fourth item in the section pertaining to juries and advisory committees was a recommendation about cultural appropriation. It was a short and rather general statement because we felt that the issue would receive more thorough consideration in the committee of aboriginal artists which was meeting simultaneously (and with which our membership over-lapped). When the report was released to the public, however, the media focused almost exclusively on this recommendation, and virtually ignored all others. In a major piece on the issue of cultural appropriation at the Canada Council, Globe and Mail writer Stephen Godfrey did little to illuminate the issue of systemic racism and, in fact, failed to report that the Canada Council had rejected the recommendation. This sensationalist article nevertheless triggered a frenzy of correspondence and opinion pieces, in which some of Canada's most prominent writers ranted about what they perceived as the threat of censorship at the Council. As someone who had spent many hours formulating and reworking the recommendations, I was, needless to say, frustrated by the way our work, and the racism that made it necessary, had disappeared from the controversy. (It was hard to call it a debate, since The Globe chose to print very few letters offering an alternative frameworkincluding my own). At the same time, the incident made me pay special attention to how the issue of appropriation was being framed.

training/background for artists working in cultural traditions other than their own. This policy will be consistent throughout sections and evident in application as well as jury procedures.

So here was a situation in which those opposed to the critique of cultural appropriationfor the most part white, successful males, who possessed easy access to the mainstream mediaimplicitly accused Native artists and artists of colour of racism (and explicitly of lacking artistic sensibility). It's no wonder that there was little real dialogue or debate. Yet it would be a mistake to be sucked into the binary polemics fostered by the media, to dismiss out of hand the concerns raised by writers such as Manguel, or to ignore the complexities and contradictions inherent within the critique of cultural appropriation. ...if I want to write in the voice of the tea cozy sitting in front of me, believe me, I'm not going to ask for its permission. _ Timothy Findley

The media often reduces issues to dualisms: a convenient mechanism for introducing conflict or demonstrating balance. Most media accounts therefore featured an opposition between an alliance of Canada Council bureaucrats (in the person of Joyce Zemans, then director of the Council) and "philistines" (mainly Native artists and artists of colour) and a number of "independent" writers such as Timothy Findley, Heather Robertson, and Neil Bissoondath, who were presented as defending artistic liberty from the tyranny of "political correctness." These writers did nothing to challenge the shocking Eurocentrism and systemic racism that characterizes Canada's cultural establishment; at the time the committee began its work, the Council had no non-white staff (except for cleaners), nor had it ever included a non-white member on its board. They were nevertheless quick to evoke the spectres of fascism and racism as the sure consequence of seriously taking into account the issues raised in the critique of cultural appropriation. In an opinion piece in The Globe and Mail, for instance, novelist and anthologist Alberto Manguel compared those concerned with "appropriation of voice" to German Nazis. Citing what Goebbels called the Rassengeist, or "spirit of the race," he concluded, "this fantastical nonsense, reminiscent of tales of sword and sorcery, would merely be foolish and elitist were it not also profoundly racistas well as intrinsically ignorant about artistic creation."

Again and again, papers have been written, careers built, tenure granted, royalties issued, and yet the people upon whom this is based are left behind on the reserves with nothing. -M. T Kelly

The primary dictionary meaning of the verb appropriate is "to take and use as one's own." Despite the rhetoric of various nationalisms, there are no unique, pure cultures today; people have steadily learned the ways of others and taken them as their own. By this definition, most of what we think of as culture involves some degree of appropriation. Foods, religions, languages and clothes all betray contacts with a larger world, which includes our closest neighbours, as well as distant imperial centres. There are no clear boundaries where one culture ends and another begins. But while some of this fusion may be celebrated as exchange, a larger proportion is the result of domination. The task of establishing cultural hegemony in the colonial context, for instance, entails the supplanting or harnessing of the social, economic and cultural systems of the subjugated, by those of the dominant power. For Native people in Canada, this has meant an often violent process of assimilation, coupled with the marketing of superficial difference either for profit (the tourism industry), or political gain (official multiculturalism). Those who raise the issue of cultural appropriation see it as a process that is not only wrong, but also incompletethus as one which is necessary and possible to organize against. The critique of cultural appropriation is therefore first and foremost a strategy to redress historically established inequities by raising questions about who controls and benefits from cultural resources. In this context, Linda Rabin's question is improperly framed, and Timothy Findley's caricature, irrelevant.

Those who advocate against cultural appropriation often assume the definition of this term to be self-evident; those who disparage the formulation make it into something ridiculous. The critique of cultural appropriation has suffered precisely due to a lack of clarity which leaves it open to misapplication. Initially propounded as a concept to explicate and justify cultural selfdetermination, the term has itself been appropriated by opposition to discredit any attempt at redefining the status quo through anti-racist activism. Thus, in discussing cultural appropriation, it becomes necessary to unpack the various meanings, emotions, and agendas with which the term is invested, and to sift through and foreground the different contexts within which positions have been drawn up.

Does this mean I cannot borrow from a Bach cantata because I am not Catholic, I am Jewish? -Linda Rabin

Appropriation occurs when someone else speaks for, tells, defines, describes, represents, uses or recruits the images, stories, experiences, dreams of others for their own. Appropriation also occurs when someone else becomes the expert on your experience and is deemed as more knowledgeable about who you are than yourself. -Loretta Todd

Although Loretta Todd writes specifically from an aboriginal context, the process she describes is a common, if not defining, characteristic of oppression. Does this mean, therefore, that the proscription against cultural appropriation should apply to the representation of all oppressed or marginalized groupsshould whites not represent Blacks or Asians; heterosexuals not depict lesbians and gay men; should men not write in the voice of women?

Gay men and lesbians have decried the media's homophobia and heterosexism, but only on occasion has it been suggested that the way to resolve this issue is to ensure that only queers are able to represent ourselves. Similarly, feminists concerned with the depiction of women do not usually call on men to desist from representing women in their work. Most lesbians and gay men don't grow up in exclusive queer cultures, but rather in the heartland of heterosexuality, where our existence is denied and our realities disfigured. Hence, in the arena of representation, the priority is usually put on reaffirming queer identity and presence through visibility, rather than preserving cultural integrity. Similarly, although we may point to feminist cultural expression, there is no women's culture existing outside of patriarchy. Neither feminist nor lesbian and gay cultures have genealogies for which cultural self-preservation make sense. When it comes to race and ethnicity the logic to self-preservation seems more clearly

defined; however, it is in a sense even more complicated. For example, reporting on cultural appropriation and the way it was handled by The Writer's Union, journalist Val Ross confidently defines it as "white writers using stories of other cultures." This common interpretation of cultural appropriation was taken even further during the 1988 dispute at Toronto's Women's Press. Amidst a range of anti-racist considerations, the issue arose as to whether white women had the right to write in the first person voice of non-white or Third World characters, or to work in the form of "magic realism," a term used to describe the work of a wide range of Latin American writers including Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garca Mrquez, and Isabel Allende. The latter part of this proscription was premised on the assumption that magic realism represented a unique pedigree, quite apart from the European traditions of the North. But such a position overlooked the vital role of French surrealism in the development of what is called magic realism, and the fact that the term was itself appropriated from European art criticism of the 1920s. The admonition therefore ignores the cultural hybridity and creolization integral to the style, and at the heart of the mestizo cultures that it aims to express. As M. Nourbese Philip commented on the debate, the effect was to assign Latin America the role of "the exotic, kinky Other to the straight, realist realities of the affluent West." Contradictions abound in the distorted racist logic of Eurocentrism. Asia's enduring rich cultural heritage has long been treasured and emulated for its incomparable high aesthetic achievements. And yet, Asian artists who worked in the pluralist contemporary mode are considered by Westerners and often by our own traditionalists alike to be a breed apart, or as strays who trespassed on someone's turf where we don't belong. - Yong Soon Min

In working through the question of appropriation, it is crucial to remember that all oppression does not express itself through the same means. Even within the category of racism, there are significant differences in the ways that the various racial others of the West have figured, both within representation, and in the economics of cultural production. Colonialism operated differently in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, and varied also according to the colonizing power concerned. To enslave and uproot the population, it was convenient that Africa be represented as a place without a culture or a history of its ownrequiring, of course, the excision of Egypt from that continent. On the other hand, the aesthetic contributions of India, China, and Japan had long been valorized in Europe, and it is the products of their culture and agriculture that motivated and justified colonialism in those parts. Diasporic Africans and Asians in the Americas have different histories from each other and, in turn, from those of Native peoples: slavery is not indentureship is not internment is not head tax is not residential schools. The ways that we various "others" are integrated into and excluded from contemporary commercial culture may be related, but they are also marked by crucial differences. In my community you walk into a classroom and when you look at the bookshelves, which is something that I always do when I go into communities, in the bookshelves are stories that are written not by our people, but by Anne Cameron, Kinsella, and a whole number of white people. And that is how our children learn about themselves.... -Maria Campbell

As a person of Chinese West Indian heritage, I feel the need to preserve what I know, and to make that knowledge and history an acknowledged component of Canadian identity and Canadian culture; this is, in part, what motivates my work to eradicate the underlying Eurocentrism of our systems of cultural funding. It also forms my interest in developing art that is relevant to the Canadian context. Having a sense that my "source" cultures follow their own paths, that the cultural forms of China and Trinidad can and will accommodate, appropriate, repel and resist the pressures of western cultural imperialism in their own ways, means that for me (here in the Diaspora) it makes no sense to freeze Chinese or West Indian cultural expression according to some nostalgic idea of what it was "truly" like. For one thing, these forms were always changing even as I experienced them in my childhood, and further, this effort to fix and fossilize "other" cultures, in opposition to the continuously developing modern and now postmodern culture of the West is, after all, the central and most insidious trope of multiculturalism.

The most hackneyed advice to young writers is: Write what you know about, describe what you have experienced. It is good adviceso long as one remembers that there are many ways of experiencing an event. Writing what you know about does not mean writing only about what you have lived. It includes all that you have come to understand or appreciate through conversation, observation, reading, dreaming, filmsthe multifaceted channels that feed us as human beings and as writers. -Neil Bissoondath

There is, however, a special urgency to the preservation and autonomy of aboriginal cultural resources, which I think makes the issue qualitatively different from those of diasporic people of colour. As Tuscarora artist Jolene Rickard said recently at a conference I attended, "this is all there is; if this goes, that's the end!" Aboriginal cultures are cultures deprived of a state; by definition they exist as "minority" cultures within a dominant national contextThai culture in Thailand is not considered aboriginal, whereas the Dai (Thai speaking) culture of neighbouring China is. Given the systematic attempts by the Canadian state to destroy First Nations cultures, economies and social systems, the desire to preserve and reconstruct them cannot nonchalantly be dismissed according to mechanical and simplistic readings of the critiques of essentialism or authenticity. That is not to say that these ideas are invalid or unimportant. It must however be recognized that the anthropological gaze and the discourse of authenticity is not the only mode of othering Third World, indigenous and non-white peoples. This is accompanied by a total disregard for accuracy in the public images about these people. Further, the critique of cultural appropriation doesn't necessarily require an essentialist understanding of identity. Some critics have explored the avenue of copyright law, for instance. Loretta Todd situates cultural resources within Aboriginal Tit1e. Along with land, environment and education it is part of what needs to be reclaimed: "When negotiations over land resources are undertaken, there is room for sharing once Aboriginal Title is acknowledged and establishedThis is not simply a seeking of refuge in a new class power, or even the advocacy of an essential 'Nativeness.'"

The public debate over cultural appropriation has been dominated by writers of fiction, and it is on their terms that the issue is usually argued. This wouldn't be a problem except that the questions thus raised are often carried over into the other arts, without recognizing their specificity. The concept of an imagination free of social constraints and responsibilities, apparently so dear to fiction writers, is near absent in the discourse of documentary film and video, for example. Issues in non-fiction media have traditionally included ethical concerns, into which the central question of appropriationthe relationship of the producer to the subjecteasily fits. On the other hand, Native and other actors of colour seem most concerned with the shortage of opportunity to develop and display their talents: and the lack of meaningful roles, the lack of roles for non-white actors generally. The case is different again when considering the circulation of musical forms and motifs. Most contemporary and even much classical music revels in layer upon layer of appropriationmusicians thrive on mixing things up. But that doesn't alter the fact that, in a context characterized by both racism and the commodification of culture, it is primarily white men who have controlled and benefited from the musical forms developed by non-white and Third World practitioners. This is the contradictory reality of using the voice, sound, image, dance, or stories of another: it can represent sharing or exploitation, mutual learning or silencing, collaboration or unfair gain, and, more often than not, both aspects simultaneously. Most positions for or against the use of the concept of cultural appropriation nevertheless disregard this complexity and promote blanket proscriptions or endorsementsat least on the surface. For even in attacking the Canada Council recommendation regarding the need for research, Timothy Findley ironically affirms the same principle: "who the hell do they think we are?... No one in his right mind would write in another voice without research and consideration." Similarly, even strong opponents of cultural appropriation who find the term indispensable have their exceptionsdiscussions of the films Dances with Wolves, Incident at Oglala, and Loyalties, always produce a wide range of responses, for example. A pressing problem for those concerned with appropriation is that the lines dividing "allowable" appropriations from "unallowable" appropriations are not always obvious. Even if we believe that, despite the exceptions, non-white stories, characters, motifs, or dances in the hands of another generally spell exploitation, there remain two sticky problems. First, where

The thoughts expressed at the "About Face About Frame" workshop represents, for me, an advance over the simple proscription against representing the other, because it moves toward considering a project's merits in terms that extend beyond the fact of the maker's identity, to the dynamics of the work itself. As Neil Bissoondath reminds us, there are many different ways to gain knowledge; identity in itself does not produce insight. Moreover, it is important to recognize that the critique of, and implied proscription against, cultural appropriation can easily lend itself to a bureaucratic regulation of identity. Consider, for example, US Public Law 101-644 of the 1990 Indian Arts and Crafts Act which states that "it is unlawful to offer or display for sale or sell any good, with or without Government trademark, in a manner that falsely suggests it is Indian produced, an Indian product, or the product of a particular Indian or Indian tribe or Indian arts and crafts organization, resident within the United States." This amendment to an existing law was responding, in part, to the concerns of Native artists and craftpersons about appropriation. But in a panel to discuss the law at the National Association of Art Organizations conference in Austin last fall, there wasn't consensus as to the value of the law. Artist Hulleah Tsinhanjinnie recited a long list of all those who would fail to be recognized as Indian under US federal regulations, including her niece, who, though 100 per cent Native, lacks enough "blood" of anyone tribe to qualify. Another Native artist simply stated, "this is not the Indian way to decide such things." We must think hard before we allow the state any increased power to define. With so few nonwhite people in decision-making positions, satisfactory interpretation of strict guidelines about appropriation would in no way be guaranteed. Moreover, such provisions could too easily be twisted to limit the options of the people they were meant to empower; for example, to restrict Haida artists to representing Haida themes, Japanese Canadians to Japanese Canadian topics, and so on. (Of course the commercial mainstream will continue to do as it pleases; that is, to say what is profitable.)

At the About Face About Frame" conference for film and video makers of colour and from the First Nations, a workshop on cultural appropriationthe most thorough and insightful I've attended concluded with participants agreeing that the key issues in representing others were respect, accountability, and equal access to the means of production. While it was mainly white producers who were deemed guilty of infraction, these principles were seen to apply to all projectswhether the directors or writers came from the same or different communities. For many critics of cultural appropriation the crucial underlying issues are the overwhelming pervasiveness of racist misrepresentation, distortion and crass commercialization, and the fact that few Native artists and people of colour have had the resources to produce and distribute their work, while others have made lucrative careers by drawing on these same forms and traditions. In terms of the concept of appropriation, there is a desire to see a levelling of the playing field. If there were huge numbers of prospering Native and other non-white artists producing culture in their own terms, a white person's telling of a story or making a film would be insignificant: but as yet, this is not the case.

Both the practices of inclusion and exclusion revolve around a single issue: the artist's racial background. When included within the institutional framework, contemporary Native arts are generally not accorded a value equal to other collections, which often leads to a token commitment and artistic marginalization. On the other hand, the exclusion of the arts of Native peoples implies that the artistic and cultural contributions to Canadian history by Canada's First Nations are nonexistent. - Lee-Ann Martin

does one draw the lines of otherness: Is a Dene situated to write an Ojibway story; can a Barbadian Canadian fashion a Jamaican immigrant character? Second, who decides whether something is appropriation or not; who is in a position to speak for the community, for the race, for the nation? Let's not forget that while artists raise the question of appropriation, many Native and other nonwhite community organizations continue to choose white directors to represent their concerns on film and video, perhaps because of a perception of these directors' superior skills, greater access to distribution and media attention, or the fact that, as outsiders, they might be more easily managed. In any case, it's impossible to enforce a consensus on an issue such as this, even within our own communities, which appear homogeneous and unanimous only to an external gaze; they too are arenas of contest and conflict.

The complexity of the net of concerns raised within the critique of cultural appropriation could not be adequately addressed in a set of fixed rules in state institutions such as the Canada Council. Even the seemingly progressive tenet of accountability to one's subject is not always desirable. For instance, if one were working on racism in a police force or a large corporation, would one demand that the organization approve the project? Hard and fast rules could not possibly anticipate all the exceptions. While I can't entirely dismiss the fears of writers such as Findley and Manguel, in the controversy surrounding the Canada Council recommendations, it is important to remember that censorship is a state function, and that those arguing against appropriation have little exercise of such powers. Consequently, it is misleading to talk of their critique as censorship. Neither can the guidelines proposed at Women's Press realistically be described as censorship, any more than their normal policy of publishing only work by women. Once the state acquires the power to regulate voice, however, even if based on the demands of disempowered groups, then the possibility of censorship does arise.

The recommendation about cultural appropriation by the Advisory Committee for Racial Equality in the Arts was rejected by the Canada Council administration. In fact, proscriptions against cultural appropriation have not materialized as policy in any cultural funding agency. There are several

Native people are few in number and mostly dispossessed of political power. We are not likely, like a Conservative government with a majority, to waste our time trying to pass laws limiting anyone's subject matter or opinions. - Daniel David Moses

...firstly, such a rule or proscription is essentially unenforceable (unless, of course, one is the late Ayatollah) and for that reason should never be made. Secondly, prohibiting such activity alters not one iota of that invisible and sticky web of systemic and structural racism. If all the white writers interested in this type of writing were voluntarily to swear off writing from the point of view of persons of other races and/or cultures, it would not ensure that writers from those cultures or races would get published any more easily, or at all... Thirdly, and, to my mind, most importantly, for those who unquestioningly clasp the rights of the individual writer most dearly to their breasts, such a proscription provides a ready-made issue to sink their anti-censorship teeth into. - M. Nourbese Phillip

Instead of attempting to set up bureaucratic constraints for white artists, the terms of which we could never be sure to control, I believe that Native and other non-white artists would be much better served by demanding a wider and more meaningful range of systemic changes. These would improve our access to and control of the means of studying, producing, disseminating and promoting our art, allow us the financial security to address audiences as other than white, and acknowledge our power to define what art means, indeed whether we want to situate our work within an art paradigm or not. This requires an investment in the system of peer evaluation and arm's length funding, a tradition from which the majority of Native and other non-white artists have so far garnered little benefit. Nevertheless, I believe it is far wiser to demand adequate representation on juries and to educate other artists to our issues rather than to place any hope in bureaucratic or political patronage. It shouldn't be forgotten that after a concerted effort to include adequate numbers of women on Canada Council juries, the percentage of women receiving grants rose dramatically.

The Butler decision on pornography offers a recent and instructive example of how the intentions of community activists can become distorted by their interpretation and enforcement by the State. Hailed by anti-porn feminists for supposedly replacing a moralistic with a harms-based approach to evaluating obscenity, the first raid immediately after the Butler decision was nevertheless made against a gay book store for a magazine produced by and intended for lesbians. Needless to say, lesbians are not the perpetrators of the violence against women that garnered support for the Butler decision. Rather, they are frequently the subjects of sexist and homophobic violence. Yet, once on the books, laws are available to selective enforcement and interpretation according to the prevailing prejudices of the day.

reasons for the failure of this issue to manifest itself in policy. Among the most significant is the fact that Native and other non-white artists are rarely given the opportunity to articulate such demands. Also, given the furor over the Racial Equality Committee's recommendation, it's not surprising that critics of cultural appropriation may now hesitate to raise the issue, because of the potential to distract from other goals. Equally important, though not often perceived or acknowledged, is the fact that Native and other critics of cultural appropriation have not generally spoken to the issue as policy. When First Nations artists have said "don't take our stories; don't steal our images," their objects of address have been other artists, not funding agencies. Their proscriptions against appropriation have been made in a moral and ethical, not a regulatory, arena. Moral and ethical directives don't easily translate into the bureaucratic language of guidelines and forms. Whereas the various approaches and protocols outlined in the Committee for Racial Equality's recommendation still strike me as relevant, the fixity of guidelines does not allow for sufficiently flexible methods of appraising the merits of individual projects. But even the rejection of official guidelines does not satisfy writers such as Timothy Findley, who object to the mere prospect of the issue arising in jury discussions or any other critical assessment. Nevertheless, it seems that the integrity of the independent jury system is a two way street: if one should not direct jury members to incorporate appropriation as a criterion for evaluation, one should not direct them to ignore it. Literature is judged "good" and "interesting" on more than punctuation, sentence structure and the skilled use of adjectives. Similarly, film and video are not assessed simply on image quality or proficient editing. The reason for having peer juries is to ensure that issues relevant to the practice and the world are brought to bear in evaluating work. Over time, these criteria will change, as will the composition of the jury itself. If the various government agencies are serious about eliminating systemic bias, juries will have to include, and consider meaningful, the contributions of qualified assessors who reflect a range, according to practice, interests, region, gender, language, race, sexuality, ethnicity and so on. The applications being assessed should also reflect this range. Thus, the issues currently communicated by the term appropriationrespect, accountability and access to the means of production and dissemination, will either arise or not. Ironically, as systemic racism disappears, we may find that the issue of appropriation becomes progressively less significant. I would like to thank Lisa McCaskell, Tim McCaskell and Kathleen Pirrie Adams for editorial suggestions, as well as the Ontario Arts Council (Writers' Reserve Programme) for financial assistance. Richard Fung is a Toronto-based video producer, writer and community activist.

Shortcomings (1993) 1993. In Martha Gever, John Greyson and Pratibha Parmar (Eds.), Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, pp. 355-367 Toronto: Between the Lines. The camera moves, hand-held, down a corridor lined with rooms. A handful of men dressed only in towels are chatting further down the hall. A white man passes, looking lasciviously into the lens. The camera peers into a room in which another man is sleeping on a cot, and then looks into the next doorway, where a white man, in his fifties, is reading a book. As he looks up, the frame cuts to a reverse shot of a young East Asian man in the doorway. A faint smile crosses his face as he moves on. The camera continues down the hall with the frame now cinematically identified with the point of view of the Asian manthe cruiser. The ensuing doorways reveal: a young black man in a leather harness, an East Asian man lying on his stomach who at first looks into the lens and then rapidly averts his glance, a young white man who mouths the word "no" while shaking his head, and finally, a South Asian man who smiles directly at the camera. Cross-cutting produces a mutual smile. The cruiser enters the room and the two men begin to kiss and caress. After a series of shots of the two licking and fondling each other, there is a brief negotiation. The South Asian man puts a condom on the cruiser (in close-up) and then sits on his penis (in medium shot). The camera pans away to show a mirror reflection of the two men enjoying anal sex as text rolls up the screen: Fuck safely, use a condom! Shortcomings: Questions About Pornography As Pedagogy by Richard Fung

The videotape I've just described is Steam Clean, a three-and-a-half-minute piece I directed in 1990 for New York's Gay Men's Health Crisis, the largest grassroots service agency for AIDS and HIVrelated issues in the United States. This tape is one of GMHC's "safer-sex shorts," a component of its educational program in fighting the spread of HIV in the lesbian and gay communities. I met Jean Carlomusto and Gregg Bordowitz, video production coordinators for GMHC, in 1989, at a conference on gay and lesbian representation. Although I am based in Canada, they approached me to produce the "short" for Asians, presumably because they knew and liked my work, but also because they could not locate an openly gay Asian videomaker in the United States who would undertake such a project. For my part, I was interested in producing the tape because it offered the chance to create sexual images of gay Asian men; images that represent them as sexual subjects in the process of realizing their desires; images that disrupt the various racial/sexual clichs about passivity, premature ejaculation, small dicks, and so on; images that challenge our almost total exclusion from the North American gay erotic imagination.

The message is repeated in Tagalog, Hindi, Chinese, and Vietnamese.

While Steam Clean was produced as one of the "shorts," it was completed several months after the other tapes, which had already been distributed together as a package. This compilation had been screened at a wide variety of venues, including workshops, bars, gay theaters, conferences, and film and video festivals. By the time I produced Steam Clean I had the benefit of having seen the "shorts" with different kinds of audiences, and I had developed my own thoughts about what worked for me in each of the individual pieces, as well as in the package as a whole. Convincing people to practice safer sex by depicting it as pleasurable is a currently favoured AIDS prevention strategy of progressive public health educators, as well as lesbian and gay groups. However, this necessitates promoting the pleasure of sex in itself, and entails depicting sex in a more or less explicit way. These are always points of conflict with religious and political conservatives, for whom the only acceptable approaches in inhibiting HIV transmission are sexual abstinence and (heterosexual) monogamy.

Given the struggle over the right to produce and disseminate sexually explicit safer sex materials, I feel a knee-jerk reaction to rally behind the "safer-sex shorts"; to uphold their efficacy and to vindicate the progay, proporn lobby. Steam Clean has now been screened in several film and video festivals, and has been used in workshops and elsewhere. Feedback has been positive on its "hotness" and its usefulness in triggering discussion. However, I have increasingly begun to question the assumptions that shaped the tape's form and function. How do gay Asian men actually watch video porn? How do they derive pleasure from what they see? How does the inclusion of Asian actors affect the tape's reception by gay Asian spectators? Can the pleasure premise of porn coexist with the pedagogical? Steam Clean, the other "shorts," as well as a significant portion of safer-sex propaganda all rely on a set of interlocking assumptions about pedagogy and pornography that warrant continuing interrogation. The Premise of Pornography Jean Carlomusto and Gregg Bordowitz sum up the purpose of the safer-sex shorts as "getting the message out that you can have hot sex without placing yourself at risk for AIDS. According to the GMHC's information sheet, Safer Sex Porn: Format and Design, each short is to he designed by a specific task group, which decides on the scenario, the characters, and the kinds of sex acts to be depicted: "The objective of this project is to come up with a number of culturally sensitive tapes addressing the needs of a number of communities regarding safer sex." The sheet also uses "advertisements," "music videos," as well as "pornography," as references to the war the tapes should look"extremely slick"and interact with their viewers: "These 'shorts' must be conceived as consumable."

