Visualizing Labor in East Asia

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

Recent studies on labor in East Asia have shown how economic changes in the global market have produced increasingly vulnerable populations of workers within and across national boundaries. Marginalized in their spaces of work these populations often go unrecognized in the mass media and society at large. This panel aims to expand the scope of these studies by examining how contemporary visual media make visible the forms and figures of labor – domestic, industrial, affective – that go unrecognized as such. We consider how film, television, animation, and photography expose the systems that produce this labor and register the effects of such systems on and in the bodies of laborers. By making visible systemic conditions, we claim, visual media maintains the potential to imagine collectives of disparate individuals organized through common laboring practices and affective proximity.

Each of the four papers in this panel addresses, through different visual media and regions in East Asia, how forms of labor are concealed and can be revealed. Individually, we examine the relationship between tired reproductive female labor and the nation in Japanese cinema, the contradictory portrayal of gendered labor in Korean television, the interplay between desolate landscapes and laboring bodies in photography of China, and how Japanese animation dramatizes the exploitation of labor in contemporary systems of credit and debt. After short fifteen-minute presentations of each paper, we will open the floor to audience participation in order to promote an expansive discussion on the aspirations made possible by the visual depiction of invisible labor.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing-Diaspora

Session Organizers

• Kimberly Icreverzi, Boston University

• Patrick Noonan, Northwestern University

Individual Presentations

• Seriality, Labor, and the Cultural Politics of Gender Performance in K-Drama - Michelle Cho, McGill University

• Laboring Bodies and Chinese Landscapes of Desolation - Corey Byrnes, Northwestern University

• The Aspiration of Somnambulant Labor in Contemporary Japanese Cinema - Kimberly Icreverzi, Boston University

• Dealing with Dead Labor: Fighting Debt in C – Control - Patrick Noonan, Northwestern University