Apart from the obvious parameters of length and sexual explicitness, the shorts reveal other similarities of approach. For instance, most of the tapes use fictional narrative only minimally, to set up a scene for sex. In Current Flow, for example, a woman is masturbating with an electric vibrator

when another woman pulls the plug. The intruder then lays out a "tool kit" of safer-sex aids, which the two tryout on each other. In Midnight Snack, a man opens a fridge in a darkened kitchen. Suddenly, the lights go on and another man appears and begins to rim him, using a dental dam as a harrier. Something Fierce, Law and Order, and an untitled piece with voguers are even more minimalist. Of the five original "shorts," Car Service is the only tape that is based on a fairly developed scenario: A black businessman in a suit and with a briefcase takes a taxi. During the ride, furtive glances are exchanged between him and the chatty, black driver. When it is time to pay, the businessman finds that he is out of cash and has only condoms in his pocket. The driver accepts these, and the tape ends with the two men having sex in the back of the car. Supplementing the narrative, each "short" ends with a brief printed text on the screen, which reinforces the specific aspect of safer sex promoted in the tape. Midnight Snack, for example, closes with the instruction: "Use latex condoms. Cut condoms lengthwise to use for rimming."

Whereas the mode of address varies from tape to tape, all of the "shorts" incorporate very prominent music tracks, from club hits to Sinead O'Connor. The music is used to create a sense of sexual energy, but it also serves to constitute the tapes and their message as fashionable and "in the know" for the target audiences. The repositioning of the appropriated lyrics with the queer sexual imagery at times endows the tapes with a layer of wit and campy humor. Whenever I've seen Current Flow with an audience, for instance, women always respond to the O'Connor sound track with chuckles. One of the most obvious aspects of the "shorts" as a group is the attention paid to race, and specifically, the consistent presence of people of color. Car Service features two black men, Something Fierce a single black man, and the entire cast in the vogueing tape is black. Midnight Snack, Law and Order, and Current Flow depict interracial sex with one black and one white actor. Steam Clean might also be said to portray interracial sex, since Indian and Chinese people are seen in this society as "racially" different, in spite of the fact that they are technically both Asian.

As producers, it is crucial to understand the discourses embedded in the depictions we fashion. It is our responsibility. At the same time, there is sometimes an unrealistic expectation that representations transcend, or even solve, problems that exist as social relations outside the text. The fact is that images of interracial sex cannot magically escape the burden of racism in the history of cinema, indeed in history itself. The possibilities for any portrayal of whites and people of color having sex are already overdetermined. If the black woman were the "passive" partner, or had there been a completely symmetrical reciprocity between the two women, the underlying problem would remain. In producing Steam Clean this became very clear to me. As described above, the tape involves anal sex between a Chinese and an Indian man. I already knew that in depictions of sex between East Asian and white men, the Asian man was almost invariably the "bottom." I knew that this reproduced a stereotype that Asian men resented. I could not, therefore, portray the Chinese man as the "passive" partner in anal intercourse if I wanted East and Southeast Asian menthe target groupto get pleasure in the tape. But what about the other man? Was it less problematic to show a South Asian getting fucked because, as a group, they are rarely represented sexually in North America? And how did all of this relate to the privileging of penile pleasure and patriarchal assumptions about the superiority of penetration? In the end, I had the Chinese man penetrate,

The frequent use of black and Asian actors, together with the common depiction of interracial coupling, sets this body of safer-sex propaganda apart from commercial porn. This perhaps reflects the proselytizing aspect of AIDS educational material aimed at high-risk populations, combined with greater sensitivity on the part of white AIDS educators to the politics of race and racism. Yet it is a mistake to think that the spectacle of queer miscegenation would only draw criticism from the racist right. At the How Do I Look? conference, Current Flow became a subject of controversy because the black woman in the tape is the "top," reproducing, it was felt, the common stereotype of black hypersexuality. Carlomusto and Bordowitz denied any racist intention and stated that the black woman in the tape chose the role she would play. Carlomusto also pointed to the burden placed on a work when there is only one of its kind: "If this tape existed within a series of tapes about lesbian sexuality, there wouldn't be as much tension around this particular frame or that particular image.

though I attempted to "equalize" the situation by having the Indian man sit on him, thereby asserting the pleasure of the anus.

I don't feel that my solution in any way resolved these crucial problems, because the fact of racism lies outside and beyond the tape, overdetermining the possibilities for maneuver within it. An option could have been to foreground the problem in a deconstructive manner; to produce a metapornography, a tape focusing on the workings and underpinnings of porn. I had already ventured such a strategy in an earlier video called Chinese Characters (1986). However, that tape didn't attempt to produce pornographic pleasure, but rather to analyze it. It seems difficult to reconcile deconstruction with eroticism in a single moment. In the context of a three-minute piece such a task strikes me as nearly impossible. Talking Sex What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret. Michel Foucault

Whenever I write or talk about sexuality, there is always the ghost of Michel Foucault, looking over my shoulder. .. laughing cynically. The project I embark on is inextricably tied up with what he identifies in sexual terms, as the two "modes of production of truth: procedures of confession, and scientific discursivity. I talk with people about their sexual lives and I document, analyze, bringing together the confessional and the scientific. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault identifies the two historically predominant procedures for producing the "truth of sex." On the one hand is the scientia sexualis of contemporary Western societies, and on the other, an ars erotica that developed in Asia, the Arab and Muslim societies, and Rome: In the erotic art, truth is drawn from pleasure itself, understood as practice and accumulated as experience; pleasure is not considered in relation to an absolute law of the permitted and the forbidden, nor by reference to a criterion of utility, but first and foremost in relation to itself; it is experienced as pleasure, evaluated in terms of its intensity, its specific quality, its duration, its reverberations in the body and soul.

I have been involved with the group Gay Asians Toronto (GAT) since its inception in 1980. One of the primary reasons for starting the group (as well as for its continuing survival), has, in fact, been talk. Not surprisingly, in both our formal (discussion groups) and informal (gossip) talk, constant themes are: sexual self-image in relation to the dominant representations of white masculinity; our desire (or lack of it) for other Asian men, white men, men of color; our absence from gay pornography; boyfriends. The sense of unburdening we feelthe pleasure of the talkis precisely rooted in the "secret" nature of sex in North American (and Asian) society, and thus in our "confessing" it. Although there are profound differencesof class, language, culture, ethnicity, politics, and very importantly, (life-)stylethe group offers a rare place where we can talk safely from roughly similar places at the intersection of race, gender, and sexual orientation. To explore my investigation of porn and pedagogy, I interviewed three gay Asian men. Two are active members of GAT, and all are friends or acquaintances. Such a small and idiosyncratic sample precludes any claim

This passage, tinged with both romanticism and orientalism, warrants many qualifications. First, the circulation of an erotic art among a privileged sector of certain societies, or the use of sexual motif as religious practice, do not in themselves indicate an absence of sexual regulation, simply different regulations and taboos. Secondly, through continuous contact (including colonialism), the existence of two such mutually exclusive systems is no longer plausible. Finally, whatever the discourse and practice of sexualities may be in contemporary Asian societies, among diasporan Asian communities in North America, the legacy of an ars erotica has not resulted in a particularly candid or nonjudgmental discussion of sex.

to quantifiable findings, and I'm certainly not interested in constructing any uniform category of "gay Asian men." My purpose in these interviews was not to produce a Kinsey Report based on an "average" or "typical" gay Asian spectator, but rather, to see how porn figures in the actual life of any gay Asian viewer. Finally, as it was known that I directed Steam Clean, I didn't feel it possible for me to elicit candid discussion of the tape. It would have been as appropriate as writing a review of my own work. In any case, my interest lay in the men's reaction to the "shorts" in general, and not in generating a critique of the individual pieces. Steam Clean is certainly implicated in whatever criticism or questions I raise in this paper.

For all three men, porn is linked primarily to masturbation, though Frank has looked at videos while having sex with a partner and finds it particularly exciting, "like having sex in a car." All have watched tapes socially, with friends, during and after which no sex followed. Li also watches porn in gay bars and finds it exciting. However, he tried not to be seen looking at it because he is afraid of being judged negatively by his peers: "This generation! I'm sure they do it at home, but when they get into a bar, they don't want people to think that they like porn. It's associated with sleaziness." When looking at porn, Frank and Ken both rely heavily on the search functions of the VCR, which disrupts the narrative and allows the viewer to reconstruct the tape according to his taste. Ken describes his viewing style as follows:

The men I interviewed watch porn only on an occasional basis. Frank owns about a dozen tapes, which he watches rarely because he does not particularly enjoy watching the same tape more than once. Neither of the others own any tapes, Ken because he is "too cheap" to purchase them, and Li because he lives in a rooming house and can only watch porn on the house VCR when his landlady and his heterosexual roommate are both out (both know he is gay, but his landlady does not approve of pornography). All three men rely on friends as a source of tapes since, until recently, censorship laws in Ontario have necessitated the communal sharing of out-of-province purchases.

Ken is second-generation Chinese-Canadian. He grew up in rural Ontario where his family owns a restaurant. He is in his mid-twenties and has a degree in semiotics. He works as an arts administrator and lives in Chinatown. Frank is an engineer, born in Hong Kong. He works for the government and has a second job in a music store. He also packages music for fashion shows. He was, at the time of the interview, involved in campaigning for the New Democratic Party (Social Democrats) in the municipal elections. Li is also from Hong Kong. He supported himself through art school, and after working for two years in a yogurt store, he is now employed in a graphic design firm.

In choosing the men to interview, the principal criteria were that they be East or Southeast Asian (the target group for the tape), that they watch video porn to some extent, and that they would talk candidly with me. As a result, there is a certain similarity among the participants in terms of their age, class, educational background, and participation in the dominant gay male community. Further, while I had spoken about sex with these men before, the "scientific" purpose of these conversations shifted our relationship with each otherfrom friends to the roles of interviewer and subjectand hence our talk.

Ken also says that while he prefers written porn over video pornbecause narratives build up slowly to sexhe dislikes most narrative in video, because "it's mostly so hokey." When watching tapes in repeat viewings, he simply zooms ahead to his favorite segments. Li, on the other hand, watches tapes right through, from beginning to end. Yet he rarely finishes them in one sitting, moving through each tape, section by section, over a period of time. Li prefers older tapes because they have more "story," as well as for the kind of men they feature. In fact, all three men express dissatisfaction with the "new" aesthetic in actors: in Ken's words, "clean, their pubic hair shaved, mostly blond and a lot younger." The word used by all three to sum up the shortcomings of the "new" porn is "mechanical." Yet what the three men look for varies considerably.

I just zoom to the sex scenes. I zoom through all the stuff where there's no sex happening and I stop at the sex scene and watch for a bit to see if I think it's exciting. If it's not, I zoom to the next. Sometimes, I zoom through sex scenes too, 'cause I think they're too long... 'cause they're kind of boring to watch."

All have various ways of negotiating the mode of spectatorship with the tapes they are watching. "Totally as a voyeur" is how Ken describes his viewing position. And here are two excerpts from Frank's interview:

Looking at porn while having sex with someone, the other person can forget who you are and imagine you are the idol on the screen. They can forget about whatever shortcomings you have. If it's a hot scene with people I find attractive I would sometimes just watch it as an observer. There is an excitement of voyeurism, in terms of you seeing things that people do very privately, especially of people that you might never really meet in real life, and the kind of situation you might never get into in your real life. Li's lack of identification with the tapenot imagining himself as part of the actionis a very conscious decision: I made this point to myself a long time ago, before I looked at tapes. I always look at tapes purely as fantasy. I never associate tapes with reality. For me the two don't mix. I know it's not good for me to want more because I know it would never happen. Fantasy is a common enough mode for viewing pornography. However, the unattainability of the (all-white) pornographic scenario in one's real life is often interpreted as having racial significance for Asian viewers. Men often say, "This couldn't happen to me because I'm Asian." Because the tapes that do include Asian men and white men are produced for a white audience, they don't offer productive avenues for sexual fantasy either.

All three men do in fact avoid racially mixed porn with Asian and white actors because of what they describe as its "offensive" or "stereotypical" quality regarding the Asian actorsthey are always the "submissive" characters. However, this is not a statement regarding the extent to which they imagine themselves within the scenarios they are watching (identification in an active sense). It is more a question of how others might view them because of these stereotypical representations (identification in a passive sense). This also emphasizes that in many instances the men's relationship to what is occurring on the screen is distant and purely observational. As for other options, Ken says that he would like access to all-Asian porn, but did not find the single Japanese tape he had seen exciting. It is the image of explicit sex that turns him on and the Japanese tape featured the "roving dot. Similarly, Li says he only watches tapes with white or black men. Conflicting Agendas? What do the viewing habits and preferences of the three men interviewed suggest about the efficacy of the GMHC tapes? Two of the menKen and Frankhad in fact previously seen the "shorts," but in very different circumstances: Ken at the lesbian and gay film festival, and Frank at a "mixed" (gay and straight) nightclub in Montreal, where the tapes were screened in a video room away from, but accessible to, the main dance area. Li had not seen the "shorts," but there were scenes of men using condoms in some of the porn that he watched. In examining how the men read what they saw (and what they didn't see) in the "shorts," I want to begin by looking at how safer sex fits into their lives and their fantasies. Li has "come out" only since the mid- to late eighties; since the advent of safer sex. One of the main reasons he cites for his attraction to older porn tapes is their depiction of unsafe sexsomething he has never done, but fantasizes about: the idea of having unsafe sex and having people actually come without using a condom... I know that's not right to actually do itbut, with video you're only watching people do it, right? Both Ken and Frank, on the other hand, had been "out" before the AIDS epidemic and express difficulty with actually practising safer sex, finding the condom disruptive to the flow of love making.

GMHC guidelines state that the "shorts" should demonstrate that "safer sex is fantastic and explosively pleasurable." The five "shorts" show condoms as coming naturally to the men in the scenarios. Frank finds the unproblematized presentation of safer sex valuable in that they remind him that, if he keeps trying, condom use will eventually come naturally to him as well. Having the tapes, and other safer-sex informational material available and visible also creates a context that makes it easier for him to negotiate with his partners around condom use. At the same time, I believe that the attempt to transcend the distaste many men have of condom useby simply showing it as pleasurablecould also have liabilities. Men such as Ken may feel inadequate or inferior because of their discomfort with using condoms. In Steam Clean, I attempted to address this problem by depicting at least a minimal negotiation around using the condom: in the middle of lovemaking one man leans over and whispers to the other, who then reaches for the condom.

KEN: It's really difficult to have safe sex with intimate partners. Safe sex with a stranger is easy. When sex is about intimacy a condom interrupts that meaning. This isn't addressed in the safe-sex propaganda.

Ken's overall assessment of the "shorts" is that he "didn't find them exciting." Although all of the tapes except the vogueing short contain depictions of at least one sexual act, Ken's memory of them is that "there wasn't any sex going on in them; it was all telling you." He adds that, as a body of work, "it doesn't disguise itself very well as porn." Frank similarly finds the tapes lacking in their ability to excite him: I don't find them sexy because they carry more of a medical or a social message than a pure porn film, where its purpose is different. There's a barrier there for people to really enjoy the safe sex because there's too much of a purpose to it.... They were something else trying to be porn.

This last sentence sums up my sense of what both Frank and Ken find lacking in the "shorts": that while they contain sexually explicit material and purport to be porn (the word is used by GMHC is reference to the "shorts") they do not look like the porn the men have seen and do not fulfill their sexual fantasies: because either the men, the narratives, the structure, or the aesthetic are "not right" according to their tastes. It is interesting to note here that in the structuring of the tapes around single pieces of music, they owe as much to music videos as to pornography. Yet no one I interviewed complained that the "shorts" were lacking in relation to their own expectations of that highly produced and competitive genre.

All three men claimed that they had sexual types or "favorites" in the porn tapes they watched. They all used the search function of the VCR to locate segments featuring their favorite actors and to pass over others. GMHC (and I in Steam Clean), on the other hand, have made a conscious effort to eroticize ordinary people, as opposed to relying on the conventions of age, beauty, and race described by Ken above. Whereas the men (and women) in the "shorts" all have "good" bodies, Law and Order is the only tape in which the actors embody the beefy look of commercial pornography. But while all the men interviewed expressed dissatisfaction with existing gay porn because it does not eroticize men who look like them, they find the men in the "shorts" lacking in comparison to commercial porn actors: in the case of Steam Clean, both race and body type break the rules. This reception is not as fickle as it might at first appear. For the tape to function well, two mechanisms are assumed. On the one hand, the Asian viewer must be asked to relate the message of the tape to his own experience and sexual practice. But the tape must also engage his libido, offering him the pleasure of pornography. However, people are not automatically attracted to others who look like them, and many gay Asian men are not interested in other Asians as sexual partners. For these men, the two criteria do not coincide. At the same time, everyone wants to be attractive to others. So it is important, even for them, that Asian features and bodies be shown as desirable. And since neither the commercial porn conventions nor our individual sexual tastes are monolithic and static, the eroticization of different types of men and women as seen in the shorts could be viewed as a positive change in our sexual environment. The "cultural sensitivity" of the "shorts" assumes that, to reach out to and educate men of color, the tapes have to portray men of color. This goes hand in hand with the notion that in order to communicate with gay men, the tapes must speak in a language that they understand and like

namely porn. However, rather than work together, my conversations suggest that these two agendas actually point toward different strategies. "Trying to be porn," in Frank's words, means that the "shorts" open themselves up to be judged by the highly personalized criteria each individual viewer brings. So the tapes may fulfill their pedagogical function in spite of their pretense at being porn, rather than because of it. The mechanisms of producing pleasure and viewer interest, and the mechanisms of imparting information to that viewer, while mutually reliant, are not the same.

Seeing Yellow (1994) 1994. In Karin Aguilar-San Juan (Ed.), The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s, pp. 161-1711. Boston, MA: South End Press. SEEING YELLOW: Asian Identities in Film and Video by Richard Fung

I would like to thank Tim McCaskell, Kerri Sakamoto, Lisa McCaskell, Kari Dehli, and John Greyson for their generous comments and criticism.

The existing GMHC "shorts" fulfill a particular and significant function. But while it is instructive to analyze and assess how they operate, they don't carry the whole burden' of safer-sex education. That task involves both the continued and expanded production of different types of safer-sex shorts, straight and gay, using a range of representational, pedagogic, and pornographic strategies. It also involves dialogue with the commercial porn industry, about the representation of both safer sex, and racial and ethnic difference.

This is not to suggest that the "shorts" are failures in their pedagogical task, but rather, that the ways they work may be different from what has been assumed and intended. Neither does this mean that educators should give up the use of sexually explicit material for demonstrations of safer sex: explicitness seems to me a prerequisite for clear education, at the very least. However, if safersex educational material is going to attempt to disguise its pedagogical intention with a sugar coating of sex and pleasure, then it has to negotiate the conventions of porn with the impulse to depict a wider range of ethnicities, ages, and body types with more savvy.

But when the Chinesemost of them peasantsbegan to immigrate to the Americas in the last century, they came under another form of racism. They lostto the extent that peasants can possess ittheir power to define others, and instead became the defined, the circumscribed. They were told who could come, where they could live and work (for smaller wages) ... and in Canada and the United States they were charged a head tax for all these privileges. The Japanese, who believed they were descended from the sun goddess, suffered a similar fate. Their ancestors had repelled the Chinese in the twelfth century when the wind of the gods, the kamikaze, rose up to destroy the invading ships of Kublai Khan. They had dominated Korea and received tribute from Okinawa that is, to the extent that ordinary people receive the benefits of tribute. But when they came here, they too found that they were told where to live and work.

Up until the nineteenth century, Chinese people imagined themselves at the center of the world. They saw their country occupying the space between heaven and earth: the Middle Kingdom. As an imperialist, colonizing power they developed what is now politely referred to as "Han chauvinism," which categorized all non-Han peopleMongolians, Miao, Tibetans ... and white peopleas barbarians. In popular speech Chinese speakers still often refer to non-Chinese as ghosts.

While the Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Filipinos, and the Vietnamese had fought each other in their old countries, and sometimes continued to do battle in the new, they had one thing in common. Here, they were all branded with the mark "oriental." Before, they had just seen themselves as east or west of a given mountain, a town or an island. In this new land, they were collectively and permanently east of something... or someone. And while one group was occasionally singled out for praise or hostilityso that was seen as being too rich and buying up all the land, or too poor and working below market value, or owing allegiance to a threatening foreign power, or flooding the land with refugees and street gangsthe makers laws and decisions really couldn't tell one from the other, and could only see the yellow in their skins. In World War II, the

Canadian government issued buttons that marked the wearer as Chinese, to distinguish him or her from the Japanese Canadian "enemy." There are rare stories of buttons being lent to friends so they could pass. To the East and Southeast Asians, their skin had of course just been skin: coarse with work, pale from a life of privilege, hairy or smooth. But then, even some of them began to look at their own hands and see them as yellow. Soon, rather than different shades of human, they began to notice that the hands of others were white, brown, red, and black. It's not that they hadn't noticed differences before, or that they didn't have their own conceptions of beauty or worth, but this particular coding and hierarchy of "races" was new.

"Asian" consciousness only begins to eclipse national consciousness in the context of white racism, and particularly as experienced here in the diaspora. It is premised on a shared sense of visibility, and less on any common cultural, aesthetic, or religious roots: What does Filipino Catholicism have to do with Japanese Buddhism or the Islam of Malaysia? In North America, "Asian" is often used simply as an acceptable replacement for "oriental." Referring to an actual geographical origin, the term seems to carry less colonial baggage. Yet it is worth remembering that Asia is not in fact a natural entity but exists only in relation to notions of Europe and Africa developed in the West. These are political and economic demarcations closely tied to the colonial project. Even today, when we witness the shuffle of states in the former Eastern Bloc, there is anxiety in Western Europe as to where to draw the line for possible inclusion in the European Economic Community. Where does Asia start and Europe leave off, and in whose interests are these borders drawn?

Another problem exists with the term "Asian." Asia, as it has been defined, covers a large portion of the globe: from Turkey to Korea and from Siberia to India. Whereas in North America, East and Southeast Asians have claimed the term, in Britain, "Asian" is commonly taken to refer to people whose ancestry lies in the Indian subcontinent and Sri Lanka. People of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Sri Lankan descent are rooted in a variety of cultural and religious traditions but share a similar history of British colonialism. More importantly, no matter whether they are born in North America, come from the subcontinent or from the Indian diaspora in Africa, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, or the Caribbean, they occupy comparable places within the North American racial configuration: They are seen to look alike. Both South Asians and East/Southeast Asians are rightly Asian. Yet because we are seen to constitute distinct groups, our experiences of racism and our resulting politics of resistance tend to follow different lines. Hence, organizing under the banner "Asian" leads to many logistical problems: Around whose terms are discussions of Asian identity framed? Who gets included and who tokenized? In the United States and particularly in Canada, many have chosen to organize explicitly as "South Asians," while "Asian" groups continue to draw predominantly from East and Southeast Asian communities ... with the occasional South Asian member.

Some endeavors have consciously attempted a "pan-Asian" basis of unity, but this works only when organizers take difference and equity into account, and plan them right from the start. Resolving this issue, however, is only partly a matter of finding more accurate names, as people will always fall out of attempts to carve up and categorize the continuity and fluidity that actually exists in the world. At the same time, we draw strength from using our socially constructed identities (with all of the problems I've described) as a lever for organizing and challenging racism. In describing and problematizing our own (albeit shifting) locations, we can move out to understand a system from which we share common oppression. It's in this way that I choose to work within a "yellow" experience of race. This I call "Asian," but with the full recognition that Asian is not only this experience. Given that the form of racism we encounter in North America is that of white superiority, it isn't surprising that the struggle for Asians to reclaim our subjecthood (or to shed our otherness) has been phrased as a tug of war between yellow and white. But something is wrong with this binary opposition of white oppressor and yellow oppressed. Whereas racism privileges whiteness and targets a somewhat shifting body of "others," anyone, no matter their status or color, can engage its discourses. There is a way that power is fluid and shifting at the same time that it is concentrated at the top. We tread on dangerous ground if we lose sight of either aspect.

Let me give you three examples. First, when I leave my home and walk to the subway, I pass a man who is young, white, anglophone, "able-bodied," and (I'm presuming) heterosexual. He asks me for money. He lives on the street and is economically poorer than I am. But he's also a skinhead, and if I don't give him money, I am aware he may resort to racist harassment. Second, this summer when I walked over to my corner store I overheard a black kid and a white kid mimicking aloud the language of the Vietnamese children playing on the street. I revisited all those conflicted emotions of my childhood: anger and embarrassment mixed with an attempt to "contextualize" what I had witnessed. Finally, after returning home from a recent trip to Chinatown, my mother perused her bills because, she says, You can't trust those Chinese merchants." By citing these three examples I by no means want to suggest that a white street person, a black child, and my mother have the same social powers, or the same exercise of racism as an immigration official, a police officer, a university professor, a government minister or a corporate head. However, to me, the power of racism is generated in an endless multiplicity of sites, including the self. The children and the young man have no power to deny me education or employment, yet these incidents continuously reassert my social place and my sense of my own (limited) possibilities. Given the historical misrepresentations of mainstream media, I am not surprised that most independent films and videotapes produced by North American men and women of Asian descent seek redress from white supremacy. They perform the important tasks of correcting histories, voicing common but seldom represented experiences, engaging audiences used to being spoken about but never addressed, and actively constructing a politics of resistance to racism. In her comprehensive article, "Moving the Image: Asian American Independent Filmmaking, 1970-1990," filmmaker-critic Renee Tajima chronicles the myriad strategies Asian Americans have employed in identifying and exposing white and Eurocentric assumptions both on the screen and behind the camera. Consider, for example, Valerie Soe's two-minute epigram of a videotape, All Orientals Look the Same (1985), in which the title phrase forms a continuous chant beneath a ceaseless procession of different Asian faces; the juxtaposition is all she needs to expose the lie of the stereotype. Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1989) by Christine Choy and Renee Tajima, on the other hand, demonstrates the consequence of that stereotypeVincent Chin was killed in Detroit by white unemployed autoworkers who thought he was Japaneseand thereby articulates a basis of unity for Asians on this continent, if only for self-protection.

Two documentary filmsBittersweet Survival (1982) by Christine Choy and Orinne J.T. Takagi and Mississippi Triangle (1984) by Christine Choy, Worth Long, and Allan Siegeluncover the sociopolitical and economic roots of interracial tension. This is a critical undertaking because it undermines the notion that racism is simply a question of attitude, or worse, of some ingrained, quasi-genetic antipathy ascribed to "human nature." Mississippi Triangle examines the interplay of class and race in the American South, focusing on the fabric of interactions between whites, blacks, and Chinese. In this cotton-growing region, categorization according to race is a crucial aspect of social organization. Bittersweet Survival looks at more recent immigrants: Southeast Asian refugees. Having escaped the dangers of war in their home countrieswar made devastating

North American popular politics has developed the term "people of color." This formulation has the advantage of drawing connections between people and avoiding slippage into a discourse of racial purity. But while it is true that non-white peoples are all casualties of white supremacy, the term "people of color," like "Asian," draws a line that collapses racial difference and assumes unity of purpose. From the early 1990s, a number of incidents began to fracture this illusion. In Los Angeles and New York, we have seen increasing hostility between African and Asian Americans. In Toronto, we have witnessed the scapegoating of Vietnamese youth and recent immigrants from the People's Republic of China for increasing violence in Chinatown. The police and the mainstream media point these fingers for sure, but they do so with the collusion of the Chinatown business class.

But in this chapter I want to turn my attention to a small but important body of work that addresses issues of identity and politics beyond an axis of white and yellow. Here I am not primarily interested in those pieces that place Asians alongside other people of color in positions of solidarity or equivalence, such as Pratibha Parmar's Emergence (1986), Shu Lea Cheang's Color Schemes (1989), or Michelle Mohabeer's Exposure (1990). These are important works. I want, however, to focus on films and tapes that explore differences among Asians, as well as between Asians and other non-white peoples.

With the ingenious use of a mole, Sally's Beauty Spot (1990) similarly interrogates the place of Asians in a black-white matrix. In Helen Lee's short experimental film, an Asian woman's obsessive attempt to erase a mark from her breast becomes a metaphor for a struggle with identity and racialized notions of beauty. Lee juxtaposes this narrative with a meditation on spectatorship, as the off-screen voices of Asian women (and quotes from theorist Homi K Bhabha) interrogate the 1960 Hollywood film The World of Suzy Wong, unleashing a multiplicity of readings and positions in relation to the film. As Sally rethinks her mole from blemish to beauty mark, the metaphor is literalized on-screen as a kiss with a black man. Her cover-all make-up spills onto the floor as the words "black is" are typed onto a sheet of paper. From the 1960s we know that the missing word is "beautiful." But, what about yellow? Sally's Beauty Spot is densely packed with metaphor and does not lend itself to a literal reading. Yet it leaves itself open to an interpretation that suggests our struggle as Asians involves locating ourselves within black politics. The use of the same framing for Sally's kiss with the black man at the end of the film and a white man earlier underlines the white-black binarism.

Juxta concentrates primarily on white bigotry. But though Asians have often suffered for not being white, their relationship to other groups of people of color has not necessarily been easy. In Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989), after the angry crowd has demolished Sal's Pizzeria, they turn to the other symbol of external exploitation, the Korean grocery store. In the heat of confrontation, the owner anxiously defends his business by sputtering "Me no white. Me no white. Me black. Me black. Me black." In a world divided into black and white, the Asian is asked to choose on which side of the fence he sits. In this film, the Korean shop owner's claim to black identity seems fuelled mainly by expediency and immediate self-interest. Yet it (enigmatically) works and the crowd reluctantly moves on ... for the time being. The film suspends judgement. Do the Right Thing presents a vivid portrait of racism in action. Yet, unlike Bittersweet Survival, its exclusive focus on a single neighborhood means that we see only the effects of power. The political and economic factors and decisions that produce that picture escape analysis.

Juxta (1989) ponders the fallout from another earlier war. Directed by Hiroko Yamazaki, this short drama follows the relationship between two children, both born of U.S. servicemen in Japan after World War II. The mothers of the children are best friends and Kate and Ted grow up almost as brother and sister. However, this closeness changes radically when the families are reunited with their fathers in the United States. Kate's father is white and Ted's black and the whole social organization of racismincluding the prejudices of Kate's white grandmotherpulls the two children and their families apart, leading to pain and tragedy. As adults, Kate and Ted try to rebuild the intimacy they once shared.

through American involvementfamilies arriving in the United States face racist policies and resentment. Often resettled in the poorest of inner-city neighborhoods, they find themselves pitted against existing black communities for limited resources.

Beyond implications of its metaphors, the yellow-black sexuality in Sally's Beauty Spotand in Juxtais rare and highly charged. Miscegenation is the ultimate fear for many Asian parents,

For Asians to show solidarity with people of African descent, we should not have to claim blackness. Indeed, I would argue that we can only work toward unity by speaking from where we actually are. Obviously, all Asians are not the same, and our various locations will always shift. In any case, this location is not black or white or some position "in between." The struggle against racism is not one of finding a convenient or seemingly correct drawer to fit in. It first involves the traumatic but ultimately liberating task of seeing that the boundaries, and indeed the contemporary conception, of race are not natural, but socially constructed and specific to the times in which we live. For while the early use of "race" in English referred to the French race, the British race and so on, the division of humanity into white, black, red and yellow was only codified and popularized in the eighteenth century, through the work of Enlightenment scientists such as Swedish botanist, Charles Linnaeus. Struggling against racism also entails working with race not simply as one autonomous piece of the mantra of race, class, gender and sexuality. We must recognize that the experience of racism is gendered, classed, and sexualized: My experience of racism as a middle-class, gay Chinese man is different from that of a middle-class, heterosexual Chinese man or a working-class, Chinese lesbian.

especially if the "outsider" is other than white. The scarcity of representations of interracial sexuality among the "others"further rare examples include Mississippi Masala (1991) by Mira Nair and the lesbians in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) directed by Stephen Frears from a script by Hanif Kureishibespeaks a situation in which producers are not interested in touching an issue that is so taboo as to be repressed. Or else it reveals the subtle work of racist assumptions in the economics of funding and distribution: on whose terms is it decided what is important, interesting, and viable?

Wayne Wang's Eat a Bowl of Tea (1988) addresses the question of impotence in an historical setting of the fifties and in the context of community cultural pressures. It describes the oftenignored personal fallout from the clash of values of different generations. The issue is also addressed obliquely in Pam Tom's Two Lies (1990), a short narrative film about beauty and selfimage, in which a Chinese American teenager reflects on her mother's pending operation to enlarge her eyes. In Helen Lee's My Niagara (1992), however, a short drama co-written with Kerri Sakamoto, the sexual relationship between two Asians becomes the film's focus. Julie Kumagai is a young sansei woman who lives alone with her father, her mother having drowned off the coast of Japan when Julie was just a girl. Since her mother's body was never found, Julie remains obsessed with the death and with Japan. At the start of the film, Julie breaks off with her white boyfriend and later meets Tetsuro, a handsome Korean, born and raised in Japan. Julie's fascination with a Japan she has never visited is counterposed to Tetsuro's captivation by North American pop culture, his memories of Japan being of either boredom or oppression.

But while Sally's Beauty Spot is groundbreaking for transgressing the white-centeredness that even informs our anger, the fact that Sally never kisses an Asian unfortunately reflects the absence of Asian men from Western sexual representation. For while white males have traditionally fetishized Asian women as sexual objects par excellenceand they are still not ubiquitous even within these termsHollywood and television have cast Asian men either as villains with a threatening but unspoken/unspeakable sexuality, or more commonly, they have infantilized them into prepubescent grown men such as Bonanza's Hop Sing. Given this context, it isn't surprising that many North American-born Asians do not think of other Asians in sexual terms.

The brief spectacle of Julie and Tetsuro making love is a rare occasion of intra-racial Asian sexuality in a North American production. But this is not a nationalist treatise. While Mr. Kumagai's bewilderment that Julie would leave her (white) boyfriend for "a Korean who wants to be Japanese" hints at the social significance of her choiceboth the chauvinism that has informed Japan's relationship with Korea and Koreans living in Japan, and the fact that over 90 percent of sansei in Canada marry non-Japanesethe film happily avoids political prescriptiveness on "correct" sexual partners. Julie's and Tetsuro's mutual involvement does not resolve the internal conflicts of identity for either character. Apart from its nuanced treatment of the question of sex and race, My Niagara also upsets an unproblematic notion of home. For Julie, home is a perpetually elusive search for the mother. For Tetsuro, home is equally unrealneither Korea, Japan, nor Canadaand to be eluded at any cost. Being fourth-generation Trinidadian Chinese and living in Canada, I feel doubly displaced. Canada is not my home in the sense of being my cultural or spiritual source. But while my dreams are invariably set in my childhood house in Trinidad, home is no longer there either. It is certainly not in China, which I've visited only once and then briefly. For me, this is the allure of "Asian" identity, one in which home is somewhere but nowhere. "Asian" consciousness both describes and produces a sense of self not rooted in the old nationalities with their attendant chauvinisms, but in a common experience of being yellow and brown in a world defined by whiteness. It is an identity born of resistance and solidarity.

At the same time, "Asian-ness" can easily mask real power differences, not only of class, gender and sexuality, but of ethnicity itself. In researching this chapter, for instance, it was striking to me how many working Asian American and Asian Canadian film and video makers come from those Asian communities, not necessarily with the longest history here, but certainly with the most economic clout. While there has been work by Filipino, Vietnamese, Thai, and Malay directors, film and video makers of Japanese and Chinese heritage continue to dominate the offerings at "Asian" showcases and festivals. And many Asian groups have not yet had access to production.

I am aware that my sense of priorities, and even my experience of racism, is rooted in being both an indistinguishable yellow-skin and specifically Chinese. So that while I may feel solidarity, neither internment, nor refugee campsnor the head tax for that matteris my own specific history. Even as an Asian producer myself, I cannot speak from these experiences, but I can assist in opening a space in which others can see and hear these visions and voices. The Trouble with "Asians" (1995) 1995. In Monica Dorenkamp and Richard Henke (Eds.), Negotiating Lesbian and Gay Subjects, pp. 123-130 New York: Routledge. The Trouble with "Asians" by Richard Fung

I learned that I was "gay" before I learned that I was "Asian." I must have been about fifteen at the time. One evening while performing the ritual of bringing the Evening News to my father in the upstairs back porch, I spotted a picture of men with placards. They were picketing in front of a statue somewhere in America; some might have been hugging each other. I quickly read the short "gay liberation" item on the staircase and, with heart pounding, delivered the paper to my father. I had seen the word and I knew that it was to me that it referred. "Gay" put a name to my previously nameless transgression. Nameless, or at least named in ways I could never choose to describe myself; names of violence, pain, and ridicule. Even now I type the Trinidadian slang word "bullerman"sodomiteas a sort of challenge to myself; it carries so much shame for me I still cannot say it without blushing. It took several years and the move to Canada before I actually uttered the word gay in describing myself. As awkward as it often felt at first, that act was both a means to, and a sign of, feeling comfortable with my sexuality. It was the result of a short period of therapy and of joining a gay liberation group-before I had ever slept with another man.

When I find myself in these situations, I feel a burden of representation, not only from non-Asians who might desire an authentic account of an "other" experience, but also from Asians in the audience, who demand that I correctly convey whatever their individual experiences and concerns happen to be. Whenever I detect this expectation and it is often I feel like an imposter. For one thing, I am fourth generation Trinidadian Chinese and my claim to Asian authenticity is very tenuous: I grew up with carnival, calypso, and Cat Woman, along with the broken Cantonese of my parentsmy father being Hakka, my mother having never set foot in China, it was a second language for both of them. In all fairness, however, I am never simply accosted on the street and dragged against my will to represent Asians. So how and why have I come to identify myself, or at least to allow others to situate me, as a gay-Asian man? For even though I grew up with a full awareness that I was Chinese, and one of my earliest memories was of kissing a poster of Ricky Nelson in my sister's closet, it was only in my mid-twenties that I adopted this particular formulation to describe myself.

When invited to participate on panels that address issues of sexuality and race, I am very rarely asked to speak from the position of artist or video producer. Sometimes, but still quite infrequently, I am situated as the lone gay person among other Asians or people of color. Most often, however, it is as an Asian that I am strategically included in the lineup of speakers, whether gay or straight, and I am usually the only Asian in a one-of-each selection of the shifting list of requisite "minorities." In the United States this also includes African Americans, Latinos, and sometimes Native Americans; in Canada, where I live, the register is similar, but with the addition of South as well as East or Southeast Asians. Since the Gulf War, there is an increasing recognition of Arab Americans and Canadians as part of the inventory of "people of color."

"Asian" involved a slower and quite different process. In Trinidad I was Chinese. Anyone who looked like me was also Chinese. They could be "local born" Chinese, "home" Chinese (born in China) or half-Chinese. But in Trinidad there were no Filipinos, no Koreans, no Vietnamese, and no Japanese-except in the war movies. When I arrived in Toronto, however, Trinidadians who were black or (East) Indian, or even Chinese as well, did not recognize me as their own unless I opened my mouth. At the same time, people on the street or at school, approached me speaking in

To address this problem, and the lack of any explicit reference to gay sexuality in audiovisual AIDS material geared toward Asian communities, I decided to produce a videotape about and for gay Asian men living with HIV and AIDS. In doing so, I was impressed with the necessity of actually showing the faces of Asian men whose presence declares "I am gay, I have HIV." I wanted to break that cycle of denial. Yet, precisely because of this criterion of visibility, the men who appear in the tapemen who were willing to go public as people with AIDS or HIVwere relatively secure in terms of economic and immigration status, as well as in their facility with English. They were also engaged in AIDS activism and were therefore hooked into the informational and personal support that accompanies that involvement. The tape does not, therefore, directly express the issues of Asian PWHIVs who are isolated, confused, illegal, closeted, or non-English speaking. All the men in the tape are unquestionably Asian, but that visible "Asianness," while necessary to counteract the invisibility of Asian PWHIVs, also serves to obscure the issues of other Asians. Because the men are Asian PWHIVs they can be seen to speak for all Asian PWHIVs, and their concerns can be read as the issues for Asian PWHIVs. In the voice-over introduction to the tape I explicitly indicate these limitations of my selection of interviews. Nevertheless, I do not believe this gesture of signalling absence is sufficiently powerful to disrupt the regime of presence at work in such a piece. An unspecified Asianness can serve to generalize Asian cultures into an amalgam not unlike the mishmash of Hollywood orientalism. It can also conflate the realities of Asians in the diaspora with those living in Asian countries. In North America, our condition of living as "visible minorities" in a society in which whiteness is normative, means that a sensitivity to racism is always at the forefront in the agenda of politically-aware Asians. Living in Asian countries, however, where gender, class, regional, ethnic, or linguistic differences contribute more directly to one's chances of success and to the regulation of daily life, white racism has little of that urgency. At gatherings of

When I reflect on my own process of self-naming I realize not only the political significance, but also the constructedness and fragility of "Asian" identity. Asian consciousness only displaces specific national or regional identities and allegiances under the conditions of white racism, either expressed here in the diaspora, or through Western colonialism and imperialism in Asia. The term "Asian" after all corrals together people with heterogeneous, even violently antagonistic, histories. Neither is this the only contradiction the category glosses over. Let me offer an example from my video producing experience. A couple of years ago I attended a safer sex session of the recently-founded Gay Asian AIDS Project in Toronto, of which I am a member. I went with a friend, an Asian immigrant who had recently found out that he was HIV positive. He was looking for support from people who shared his culture and language. But while the men in the room intellectually recognized that Asians were susceptible to HIV infection, it was clear that having not had any "proof"either through people they knew, or in any of the representations of PWAs that were in common circulationthey had not taken that fact to heart. The unspoken consensus was that no one in the room could be HIV positive, making it impossible for my friend to find the support he needed.

Whereas I had to make an effort to be included as West Indian, I found myself easily organized into groups with people whose origins were in Hong Kong, Japan, the Philippines, or Korea. These groupings seldom included people from India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh, with whom I share a significant cultural and political affinity, both because almost half of Trinidad's population is of South Asian origin, and because of the common reference point offered by British colonial culture. I also found that in Toronto my lack of facility in Cantonese put my Chinese cultural credentials in jeopardy, whereas in Trinidad most Chinese people communicate in English. What I shared with East and Southeast Asians was a similar experience of being "oriental" in white society. The passive construction of my identity as an Asianthrough the way others perceive mebecame inextricably tied up with an active choiceof political solidarityto identify as such. It is in this way that I became Asian in Canada after having been Chinese in Trinidad.

Cantonese, Korean, and Vietnamese. White Canadians, assuming that I came from Asia, commented on the baffling peculiarity of my accent. They would ask me if I felt more Trinidadian or more Chinesea question I had never been asked in the West Indies. I felt a rupture develop in my identity between my look and my voice, my "race" and my "culture." I suddenly found myself a walking contradiction, and it was my look (my visibility) which predominated in everyone's perceptions.

On the other hand, if I concentrate solely on the appropriateness of my (re)appropriation of things Asian; if I scrutinize the use of Asian motifs in my work but take the rest for granted, am I endorsing the notion of the Western as normal and universal? In denying the "oriental" do I, by default, perpetuate Eurocentrism and white supremacy? There is a thin line between refusing the constriction of the stereotype and denying difference. The liberal declaration that Asians (or other people of color) are just like everyone else is as erroneous as the overtly racist precept that we are fundamentally differentfor "everyone" is undoubtedly the white subject by another name. Yet if we look at North American history we can detect why some Asians might not want to emphasize their difference from the "mainstream." The internment of Japanese Americans and Canadians during the Second World War was justified by their assumed allegiance to the Japanese government, their untrustworthiness as true Americans and Canadians. Similarly, one of the grounds for excluding the Chinese from immigrating to this continent in the latter half of the last century was the impossibility of their assimilation. Witness a piece of testimony by John W. Dwinelle, "lawyer, and a resident of California since 1849." It was taken in 1884 by Canada's Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, which led to the institution of a Head tax on immigrating Chinese: I do not consider it desirable to have the Chinese here. They are not capable of assimilating with us. They do not come here with the intention of growing up with the country, but only acquire a certain amount of money and return to their own country. They have no desire to acquire our language, or assimilate with our institutions, as they are incapable of doing so. During a conversation about the seventeenth-century invention of racial categories as we know them in the West, a friend of mine stated recently, "there is no race beyond racism." An antiracist politic, she suggested, could only develop through the negation of race; to celebrate racial identity entails the perpetuation of racism. I disagree. First, I do not experience my Asian identity only as racism; neither is my homosexuality only apparent to me in the face of heterosexism. Our identities are sources of pleasure as well as oppression. Second, "pride" in ourselves as Asian, gay or gayAsian does not preclude a political awareness. It is often, in fact, an important feature of political development. The problem arises when we take the categories of race or sexuality for granted as real and as natural, and when we slip into smug nationalisms, from which people like me are inevitably

It is possible to romanticize the Eastthe third worldonly when we are far from it. Many of our ancestors left their homelands to escape political repression, male domination, stifling class structures, as well as poverty. Many of the same reasons (in addition to homophobia and heterosexism) propel people to leave Asia today. It may be true that sexism, homophobia, class exploitation, and political repression are all present in North American society as well. It may also be true that many of these oppressive social forces are maintained in Asian and other third world countries because of the imperialist foreign and economic policies of the United States, and to a lesser extent, Canada. Nevertheless, our experience of racism in North America and the racist devaluation of who we are cannot allow us to fix and romanticize Asia. When third or fourth generation Canadians and Americans of Asian ancestry embrace "Asian" culture, it is often with a self-conscious nostalgia that distorts history, ignores regional differences, romanticizes and essentializes. So I ask myself, what do stories of emperors sharing peaches with their beloved pages really have to do with me, the descendent of peasants? Or what does it mean for me to wear Chinese clothes or take up my Chinese name when I cannot pronounce the tones correctly? There are many problems with the born-again-Asian project.

"third world" filmmakers and filmmakers "of color," I have seen the tension level rise as the "continentals" view the "diasporics" as unproductively obsessed with the single issue of racism, and the "diasporics" see the "continentals" as naive and unpoliticized because they collaborate with inappropriate individuals or institutions in their bid to have their work produced and distributed. North Americans of color may use the term "third world" to describe ourselves only in a metaphorical sense; if not, we risk appropriating other people's struggles. For in spite of the barriers of racism and the mere crumbs we might receive, we benefit indirectly from imperialism: there are more films produced by West Indians abroad than are able to be made in the West Indies itself, for example. And of course not all Asian countries are part of the so-called third world.

I have found that the significance of speaking as a gay-Asian man shifts, depending on whether my audience is primarily defined by the venue as gay, Asian, or neither. Lesbian and gay audiences are far more receptive than those at (non-gay) Asian-oriented events. This is possibly because the lesbian, gay, and bisexual movements need to show that we cover the spectrum of society; straight Asians feel no such pressure to include queers. Audiences primarily defined by the venue as "mainstream" or "general," that is, primarily straight and whiteat a large public gallery, for exampleseem merely baffled by what I or my tapes have to say. I have referred to the venue as gay, heterosexual, or white, but I am aware that the audience as viewing, listening, or reading subject is always more complex, varied, and nomadic than this may imply. People in a particular setting, no matter how superficially homogeneous, will therefore intersect with my words, my tapesthe textin a multitude of ways, as they will bring different histories, experiences, political priorities, and tastes to the interaction.

excluded. And it is not because my identity is any more "multiple" than that of a straight white man, who is also raced, classed, gendered, and sexually oriented. It is that the burden of "identity" falls on the socially devalued half of the binaries white/colored, male/female, hetero/homo, abled/disabled, and so on. Thus the identity of a middle class, gay, white man is seen as gay, but my race, culture, and sexual orientation are seen to compete with each other. The affirmation of identity through organizing as gay Asians is therefore necessary because that description exists for much of society as an oxymoron, this being particularly so for Asian lesbians. Of course, the notion of the binary is only a crude model for conceptualizing the mess of social relations, and the reality of anyone's life is far more complicated and fluid. It is this space between politically useful categories such as class, race, gender, and sexuality, and the shifting, contradictory ways in which these social forces are played out in the everyday, that I am interested in exploring in my video work.

So speaking as gay, as Asian, or as a gay-Asian man is a tricky proposition. For one thing, speaking as any one thing too often implies not being listened to on any other terms. As Gayatri Spivak observes: "The question of 'speaking as' involves a distancing from oneself. The moment I have to think of ways in which I will speak as a woman, what I am doing is trying to generalize myself, make myself a representative, trying to distance myself from some kind of inchoate speaking as such." In making a videotape or speaking on a panel I cannot escape the burden of representation; it is already inside the accumulated knowledge that allows an audience to make sense of my work or of my words. This burden, which accumulates over the history of representation, cannot be transcended any more than the socially defined categories of race or gender canthey affect our lives whether we recognize them or not. Nevertheless, in foregrounding the burden of representation and in making its dilemmas explicit, we have the opportunity to clear a space where we might tentatively begin to close that distance between our socially mediated lives as "minorities," and the dominant privilege of speaking "as such." NOTES Thanks, as always, to Tim McCaskell for words and wisdom.

Burdens of Representation (1995) 1995. In Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis, and Simon Watson (Eds.), Constructing Masculinity, pp. 291298, New York: Routledge. Burdens of Representation, Burdens of Responsibility by Richard Fung In many ways "identity politics" is for the left what "political correctness" is to the right: a shorthand dismissal. As a critique, its usefulness is in its malleability, deployed as it is against a wide range of political and intellectual positions. And, like the charge of "political correctness," it releases the attacker from any sustained engagement with the specifics of what is being repudiated. Whenever I come across the accusation of identity politics, I imagine, perhaps with a little paranoia, that it refers to me. For while I struggle against a view of race and sexuality as given, stable, essential quantities, as the sole determining factors in experience, or as the only fundamental

Simply put. I believe that some instances of organizing around identity are valid, others not. Sometimes there are practical reasons for exclusions: discussions of the experience of racism shift dramatically, depending on who is in the room; it therefore makes sense to have Asian-only or black-only spaces, even if one's strategy is to build up a larger, non-race-specific organization. In other instances, race segregation is simply a rote response with little justification or reason. Deciding between the two is a matter of engagement with particular circumstances. When "identity politics" is alleged, however, one is left with little more than a righteous sense of disapproval. In the prospectus prepared by the editors of this book, the authors were asked to imagine the goals of a critical men's movement, and to explore "the role of male political responsibility" at "a time when religious fundamentalism, right-wing extremism, and divisive identity politics are polarizing the nation." I have two basic questions here: first, is there an identity as men that cuts across race, class, and sexuality, and that could be hailed by such a project of a men's movement? Second, does men's identity, whatever that may be, constitute a valid basis of organizing?

contradictions in society, my political engagement and my work are not only organized around the deconstruction of socially-produced identities; they are simultaneously and explicitly grounded in my particular contradictory experience as gay, Chinese, Trinidadian, Canadian, a video maker, middle-class, and so on. I do not believe I can shed my social location for a transcendent, universal perspective.

At the heart of the editors' statement lies a desire for social and political reconciliation. Nevertheless, my identity gets in the way of my identification with its premise. For one thing, as a Canadian I live in a country where the nation is always viewed as fragmentary, and where Canadian nationalism has always been defensive and reactive. Can you imagine a House Committee on UnCanadian Activities? More significantly, however, it is important to me that both gay men and Chinese men have been defined as outside dominant constructions of masculinitylet us call it "Masculinity"precisely on the basis of responsibility. Whereas gay men are penalized for the actual transgression of same-sex activity, homophobia is managed through a much broader regulation of difference. There are many ways in which gay men confound notions of Masculinity that bind maleness to particular roles and behaviors responsibility is one of them. As Barbara Ehrenreich has written, homosexuality is seen as "the ultimate escapism from the male role of breadwinner." Certainly, the image of the (white) middleclass gay man, unfettered by dependents but earning an income that is geared to supporting a family, is a central axiom in the homophobic construction of queers as a privileged minority undeserving of human rights protection.

Freedom from heterosexual responsibilities was also a principal charge against Chinese men living on this continent until the late 1940s. Early Chinese immigrants to North America, seeking employment first as miners and then as railroad builders, were mainly single men. For instance, of the 1,767 Chinese living in Victoria, British Columbia, at the time of the 1884 Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, only 106 were women: forty-one were listed as "married women," thirty-one were "girls," and thirty-four were "prostitutes." The commission, called to address, among other issues, "the social and moral objections taken to the influx of the Chinese people into Canada," resulted in the imposition of a head tax on Chinese immigrants. Incoming Chinese were at first charged ten dollars, but by 1904 the sum had risen to five hundred dollars, an exorbitant amount at the time.

In the age of AIDS, this trope has been supplemented by another frame of gay male irresponsibility, that of a self-destructive and uncontrollable appetite for sex. Now widely promoted among liberal audiences by books such as And the Band Played On (also a made-for-TV movie), the notion of gay promiscuity as the cause of the AIDS epidemic is both conservative politically and hazardous pedagogically. In the vilification of the baths, washrooms, and parks, the focus shifts dangerously from the kind of sex one engages inunsafe or safer sexto a moral agenda around the site of sexual activity, the number of partners one has, and the HIV status of those partners. (In fact, the baths may constitute a safer environment for sex, since they are consciously chosen for sexual activity. Most gay bathhouses in Canada feature safer-sex brochures and posters, free or easily available condoms, and even AIDS education counseling and HIV testing.)

Nevertheless, the tax was seen as still not enough of a deterrent, and in 1923 the government passed what is commonly known as the Chinese Exclusion Act, which effectively cut off any chance of family reunification for Chinese workers living in Canada. Until the Exclusion Act was lifted after World War II, therefore, Chinese communities were commonly referred to as constituting "bachelor societies." The term "bachelor" is, of course, a misnomer, since many of the men were in fact married, but were separated from their wives and families by the threat of racial violence and by the state apparatusnot altogether separate elements. Herein lies the special significance of the term when applied to Chinese Canadians, summoning as it does the poignant image of connubial denial, a profound deprivation in a Chinese cultural context, in which generational continuity is seen as essential to spiritual survival.

Nevertheless, in a society that privileges heterosexual marriage as the right of passage into manhood, the term "bachelor" is burdened with a multitude of connotations. Most significant to me is its anxious suppression of the possibility of sexual relations between menwhile the word "bachelor" has often been used as a euphemism for homosexual men, the designation generally turns on a presumption of heterosexuality. Second, while the label can be seen to infantilize the Chinese into nonmen, it simultaneously endows them with the sexual threat (prostitution, predatory sexuality, and so on) of men devoid of socially-sanctioned sexual release. Both connotations were used against the Chinese.

Whereas cheap Chinese labor was promoted by capitalist interests in the nineteenth century, Chinese workers were seen as an obstacle to the advancement of the white working class, and of white people in general. In such a hostile environment, it is not surprising that most Chinese men chose not to send for their wives, even in the early days when it was still possible. But because of their failure to fulfill the responsibilities of heterosexuality, the Chinese were blamed yet again. In testimony to the Royal Commission in 1885, for example, a Senator Jones of Nevada paraphrased the thoughts of one of his constituents, a white miner: While my work is arduous I go to it with a light heart and perform it cheerfully, because it enables me to support my wife and my children. I am in hopes to bring up my daughters to be good wives and faithful mothers, and to offer my sons better opportunities in life than I had myself. . . . How is it with the Chinaman? The Chinaman can do as much work underground as I can. He has no wife and family. He performs none of these duties. Forty or fifty of his kind can live in a house no larger than mine. He craves no variety of food. He has inherited no taste for comfort or for social enjoyment. Conditions that satisfy him and make him contented would make my life not worth living. The sexual aspect of this danger saw Chinese men as posing a special threat to white womankind. This fear, whether genuine or simply a ploy to attack Chinese businesses, became more immediate after the completion of the railroads as male Chinese workers, barred from other labor, took on traditional women's occupationsin laundries, domestic service, and as cooksthereby putting themselves in direct competition and direct contact with white women. In the early twentieth century, several Canadian provinces enacted laws preventing white women from working in Chinese businesses.

It is only recently that Chinese men have begun to function as regular sexual beings on screen, mostly in films by white directors, like The Lover(1991), Dragon (1993), and Ballad of Little Jo (1993). In films by Asian-diaspora directors, Asian male characters are seldom inscribed within the codes of Hollywood masculinity. Refusing the pressure to deliver role models, these directors often opt instead for a critique of patriarchal values, creating in the process male characters that are damaged and/or damaging to those around them: this is true of Living on Tokyo Time (1987), Bhaji

Even today, when Chinese communities are no longer "bachelor societies" and Chinese men are no longer assumed to be bachelors, the figure of the Chinese man in contemporary North American mass culture still oscillates for the most part between an asexual wimpiness and a degenerate, sexual depravity, reflecting and reproducing this unstable Masculinity. It is notable that, in the current, highly-promoted wave of feature films by Asian and Asian-diaspora directors, there are as many movies with homosexual themes as those featuring heterosexual relationships.

Specific histories burden the term "responsibility" for gay men and Chinese men. As a rallying cry for a new and critical approach to masculinity, therefore, its appeal is limited. But men's movements, whether in support of, hostile, or indifferent to feminism, have generally been founded on precepts that come from the experiences of middle-class, straight, white men. For example, a men's movement based either on a response to violence against women or on the supposed victimization of men (because the binary gender division does not allow them to touch, feel, and express their emotions), do not speak to the lives of most gay men. Although gay men are not immune to misogyny, and some gay men are married or in heterosexual relationships, our sexuality generally puts us outside the direct mobilization of men as the perpetrators of male (hetero)sexual violence in rape and spousal abuse. Similarly, while straight men may want to learn to touch other men (and still remain straight), it is homophobia that makes same-sex contact taboo-gay men are already penalized for touching. When I think of movement and men I think of troops. In some ways this is merely a glib dismissal. But it nevertheless points to a basic contradiction in the concept of a men's movement. For when one thinks of troops, there is the image of a monolithic and coordinated exercise of brute force, in many ways the ultimate statement of male power. On deeper examination, however, there are also internal axes of power and violence. In many real ways, then, men in troops (and there are women, too) are moving to and from very different places in their lives. The rank-and-file is filled with the urban and rural poor, the nonwhite, the undereducatedmen with little to sell but their lives. The career officers display very different demographics.

on the Beach (1993), and most of Wayne Wang's films. For, while stereotypes undoubtedly affect the ways that we Asian men live our lives, the feminization of Chinese men in public representations should not be taken to mean that, as a group, we are any less prone to sexist attitudes and behavior. In fact, as an organizer with gay Asian men, I have observed that, in many Chinese families centered around Confucian values, however loose the interpretation, men are often able to carry on gay lives precisely because of the relative mobility allowed them compared to their sisters, a freedom that coexists with the oppressive obligation to produce sons.

Not only are men's experiences of gender different one from another, but they are different from those of womenand in a patriarchal world they are never on an equal footing. So even when a men's movement is not about learning to touch, feel, or cry without being unmasculine, even when men organize only to support women's demands, they are confronted withand confounded by their own power. To organize as men is to organize from a position of power. The problem of a men's movement is therefore related to, though not the same as, organizing as white, as middle class, or as heterosexual. In seeking to confront privilege (and not all versions of men's movement would admit to male privilege), men are forced to replay it.

While the notion of a movement founded on men's demands is difficult to justify, all attempts to bring men together should not automatically be dismissed. Specific projects such as the Canadian White Ribbon Campaign, whose goal is to organize men to halt male violence, offers an interesting experiment. Although suffering from all the problems of expanding a constituency to working-class men and men of color, as well as the dilemma of finding themselves in competition with women's organizations for resources, this project has managed to raise the awareness of violence against women through a large, successful, public campaign.

I have closed this paper by mentioning a specific project, however briefly. because it seems to me that discussion of men's movements and men's organizing is not simply a theoretical issue. While intellectual analysis and assessment are always crucial, I find that questions of movements are best addressed in particular sites and in relation to the actual process of organizing. Dear Shani, Hiya Richard... (1995) A Dialogue by/with Richard Fung and Shani Mootoo Dear Shani,

As we launch our dialogue on landscape, I think not only about our mutual interest in the land as the principal icon of Canadian national identity, but also of our actual journeys across geography.

My house in Port-of-Spain was at the foot of the Northern Range. You could see the rain showers moving down the Cascade valley and everyone would go around shouting "rain coming," closing all the windows and putting out buckets and basins for the leaks. I think of San Fernando as dry and hot. Although hilly, I associate the town with the long drive (probably all of one hour) across the Caroni planes, first rice then sugar fields, dead flat, the horizon broken by temples and mosques and oil rigs. Returning to Trinidad as a birder, I'm struck that even the wildlife is different in the South. The picture I'm sending you was taken in our back yard in the early seventies, just before I left for Dublin. It shows my sister Nan, who died about six years later. Nan was the closest in age to me and at this point we were the only two siblings left in Trinidad. All of the others had already gone abroad to study none of us returned to live in Trinidad. Nan and I were often bored and that afternoon we had decided to play model and photographer with her instamatic. This photo is part of a series with Nan in different mod outfits hot pants, minis, flares taken mostly from low angle and with the camera tilted to one side.

Our trajectories mirror each other: you, born in Ireland, growing up in Trinidad, then arriving in Ontario to study; I, born in Trinidad, finishing high school in Ireland, then also coming to Canada. This movement continues the nineteenth century journeys of our ancestors to the Caribbean, yours from across the black waters in India, mine from Southern China. Our histories are so overlapped, yet when we talk about Trinidad still at the heart of both our work it is such a different place for us. A lot of this is social the differences between your family's South Trinidad Hindu culture and the creolized Catholic Chinese of Port-of-Spain that is my family. But in an island barely fifty miles long even the land itself is different, almost as much it seems as between your Vancouver and my Toronto.

I'm truly convinced that our sensitivity to the political construction of landscape comes out of these displacements.

The other notable fashion elements in this photo are Nan's half-bangs which were fashioned after a character in a TV western, and the chain and medallion Nan had bought me as a souvenir from Carnaby St. in London. It is actually quite a long chain about a foot is hanging down her back, out of view and went with a brown turtleneck sweater. Neither got much wear from me: the sweater either because it was too hot for the climate, or, more likely, because I was very self-conscious about being skinny and it exaggerated my boniness; the medallion I didn't wear because I was already victimized for being a sissy, and I didn't want to call more attention to myself with such a flamboyant fashion statement.

Nan is wearing a piece of cloth tied in the front; if you look carefully you can see where the unhemmed end of the fabric hangs down the middle. Suffering from thalassaemia major from birth, Nan had left school when she was about ten. Dress design was one of several courses that my parents financed to keep her active mind occupied. As a result she had a large stash of cloth, waiting to be turned into clothes whenever she could muster the energy. This fabric reflects the African vogue of the black power period. First generation, middle-class and Chinese, Nan and I were nevertheless both distant supporters of the rise in black consciousness. At about this time she also delighted in owning a copy of Mao's Red Book, given to her by a cousin visiting from New York. Her other favourite books included the work of Lopsang Rampa, the Tibetan monk born into the body of an Englishman, and The Prophet by Khalil Gibran.

Nan is standing in front of our lime tree, behind which was a Jamaica plum and an orange tree whose fruit was too sour for anything other than juice. I would be sent out to harvest limes from under the prickly branches whenever Nan or my mother was baking. A curl of rind would always be beaten with the eggs for a cake. In this instance, we obviously decided that the lime tree wasn't exotic enough, because amidst the shiny green leaves we had arranged red blossoms from the Flamboyant tree down the street in front of the Mahabir's house. These photographs were not intended for eyes other than our own; certainly any Trinidadian would see through our transvestite lime tree. What is striking to me now is how we set out so selfconsciously to exoticize the Trinidadian landscape and my sister. As an adult I recognize the aesthetic of forced hybridity from tourism publicity, restaurant menus and hotel decor I've seen in

many neo-colonial tropical countries: elements of Hawaii are blended into the Caribbean by way of Mexico and Indonesia until any cultural specificity dissolves into one big fantasy of (first world) escape. I'm not sure from where we devised our ideas of "tropical island beauty." It could have been from the British or American popular culture that saturated the country, or it could have come from Trinidad's own self-promoting publicity. In any case, when I look at this picture now I see the struggle of the newly postcolonial subject to represent her or himself. In the search for visual signifiers of specificity, English-speaking West Indians rummaged through the international clothes chest, trying on, borrowing, discarding. In the quest for authenticity one remains entangled in the mediation of imperialism; so even the physical body of the nation is viewed through a thick lens. The prominence of the beach in public representations of the Caribbean can't be seen outside of the economic need for tourism, for instance. This photo may simply come from the antics of one boring afternoon, but the elements in its composition indicate a far larger social and historical context. I think for both of us our work is fueled by this constant going over, a continuous reevaluation of what we once took for granted, a look at the past as a way of understanding the present. My invocation of Trinidad is a way of understanding Canada: lands apart, lands connected like your Vancouver and my Toronto. Love, Richard

Hiya Richard, Just to let you know, man, South Trinidad is not "dry and hot: when I am asked up here about Trinidad seasons (not "seasonings" as the Fung culinary mind might well read), the "do you have winter in Trinidad?" type question, I immediately think of the coldest time down in that particular south when the temperature drops to about 70 degrees and we pull out sweaters and wool blankets and walk around hugging ourselves, necks tucked deep into shoulders. The strongest image that comes to mind actually is that first year when I planted string beans in a Styrofoam cup and transplanted them to the back garden when they were about ten inches high. Every morning before school I would go and look in awe at their new height and then in the evening I would carefully dribble water on them, making sure not to give too much too heavily. Then before the plant was a good foot and a half rain came, (we too could see it comingaround the corner and up the road) and it came and it came and it was as if it would never stop. That time, I watched my string beans from up by the dining room window as they were first beaten down by heavy rain, and then with helpless quiet panic I watched the water in the yard rise inch by inch. Rich black manure from the flower beds slid into the rising water. I watched the lawn disappear into it and saw my string bean plant first float on the black coffee-coloured water, then get totally submerged. I have another memory of a different time when the street flooded from heavy rain, and people's belongings were just floating down the street. That happened often, but this particularly striking memory was of a man in half an oil drum paddling down the street grinning, quite pleased with himself. So, Mr. North Trinidad, keep in mind that it's not so dry in the South! And another thing: you had to mention the hills, of course! You northerners just love to heckle us about our hills in the South, eh! "How can you tell a person from San Fernando?" "By their calves" (meaning that muscle at the back of the lower leg... not the little animals that one does indeed see just about everywhere except on hillsides in the southern country landscape). Do you think it's scripted that you would choose to live on fairly flat terrain in Toronto and that I have settled in hilly Vancouver, content with the familiarity of forever developing my calves? The photo that you sent is terrific. Its dimensions and the particular hues of the emulsion are exactly the same as a whole batch of photos that I have of back-home. You know, the memories of the events that many of my old photos mark are so very fixed in time, their beginnings and endings fixed right there in the emulsion. Your photo brings back to me memories, not of Trinidad per se, but of my photos, the little 4 x 5 pieces of paper. My childhood is now like a muddled and fading dream: here, my Trinidadian past has been exoticised away (by myself as well as by others), and I am afraid that I am losing my grasp on what I once considered banal details, but which now I long to snatch back as precious specificities that might keep those early Trinidad days alive in me banal details which I tended to omit because they were not easily translatable to the uninitiated. Most of

I could also just imagine you and Nan inventing yourselves in the heat of a lazy afternoon. It's not much different from the time that my sisters and I were on holiday in England with our parents.I was about 14 and they were younger. For some reason, (I want to invent the reasonbut something holds me back, perhaps the fear of that unfortunate practice of reconstructing events to ensure specialness, to inscribe a politic) we found ourselves, the only children, on a busy street corner, very much aware of our difference in skin colour and clothing. Gray and cream coloured public buildings surrounded us, and fashionably suited severe looking white adults were hurrying by us. I remember feeling small and... well, invisible a word we might not have used then. It was as if we were failing, not matching up, to the promises our colour held. Until the three of us spontaneously broke into a language we invented right there and then, a language made up of words, mostly nouns, strung together in sentence-like structure, words brought to Trinidad by it's immigrant populations from India, parts of Africa, and those that were sewn into a patois that included Spanish and French elements. We thought that this language would turn us into toucans like the ones in the Central Range back home. We thought that we'd be truly exotic, not just brown children who didn't even have a language of mystery, an intrigue to compensate for their browness. Not long ago I wrote a poem based on that memory:

what is left now is photos that speak to me only of themselves. Precious moments with, at best, a blurry context.

It's so ironic that you and I come from such different Trinidads where the crossing of our worlds might only have resulted in muddled collision, and here in Canada, I almost always think of you as my primary audience, in spite of the fact that I often feel pressured to respond positively to the assumption that the South Asian woman, and in particular, lesbian, is my true audience. Take a look at the photograph I have sent you, Richard. It was taken at Chung's Photo Studio by the Library Corner on Cipero Street in San Fernando. It is a classic formal studio pose of the time, made all the more ceremonious with the Greek column on which I stand, taken to send to my parents who were living in Ireland at the time. Can you puhleeze tell me what my Grandmother is doing in a Chinese style dress with her Indian orinee, which she never left the house without wearing, dutifully draped over her head and tucked in at the waist! Only in Trinidad! I remember the dress well: dark-cream coloured heavy linen. The bamboo plant and Chinese characters were printed in brownish black to suggest ink and brush work. This is way back in 1962. Just down the road from our house, next to the San Fernando Mosque, was a Muslim Indo-Trinidadian family who frequently received suitcases of linen from China which they sold from their house. (Did they receive these suitcases, or did they actually go to China, I wonder?) I remember the whiter than white tea towels we took home and the pillow cases with invisibly attached mint-pink flowers, mouth-freshenergreen leaves and dots of egg yellow stamens. And the crocheted doilies my grandmother liked to

In Trinidad race, culture, class and region has so many jumbled up permutations! Trinidad with all this complexity sure is a mirror for the possibility of Canada. Now, what we really must begin to emulate here in Canada is that line from our Trinidad and Tobago national anthem: "every creed and race" by allowing everyone to celebrate each religion's festivities with a different national holiday for each and every one, don't you think?! Not just Christmas and Easter, but how about Eid, and Divali, and Chinese New Year, and Yom Kippur, and...

Richard, your Trinidad culture seems so much different from mine. In a word, richer, actually. It intrigues, and infuriates me that my fifth generation family is not in touch with local bush remedies, barks of trees, teas from plants, that your mother has passed on to you, and that your mother knows how to speak patois, while none of my family for as far as I could remember knew more than a word here and there, and that one tying up the tongue on its torturous exit. I wonder where is the "creollised" part of the, or rather, my, Hindu Indian identity. When a phrase in patois glides out of your mouth I admit to a feeling of having been robbed of authenticity, a feeling that I don't remember having had in Trinidad, but experience here, in Canada. Here having a language of one's own can be a double edged sword: exoticisation on one edge, dismissal and banishment on the other. Patois is not a living language and so is no threat to anyone, inflicting then the edge of exoticisation, and sometimes, Richard, with your knowledge of things Creole you do seem so much more exotic than I! I am wary of falling into an easy stereotyping when I attribute the multiplicity of Trinidads to race and its specificities in relation to region, and/or to class. The Chinese in Trinidad... or Northerners were more... than... Indians in the South tend to...

give away as wedding presents. There was such a fascination with things Chinese then. On the other hand as far as I can remember there were no signs of attachment to India or Indian identity in my grandparents' house. Sure Ma wore an orinee and we ate food of Indian origin as if there were no other, but there were no colourful pictures in our home of deities like the ones I like to use in my art work nowadays, and no ornaments from India, no fabric, or filigree furniture from over there. I know that Ma had a lot of heavy gold jewelry that was passed on to her from her ancestors in India, but she preferred to wear colourful costume jewelry, clip on earrings and the like. What we "other," privilege and exoticise then, as now, had everything to do with where and how precariously, or firmly, rooted our culture and "place" were case in point is my not-too-long-ago born again Indianness here in Canada. (Ma went to the Open Bible Church three times a week. Which may well have had something to do with the erasing of Indian ties and the creation of a vacuum yearning to be filled with the richness of someone else's culture.)

When I look at this photo with my grandmother now, and think that her body might well be a map for mine, images of the outdoors and outdoor sports come charging at me as if in reaction. In her fleshiness is marked her gender and her class as a woman, and even though this very flesh was my security and assurance of being loved, it's flabbiness and softness, verifying the feebleness ascribed to her from childhood, has always been the marking that I have tried to avoid. Outside of that institution called home first the garden, then later, mountains, rivers and lakes with faraway shores has long been a refuge for me, and I speculate now that my passion since youth for the outdoors is an instinctual recognition that here my desperate need for the freedom to self determine, to be, and to become can most be fulfilled. I am constantly battling with the deeply inscribed memory in my body of umpteen generations of gendering. I agree with you that "our sensitivity to the political construction of landscape comes out of... displacements" through "our actual journeys across geography." But may I include gendering as a displacement for those of us who cannot, will not be placed inside its structure, and landscape as a significant haven and site of reinvention and imagining?

Check me out! I was about five years old here. So many years later I can still feel the scratchiness of the stiff frilly crinoline under my dress. I don't remember this occasion specifically, but I bet that the dress wasn't easily put on me. I kicked and screamed pathetically whenever they tried to get me to wear one. (Not much has changed!) Even then I preferred shirts and pants and nothing in pink! clothing as signifiers that didn't confine me and mark me as different from my boy cousins who, unlike me, were not discouraged from running wild around the yard, and from falling, or climbing. In spite of the wide platform of the pedestal, Ma's hand is placed protectively behind me. Years later, this gesture still means the world to me. She died about two years after this picture was taken. Looking at her image now, I can all but smell her cool, always slightly damp, fleshy skin, and even though this is a black and white photo I clearly recall her light yellowish colour, a paleness prized in my family. With perverse pride she had always been teased that perhaps her mother, my greatgrandmother, had been visited by the white overseer on the sugar estate that she and my greatgrandfather had worked on. A truly perverse pride. But not entirely improbable this allowance is not a reflection of anything that is known about my great-grandmother, but putting aside prudishness, who really knows what goes on behind the closed doors of ordinary mortals?

In my late teens, on countless hikes to Mount El Tucuche and to Maracas Waterfall in Trinidad's Northern Range I was the only girl, and at Maracas Beach I dared to go where no girl would go beyond the breakers where I would rise precariously with the swell of each wave and when it subsided bob there amongst a sprinkling of men. Even there, at the beach, I must admit, the unwelcome attentions of adult men on this little girl sent me swimming even further and further out to sea. What I remember well, now, but have never before admitted, was how terrified I was of snakes and scorpions and land slides in the hills, and of not being able to get back to shore, or of being sucked under by a current. (My mother often chided me for "showing off." If only she knew how scared I was of hurting myself when I preformed my anti-girliness stunts! In those days I was a tom-boy. You and I would have been quite a team!) These risks that I took were not to defy the outdoors or its elements (which were sites of opportunity in fact), but to defy the boundaries that I was expected to be contained within, to prove that my body was alive and capable, and to rebel against this body taking definition and direction from elsewhere. Going deep into the land, or

beyond the breakers was something that cowards would never do, and dirty old men proved to be perfect cowards! My childhood fantasies of adventure invariably involved severe challenges to my body, and challenges to other's perceptions of my body, and they always took place away from cities or even towns, across vast continents and expanses of land, the land itself and my closeness to it being of utmost importance. Riding a bicycle from the tip of the North West Territories all way down to Tierra del Fuego. Canoeing up the Amazon River. Trekking over the foothills of the Nepalese Himalayas. In my teens, after I had successfully defied normalcy by playing cricket in the streets with the boys, by helping them build a house in a mango tree, and refusing to wear dresses, my fantasies began to include a girl whom I would rescue, never from the elements or from nature, but from family, from men, from society.

As I become intimate with geographic regions of the country and their specificities, as I pour over topographical maps, and learn to distinguish the details of flora and fauna, as the land takes me in I find that my yearning for the details of Trinidad quietens. It is not about the details of either landscapes but more about rummaging through the country, past its towns, its people and all its constructs to find that safe place. The Canadian landscape has consequently begun to replace precious imitations of the Trinidad landscape in my work, have you noticed? Significant elements still exists, but the Canadian version of them. Magnolias instead of hibiscus. Evergreens replace coconut and poui. "Red canoes on a glacial jade and turquoise lake"1 instead of the Banana Quit in the tropical broad leafed bush in front of a hot blue sea.

Recently, barely able to stand against an icy and menacing wind in a wide dried out bed of rocks uprooted by ancient glacial action just below Yoho Glacier in the Rockies, I was struck by my own vulnerability in this almost barren landscape. Because of the turning weather I was at the mercy of this wild and fierce environment and had no strength or reasoning against it. But in a place like that everyone is equally at its mercy. When in a wilderness park I cross a tiny plank over a raging river, and am terrified almost to the point of paralysis, the only one who sees my body cowering, and my face crumbling is the woman who respectfully does not rescue me, but holds my hand and passionately tells me that she has every faith in me that I can do it. (Here I am back in my apartment in Vancouver safely writing this to you, so of course I crossed that one successfullytwice, there and back!)

In all of this, I am wary of the risk of a new colonising and exoticisation of this land by those of us who are fairly new immigrants even if we are immigrants of colour to the country seeking refuge in land, in one form or the other. On questioning my desire to know and so to own this land, I recognise a need for it to be that necessary place where I fortify myself, and am unconditionally welcome. As I am. Sorry to stop so abruptly, but rain comin and I have to run and close up windows and look for a basin! I look forward to your reply. Soon, I hope. Keep well. Love, etc., etc. Shani

Colouring the Screen (1996) Source: 1996. In Peggy Gale & Lisa Steele (Eds). Video re/view, pp. 256264. Toronto: Art Metropole & Vtape, Toronto. INTEGRATION AND THE RADICAL VIDEO DOCUMENTARY Colouring the Screen: Four Strategies in Anti-Racist Film and Video by Richard Fung

Originally published in Felix (editor: Kathy High) http://www.e-felix.org/issue4/shani.html

Since the American Civil Rights movement of the 1960s racial integration has been the goal in rhetoric, if not always in practice, of corporations and government bureaucracies, as well as of grassroots organizations. Racial and ethnic differences are expected within groups or institutions that claim to represent or serve the entire community. Lack of visible diversity is perceived to be an

Given its roots in public access and guerrilla television, politically committed video documentary is especially reflective of trends in grassroots politics. Its mode of production often mirrors a collective process, with collaboration between producer and subject much more common than in political filmmaking. Many tapes are produced by actual participants in the movements represented. While, as in mainstream cinema, the means of production remain largely in the hands of white producers, there is a deeper recognition by these videomakers of the imperative of multiracial representation in both the production and analysis of the work. Tapes that deal with any social topic not limited to one racial group are expected to show racial diversity, and work that surveys broad issues such as abortion or labour rights will include, among a majority of white participants, a one-of-each representative selection of non-white interviewees. The configuration of "appropriate" coloured participants actually varies from region to region. In the United States, for example. Latinos are automatically seen and see themselves as people of colour. This is not always so in Canada. Similarly, "Asian" is taken variously to mean south, east or southeast Asian, depending on context. And the status of Arabs and other Middle Eastern people is presently in flux. While antiSemitism constructs Jews as non white. they have not traditionally been included for these purposes of explicit display. If a documentary focusing on gay youth or on women in non-traditional occupations fails to include people of colour, it risks being dismissed as not truly representative. By the same token, the inclusion of people of colour often allows a tape to position its premise of conclusion as universally representative. The nonwhite subjects interviewed may find their presence used to legitimize an overall agenda they had no role in formulating and one with which they may even disagree.

indicator of overt or systemic racism. Particularly in the United States but also in Canada, the implementation of policies of integration have to a large extent been informed by a discourse about "minorities" and "minority representation." Racism, however, is a question of power, not numbers, and policies based on figures and percentages do not necessarily redress oppression. They may, if fact, serve to mask or even reproduce unequal power dynamics, as when quotas are used to define ceilings on the participation of people of colour. Similarly, minority representation can slip easily into tokenism. In this segment, I would like to look at the politics of integration, particularly as it surfaces as a representational strategy in politically committed video documentary.

Further, if a person of colour is shown only in work that focuses on racism, there is the danger that she will be reduced to a function of her racial identity. If the experience of racism is not described. however, a crucial aspect of her experience may be ignored. Either way she is in danger of being tokenized. One of the most expedient ways of dealing with this dilemma is to foreground the constructed nature of the piece and, thereby, the issues of representation in the production process itself. Such self-reflexive moments appear in varying forms in the documentary films Word is Out (1977). in Sara Diamond's video history of working women in World War II Keeping the Home Fires Burning (1988), or Colin Campbell's pseudo-documentary film Skin (1990). However. simple acknowledgement of issues of power or of the dangers of tokenism cannot in themselves resolve the underlying problem.

In the video documentary Just Because of Who We Are (1986), produced by the feminist Heramedia collective, the involvement of women of colour in a largely white group from the earliest stage of production and decision making facilitated an informed attention to race throughout the project. The subject of the production is violence against lesbians and the tape features interviews with women who vary in age, class, religion and race. As in many other tapes and films employing strategies of integration, the variety of women is used to suggest both the diversity of lesbians and the consistency of their oppression. However, this tape also addresses the experience of racism as an integral aspect in the lives of lesbians of colour. In a lengthy interview with Barbara Smith and Cherrie Moraga, the two writer-activists describe an incident in which their home was vandalized. In their description of the graffiti left scrawled on their walls, the women talk not only about the similarities between racism, sexism and homophobia but also about the points of convergence among these oppressions.

The representation of a racially integrated world emerges as an issue primarily in the work of white producers or producer collectives in which the majority of members are white. Tapes directed by people of colour, on the other hand, generally avoid any interpretation of their interventions as

Unfortunately, despite the organizing efforts of non-white producers to develop independent networks and the fact that the institutions of funding, distribution and exhibition are slowly being forced to confront systemic racism in their practicethe means of production continue to elude all but a few people of colour. As a result, lobbying efforts to avoid tokenism and insure meaningful participation remain necessary, not only at a governmental level, but also within communities of independent producers and within individual productions. TORONTO VIDEO ART: DISRUPTING SIGNIFICATIONS In Toronto, the producers of video art form a community that is in many ways more coherent and tangible than specific ethnic and racial communities. Drawn together through common interest, the "video community:' as part of a larger grouping of art communities, is manifest in two specialized educational institutions, the city's two production cooperatives Charles Street Video and Trinity Square Video, various organizations such as artist-run galleries and through a common social network. But in Toronto, a city where approximately 30 per cent of the population in made up of people of colour, this community is almost exclusively white. This, in spite of the anti-racist sympathies of many of the artists, and the generally oppositional nature of the work produced.

universal. Bolo Bolo! (1991) by Gita Saxena and Ian Rashid, for instance, looks not simply at AIDS but at how the disease specifically affects South Asians. A Voice of Our Own (1989) by Premika Ratnam and Ali Kazimi does not examine the women's movement in general, but rather, issues particular to immigrant women and women of colour.

At V tape in Toronto (a distributor with one of the largest collections of video art in English Canada, including virtually all Toronto-based production), only a handful of local tapes feature people of colour, and of these only a few are by non-white producers. Of the tapes that do include non-white representation, only a fraction employ convention of "realist" fiction. Two works by white artists. Night Visions (1989) by Marusia Bociurkiw and A Place With No Name (1989) by Elizabeth Schroder, use naturalistic codes of acting to create empathetic characters. Both tapes seek to avoid the dangers of speaking "for" Native people by focusing instead on the relationship between white and Aboriginal women and drawing out issues that separate and unite the characters. Night Visions juxtaposes questions of censorship and lesbian rights with the struggle of a Native woman to keep her child. A Place With No Name explores the terms on which a Native woman from northern Canada and a white "southerner" woman from Ontario relate across distances that are more than geographical. In both these pieces. issues of voice and representation (who speaks for whom) are dealt with solely within the diegesisthat is, at the level of character and plot. In most of the other tapes dealing with nonwhite representation, however, there is an attempt to confront and unsettle dominant systems of signification through disruptions of racial typecasting and formal devices such as distanciation, whereby the spectator is made conscious of the conventions of illusionism. The Flow of Appearances (1986) by Tess Payne, for example, is a narrative fiction about our "connotative culture" and the way in which individual perception is mediated by a language learned from popular media. In this piece, one of the anchoring tropes is that of a Korean woman who speaks only in Italian. One scene shows her dressed in "Oriental" clothes, displaying classic preparations of pasta. In another, she is "riding" a bike (keyed in front of footage shot from a car) lip syncing to Italian pop songs. In Kipling Meets the Cowboys (1985) by John Greyson, a tape about colonialism, neo-colonialism and gay sexuality in the Americas, a travel agent accidentally walks in on the

In one evening of mainstream television there is more multiracial representation than can be found in the entire body of Canadian video art. This holds true at a national as well as a local level. Among the reasons behind this is the fact that video artists have traditionally used other artists as cast and crew. Drawing on the pool of professional actors, for instance, might allow for greater racial diversity. More recently, concerns about appropriation have made many artists cautious about representing experiences not "their own" (a complex issue needing much more discussion). Nevertheless, since few people of colour have had the opportunity to produce video, we are left with a strangely whitened version of the world, in which people of African, Asian and Aboriginal ancestries, when they do appear, figure on the peripheryin crowd shots or found footage. Through default, then, this work reinforces the most exaggerated extension of stereotype: the very absence of attributeinvisibility.

The discomforting fact remains, however, that most Koreans do not speak Italian and that neither ranching nor the porn industry have been significant employers of Asian men. These fictional subjects, then, are not meant to tell us anything about actual people of colour in any historical or social sense; they do not assert a "real experience" by contradicting the stereotype. The strategy employed by these tapes may instead be read as a conscious avoidance of "essentialism" and stereotype. But this approach to representation raises other questions: to what extent are the nonwhite characters reduced to self-reflexive, postmodern signifiers? Are they being used, like their predecessors, solely to make a point, albeit this time about racial expectation? Both these tapes eschew a language of realism and, in a sense, render all of their characters into caricatures. Equal treatment, however, does not necessarily foster equality. Because of the universalization of whiteness in the history of representation, white characters are invested with a taken-for-granted subjectivity. This is not the case with representations of people of colour, in which subjectivity must be carefully built. In most of The Flow of Appearances, the Korean woman is positioned as an object by the camera, most notably in a sequence where the camera follows her movement through a crowded street, visualizing a description by a young white man later in the tape. In the "pasta" scene, the woman addresses the camera, but her Italian is not translated for an anglophone audience; in this sense she is "silenced" within the tape. At the same time, she is always depicted as self-assured. And the bicycle ride sequence centres as much on her pleasure as on the fact that she is "singing" in Italian. In Kipling Meets the Cowboys, the cartoon figures of the cowboys are counterbalanced by the Native travel agent. Though he is cast "by race" and though, in a sense, he bears the burden of inserting consciousness about race in the diegesis, he is made a subject through the use of several devices. His character is developed, he is given the pleasure of revenge at the end of the tape and, clearest of all, his point of view is privileged through direct-address voice-over.

filming of a cowboy porn musical. The travel agent is a Native man and the incongruous group of cowboys includes one black and one Asian actor. Both these tapes disrupt symbolic references traditionally associated with racial "types." Stereotypes are turned on their sides, the authenticity of the image is questioned and attention is called to the ways in which we have been educated into limited racial expectations.

Edward Lam likewise employs transgressions in racial typecasting as an entry into analyzing the question of subjectivity itself. Both of Lam's tapes, based on performance pieces, feature black actors as the lead characters. As in the tapes by Payne and Greyson, these actors are used in ways that subvert their connotative associations in the dominant lexicon. Nelson is a Boy (1985), for instance, features a young black man delivering a stilted, anachronistically erudite dissertation about beauty, with references to Brancusi and Gustav Mahler.

In most of his work, Lam constructs a tension between the characters within the diegesis and himself as creator. This is often accomplished through explicit references to "Mr. Lam" so that he becomes an absent character in his own piece. Whereas distanciation and reflexivity are by no means novelties, the device takes on new meaning within a context that is racially charged. Lam is Chinese. In Nelson is a Boy, the black actor introduces himself directly to the camera, and proceeds to muse on an "educated Negro's" appreciation of "Negro art.' In the confusion of subjectivity and authorship, there emerges a potent image of the struggle against internalized colonial discourse and the search for "authentic" voice by people of colour. Through intertitles such as "this is a slave," Nelson is a Boy is infused with constant references to race. Racism, however, is never explicitly named, thereby confounding any comfortable appropriation and denying the viewer resolution and closure. Ironically, by leaving the issue thus suspended, attention is drawn toward it even more compellingly.

Finally, in Second Generation Once Removed (1990) Gina Saxena questions the "essentialism" with which racial identity is often viewed by exploring her own mixed racial heritage and how it is perceived by others. A parade of different peoplein an office, on the street, in a domestic settinglook into the camera and question the artist on her racial background. These snippets are intercut with shots of the artist's face keyed against the flat plane of "colour bars" while her voice

offers evasive answers to probing questions. Also intercut are shots of the artist "Orientalized" into a seated Hindu deity. The tape dismantles and parodies the assumptions that accompany the need to "know" one's own racial location or that of others, illustrating what Homi K. Bhaba describes as the "ambivalence" of the stereotype:" a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always 'in place, already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated. Second Generation Once Removed presents an autobiographical intervention at the same time as it underlines the constructedness of subjectivity. Given the history of race and representation that we inherit as video artists, we sometimes seem to be caught in a double bind when presenting non-white characters: a choice between their reduction to a function of race and the denial of racial difference by casting people of colour in essentially "white" roles. The apparent impasse of this sort of "catch 22" is overcome by the self-reflexive, deconstructive approach of some British films. However, as with the strategy of "positive images, there is no absolute representational remedy, only those which are more (or sometimes less) challenging and insightful. POWER STRUGGLE: WORKING FOR A FUTURE

In Canada, inasmuch as it is dealt with at all by the State, racism is envisioned as a set of "bad ideas." Anti-racist work is then conceived of as the displacement of an old mind-set by a new, enlightened one. A policy of Multiculturalism, for example, is based on notions about ignorance and knowledge: people have prejudices because they don't "know other cultures." Once they understand these culturesconceived of as "ethnic" (not English or French) and manifested through songs, dances and foodtheir prejudices will "naturally" dissolve. Media is crucial for this Multicultural agenda because it is the conduit through which these new ideas are disseminated. Fighting racism becomes a battle of competing representations: the problems associated with the "positive images" tendency toward simplification and idealization can ensue. A more radical and useful definition of racism is "prejudice plus power." While this concept is sometimes used to reify power (with the idea that some have it absolutely and others not) and obscure the shifting nexus of power relations in which we all live, it does begin to explain the limitations of anti-racist strategies that are purely image-based.

But the systemic changes that allow the emergence of "new voices" (including those from experienced producers) depend greatly on political context. It is worth noting, as an example, that the black British workshops were funded after massive and widely publicized rioting in the early 80s. At least within the initial five-year period, guaranteed funding and an integral connection with Britain's Channel 4 and the British Film Institute meant that producers were relatively free of commercial pressures. Their license to deal with social issues while experimenting with form to make work geared to a non-white audience AND get it widely seenis a luxury specific to that context.

It is also deficient to discuss anti-racist representational approaches without a simultaneous call for strategies to increase the number of people of colour with access to work in film and video, producing on their own terms. The two areas are intimately related: increasing the number of nonwhite producers does not simply add more colour to the screen, it has the potential to alter both the questions and the ways in which they are posed. In much of the new work by people of colour many of them first-time producersracism forms the implicit context, but the tapes themselves are concerned with questions of (autobiographical) identity and cultural validation. Artists relatively new to video such as Donna James, Zachary Longboy, Shani Mootoo and Shauna Beharry, as well as established video producers like Paul Wong and Leila Sujir, have all made recent work on family histories or on the preservation of cultural identity in a diasporic context, or in a colonial context in the case of Aboriginal producers. The tapes draw on different strategies, from the reworking of documentary codes to the development of a poetic, expressive vocabulary to the use of humour and irony. What they hold in common, however, is the refusal of generalized statements about race; rather, they deal with a close and more-often-than-not explicit relationship to the artists' own histories and social isolation.

In order to deal with both overt and covert codes of racism in media, we must begin withbut go much deeper thanan analysis of images and a challenge to the dominant language of representation. We must look toward the transformation of the power relations in production and in society; and these must occur, not apart from, but integral to, other equity issues of gender, region, sexuality, language and physical ability. There must be a change in the racial composition of decision makers at all levels, as well as the processes by which they function. This will require an emphasis on strategies of access to education, funding, distribution, exhibition and informed critical attention. We must foster the interest of young people of colour in taking up the challenge of media. But even more than a change of faces or better funding, we must facilitate the development of nonwhite audiences from the position of marginalized witness to that of active participant: this is one of the primary successes of the deconstructive strategy, so long as audiences are not remarginalized by an overly coded or experimental cinematic language. We have recently witnessed racial equity initiatives from the Canada Council and some other provincial and municipal bodies. Studio D of the National Film Board has held special workshops for women of colour and Native women. In most of these organizations, however, reports and declarations of changing attitude have amounted to little in terms of meaningful structural change. Particularly in the larger, more established organizations, such as the National Film Board and the Canada Council where personal interests are so much at stake and practices so entrenched, it is utopian to expect significant improvement beyond the one-off conference, workshop or committee, without extensive external pressure. In times of "fiscal restraint" and general cultural conservativism, lobbying efforts must be shrewd enough to avoid racial equity being used as an excuse for defunding the arts altogether. But while it is important that discussions of race and representation do not neglect the crucial issues of material conditionswho gets to produce and on what termssuch concerns do not displace the need to evaluate what is produced, the strategies that are employed and the meanings embedded in the vocabulary of sound and image that we draw upon in the creation of our new visions. Bodies out of Place (1996) Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 8:2 1996 Women & Performance Project. Pp. 161-173

Bodies Out of Place: The Videotapes of Shani Mootoo by Richard Fung

Born of Indo-Trinidadian parents in Dublin, Ireland, Shani Mootoo grew up in San Fernando and Trinidad, and she currently lives in Vancouver, Canada, where she works in video, visual art, poetry, and fiction. I mention these geographical details because her work reveals a preoccupation with place and displacement, signaled through Mootoo's autobiographical presence as narrator, actor, or through the pointedly self-reflexive presence of the director as a character. Of the five tapes I will discuss, Lest I Burn (1991), A Paddle and a Compass (1992), and Her Sweetness Lingers (1994) are structured as visual montages accompanied by Mootoo's first-person voice-over; Wild Woman in the Woods (1993) is a short narrative featuring Mootoo as the protagonist; and English Lesson (1991) features an on-screen performer who addresses an off-screen director in his monologue. But although the tapes arise from Mootoo's experience as an Indo-Trinidadian, an immigrant, a woman, and a lesbian, the "I" they deploy is not a transparent, unmediated subject; rather it is a strategic device in which the artist performs her "self." In putting her image and voice into her

There is a sensuousness to the video art of Shani Mootoo. It's the first thing you notice: the colors, the textures, the thick, silky voice beckoning into a world of flavor and heady fragrance. Her work directs you to use your senses. But the bodies presented in the tapes and the bodies addressed by them are not an unspecified mass of flesh and nerve endings captivated in a sybaritic dance of transcendence. They are social bodies, born into specific times, places, languages, and genealogies. They are gendered and sexual bodies, raced and placed. The pleasures they elicit and experience are usually forbidden ones that at once foreground and work against the grain of their ascribed location. It is by analyzing and subverting the regulation of pleasure, and with it the performance of identities, that these tapes both foreground and undermine the anxiously repeated stereotypes of patriarchy and colonialism.

National identities are always built at the expense of "others": those outside the borders, those of a different color, language, or sexuality. Of course, one's connection to an "imagined community" does not depend entirely on others' recognition of one's right to belong. Mootoo's videotapes persistently grapple with the twin powers of definition and self-definition. In some instances the tapes undermine hegemonies through a documentary analysis, in others they reinvent the self or reinvent the world to satisfy the needs of the self. Body of Language

Race and culture are not the only criteria for national belonging. Since the mid-80's, lesbian sex has been criminalized in several Caribbean nations (along with the already existing laws prohibiting male homosexual activity). This includes Trinidad and Tobago, where it is classed as "serious indecency" and punishable by five years in prison. As an out lesbian, Mootoo is a priori an outlaw. "Not just (any)body can be a citizen anymore," writes M. Jaqui Alexander, "for some bodies have been marked by the state as non-procreative, in pursuit of sex only for pleasure, a sex that is nonproductive of babies and of no economic gain. Having refused the heterosexual imperative of citizenship, these bodies, according to the state, pose a profound threat to the very survival of the nation" (1994:8). The link between reproduction and nationalism, especially ethnic nationalism, became visible in Canada recently when, during the 1995 sovereignty referendum campaign, Bloc Quebequois leader Lucien Bouchard lamented that francophone Quebequois are one of "the white races that have the least children" (1995:A18).

Where place and identity merge we call home. But for the diasporic subject, the connotations of wholeness, security, and refuge associated with the place(s) one might regard as originary can not be taken for granted. Mootoo doesn't fit in to essential(ist) constructions of what it means to be Irish, West Indian, Canadian, or Indian. She either doesn't look, sound, or act "right." Race, language, and culture are the obvious culprits: the "typical" Canadian woman is white, just as the "typical" West Indian is black. Even in 1995, as Indians celebrate their 150th anniversary of arrival in Trinidadthey now constitute that island's single largest ethnic grouptheir claim to Caribbeanness is still a matter of contestation. Predominant North American stereotypes about the Caribbean share in common with certain strands of anti- and postcolonial nationalism the collapsing together of the distinct, though overlapping, histories and realities of different Caribbean nations into one another. In this conflation, the resulting generalized West Indian identity is inevitably narrated solely in terms of its African heritage. Despite a national anthem that proclaims "every creed and race find an equal place," in Trinidad and Tobago there still exists a European, African creole cultural hegemony in which the Indian contribution to the nation is constructed and managed as something of an add-oil. This is not to suggest that official and oppositional discourses of race and nation in Trinidad and Tobago are at all simple or stable. It is also important to recognize the process of decolonization that the reclaiming of Africaand Indiarepresents.

work, Mootoo carries on a longstanding tradition of self-reflexive performance in Canadian experimental video. In the process of unraveling and weaving together the complex strands of the self, she touches on issues of identity that are particularly topical.

The tape begins in darkness with a male voice warning the director in Trinidadian English that this had better be the last take. When the screen fades up, it is on a black and white t-shirt with the slogan. "Native West Indian." The camera then zooms out to reveal a white man. In thus orchestrating the revelation of the speaker's identity, English Lesson plays with the audience's expectations about what a West Indian looks like, simultaneously indicating and undermining the stereotype that conflates race with nationality. At the end of the tape, when the instructor sounds out a Caribbean beat with two wooden spoons, the conflation of race and culture is similarly parodiedin Trinidad white men have rhythm, too. A parallel inversion occurs in the content of the lesson itself, which consists not of a lecture on standard English, but rather in the correct

All but one of Shani Mootoo's tapes feature her voice. It is a voice whose accent and inflection bear the marks of her history: the rhythm and cadence of the Caribbean, the precise enunciation of a privileged education, the increasingly Canadian curl of the "r." Voice and language are the focus of her second videotape, English Lesson; ironically, it is the only piece in which Mootoo's own voice is absent.

At face value, English Lesson addresses the viewer as one ignorant of the Caribbean and in need of language instruction. But the tape engages the Trinidadian-ness of its audience in a number of ways. First, this is accomplished through the presentation of an identifiable "Trini" character in the body of the instructor. English Lesson follows in a tradition of resistance to the deluge of American cultural product through the celebration of folk personae (for example, Trinidadian storyteller Paul Keens-Douglas, or the Newfoundland satirical theatre review Codco). Second, the tape speaks in proxy for the Caribbean viewer who has suffered through North American attempts to mimic the long, wide vowel in the West Indian pronunciation of "man": "What the hell is 'mon'?,' our instructor challenges. "Don't say 'mon'; I never see a 'mon' in my life." Finally, given the traditional emphasis on "good" English, Mootoo explores the subversive pleasure of the nation language itself. In the anglophone Caribbean there is a range of spoken language. This has been cataloged in Edward Kamau Braithwaite's History of the Voice. He writes:

pronunciation of Trinidadian "nation language" phrases such as "wha' hap'nin, man?" The instructor addresses the camera directly, employing a pedagogy of repetition until the viewer/pupil gets the lesson right. The instructor's patience and zeal recall the missionary, but Mootoo recasts the scenario as a postcolonial on linguistic assignment to the metropole. It is an added irony that the postcolonial missionary is a European creole.

The speech of most Trinidadians slides along a continuum from standard English to nation language. Although many Trinidadians have an ability to shift register according to context, and the privileged regularly express themselves in nation language, there is a strong correlation between class, race, and education and the language forms at one's disposal. So although nation language sometimes gains public circulationin calypso, for exampleit is still seen as "bad" English with low-class connotations. Standard English is the official language of education, government, and business: language is a significant factor in the maintenance of the class structure. For example, children from families in which standard English is regularly spoken have advantages in an educational system in which that is the only acceptable form of communication. Accent, as well as grammar and vocabulary, plays a role. Trinidad's post/neocolonial status is reflected in the traditional prestige afforded Britishand North Americanaccented English. This has engendered a practice and a consciousness about "putting on" northern accents, illustrated in the popular expression, "freshwater Yankee," referring to a person who has acquired an American accent without having left the islandthat is, without having crossed salt water. While nation language may be a sign of class inferiority in the Caribbean, in the diaspora it can signal a much sought-after ethnic authenticity. It is worth noting that there is no nation language in the tapes featuring Mootoo's own voice, most of which were made after English Lesson. Her accent is neither explained nor contextualized, even in Wild Women in the Woods, where the Trinidadian-sounding protagonist lives in the heart of the Canadian wilderness. In these tapes, Mootoo's voice does not figure as a trope of authenticity or oppositionality. Its place at the center of discourse is situated as unselfconscious and natural. Place and Identity A Canadian Rocky Mountain town in winter. Pria (South Asian and butch) nervously drops in on a burgeoning love interest (also South Asian but decidedly femme) who enthusiastically shows off her new engagement ring. Disappointed and bitter, Pria (played by Mootoo) takes a stroll along a country road, where she runs into a female acquaintance returning from skiing alone in the back country. Invited to go camping in the woods, Pria declines. Asked to go skiing, Pria timidly admits

(W)e have English, which is the imposed language on much of the archipelago. It is an imperial language, as are French, Dutch, and Spanish. We also have what we call creole English, which is a mixture of English and an adaptation that English took in the new environment of the Caribbean when it became mixed with the other imported languages. We also have what is called nation language, which is the kind of English spoken by the people who were brought to the Caribbean, not the official English now, but the language of slaves and labourers, the servants who were brought in by the conquistadors. Finally, we have the remnants of ancestral languages still persisting in the Caribbean. (1984, 56)

that she has never learned how. Finally the woman asks Pria to go for a day hike, "up there." The camera follows the woman's' gesture up a vertiginous rock face to a distant cap of snow. Pria demurs: "How about a coffee some time?"

From the moment of contact, the cult of the outdoors is already commodified and tied to whiteness, foreignness, and a gendered nuclear family. The cultural imperialism at work in the catalogue photo is referenced against the concrete imperialist presence on the island. Mootoo illustrates the role of pleasure in extending that cultural hegemony: "more than anything I wanted to be in the picture with the father and son in their matching, red-plaid lumberjack shirts." Nevertheless, attempts at satisfying such desires result in either a futile, unfulfilling mimicryShani the little girl pitches her toy tent in her garden, the stenciled drawings of Cowboy and Indian against a hibiscus fence and palm tree, not the forest of evergreens in the photographor in extravagant exercises in class privilege: her father buys a heater for the swimming pool: friends order sleeping bags, which they can use only in their air-conditioned bedrooms; her uncle imports a ten-person tent that the family takes to the beach, where other beachgoers "strolled by inspecting the tents and us." In A Paddle and a Compass, Mootoo contrasts the self-consciousness and foreignness of the cult of the outdoors with what might he read as an authentically Trinidadian approach to nature: "I don't remember talk there of conquering this mountain, this coast, that river, we used to take long drives into the country, turn around, and come back home." The tents, the sleeping bags, the swimmingpool heaters are imported commodities that complement the distinctly foreign need to categorize, measure, and contain nature. However, differences between the North American and the Trinidadian are not fixed and permanent. Phoning home from Canada, Mootoo questions her mother about the highest mountain and the longest river in Trinidadshe, too, as her father points out, has begun to talk in superlatives. "From the tourist board she found out that the longest river is the Caroni river, but no one knows how long it is." With this anecdote, the artist charts her own acculturation as a Canadian. But as she, an immigrant "of color," becomes Canadian, so do the markers of Canadian identity have to change: Oberlander, the white Canadian, rethinks the childhood experience of singing the Canadian version of 'This Land is Your Land." "I wonder if Woody Guthrie ever saw the Canadian Rockies," she asks. "and I wonder whose land this really is?" This is a particularly poignant and potent image. By pointing to a gesture of Canadian nationalism authored by an American, the closing phrase suggests that Mootoo has moved from one neocolonial context to another. It also opens up the question of Canada's own colonial relationship with this continent's First Peoples.

In Wild Woman in the Woods, Mootoo's most formally complex videotape, the land is initially presented as something intimidating and forbidding. Pria sticks to the paved road, the thin strip of safety that slices through the wilderness. It is the white woman who can move across this landscape. This association of race, gender, and place is repeated in A Paddle and a Compass, the tape that precedes Wild Woman and is in some ways a prelude to it. Here Mootoo and co-director Wendy Oberlander trade stories about their differing relationships to the land. Told in voice-over, these tales frame and re-frame the tape's visual images of rock, pine, and red commercial canoes cutting through the impossibly turquoise water of Lake Louise in Banff National Park. But while Oberlander tells of daring exploits in northern extremesher own and those of others who fascinate and motivate herMootoo's anecdotes situate her take on nature in a wealthy childhood in neocolonial Trinidad. Her parents borrow a Sears Roebuck catalogue from American friends who have ordering privileges at the American military base on the island. Mootoo the child becomes fixated on an advertisement for camping gear. Set against a scene of a lake, mountains, and evergreens, a nuclear family is shown interacting with appropriate merchandise. The mother and daughter look into a tent, while the father and son cook at a hibachi.

The resolution of the nature dilemma in Wild Woman, though complementary, is quite different. After her encounter with the outdoors woman, Pria takes another stroll along the foot of the mountains. This time, however, she is approached by a postmodern pastiche of the Hindu goddess Durga wearing sari and ski boots, played by ritual performance artist Shauna Beharry. Teased and tantalized, Pria follows this cross-country-skiing trickster higher and higher into the mountains. The unathletic Pria even dons skis when the goddess feigns an accident. Led through an area of darkness by a path of lights laid in the snow, she finds herself in a happy world of hybridity among a group of beautiful South Asian women decked out in silk, leather jackets, and camping wear,

dancing to the rhythms of calypso-inflected Hindi movie music. In this world, the goddess tells Pria. "we have no roles, no rules. You simply are as you are and you're perfect." In A Paddle and a Compass, the childhood encounter with the image of the northern forest precipitates a desire to refuse the gendered, racialized location by entering the world of the white father and son in the photograph: it brings location to consciousness but also produces a rift in the self. In Wild Woman, on the other hand, the landscape holds the promise of healing for the fractured self: at the heart of the mountain, Pria finds a complex imbrication of identities.

Unable to enter nature on a leisure quest, Pria is drawn to the mountains by something more spiritual; it is a place of wholeness and solace. But in this epigrammatic narrative, the image of Pria in the snowy Rockies has more than a psychological resonance. Since 1971 Canada has had an official policy of multiculturalism that recognizes two official languages and many cultures. Despite such apparent inclusiveness, however, in a country whose identity is tied to a romantic image of the land, people of color are discursively tied to the urban landscapeand the inner city, at that. In this version of Canada, Aboriginal Canadians occupy the ironic position of being a fixed feature of the sentimental, untamed geography but simultaneously erased from the land as a living people. By inserting Pria's queer, brown, female body into the iconic national landscape, Wild Woman disturbs the hegemonic construction of Canada. And in its realization of Durga as a sporty diva, the tape gives us a portable, adaptable mythology that challenges essentialist notions of culture and identity. Public and Private In Mootoo's tapes discussed thus far, the only characters shown exclusively in interior space are the male instructor in English Lesson and the newly engaged love interest in Wild Woman in the Woods. In the first case, placing the male instructor in the domestic (feminine) space of a kitchen is a spatial gag that parallels the linguistic inversion of the lesson. In the second instance, Pria meets the woman in the most public area of the home, the living room, and she never gets to a more intimate space. The woman's location in the home further symbolizes her collusion with conventional norms of femininity and heterosexuality, and it serves to contrast with the free women in the woods whose lives are undefined by men. In fact, the lesbian characters in Mootoo's videos are always shown outdoors.

By presenting lesbian identity in exterior space, Mootoo's work subverts the normal private-public dichotomy in which sexuality (and homosexuality in particular) is relegated to the former. "The state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation," declared Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to justify the 1969 amendment that legalized "sexual acts between two consenting adults in private over the age of 21" (1982:226). Tolerance was therefore conditional: homosexuality is to be kept in the bedroom and away from public view. When homosexuality disobediently moves out into public space, the euphoria of liberation is always muted by the (possibly violent) consequences. This ambivalence is captured in Lest I Burn (1991), in which images of a lesbian couple out on the street are juxtaposed with a voice-over (Mootoo) describing a forced performance of femininity lest her "spiky shortness of hair" make her the butt of homophobic abuse, "lest I burn under the curl of their lips." The tape was shot in front of a cafe on Vancouver's Commercial Street, where the city's Italian and lesbian communities intersect. The irate owner once turned a hose on two lesbians who greeted each other with kisses in front of his establishment. In Lest I Burn, the city is configured as an uncertain space for lesbian identities. In Mootoo's work generally, it is not simply the freedom from domestic space that is celebrated, but specifically the natural worldeither the unpeopled wilderness of A Paddle and a Compass and Wild Woman in the Woods or the garden in which two female lovers flirt in Her Sweetness Lingers (1994). In choosing a garden as the setting for that piece, an erotic prose poem of longing and seduction recited over lavish, electronically manipulated images, Mootoo exploits the hybrid geography of a space where the oppositions of city-country and natural-social give way. Also interesting is that the garden is also one of the few public leisure spaces with feminine associations.

In the adage "a woman's place is in the home," the feminine space of domesticity is counterposed to the male-identified workplace. But the gendered separation of public and private space does not only occur along this axis. As A Paddle and a Compass and Wild Woman indicate (and defy), there also exists a separation between the female domestic space and the public space of leisure, which is

Bodies in Place In the postcolonial context of diaspora, home becomes a fixation: losing home, remembering home, imagining home, returning home. Feminist geographer Doreen Massey writes, "(s)uch views of place, which reverberate with nostalgia for something lost, are coded female. Home is where the heart is (if you happen to have the spatial mobility to have left) and where the woman (mother/lover-to-whom-you-will-one-day-return) is also" (1994; 180). Of course, for this concept of home as security and stability to have currency, the mother/lover-woman-must be fixed in her place. For lesbians and gay men, our sexuality can also make this vision of return problematic. The literal home is often a place to leave, though not always without regret. New homes must be built just as new families are chosen.

also coded as masculine. In Mootoo's description of the Sears Roebuck catalogue, the mother and daughter kneel looking into the tent while the father and son are at the barbecue, their fishing rods and canoes beside them. The females gaze inward into the surrogate home while the males participate in what at first glance may also seem domestic. Nevertheless, cooking is what women do as part of their domestic chores. When it is moved into the workplace (e.g., the restaurant), or it becomes a leisure activity (e.g., the barbecue), it shifts into the domain of men. It is their command of the public recreational space that the child desires when she fantasizes herself into the photo with the father and son. While A Paddle and a Compass and Wild Woman debate race and nationality in the North American outdoors, they simultaneously affirm the presence of women in that public sphere.

Anglo-Canadian mythology is rooted in images of a vast land that runs "from sea to endless sea:' "My Canada includes Quebec," goes a slogan in the recent Quebec referendum. The identity of francophone Quebeois, on the other hand, is traditionally tied to language and memory: "Je me souviens (I remember)" reads the Quebec licence plate; "Mon pays, ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'hiver" [My country isn't a country, it's the snow] begins an unofficial anthem. These conflicting discourses of identity fight it out over territory claimed by native people. Shani Mootoo's videotapes shatter the binary of English-French in which the Canadian national debate is usually trapped. They deconstruct the central tropes of land and language, mapping out a space in which the nation's "others" might become both centered and central. Videography English Lesson, (1991) 2:45 min. Lest I Burn, (1991) 5:00 min. Wild Woman in the Woods, (1993) 14:00 min. Her Sweetness Lingers, (1994), 12:00 min.

Shani Mootoo's tapes all reveal the search for a home where her affinities of gender, sexuality, culture, language, race, and national belonging can come together. The strategies offered up in the different tapes have changed over time. Her early pieces are interventionist and assertive: although modified by humor, English Lesson forcefully inserts Trinidadian nation language into the space of dominant speech; at the end of Lest I Burn, the narrator's tone changes abruptly from fearful to defiant, "Enough of this shit; from now on this is amazon land!" The camera shows that slogan painted on a wallit is a turf war. On the other hand, Wild Woman in the Woods, which was produced later, posits a space of self-fulfillment carved in metaphor and the imagination, rather than the literal landscape. In Her Sweetness Lingers, the most recent of the tapes I have discussed, interracial lesbian lust runs free in the hybrid space of a garden. In viewing the body of work as a whole, what is significant is not the linear progression of strategies from tape to tapewhat is striking is the way in which, as a group, they represent an attempt to balance the social, the personal, the imaginary, and the political.

A Paddle and a Compass (1992) 9:10 min. (co-directed with Wendy Oberlander)

Distributor: V Tape, 401 Richmond Street W., #451. Toronto, Ontario. M5V 3A8, Canada. Telephone: (416) 351-1317; Fax: (416) 351-1509.

Notes

This article was conceptualized during a Rockefeller Fellowship residency at the Center for Media, Culture, and History at New York University. I would also like to thank Tim McCaskell for his usual insight and criticism.

Uncompromising Positions (1997) Source: 1997. Lorraine Johnson (Ed.), Suggestive Poses: Artists and Critics Respond to Censorship, pp. 137-149. Toronto: Toronto Photographers Workshop and The Riverbank Press. Uncompromising Positions: Anti-censorship, Anti-racism, and the Visual Arts by Richard Fung "For some, artistic freedom appears to be alive and well in Canada; these writers, however, pay not the slightest heed to the fact that the wider context includes many who, because of racism, cannot fully exercise that artistic freedom. In Canada, that wider context is, in fact, very narrowly drawn around the artistic freedom of white writers." -M. Nourbese Philip, This Magazine

The politics can be reduced to a simple equation: artists want freedom of expression; people of colour and ethnic minorities demand freedom from oppressive stereotypes and expressions of hatred. For the most part, anti-racist and anti-censorship activists stay out of each other's way: antiracists don't normally comment on porn busts, gay and lesbian book seizures, or instances of artistic censorship; those who work on anti-censorship issues in the visual arts don't jump to criticize restrictions on the Heritage Front or the KKK. But for someone like myself, a person of colour and a cultural producer who sometimes works with sexual imagery (and queer representation at that), this segregation of anti-racist and anti-censorship politics, although expedient, seems intellectually shortsighted and strategically risky. As anti-hate-speech advocates team up with pro-censorship, anti-porn feminists, and civil libertarians defend the racist's right to speak, it becomes even more crucial to address these movements' central assumptions about representation, pedagogy, and the state. While this article focuses on the campaigns advocating or opposing state censorship, the circulation of ideas and images in countries such as Canada and the United States is far more dependent on less obvious systemic factors, such as (the often narrow, often Eurocentric) notions of "innovation" or "excellence" when it comes to arts funding and curating, or marketability and audience in mass culture venues. So while it is rare for a piece of art to be banned by the government, it is normal that a film or video be refused distribution or airing because its audience is too "specific," it is not "objective," or it is in poor taste. This was driven home to me when I was doing research for a videotape about racism and policing, and various broadcasters refused to let me even see, much less purchase, television footage related to my subject's false arrest. The grounds they used included not selling material to "advocacy projects," not selling to "independent producers," and only allowing the purchase of "happy" footage, "such as if you were at the CNE" (the annual Canadian National Exhibition). Keep in mind that media rely on police tips for their stories and you get an important part of the picture. The regulation of expression is accomplished by the everyday practices of thousands of decisionmakers, from petty to powerful, simply doing their jobs. This includes the self-censor-ship of

For many artists of colour, censorship is at best a peripheral issue, a luxury. At worst, anti-racism and anti-censorship are imagined to be in competition with one another. Over the last fifteen years, I have worked with other artists of colour on anti-racist and equity initiatives. Whenever I have involved myself with issues of artistic censorship, however, I have been able to count the number of non-white faces on one hand. The reasons behind this absence are seldom elaborated upon, but one need only think of the defence of genetic determinist Philippe Rushton, or the image of Holocaustdenier Ernst Zundel with "Freedom of Speech" emblazoned on his hard-hat, and it starts to become clearer why politically conscious people of colour may be reluctant to jump on any civil-libertarian bandwagon. Add to this the fact that when artists of colour address the effects of systemic racism and white privilege they are often themselves accused of censorship, and a degree of mistrust seems only natural.

cultural producers themselves. It is ironic, therefore, that the relatively few incidents of state intervention in the capitalist liberal democracies are used to convey an image of a "free" world. This freedom then becomes a point of distinction from the backward or "despotic" countries, and is often cited when a justification for imperialist intervention is needed, or, as in the case of the hysterically squashed New International Information Order, to delegitimize Third World challenges to the hegemony of the Western media. As Dionne Brand and Krisantha Sri Bhaggiyadatta wrote in A Space's 1985 anthology Issues of Censorship, in this global context, narrowly defined anticensorship campaigns may seem like "flaunting one's genitals against the military-industrial complex." In tracing the implications of what is called free speech, we find that the concept echoes in the mass silencing of four fifths of the world, just as the welfare state of the ACCs [Advanced Capitalist Countries] thrive on the super exploitation of or illfare of the rest of the worldFree Speech becomes a tool in legitimizing that exploitation, as a measure of the ACCs advertized freedom against the backwardness of the "third" world or the totalitarianism of the "communist bloc."

The point is not that the citizens of countries such as Canada don't enjoy a relatively high ability to express themselves without fear (or that we shouldn't fight to safeguard those rights), but that this advertised political and artistic freedom is not as absolute as it's made out to be: transgressive images and ideas are tolerated as long as they remain on the margins of social consciousness. With the regulation of voice accomplished through the building of a social consensus, state censorship only represents a failure in an otherwise effective system of control. Way back, before some artists became "of colour," we used to say that censorship wasn't an issue for us non-whites because we didn't have resources to make work in the first place; there wasn't anything to censor. If that ever served as a legitimate justification, it no longer does. Although access and equity should be on the agenda of anyone who claims to have an interest in artistic expression (extending it, not simply preserving it for those who already enjoy the privilege), it is also true that non-white artists do make work and we do get censored, especially when that work deals with sexuality. (Political censorship is normally more systemic and taken care of before this stage.) Artists of colour have been at the centre of some of the biggest censorship controversies in North America. Think of Vancouver artist Paul Wong whose show Confused: Sexual Views was cancelled by the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1984, or the late San Francisco-based filmmaker Marlon Riggs, whose Tongues Untied was maligned by Senator Jesse Helms and was refused carriage by several PBS stations. More recently, in 1996, Cheryl Dunye's feature comedy, The Watermelon Woman, about the search for a black lesbian cinema icon, was attacked on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives by Republican Peter Hoekstra (Michigan), who offered an amendment to decrease National Endowment for the Arts funding by $31,500, the amount the organization contributed to Dunye's film. In 1988, there was a campaign to censor a number of tapes from the inaugural video exhibition at the National Gallery in Ottawa. Susan Ditta, the show's curator, and Dr. Shirley Thomson, the gallery's director, stood firm and the storm blew over. One of those tapes, Chinese Characters, a critique of gay porn from an Asian perspective, was mine.

Much of this offending work attempts to reframe sexual representation from a non-white perspective and to dismantle the distorted sexual constructions of racist and colonial discourse. But while the spectacle of non-white sexual subjectivity, especially when coupled with the unapologetic display of gay desire, may have made these pieces more obscene in the eyes of their critics, discussion of racial difference was noticeably absent from the public campaigns against the worksthough Susan Ditta received, on my behalf, private hate correspondence that combined homophobia with race hatred. For the pro-censorship forces to address the racial specificity of the work would have complicated and perhaps derailed their lines of attack, possibly precipitating a fracture along colour lines; not to address such issues would keep conservative clements within communities of colour on side. These communities are not monolithic. If one thinks of the African diaspora in North America, for example, there are indeed conservatives and religious puritans, but there is also a whole rap youth culture, vilified precisely for its sexual expressiveness and censored for it. This fact is not always remembered in the confrontation between race and anti-censorship politics, however. In the art magazine MIX, for example, editor Margaret Christakos reports on the process through which an essay by Eli Langer, the Toronto-based artist whose paintings and drawings were put on trial under

In fact, there is at this point no coherent anti-censorship movement as such but, rather, overlapping circles of individuals and organizations, which may be mobilized around specific issues or according to artform. In the visual arts, the political spectrum includes civil libertarians opposed in principle to any limit on expression, no matter the content; feminists and socialists concerned about giving more power to a patriarchal and/or capitalist state; artists fearful of limits to their practice; art institutions concerned about funding; sexual minorities, especially gay men and lesbians, who are used to being scorched whenever the fires of censorship rage; and, finally, fascists and porn producers who opportunistically take up the slogans of freedom of expression as a form of self-defence. Many anti-censorship activists fit in to more than one of these categories, but only hardcore libertarians would actively work to support the full range of anti-censorship causes, from

In the eighties, there were strong attempts to produce a progressive anti-censorship coalition that attended to anti-racist concernsA Space's anthology Issues of Censorship was one such effort. Visible and active censorship bureaus facilitated conceptual links between censorship of the arts and other forms of state repression. Recent anti-censorship organizing, however, has generally failed at effectively making connections between different forms of censorship and across "high" and "low" cultural forms-the films, videotapes, visual art, and literature that have served as foci for anti-censor-ship activism usually being of a high art variety. In the visual arts, this is at least in part because of the kind of work that has been censored, but there has also been a long struggle over the question of elitism: is it opportunistic to invoke the defence of artistic merit, which is available only to certain types of censored material, or for galleries and festivals to advocate (or accept) exemption from submission to film and video censor review? This discussion has evident implications with regard to the cultural products of minoritized communities. In the United States, for example, the defence of rap has come almost exclusively from black scholars such as Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Tricia Rose.

One makes choices about political priorities. Involvement in a costly censorship campaign can take resources away from issues deemed more urgent. This can produce resentment especially if one has reservations about the offending material or the motives of its producer. As this was the premiere issue of the magazine, the inclusion of Langer's controversial piece could have helped to define the publication's readership: a strong anti-censorship gesture could have demonstrated a vigorous, uncompromising editorial stance; or, it could have limited a grassroots audience. While I am sympathetic to the fact of these dilemmas, I am leery about the construction of community homogeneity that bolsters the anti-racism versus anti-censorship dualism described in Christakos' account. MIX is not a community newspaper; its roots are in the progressive artist-run movement. Given the magazine's format, writing style, and content (even without Langer's article), its readersof whatever colour or ethnic background-would be, relative to most of society, politically and culturally sophisticated. In such a context, one could expect to be confronted with difficult, controversial questions of representation. But in any case, isn't the role of progressives to challenge conservatism in the communities? Especially in these times, frank talk about sexism, homophobia, and sex needs to flourish, not be dampened in the name of cultural sensitivity. Even if the artist is of a relatively privileged background, there is a need for building an analysis of the links between the state repression of non-white political voices and of artistic censorship: what might the similarities and differences be between Eli Langer's paintings and the rap song "Cop Killer," for example? How one raises these issues productively is another matter, of course, and this is where the dilemmas and priorities come incensorship cases are almost never straightforward, as work that supposedly crosses legal boundaries is often transgressive from the perspective of other criteria as well.

I find it important to be mindful of how women of colour involved with the magazine offered a different context altogether in which the Langer article raised issues of white male privilegeIn this case, supporting going public with material that might have incurred conservative legal and social outcry might have endangered their grassroots broad-based politics of change that ranked anticensorship around this particular type of imagery a luxury.

the child pornography law, was deemed unpublishable. Christakos writes about the censorshipinduced obscenity chill that makes cultural producers cautious and self-censoring. But in this case, race was also factored into the magazine's decision-making process:

The most visible force behind hate-speech prosecutions in Canada has been the Canadian Jewish Congress. Often working in tandem with the League for Human Rights of B'nai Brith Canada. In my opinion, the zeal of especially the CJC to engage the motors of the state reflects not only the political orientation of its leaders, but also the centrality of anti-Semitism in Nazi and neo-Nazi doctrine and the particularity of anti-Semitism as a form of racism. The Jewish community is not homogeneous economically or politically. There is, nevertheless, sufficient clout within the constituencies of these organizations to facilitate confidence in the traditional wheels of power. This attitude is reinforced by the fact that, today at any rate, anti-Jewish prejudice in Canada is not acted out at the level of governmentJews are not criminalized and policed in the manner of, say, Aboriginal or African Canadians. But the CJCs readiness to enlist legal methods to combat anti-Semitism runs its risks. Not only is it costly, time consuming, slow to resolution, and unpredictable in outcome, but there can be more direct fall-out as well. For instance, the CJCs unsuccessful attempts to ban Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan from Canada put a strain on the anti-racism coalition and apparently produced a divergence from the B'nai Brith, which called for dialogue. Farrakhan, who is infamous in the mainstream media for flourishes against Jews, whites, gays, and others, is, since his Million Man March, increasingly popular with established African Canadian (especially heterosexually identified, male) leaders who find his message of masculine responsibility and community self-help appealing. So when the CJC invokes the force of the law to prevent black people from hearing a man they regard as inspirational, or are simply curious about, the Congress' justification, based on a discourse of racial victimization, certainly doesn't help to convince African Canadians that hatespeech legislation is a tool that will reliably work in their favour.

What is thought of as an anti-racist movement also consists of interlocking circles of interest that span a range of organizations and individuals working in different milieux, and with different orientations toward strategy and even toward the concept of race-from various racial nationalists who see contemporary racial categories as real and natural (they may simply want to overturn the configuration of power allotted the different groups-or their group), to people who, like myself, regard race as a social not a biological reality and consider the idea of racial difference as socially constructed and historically bound. Those who pursue state intervention as a way of dealing with racist speech constitute a relatively small portion of this movement; grassroots organizing tends to favour community mobilizing, popular education, and, in some instances, direct confrontation. The legal route is primarily an option for those who find themselves comfortable traversing the corridors of power and who trust their own ability to manoeuvre the state's coercive powers. (Hate-promotion charges can only be laid with the consent of the Attorney-General.) This excludes most people of colour and most people in general.

the Eli Langer trial to the Little Sisters Customs seizures, from Red Hot Video to the Keegstra and Zundel hate-speech cases.

One of the areas to which critical race theory has been applied is hate-speech legislation, and of these thinkers Richard Delgado is one of the most prominent. A University of Colorado law professor and co-drafter of the University of Wisconsin's hate-speech regulations, Delgado has sought to broaden the notion of hate speech. Working with Laura Lederer, editor of Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography, Delgado organized a conference and subsequent anthology, which designate "hate speech" and "harmful speech" as "a catch-all to refer to all forms of racist speech,

Hate speech has been a relatively minor and sporadic preoccupation for organizations of people of colour, compared to those issues that are far more constitutive of the everyday experience of colour racism: policing, discrimination in access to housing, racist violence, and systemic racism in education and employment. But going against the grain of what Henry Louis Gates Jr. describes as the civil rights legacy of resisting rather than enlisting power, is a growing movement of legal scholarship in the United States known as critical race theory. Encompassing a wide, even divergent, range of legal thinkers, mostly "of colour" and mostly teaching in universities, critical race theorists are unified, according to the editors of a comprehensive anthology of their key writings, by two common interests: 'The first is to understand how a regime of white supremacy and its subordination of people of colour have been created and maintained in America, and, in particular, to examine the relationship between that social structure and professed ideals such as 'the rule of law' and 'equal protection.' The second is a desire not merely to understand the vexed bond between law and racial power but to change it."

That argument has absolutely no basis as an historical claim because the mass avail-ability of pornography since World War II certainly cannot have caused violence and misogyny; they have existed for centuries. This argument has no merit as a cross-cultural claim because the status of women does not increase in societies that suppress sexually explicit materials-whether it is the state of Utah or Saudi Arabia.

Lisa Duggan, for example, gives a four-part answer to the question of why so many feminist historians are uniformly critical of the campaigns to ban pornography. Drawing on the lesson of the "fruitless, counterproductive strategy" of the nineteenth-century women's temperance movement to ban alcohol as a means of combatting spousal abuse, Duggan identifies the first reason as a problem of displacement. During hearings into a proposed anti-pornography ordinance in New York state, for example, men confessed to sexual violence with explanations such as "pornography came into my home and made me do it." As Duggan notes, "They confessed their acts of violence, but did not hold themselves accountable. Instead, they displaced responsibility for their acts onto pornography in exactly the way that is so familiar to people who have looked closely at the temperance campaign." The second lesson is based on an analysis of the social purity movement, which worked to strengthen anti-prostitution laws at the turn of the century. This led to a coalition in which feminist concerns about the economic and sexual vulnerability of women were overrun by conservative forces interested in regulating morality. This experience, according to Duggan, is mirrored in anti-porn feminist Catharine MacKinnon's alliance with Stop-ERA and Moral Majority activists in an effort to pass the 1984 anti-porn ordinance in Indianapolis. The third reason is based on the fact that, in the application of the aforementioned anti-prostitution laws, it was primarily women, not men, who suffered. As contemporary parallels, Duggan cites the defunding of lesbian, gay, and feminist artists from the National Endowment for the Arts, fuelled by the idea of obscenity as dangerous, and the prosecution of a lesbian publication as the first post-Butler interpretation of the Canadian obscenity laws. Finally, Duggan attacks the central assumption that pornography causes misogyny and violence against women:

hate propaganda or pornography." Given their common approach to state intervention, it is only logical that anti-hate-speech and pro-censorship anti-porn activists would eventually team up. But, for me, whatever clarity the anti-hate-speech rationale might have it loses when such a conflation is effected. What this marriage does is apply a literal reading to the metaphorical rhetoric of pornography as hate propaganda against women; this is a qualitative and, in my opinion, untenable leap. Leaving aside the discussion of whether speech constitutes an act in itself, the invitation to violence and hatred is clearly and explicitly stated in the message of racist and homophobic groups; this is the message's purpose. But despite the radical feminist claim that pornography is the theory, rape is the practice, porn's causal relationship to sexual violence remains unproven, and the case against state censorship as a response to misogyny in heterosexual pornography is eloquently argued by feminist writers and artists.

Their fixation on sexual explicitness has always placed anti-porn activists in an objective alliance with moral rightists. Suspicion of a moralistic impetus is strengthened by their inability or unwillingness to distinguish between different genres of porn, and between gay and straight pornography. In fact, whereas the Butler decision was celebrated for its apparent shift from a concern with sexual explicitness to an assessment based on harm against women and children, the opportunistic manipulation of the judges' homophobia hints at why the terms of policing haven't shifted that much. Law professor Kathleen Mahoney, architect of the campaign to enshrine the harms-based analysis in law, describes the strategy: "'How did we do it?' she said. 'We showed them the pornand among the seized videos were some horrifically violent and de-grading gay movies. We made the point that the abused men in these films were being treated like womenand the judges got it. Otherwise, men can't put themselves in our shoes. Gay anti-porn legal scholar Christopher Kendall goes even further along this path, condemning gay porn as "hate speech" against gay men that precipitates "precisely the types of harm addressed in

Duggan's point is not that pornography should escape criticism, but that the critique and protest around it should follow the lines and scale as for other forms of cultural representation, such as advertising, novels, or television: "It makes as much sense to organize a group called Women Against the Novel as it does to organize Women Against Porn.

Butler." Implicating gay pornography in causing gay spousal abuse, he argues that "[a]lthough research thus far has relied only on heterosexual pornography, I suggest that these findings are equally applicable to gay pornography-that is, that the presentation of real people in scenarios of violence and degradation (not to mention the exploitation involved in the production of these images) can in this case, too, lead to increased violence against real people. He concludes, while no research has been done to determine if gay men who abuse their partners use gay pornography, there is no evidence that they do not." Even if they did, it would not indicate a causal relationship, merely a correlation. One might also find (if one set up such research parameters) that gay spousal abusers drink beer, smoke cigarettes, and watch "Married with Children"; this represents the limitationsand the dangers-of this kind of functionalist research. Yet based on such a thin foundation of conjecture, the pro-censorship anti-porn lobby is willing to build its justification for massive controls.

Kimberl Williams Crenshaw, another critical race theorist, expresses similar misgivings about the way black women were used in the obscenity prosecution of 2 Live Crew's Nasty As They Wanna Be. Grounded in a notion of what she refers to as the "intersectionality" of race and gender (that the construction of totalizing and mutually exclusive categories of "blacks" and "women" is useless in understanding the problems faced by African American women, for example), Crenshaw is equally critical of those who would dismiss Nasty's misogyny and defend the lyrics as simply a black injoke, and of the selectivity of the prosecution's case, which relied heavily on racist fears and stereotypes about black male sexuality: "Whereas 2 Live Crew was performing in an adult's only club in Hollywood, Florida, Andrew Dice Clay was performing nationwide on HBO. Well known for his racist 'humour,' Clay is also comparable to 2 Live Crew in sexual explicitness and misogyny. Crenshaw also points out that 2 Live Crew was playing in a district in which sexually explicit, misogynist material is readily for sale.

But the complaint of gay Asian activists is how Asians figure in gay erotic representation, not that they figure. And I cannot stress too much how crucial it is to distinguish between the seemingly coherent regimes of representation on screen, the idiosyncratic ways that these images are consumed, and the complicated social and interpersonal relations that exist between Asian and non-Asian gay men on the ground. Christopher Kendall lists an inventory of titles and sexual activities that is meant to shock the reader with the horrible reality of gay porn. When he hyperventilates about "bondage, watersports, fisting, bootlicking, piercing" or "torture to the genitals and nipples with hot wax," I imagine the frenzied tone of his invective reflects the difficulty of trying to convince gay men that gay porn plays any role in their everyday experience of violence and oppression. But when, in his anti-porn diatribe, he lists Big Black Cocks and Oriental Guys (a glossy magazine out of Southeast Asia collected by many gay Asian men, and one of the titles ,singled out for Canada Customs seizure from Glad Day Bookshop), I can only feel used. Kendall seems totally uninterested in the complex and contradictory feelings of gay Asian men toward these representations that simultaneously eroticize and orientalize them.

The analysis of race in anti-porn writing is equally shallow and opportunistic, but to different purpose. In the early nineties, I wrote an essay on the representation of Asian men in gay video porn. Film scholars Richard Dyer and Tom Waugh had each written convincingly about the specificity of gay porn with its greater mobility in viewer subject position. What struck me when I began to research how Asian men figured in the narrative and the image, however, was the consistency with which the tapes reproduced some of the most stereotypical, orientalist tropes. The tapes I looked at were constructed for the pleasure of a white viewing subject; the Asians were on show. This, I argued, held some commonality with the gendered gaze of most heterosexual porn.

Obscenity doctrine, Crenshaw argues, does little to protect the interests of black women. Nevertheless, "black women's bodies were appropriated and deployed in the broader attack against 2 Live Crew. Crenshaw's deconstruction of a Newsweek article by George Will demonstrates the process: Will invokes Black womentwiceas victims of this music. But if he were really concerned with the threat to Black women, why does the Central Park jogger figure so prominently in his argument? Why not the Black woman from Brooklyn who, within weeks of the Central Park assault, was gang-raped and then thrown down an air shaft? What about the twenty-eight other women

The problematic construction of women as helpless victims of and in pornography has long been noted by feminist critics of anti-porn discourse. But some anti-hate-speech reasoning also relies on patronizing notions of passive victims in need of protection by a benevolent state. In their essay "Minority Men, Misery, and the Marketplace of Ideas," for example, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic argue that "[h]istory shows that one cannot effectively 'talk back' against the dominant narrative of the day. And, with race, the reason is that we simply do not see the racism of our time as such. We see it only years later, after the paradigm has begun to shift and society has adopted a different, sometimes more enlightened, view of the group in question. The authors further contend that when counter-narratives are put forward, they are denied credibility and dismissed as biased; people of colour and other socially maligned groups have no hope of self-expression, the authors deduce. Although they do not explicitly argue for a remedy of state censorship, their pessimistic prognosis coupled with an attack on "reductionist First Amendment marketplace analysis" accomplishes this by default:

mostly women of colourwho were raped in New York City the same week the Central Park jogger was raped? Rather than being centered in Will's display of concern, Black women appear to function as stand-ins for white women?

Delgado's and Stefancic's self-serving vision that racist ideas are monolithic, all pervasive, and unshakable bears many similarities to the determinism of pro-censorship anti-porn rhetoric. But if stereotypes are so deeply ingrained, not only impossible to counteract but unrecognizable as such, who will decide what is and isn't racist, and why turn for protection to the state, the very centre of hegemonic power? In answer to the first part of the question, I suppose Delgado and Stefancic propose people like themselves. However, when laws, policing, and judiciary are permeated with systemic racism, why should minoritized communities expect that the legal arm of the stateeven under the guidance of an anti-racist mandatewill act in their interest? Certainly, this has not been the case with recent, supposedly feminist-informed censorship legislation in Canada. While the new laws have done little to unsettle sexist and heterosexist hegemony, the police, customs, and judiciary have maintained their inability or unwillingness to distinguish between "harms-based" and old-fashioned moral policing. Yet again artists and sexual minorities are the victims. With the discretionary nature of hate-law enforcement, satisfaction from a progressive viewpoint is hardly guaranteed, no matter how ostensibly clear the laws. Consider, for instance, the work of Mari J. Matsuda, one of the most complex of the critical race theorists working in the area of hate-speech legislation. Writing within the framework of First Amendment rights, Matsuda attempts to formulate a progressive position that isolates racist hate speech for legal proscription, while protecting other unpopular ideas such as communism. Matsuda identifies three criteria that would have to be satisfied to make speech legally actionable: "1. The message of racial inferiority; 2. The message is directed against a historically oppressed group; 3. The message is persecutory, hateful and degrading.

Not only does the system of images resist changes, our political system of free expression often makes matters worse. Writers and graphic designers feel freer to use racist images because another writer is free to make an anti-racist movie.

Under these narrowing elements, arguing that particular groups are genetically superior in a context free of hatefulness and without the endorsement of persecution is permissible. Satire and stereotyping that avoids persecutory language remains protected. Hateful verbal attacks upon dominant-group members by victims is permissible. These kinds of speech are offensive, but they are, in respect of first amendment principles, best subjected to the marketplace of ideas. This is not to suggest that we remain silent in the face of offensive speech of this type. Rather, the range of private remediesincluding counter-speech, social approbation, boycott, and persuasionshould apply. Under Matsuda's stringent criteria, Jim Keegstra would be liable to legal sanction but Philippe Rushton would not, although he would be subject to other forms of reprimand, including academic censure. But no matter how airtight Matsuda's formulation is on paper, it is nevertheless subject to the vagaries of an unpredictable (or, some might argue, all too predictable) state apparatus. And as Henry Louis Gates Jr. has argued, while critical race theory is correct in challenging the notion of

In Canada, although the hate-propaganda legislation has survived several constitutional challenges, charges are very rarely laid. Provincial Attorneys-General are very reluctant to give their consent for prosecution under the sections of the Criminal Code related to advocating genocide (section 318(1)) or promoting hatred (section 319(2)). The case against Ernst Zundel, for example, was initiated independently by the Canadian Holocaust Remembrance Association under the spreading false news section of the Criminal Code (section 181), because the Attorney-General felt there was too slim a chance of successful prosecution under section 319(2). At the time of writing this article, I am part of an Asian coalition that rose to combat a viciously homophobic editorial in a Toronto Chinese-language newspaper and the fall-out that it precipitated. In considering available options, legal counsel advised a libel suit (the article was accompanied by photographs of Asians from the Lesbian and Gay Pride Day parade in Toronto), because the Conservative Attorney-General was unlikely to take on the case and the Human Rights Commission would involve too lengthy a process. Perhaps the most useful aspect of hate-speech legislation is the fact of its existence. It represents a symbolic societal stand against hatred and a symbolic inclusion of minoritized communities in the body politic. This is different from private remedies such as group libel statutes. In the case of racist hate propaganda, these laws most likely act as a deterrent against reckless racist speech, although committed Nazis and other racists seem ready to pledge their resources and their timeeven in jailto support the cause. In North America and much of the world, we are at an historical juncture in which the corporate bourgeoisie, aided by partners in government, is attempting to dismantle the "legitimizing" aspects of the state in order to increase their capital accumulation. A progressive politics therefore includes the demand that the state fulfill its responsibilities to education, culture, health, social programs, and human rights protection. In this context, finetuning hate-speech legislation is a laudable effort. But while we may press the police or judiciary to act in cases of racism, homophobia, or violence against women, we must be careful about the degree of state control that is made legitimate in the process of these efforts. And let's not forget that these same functionseducation, culture, etc. also support the needs of corporate state hegemony; we must fight to preserve and to change them.

neutral application of legal principles in American jurisprudence, "[i]ronically enough, what trips up the content-specific approach is that it can never be content-specific enough...[T]he test of membership in a 'historically oppressed' group is either too narrow (just blacks) or too broad (just about everybody)... I suspect it is a matter of time before a group of black women in Chicago are arraigned for calling a policeman a 'dumb Polak.' Gates further points to the fact that contemporary anti-Asian prejudice and violence are fuelled by a stereotype of Asian overachievement, not Asian inferiority (think Philippe Rushton). And, of course, using the test of Matsuda's three criteria, homophobic hate speech would not be actionable.

From my vantage point as a person of colour, a gay man, and a cultural producer whose work has variously faced difficulties for either its political or its sexual content, an intersectional approach would indicate the necessity for both enlisting and resisting power. From my perspective, freespeech campaigns that deny the fear and violence hate propaganda can cause are as limited as antihate-speech or anti-porn campaigns that stifle debate or that ignore the ways criminalization is used against artists and sexual minorities or to limit social dissent. Artists and anti-censorship activists need to make a wider range of people care and understand the importance of these issues; this involves a wider conception of expressive freedom. Artists of colour need to understand that we can't get our concerns on board unless we engage with the issues. I would like to thank Bob Gardner for references. Professor John Manwaring for information on the Canadian legal context, and Amy Gottlieb, Tim McCaskell, and Kerri Sakamoto for editorial suggestions. Richard Fung lives in Toronto where he writes, makes video, and stuffs as many plants as he can into a very small garden. His videotapes have been screened and collected internationally; his essays on race, sexuality and representation, and on cultural policy have been published in many journals and anthologies; and he has received several awards, including fellowships from the Rockefeller and McKnight foundations. He has helped develop grassroots and institutional

initiatives toward the eradication of systemic racism in the arts, such as the Canada Council Committee for Racial Equity in the Arts and the conferences Shooting the System and Race to the Screen. He has also served on the boards of several arts and community organizations, including FUSE Magazine, A Space Gallery, and Gay Asians Toronto. Programming the Public (1999) In GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES 5:1 pp. 73-93 Copyright 1999 by Duke University Press Programming the Public by Richard Fung

If I were being rigorous, I'd contexualize this observation by pointing out that each such establishment has its own ambience and clientele or that in the unclothed environment of a steam bath, signs of gay acculturation must be detected right on the body: haircuts, piercings, neo-Celtic tattoos encircling the upper arm, evidence of the gym in the pecs, stiffness or flexibility in the hip. But rigor is not my aim. I recount this little epiphany merely as an example of the times when, for whatever reason, one is moved to ponder how extensive queer practice, if not community, must be: detectable gay men and lesbians represent only the tip of the queer iceberg.

Whenever I go to a gay bathhouse, I'm struck by the ordinariness of so many of the men, who seem to evade all recognizable gay styles of masculinity and femininity: they aren't swishy or hypermasculine; they don't even have that soft butchness so well depicted by Paul Rudd in The Object of My Affection. Beyond the erotically imagined "straight-looking, straight-acting" men heavily sought in gay personal ads, these men exude a regular guyness that seems just plain, well, straight, which is no doubt how some of them identify themselves.

Gay liberation has long used the slogan We Are Everywhere. But unlike women or "visible minorities," the preferred term for "people of color" in Canadian race-relations discourse, queers for the most part form an "invisible" minority that reveals itself, even to other queers, only through acts of queerness (from the use of discreet rainbow bumper stickers to the very public declarations of entertainers and politicians) or sites of community (Pride Day events, bars, community groups, women's golf tournaments, tearooms, film and video festivals). The more "underground" the venue, the lower the degree of identifiable gay and lesbian acculturation. In this economy of queer visibility, gay and lesbian film and video festivals are especially important because they constitute a kind of double representation on and in front of the screen. So when one programs a festival, one also programs the audience and the community. One presents queer community to itself and then, as a festival becomes more "mainstream," to the larger public as well. In the work that is selected and the way in which it is grouped and promoted, one not only represents but also produces specific instances and interpretations of queerness in the same manner as a leather bar, a gay and lesbian synagogue, or a softball match does.

In 1997, the Inside Out Lesbian and Gay Film and Video Festival of Toronto programmed Out at Work, a film about gay and lesbian labor activists. Together with my partner, Tim McCaskell, I had previously worked with trade unions to bring gay labor historian Allan Brub to Toronto, so it was relatively easy to enlist organized labor in promoting the screening within union networks and in financing trips to Toronto for one of the film's codirectors, Kelly Anderson (the other is Tami Gold), and one of its subjects, auto worker Ron Woods. This screening was one of those rare sites at which gay and lesbian identities become articulated with labor issues. The 1998 Inside Out festival featured several programs on transgender issues and one youthcurated program on work by and about young queers. As with Out of Work, these screenings and the process of producing them served, through cosponsorships, speakers, and other efforts associated with them, to affirm, organize, and produce infrastructure for identities marginalized and/or emerging within gay and lesbian communities.

Inside Out has also largely moved away from ethnic or race-specific programming. Many film and video makers "of color" resent dedicated screenings. In part, their resentment is a reaction to the "ghettoization" arising from curatorial lazinessit's Asian, so let's put it with other Asian work and include rice in the program title. But in the context of the art-world backlash of the 1980s (U.S.style) "multiculturalism," artists are also mindful of the lower status accorded racially hyphenated artists relative to "just artists." Never mind that a gay and lesbian festival is already identity-based and "segregated"; there is a well-gounded concern that race-dedicated programs may spell smaller audiences and marginality within the festival. Yet a program of Asian shorts at the 1997 Inside Out festival drew a significant number of Asian viewers who did not attend any other screening, which points to identification as one important factor in how viewers select screenings. In the post-gay liberation era, with its fragmentation of community and social groups, civil rights campaigns, and academic studies, gay and lesbian film and video festivals are among the few sites where different queer interests and communities intersect and interact (for the price of a ticket). They are also crucial sites of queer pedagogy, classrooms of queer images. But work, programming, and audience are interdependent. For example, how does Inside Out continue its support of queer workers without an Out at Work each year?

How one programs film and video in a festival both reflects and engages specific understandings of who queers are. Over the years the slotting of work by race and gender has shifted at Inside Out. Past programs have been segregated by gender, with men's and women's productions screened at different locations. In part this approach catered to a generation accustomed to gender-separate gay and lesbian social spaces, but it also made the offerings by and for lesbians more prominent in a context dominated by men's work. That this model of programming has persisted beyond the conditions that gave rise to it, however, betrays the mistaken assumption that identification is the principal or the only reason to choose a screening: people are interested only in seeing work about others like themselves. Most of our programs are now gender-mixed.

Short experimental or documentary films or videotapes are not by nature free of these problems God forbid that I should propose a determinism based on size or length. While the cheapness of doit-yourself formats suggests their accessiblity, the demographics behind the camera, in the image, and in front of the screen don't imply racial diversity any more than those of other formats. And let's not forget the artists who have recently made aesthetically and/or politically challenging films in long format, including Yvonne Rainer, Quentin Lee, John Greyson, and, of course, Cheryl Dunye.

The blossoming of the gay and lesbian feature film is important to the widening of the audience at queer festivals; many people, even those with otherwise radical politics, want to see "real" movies. This trend is therefore exhilarating not only because of the strength of the works themselves but because of their growing legitimacy. As a maker of short videos, however, I am apprehensive about what the rise of the feature film may mean for the politics of queer representation. Although a handful of great filmmakers can offset a low budget with their creativity, feature filmmaking in general requires a level of financing and infrastructure that demands a return on the investment. This imperative may force gay and lesbian filmmaking towards the codification and demographic appeal of the Hollywood feature, with its predictable plot and its good-looking, young, white, middle-class protagonist. The difficulty of finding a distributor for an accomplished film such as The Watermelon Woman (which won Inside Out's audience award), a feature with a good-looking young black protagonist in mostly middle-class surroundings, raises my suspicions. In the meantime I've noticed the increasingly frequent appearance of the black best friend in "white" queer feature offerings, a phenomenon that mirrors the rise of the gay best friend in recent Hollywood fare.

I've noticed two trends in the work submitted to and screened at gay and lesbian festivals, and each suggests different audience directions: the feature film and the fiesty do-it-yourself short produced on super-8 or low-end video.

In 1997 Inside Out hired a new executive director, Ellen Flanders, who oversaw a number of changes: the staff was expanded (for instance, the position of program coordinator, which I was offered, was created); the festival moved from its art-community venues to a center-city cinema complex that also houses the Toronto International Film Festival; significant corporate sponsorship

Although they cannot be resolved simply through the will of festival organizers, the decision makers at Inside Out have recognized these problems and have designed productive strategies with which to address them. As Inside Out becomes more prominent in Toronto and as its audiences grow and begin to attract even "straight-identified" attention and attendance, it is an interesting possibility thatto borrow from Teresa de Lauertisthe festival will address its viewers as queer in an increasingly public space.1 It will play it's part in queering the public. Notes This essay is informed by my participation in gay and lesbian film and video festivals as a video maker and especially by my association with the Inside Out festival, as program coordinator in 1997 and as a member of the programming committee in 1998. See Teresa de Lauretis, "Rethinking Women's Cinema: Aesthetics and Feminist Theory," in Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 127-48. Art for Glob (2002) Source:

was snagged; and the number of screenings and the proportion of feature films among them were increased. The festival audience nearly tripled. In such a case "mainstreaming" doesn't mean less gay or lesbian culture. There is a reciprocal relationship between the high profile now possible for gay and lesbian productions and the gay and lesbian festivals sometimes seen as launching grounds for them. It is possible, therefore, that features can be privileged over shorter work in publicity and venue. Corporate sponsorship also raises the question of political and aesthetic (self-) policing and further favors the promotion of the feature.

FUSE Volume 25 Number 4 Nov 2002, 7-8. Art for Glob by Richard Fung They say to themselves,

"Let's go spend the weekend in Quebec City, we'll have fun, we'll protest and blah. blah, blah -Jean Chrtien, Le Devoir (14 April 2001) The future is capricious. It is stingy with its secrets. How many doomsday prophets have been left looking foolish on the day of the fore-told apocalypse? I'm not advocating a move to Arizona or ordering any Kool-Aid. Still, the symptoms are pretty clear and I'll take a chance at saying that the earth's prognosis doesn't look too good. A noxious cocktail of militarism and corporate greed stirred with doses of political opportunism and sundry ideological fundamentalisms seems sure to kill off the planetunless some potent medicine comes along to neutralize the poison. What we call corporate globalization didn't come from nowhere: we've had over 500 years of colonialism and imperialism. But the system's being distilled and there are crucial changes. Unlike classic colonialism, which saw workers in the "metropolitan" countries benefit from the exploitation of the Third World colonies, in this new phase the desperation of Third World conditions is being used to pull the rug from under the First World working poor. And the ranks of

the First World working poor are increasingly filled by Third World folks: check out the demographics of any low-wage picket line in Montreal, Winnipeg or Torontoand these are the folks lucky enough to belong to a union. "Liberalize the economy," clamour the corporate internationalists. "We must compete, chant the corporate nationalists. Whether it's the IMF or the BC Liberals, in Canada, Peru, Kenya or even the United States, poor people bear the brunt of privatization and corporatizationwhich leads to overturned environmental and cultural protections, the seizure and destructions of indigenous lands, and a devastated public infrastructure of health, education, housing, transportation and culture. It sometimes leads to genocide. There has never been so much disparity not only between, but also within, nations.

Looks like Rosa Luxemberg might have been right about the choice between socialism and barbarism. So what precious antidote will carry us into the future? Who are our champions in the struggle? And does art have a role? The Zapatistas in Mexico, the Nigerian women who occupy multi-national petroleum plants, the school-board trustees in Tory-ruled Ontario who refuse to turn in a balanced budget: these are all resisters to the CEOS. But while local initiatives offer sparks of hope, it will take a coordinated transnational movement to erode the power of post-national capital. We've seen attempts in the protests at Seattle, Genoa and Quebec. As world political leaders meet to cook up new ways to screw their citizens, a jamboree of environmentalists, union militants, human-rights activists, peaceniks. concerned civilians and young people looking for a buzz have conferred and demonstrated on the outside, often stealing the thunder from the assembled power. In all of these events, alternative media have played a crucial role in circulating information and analysis. But the ambitions of the Blah Blah Blah collective were quite different. Fourteen film and videomakers from Toronto responded to the 2001 Summit of the Americas in Quebec City by creating art. Each produced a short video anchored in footage taken at the April summit. These were premiered to a capacity audience in Toronto the following fall, and subsequently screened separately and together at various festivals and events. A compilation

VHS cassette, Blah Blah Blah: (re)Viewing Quebec, was assembled and is distributed through V tape (www.vtape.org), proceeds going to the Quebec Legal Defense Fund. The collective takes its name from Chrtien's typically dismissive quote. The project was initiated by film and video artist John Greyson and actor-filmmaker Sarah Polley and producer Gisele Gordon stepped in to coordinate logistics. There was no formal membership and the final tapes represent only some of the people who participated: I, for instance, attended many of the meetings but was unable to go to Quebec, and Sarah Polley didn't produce a Blah Blah Blah tape but instead incorporated her footage into her short film I Shout Love (2001). One of the most exemplary aspects of Blah Blah Blah was that it produced community from a range of artists toward a single cause: longtime activists and people who had never attended a demonstration; documentarians and experimental artists; seasoned filmmakers and novice directors. It was also racially diverse. This is significant because diversity has so far been lacking in the self-defined anti-globalization movement. It's ironic that the depiction of anti-globalization protesters we see in the media is that of mostly middle-class, mostly white youth in Europe and North America rioting on behalf of the planet and its inhabitants images of the 2002 Johannesburg protests were not as widely circulated. This is not to knock the act of solidarityI for one am grateful for mostly white groups like Anti-Racist Action, which battles to keep the fascists

off my neighbourhood streets. Still, the unrepresentative racial composition of both the progressive internationalists of the Canadian anti-globalization movement, and the progressive nationalists of organizations like the Council of Canadians ultimately subverts their important goals. The art of Blah Blah Blah reflects the diversity of its makers. While demonstration footage provides a repeated and perhaps repetitive motif, the range of approaches in substance and form is striking: from an incisive deconstruction of the news industry to a sweetly subversive take by a mix-raced group of Quebec City girls; from a haunting meditation on a first encounter with a tear-gas canister to a rebel fashion file; from a harrowing account of one independent filmmaker's harassment by police to a viciously funny take-down of the summit's display of phallic power. At the premiere screening at Toronto's Innis College Town Hall, a member of the audience raised a familiar and thorny question about art and politics: the idea of "preaching to the converted." Because the tapes focus on the protest rather than the issues requiring protest, the works in Blah Blah Blah are not primarily pedagogical. But there are different kinds of art. One of the ways the Blah Blah Blah tapes were conceptualized was somewhat like artistic home movies for the antiglobalization movement. We shouldn't underestimate this function of rallying the troops and raising morale. In the current war on Afghanistan, and the impending war on Iraq, the US entertainment industry has sent Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt and George Clooney to entertain American soldiers in Turkey, and Jennifer Lopez to warm the fervour of US troops in Germany. To me art is like food and sex: a basic and persistent human need. Attempts to justify art by citing a social or redemptive function are not just unnecessary, but usually end up trivializing its significance. Still, what better tonic for a sicklv planet than good art with good politics? Blah Blah Blah participating artists: Gisele Gordon. Ali Kazimi. John Grevson, Charles Officer. b.h.Yael. David Best. Jody Shapiro, Lindsay Moffat, Karma Clarke-Davis. Julie Fox, Michael Connolly, Kevin McMahon and Christopher Donaldson. Website: http://www.urbannation.com/blah.htm. Video Stills: l. (of) fences, b.h. Yael; m. Packin, John Greyson; r. Like a Nice Rubber Mask, Malcolm Rogge. After Essay (2002) Source:

2002. In Lynda Jessup with Shannon Bagg (Eds.), On Aboriginal Representation in the Gallery, pp. 3742. Hull, Quebec: Canadian Museum of Civilization. After EssayQuestioning History, Questioning Art by Richard Fung I immigrated to Canada from Trinidad with my family in the early seventies. To qualify on the point system, my parents had to show they could support their dependent children and that they could speak one of the two official languages, English or French. When I disembarked at the airport in Toronto, I received a pink forma Canadian Immigration Identification Recordthat detailed my immigration status. Stapled to my passport, this slip entitled me to re-enter Canada legally and to visit the United States without a visa, something I could not do with my Trinidad and Tobago citizenship documents. My volunteer work as a translator for Latin American immigrants and

refugees in the mid1980s instilled a paranoia (or perhaps a sober realization) that my political activism might one day jeopardize my immigration status. This, coupled with a growing recognition that I had set real roots in Toronto, drove me to apply for Canadian citizenship. I remember a shaky moment in the qualifying interview when the citizenship judge asked who the head of state was. I answered confidently, "the Queen of England." I was, after all, born and raised in a British colony. But she looked sternly at me and solemnly pronounced, "No, the Queen of Canada." I now carry a Canadian passport. At the start of the Vancouver session of "A Working Discussion on Aboriginal Representation in the Art Gallery," the delegates were welcomed to Musqueam territory by Debra Sparrow. I had undergone no official process to come in to her territoryno interviews, no language tests, no pink forms, no border guards, no customs. I could enter and leave Vancouver without even being aware of whose land

I was visiting. During the discussions that followed, other Aboriginal speakers outlined a political geography not illustrated in any widely available contemporary world atlas. It is precisely this parallel cartography that dramatizes a defining fact of Canada, its colonial character. The fact that Canadalike all the states of the so-called Americasis an actively colonizing nation built on and thriving at the expense of other living nations is seldom acknowledged or appreciated in its full magnitude. The implications of this geopolitics puts Canadian nationalist fears about American encroachment in another perspective and renders surreal the smug sanctimoniousness with which official Canadian discourse pronounces on the Balkans or other situations of territorial dispute.

Colonization in Canada no longer demands a literal war. Paraphrasing Michel Foucault, the tanks at Kahnesata:ke represent only the failure of state power (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983). Canadian legitimacy is accomplished hegemonically through a social consensus that saturates our institutions of governance, law, information, educationand our institutions of culture and art. The large institutional gallery is historically one of the places where we learn narratives about civilization and cultural superiority. In this sense, the gallery can rationalize the colonial project as a civilizing mission. This is what is at stake in any discussion of the relationship of Aboriginal historical art to the historical time lines of Canadian art in the public gallery. The placement of objectstheir contextualization, juxtaposition, and institutional housing, whether in an ethnographic museum or an art galleryboth reflects and constructs competing claims of legitimacy. At the conceptual core of the issue is the double-sided truth that, as Gerald McMaster pointed out, Canadian history and Aboriginal histories have been intertwined for

many years, and, as Lee Ann Martin appended, this relationship is defined by unequal power. Such a situation produces a series of dilemmas. Ignoring Aboriginal work in the historical time line of Canadian art misrepresents the history of artistic production in this land, but including Aboriginal works within an already established and legitimated Euro-Canadian framework can reinscribe the processes of colonization and subjugation. As Audra Simpson asked. "What does it mean to name us (Mohawks) as Canadians?"

Yet it is Canadian, not Aboriginal, institutions that are generally in a position to frame these works for the public, because they have the resources, the status, and in most cases the collections, as well. This forum is not set up to discuss the question. "How can we include Euro-Canadian objects in Aboriginal aesthetics or art history?" Tom Hill described the inclusion of works on Native spirituality by non-First Nations artists in exhibitions at the Woodland Cultural Centre, but he also used the metaphor of being invited to play on a rink where some players have skates and others do not, to illustrate the difference between his institution and the large urban public museums and galleries. Taking this question even further, Jolene Rickard asked whether either the museum or the

gallery constituted "neutral legal space" when "Native history is not acknowledged within governmentally-empowered space within our homelands." The historic split between institutions of art and those of ethnography relates to divergent meanings of the word "culture." In the past, this division was reflected in what I have referred to as an apartheid in cultural funding. The Canada Council for the Arts and other arts councils based their decisions on Eurocentric narratives of high art that start with the Greeks and develop dynamically toward modernism and beyond to postmodernism. The "other" cultures were seen as frozen in time and delegated to the purview of the various departments of multiculturalism or Indian Affairs. Though formally banished, traces of these assumptions still linger within the institutional divide. Regarding institutions of exhibition and display, Ruth Phillips noted that an art gallery carries more "symbolic capital" than an ethnographic museum. Thus to recognize historical Aboriginal pieces as art serves to legitimize their worth. Many historical pieces in collections were made specifically for nonNative trade, but in what ways does the foregrounding of aesthetic qualities detract from the significance, spiritual or otherwise, of other works? As writers such as Gayatri Spivak and Clyde Taylor remind us, art is not an innocent category. The development of the philosophical ideas of aesthetics and art which inform the practices of art galleries are intricately intertwined with histories of colonialism, racism, and Eurocentrism (Spivak 1999, Taylor 1998). Morgan Wood raised the issue of repatriating spiritual items. Can Aboriginal historical pieces find an appropriate home in an institutional site that does not recognize all aspects of their value? This is a challenging question. "Objects speak, but objects are also silenced," noted Dot Tuer. While it is necessary to develop well-funded Aboriginal-specific spaces, the large public art galleries are important for their symbolic and pedagogical functionsand these institutions are neither static nor unchangeable. What they show, how they show it, and to whom they show itnot divorced, of course, from whom they address as their audiencehas evolved over time. Under current financial pressures, for example, we are seeing a return to more popular, and populist directions as they attempt to increase audiences. Understanding that shifts have taken place allows us to imagine the institution differently. But before art and audiences, or rather, in tandem with art and audiences, there must be a shift in who makes the decisions and who defines the terms of inclusion. Jamelie Hassan raised the crucial (and for most institutions presumably embarrassing) question of how many galleries have Aboriginal members on their boards of directors and, for those that do, whether these members sit on committees that exercise power to affect the acquisition and exhibition of artworks? Richard W. Hill raised the question of institutional change at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Will the gallery hire First Nation curators and institute comprehensive equity programmes for Aboriginal people? Chief Curator Dennis Reid responded that the AGO was "willing to be pursued." Hill sought assurances that if Aboriginal people engaged in a process of negotiation or collaboration with the institution their recommendations would be enacted. I started my introduction to the Toronto session by lauding the courage of participants in undertaking this conversation. I was thinking back to my tenure on the first Canada Council Advisory Committee for Racial Equality in the Arts (an initiative of then-director Joyce Zemans, convened by Chris Creighton-Kelly). The Committee brought together a cross-disciplinary selection of First Nations, people of colour, and white artists, as well as academics from different regions of Canada to study how the Council functioned to support or pass over the work of non-white artists. We made recommendations to reaffirm the existing strengths of the Council, to begin the process of systemic change, and to guide the implementation of those recommendations. One of the members, Margo Kane. also sat on the Aboriginal Committee which met simultaneously with a complementary mandate. Although there is still work to be done at the Canada Council. I remain pleased with our efforts. Yet I suspect I was not the only participant for whom the experience involved stress and anxiety. Many

of us from outside of the Council were worried about maintaining our integrity and our reputations among those we regarded as our home communities. We did not want to be co-opted by the institution. On the other hand, we could detect fear on the part of some Council employees (at that time the Council had an all-white staff except for Creighton-Kelly who was hired on contract) that work might be disrupted, that art might be overpoliticized, or that the process might engender a political backlash (Fung 1993). In the end, the Committee made a thorough analysis of not only how and why First Nations artists and artists from minoritized racial and ethnic communities were handicapped at Council, but also the ways in which they were enabled. We devised recommendations to eradicate and redress the effects of systemic racism in twelve areas, including communications, human resources, juries and advisory committees, board appointments, designated funding, and definitions of professionalism. Although it is important to open up jobs, equity does not begin or stop at a hiring process, nor are internships a substitute for real jobs. The Committee structure was continued to support the work of the equity officer employed to implement the changes. Finally we set a time line to achieve these goals. The racial logic that drives settler states such as Canada overlaps with racial ideologies connected to other instances of colonialism. These in turn manifest themselves in Canada against the presence of diasporic communities of colour. Wendy Brady has described the unwillingness of dominant institutions in Australia to absorb and respect Aboriginal protocols. Culture and colour are issues for Aboriginal peoples. Yet Aboriginal sovereignty differs importantly from racial equity in its relationship to the land. It contests the master narratives of the nation. The answer to this central question posed for the session on history and art is neither simple nor straightforward. There can be no single answer. What is required is a strategic decision based on an assessment of political and practical gains and liabilities for each instance in which the issue arises. I suggest that the location of who is answering the question also guides, if not determines, the response. On this question, for example, the tone and direction of the discussion in Toronto was quite different from that in Vancouver. The Toronto discussion focused on the broader political and conceptual questions at stake, while the Vancouver discussion focused on more pragmatic concerns of implementation and experience. This no doubt derived from the selection of individual participants, the order in which the consultations took place, the artistic and demographic economies within the two cities, and the differing histories of community relationships forged by the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Ontario. But it also reflects the diversity in culture and in the political strategies adopted by Aboriginal artists and nations in the centre-east and on the west coast in response to varying contexts. The working discussion was an important forum for sharing ideas and opening up questions regarding the relationship of historical Aboriginal works to the space of the Canadian historical gallery. Yet there is an impatience with too much talk. Both the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Vancouver Art Gallery must be congratulated on their willingness to participate in these exploratory conversations, but if the good will is to last, those with power in the galleries must demonstrate their commitment to further decolonize their institutions through an ongoing formal process of power-sharing, collaboration and change. References

Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Paul Rabinow. 1983. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fung, Richard. 1993. Working through Cultural Appropriation. FUSE 16: 1624.

Spivak, Gayatri. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Taylor. Clyde R. 1998. The Mask of Art: Breaking the Aesthetic Contract Film and Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Uncomfortable: The Art of Christopher Cozier (2005) by Richard Fung (originally published in Public 31, 2005) I dont like documentaries about artists. I find the mediating lens puts me at a distance from the artwork, and explication by the artist doesnt enlighten me. There are exceptions, of course. In Mereta Mitas Hotere (2001), the great Maori modernist is barely glimpsed in this feature length consideration of his life; I thought perhaps he had died. Similarly, in Tom by Mike Hoolboom (2002), the figure of New York filmmaker Tom Chomont only occasionally emerges from behind a waterfall of moving images, borrowed, found and stolen. Rivers and Tides (2001), by Thomas Riedelsheimer, takes a different tack: it doesnt impede but rather amplifies our vision. It sneaks us into the secret rituals of Andy Goldsworthy who creates solitary spectacles in the wilderness: a rock pool filled with dandelions, a dome woven from driftwood which collapses in the rising tide. These portraits work foremost as films. They excel as creations of sound and image rather than as vehicles for information about their artist-subjects. They are exceptions to the genre. I didnt plan to make a documentary about an artist. A few years ago, I received a research-creation grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to study the relationship between nationalism and homophobia in Canada and Trinidad and Tobago. In the 1980s, Trinidad and Tobago outlawed lesbian sex, and Canada began accepting gay and lesbian refugee cases. I was interested in how both countries defined their national spaces by criminalizing or accepting queer sexualities. These gestures reflected official discourses about national character, upstanding and God-fearing in the case of Trinidad and Tobago, compassionate and tolerant in the case of Canada. As a gay man who has lived in both countries I was aware of the extent to which these narratives were ideological constructions, and I proposed to consider these questions through a series of short videos. I completed the introduction to the series, Islands, in 2002. However, as I proceeded with my research I found myself increasingly feeling the burden to represent, to produce yet another instalment in the seemingly inexhaustible series of documentaries with the subtitle, gays and lesbians in.. Apart from my boredom with that project, British-based filmmaker Inge Blackman had recently released Paradise Lost (2003), which is billed as a personal journey into carnival, Catholicism and homosexuality in Trinidad. Although I as yet have not seen this film, I felt relief that perhaps the job of representing Trinidadian queers had been done.

On one of my research trips to Trinidad, I attended a large solo exhibition by Trinidadian visual artist Christopher Cozier. As I moved through the large gallery at CCA7, I was accosted by the word bullers written on an old-fashioned, stand-up blackboard that formed part of an installation. Buller is a derogatory term for gay man, though it and its verb from, to bull, both have traces of a pre-identitarian sexuality. It refers specifically to anal sex, and is closer to sodomite in meaning. In my youth I lived in terror that the word would be shot my way. Buller is sharp and poisonous, and it is yet to be tamed and re-appropriated by Trinidadian queer folk. In Christopher Coziers installation, buller is part of a litany of attributes that delineates them from us. It is squarely in the them column. The implied subject of the utterance is a particular form of Trini nationalist, a subject position well known in the modern Trinidadian political landscape. The installations social commentary is both wry and cutting, in the best calypso tradition. That the critique of homophobia in building the xenophobic nationalist project would come from an artist I knew not to be gay, intrigued me. This is how I started conducting video interviews with Christopher Cozier over three years, from 2003 to 2005. The result is Uncomfortable: The Art of Christopher Cozier, a fifty-minute documentary on the artist and his context. I am not sure I have made the kind of documentary I would approve of, or whether I have succumbed to the pitfalls of the genre. Hopefully it will reach an audience, and they will judge it. Many artist biographies reproduce the trope of the troubled artist. I decided early on not to focus on Christophers personal life (not that I found any skeletons in the closet), but rather on his work, ideas and context, and what it means to be based in Trinidad but circulate internationally. An ideabased approach made a narrative arc difficult to emerge. This presented obvious challenges of structure and storytelling: there is no three-act structure, no crisis, no resolution, no dnouement. Working with two editors over a year and testing the documentary in several in-progress screenings taught me a great deal about the artist portrait. In test screenings, a common criticism was that the tape was too much within Christophers paradigm, as filmmaker Helen Lee put it most succinctly. I had early on decided to avoid both expert interviews and narration. In much of my work I have used self-reflexive strategies, but in this documentary I did not want to focus on my relationship to Christopher but on his art and ideas as told by him. This raised a problem related to point of view. In documentary scenes there is a triangular relationship between filmmaker (or filmmaking team), human subject and viewer. The viewer expects the filmmaker to reveal the subject to her/him, to take her/his side, as it were. In obvious instances, the filmmaker undermines or makes fun of the subject for the viewer as when Michael Moore interviews CEOs or conservative politicians. In more subtle cases, the film reveals an aspect of the subject that he or she would not necessarily convey directly, as when the subject is captured asleep or in an intimate interaction. Even the gentlest of biographies has such moments. In Uncomfortable, however, Christopher narrates his own work and career, as well as performs direct address deconstructive readings of sites in and around Port of Spain. He is both subject and expert. In fact, except for his wife, painter Irne Shaw, he is the only real speaking subject. Some viewers therefore felt that filmmaker and subject were ganging up on them. They wanted to see behind Christophers own account of things. A more familiar issue for me was the burden of representation that weighs upon any images of a place like Trinidad and Tobago. One Trinidadian Canadian viewer, for instance, pointed out that Christophers cultural critique derives from his specific ethnic and geographical location, that of a middle class, brown person from Port of Spain. He was right, of course, and Christopher does situate himself as a northerner in a clip that dropped out of the final edit. No one would expect a documentary on Mordecai Richler to represent Canada equally with his Montreal. But in the Trinidadian context, this critique arises because of the small number of circulating filmic images. It

also relates to the fact that while the countrys largest ethnic group has roots in India (over fourty percent), the capital is very much an African-Creole space, and the prevailing political party has a predominantly African-Creole constituency. So the stakes around who speaks for the nation are very high. Media making is about problem solving, and I addressed both the concerns described above with fact-based intertitles, such as the 2000 census figures for Trinidad and Tobago and for Port of Spain. These were meant to contexualize Christophers work and to momentarily shift the tapes point of view away from his perspective. As Christopher has reminded me, he does not employ facts or statistics in his work. As with many formal strategies, these are simply gestures to address a problematic. I am intrigued to see how they work. Viewers will decide if they work for them. Works Cited Hotere, Merata Mita, 2001, 78:00, New Zealand Islands, Richard Fung, 2002, 9:00, Canada Rivers and Tides, Thomas Riedelsheimer, 2001, 90:00, Germany Tom, Mike Hoolboom, 2002, 75:00, Canada

Continental Drift: The Imaging of AIDS by Richard Fung and Tim McCaskell Weve got a desperate population here. This is the first time in history where the infected population is actually taking control of the epidemic. Larry Kramer, ACT UP founder, Testing the Limits Watching the 1987 AIDS activist documentary Testing the Limits 20 years after its release, what strikes us most is the confidence of the people on screen. It isnt that a cure seemed just around the corner or that the spread of the infection appeared manageable; the sense of barely controlled panic is palpable throughout. Nevertheless, speaker after speaker either echoes or illustrates Kramers pronouncement. At a time when the cultural politics around identity fostered an acute sensitivity to questions of voice and representation, these activists exude the conviction and certitude that come from speaking in ones own interest when the stakes are high. We are fighting for our lives, chant demonstrators in the one segment. The year 1987 was a key year in the history of the epidemic. It saw the founding of the definitive AIDS activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), and the Silence=Death Project, which produced one of the iconic logos of the 20th century. These organizations, like the Testing the Limits project, were formed in New York City, which at the time had the highest number of reported AIDS cases in the world. In Toronto, where we live, AIDS Action Now, roughly modeled on ACT UP, made its debut early in 1988 and soon grew into the leading AIDS activist organization in Canada. In 1989, a group of Canadian and American activists hijacked the opening ceremony of the international AIDS conference in Montreal to protest government inaction and the absence of people with AIDS in the conference program. When we look at the footage of Tims unauthorized address from the occupied stage, captured in John Greysons 1989 video The World is Sick (Sic) and recycled in Richards Sea in the Blood (2000), we are similarly struck by his assurance: On behalf

of people living with AIDS in Canada and around the world, I would like to officially open the fifth International Conference on AIDS. At the birth of AIDS activism, AIDS had only just stopped being referred to as GRID (Gay Related Immune Disorder). The infected were seen to be gay men largely contained in the cores of cities like New York and Toronto, a location they shared with others under suspicion: Haitian immigrants, IV drug users, and sex workers. The social contract that had traditionally allowed gay men continued access to gender, race, and/or class privilege was the closetthe original dont ask, dont tell. As long as homosexuality was private, everyone could pretend it wasnt there. Stonewall was the thunderclap that had announced the beginning of the renegotiation of that contract. The outcome of the subsequent gay rights strategy was to allow some gay men to be public about their homosexuality without losing social entitlements. But AIDS blew the closet door open for many of those still content with the old arrangement. HIV did not discriminate, and people of status found themselves or their loved ones turned into pariahs and treated like the underclass. The dying bodies of some, like Rock Hudson and Liberace, slumped out of the closet in shame or ambiguity. Others were radicalized. For example, Brian Farlinger, one of AIDS ACTION NOWs most prominent members, had been director of commercial affairs for the Canadian Bankers Association before coming out as both gay and HIV-infected. Unlike other grassroots movements, AIDS activism was able to draw on skills, information, and networks usually reserved for the elite. Looking back at the clip of the Montreal conference, we now see not only the desperation and righteous anger at people living with AIDS being overlooked at the opening ceremonies but also how privileges of class, race, gender, and geography came into play to enable the action. The initial government and institutional response to AIDS, what little there was, fell within a purely public health paradigm. The goal was to stop the spread of the plague to the public. Those who were already infected and sick and the communities they belonged to were ipso facto not part of that public. They were the reservoir of infection, a danger, a swamp that needed to be mapped, put under surveillance, and, once delineated, its shores policed. If policing succeeded, if high enough walls could be erected, then the public would be safe, the epidemic would burn itself out. The reservoir would slowly evaporate. So for the gay men who were the early core of ACT UP and AIDS ACTION NOW, being both out and part of the public took on a new life-and-death significance. To be part of the public was to claim rightsto medical care, treatment and research, and to be treated with dignity. To remain the other was to be isolated, quarantined, left to die. Activists on both sides of the border shredded the contract of silence with theatrical media-savvy tactics like staging mass die-ins on city streets, occupying drug company headquarters, and disrupting legislative proceedings. But the struggle and the epidemic soon overflowed the confines of gay identity. More and more central to AIDS activism was the emergence of a new poz identitya brotherhood (and soon sisterhood) of infection located within, but also outside, the gay communities. Activists demanded inclusion, and soon HIV-positive representatives were required for boards and advisory committees of AIDS service organizationseven gay onesas well as government panels and advisory committees for pharmaceutical trials. Coming out as poz might be modeled on coming

out as gay, but its soundscape was amplified. Positive people spoke, shouted, whistled, and chanted for themselves. The insurgent liberating vision of this new identity claimed to reach beyond the divisions of race, gender, and class. At times it almost did. Impending common death tended to intensify the need for solidarity. The imperatives of prevention furthered this embrace of difference. Sex demanded talking about, in all its wild and wonderful permutations. Different races, body types, and practices required public eroticization if messages were to reach target audiences. It was a heady moment, expressing a defiant optimism as the epidemic continued to take its toll. Some of the most important artistic production and intellectual thought of the late 20th century was produced in response to the AIDS crisis. Twenty years later, the map of AIDS has changed. The cities, once a place of danger, have become gentrified. In North America, most of the infected who survived the tsunami of the epidemic now float in a lifeboat constructed by pharmaceutical companies. In Canada, provincial drug programs, the ultimate victory by AIDS activists, make treatment accessible to all citizens, regardless of income. But the demographics of infection have changed. The quintessential PWA is no longer a white, gay man in urban North America, but more likely to be a black heterosexual woman in rural or township Africa, and as with the sinking Titanic, the lifeboats have not been distributed equitably. For the new person with AIDS, access to adequate nutrition and sanitary living conditions may be as crucialand elusiveas medication. Dying has been outsourced, like manufacturing or telecommunications, to countries and peoples on the periphery. While most people living with AIDS now reside in the third world, global political and economic disparity means that those who speak about and for them on the world stage are still based mainly in the first world: the scientists, policy makers, funders, even to some extent the activists. At the 16th International AIDS Conference held in Toronto in 2006, Bill and Melinda Gates advocated on behalf of poor women and sex workers. Stephen Lewis spoke out for African grandmothers. French and American activists protested the Presidents Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and bilateral U.S. free trade agreements that limit access to generic AIDS medications. It isnt that there were no participants from Africa, Asia, or Latin AmericaIndonesian PWA Fricka Chia Iskandar addressed the opening ceremoniesbut the media was more interested in celebrities like Richard Gere, Bill Clinton, and Alicia Keys. If the face of AIDS is increasingly coloured, its global public voice is still largely white, and increasingly heterosexual and HIV negative. There is nothing wrong with actions of solidarity by the rich and famous or ordinary people, negative or positive, in the developed world. Philanthropic work is often effective and necessary, especially in the absence of support from impoverished or indifferent governments. However, altruism comes at a price. When American and Canadian PWAs are unhappy with policies or delivery of care that affect them, they can lobby, demonstrate, and confront decision makers. As part of the public and as citizens they have rights and officials can be held accountable. But if in Zambia or Cambodia the main source of support is not local, if it is based on charity and not a right, if priorities and delivery methods are not decided in the regional or national capital but in Seattle or Geneva, making demands, or even feeling one has the right to do so, is much more difficult. Wealthy people and wealthy nations and have always felt comfortable with the apparatus of charity. By giving, they garner praise, feel good about themselves, and stay in control. Philanthropy

functions differently from taxes; indeed, it is often used to avoid paying taxes. Similarly, much foreign aid ends up subsidizing industry in the donor country. The West is perversely content to maintain African, Asian, and Latin American countries as recipients of benevolence. The ability to giveand the need to requestaid reinforces the neo-colonial status quo. A crucial victory in the discursive war around the pandemic was the excision of the terms AIDS victim and AIDS sufferer. People Living with HIV and AIDS insisted on their agency. But in the recent reporting on AIDS in Africa and elsewhere we see the reemergence of the AIDS victim, the suffering subject who stares motionless from the cot in a photogenic act of dying. And it is not only in the popular media. In the first decade of the epidemic, artists and activists created a deluge of film and video that combined criticality, social urgency, aesthetic innovation, and novel approaches to building audiences. They deployed a variety of approaches in a range of genres, but common to all the work was the notion of personal investment by makers and intended viewers alike. Collectively the films and tapes posit a shared community of interest. By contrast, when Richard previewed work for the AIDS 2006 Film and Video Festival, held in conjunction with the International Conference, he was struck by a curious bifurcation among the submissions. Work about North American subjects tended to rehearse the genres of AIDS media established in the 80s and 90s, and were mute about the global context. Work about the rest of the world, often produced by Western filmmakers and/or Western-based international agencies, addressed the viewer as both HIV negative and foreign to the circumstances depicted on screen. There was little sense that makers, subjects, and viewers would constitute a common community of interest. A startling exception was Siyayinqoba Beat It, a South African TV magazine program for everyone living with HIV and AIDS, our partners, families, friends and colleagues. Because it is produced by South Africans for South Africans, and because all the presenters are HIV positive, the tone of Siyayinqoba Beat It is unlike anything that normally reaches North American audiences about AIDS in Africa. The program, which has run since 1999, does not shun the suffering endured by people with HIV and AIDS, not just resulting from the disease, but also because of the violence they face due to the fear and stigma. But Siyayinqoba Beat It documents the battles people go through to protect themselves and their loved ones. Upbeat and full of humour, it fearlessly challenges government policy while giving tips on nutrition or personal relationship management. Siyaninqoba Beat It also portrays the complexity of race and class in post-Apartheid South Africa, one segment featuring a spontaneous debate between two HIV positive people about whether yoga is just a middle-class option. But while South Africa now has the highest number of people living with AIDS in the world, it is atypical of other countries in southern Africa because of its relative wealth, democratic stability, and developed infrastructure. It also has a tradition of mass struggle forged during the fight against Apartheid, which has inspired a highly developed and effective activist movement in the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC). The emblematic TAC T-shirt defiantly and boldly announces its wearers as HIV POSITIVE. A poz identity has developed along with AIDS activism in South Africa. But what does this identity have in common with the one that emerged in America and Europe in the 80s and 90s? Given the relatively stable health that anti-virals offer, does Tims poz status make him somehow closer than Richard to that African woman with AIDS with no access to treatment? Does she have more in common with him, or with her neighbour, HIV negative but fighting tuberculosis and malaria?

These questions have generated a crisis of legitimacy for the North American AIDS movements, already fatigued, depleted by the loss of comrades, and lulled because individual needs have been met. Kramers assertion no longer rings true, as the epicenter of the pandemic has dispersed to other continents. Even those here most acutely affected by the disease lack the resources of the earlier generations of AIDS activists. In Canada, undocumented migrants and refugee claimants face major barriers to care, and the seroconversion rate is highest among youth, intravenous drug users, and Aboriginal people. While the desperation and anger survive, the confident voice of AIDS activists speaking from their own experience and in their own interest has been muted. The original AIDS activist organizations are now faced with the difficult task of reinventing themselves and struggling with questions of solidarity and voice unnecessary when they were at the centre of the holocaust. Originally commissioned for the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, 2007. Remaking Home Movies (2009)

(This is an excerpt from an essay in the forthcoming Mining the Home Movie: Excavations into Historical and Cultural Memories, edited by Karen I. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmerman.) After I left Trinidad to go to school, my mother would send me packages entrusted with relatives or family friends. Sometime in the 1980s, I received such a parcel, but instead of the usual guava jelly and mangoes, I was handed a plastic bag containing two dozen reels of 8mm film. In a note, my mother explained that she had placed the film in an iron safe that sat in the back of our house, one of several ancient appliances she just couldnt bring herself to discard. In time, bees had colonized the safe and sealed the lock with wax. After many years Mom had managed to pry it open. Did I want these pictures? Alone one night I ran the film through a super-8 viewer borrowed from filmmaker Midi Onodera. The screen was tiny, the image was almost abstract. Yet each luminous frame opened a successive drawer in an archive of memories. From my gay leftist commune in downtown Toronto I was sucked back into the sixties to a Chinese Catholic home in Port of Spain. Even more unsettling than the time travel was the fact that the images on the screen didnt sync up with the recollections in my head. These films contradicted everything I remembered of the tone and texture of my childhood. The introduction of home movies, like the family snap before it, is associated with the mid-century rise of consumerism, suburbia and the nuclear family. As Don Slater describes, Your family photographed, the advertising promised, would be the ideal advertised family, the site of modern consumption and domesticity. Simply and reliably, the snapshot camera would reproduce the right family. (Consuming Kodak, by Don Slater in Family Snaps: The Meaning of Domestic Photography Jo Spence and Patricia Holland eds. London: Virago, 1991, p. 49) These images of the right family were precisely what unsettled me when I first re-encountered my familys home movies. I was taken aback by the extent to which the movies cast our Chinese Trinidadian family according to the template of suburban America many of the images looked like they could have been shot in Southern California.

The shock of that initial encounter, the disjuncture between remembrance and apparent evidence, led me to question both my memory and the cameras version of my childhood. Out of these reflections I produced three videotapes: The Way to My Fathers Village (1988), My Mothers Place (1990) and Sea in the Blood (2000). Each tape has a different conceptual focus and aesthetic approach, and a different use of the home movies. The Way to My Fathers Village is a contemplation of the dual commanding absences of a father who had recently died and a China I had never visited. I used the home movies to suggest the capriciousness of memory, splicing them with inter-titles which at time reproduce, at other alter or even contradict, the voice-over description of the past. This relationship of narration and image is reversed in My Mothers Place, an exploration of consciousness about race, gender, class and sexuality in colonial and post-colonial Trinidad. Here narration and on-screen text draw out the ideology embedded in the footage. For example, in a shot of my sister and me playing in a homemade tent, the viewers attention is drawn away from the intended subjects towards the old African-Chinese woman who took care of us, standing at the side and in the background. The sequence deconstructs the geography of power in the frame. Finally, in Sea in the Blood, a digital poem about love and loss produced a decade after the parental diptych, the narration also rubs against the grain of the image, but the purpose is less analytical and political, more for emotional and dramatic effect. At the centre of this tape is footage of my family in England while seeking treatment for my sisters fatal illness. Over the image of tourist sighs and snowball fights are audio taped reactions of my mother and surviving sister watching the footage for the first time since the sixties. Home movie images offer a rich archive of everyday life, but they do not speak for themselves. If they are to be anything more than triggers for nostalgia, or in the case of my familys footage quaint and exotic objects or fascination they require context. Their hidden meanings must be coaxed from the grainy images and washes of colour.