I spent the first two weeks of March in Cusco, Peru, a city
rich with Incan and colonial history. I was working with OCAD University
Professor David McIntosh on his project Quipucamayoc, a research-creation
interactive media art exhibition project. The goal of the project is to
re-imagine Incan and Andean traditions in contemporary contexts, using digital
and wearable technology to help performers and audience members embody Andean
gods and mythological figures. The Peruvian colonial case, involving the rapid
modernization of the country by Spanish colonizers who forcibly destroyed
Andean traditions, bears many similarities to subject material and historical
context we have studied in this course.
(Myself at the Cusco carnival, March 10, 2014)
One subject of particular note in both the Andean and Korean
cases is gender, particularly how it applies to conflict. A particularly strong
modernizing influence in Peru was psychoanalysis--traditional societal
structures of gender were re-imagined under patriarchal, Freudian ideas. This
“colonization” of traditional conceptions of gender continues today in academic
discourse on the subject. Meanwhile, rural Andean communities, and indeed some
urban centers like Cusco, have attempted to reintegrate these traditions into
contemporary life.
The results are provocative ceremonies and coming-of-age
rituals that involve a combination of sexuality, androgyny and war-play. In
these rituals, adolescents in a community turn sexuality and sexual interaction
into a game of conquest, with both men and women as strategists and active
players. Victories involve outlasting the sexual partner and accumulating as
many sexual partners as possible. Rather than a patriarchal system in which the
male dominates the female through sex and through the phallus, this system
holds a kind of feminine androgyny at its center.
I see similarities to this re-appropriation in the Korean
context, namely in The Marines Who Never Returned and Taegukgi.
In Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and National Cinema, Author
David Scott Diffrient suggests that The Marines Who Never Returned
adopts melodramatic emotional outpourings commonly associated with women’s film
in Korea. The character Young-hui also embodies this crossing of
genders--Young-hui acts as a mascot and leader figure, giving the soldiers
names and ordering them to do things. However, Young-hui also acts emotionally,
and in doing so (particularly through her letters to the soldiers), allows them
to express themselves as well. Young-hui thus expresses gender fluidly, in a
similar way to the feminine androgyny expressed in Andean communities.
Meanwhile, Taegukgi, while also still emotional in
its delivery, also emphasizes, through several action scenes involving extended
hand-to-hand combat between men, a very traditional and physical notion of
masculinity. It is interesting to note as well that The Marines Who Never
Returned involves a scene in which the soldiers travel to a brothel and
force the prostitutes, who are at first unwilling, to accommodate them. Here,
the films attempt to return to modern notions of sexuality and gender, in which
female bodies are passive and male bodies are active in sexual interaction. Why
is this? Perhaps patriarchal notions of sex are so ingrained in modern culture
that they are difficult to remove. However, I posit that this return embodies a
repetition of a kind of traumatic masculinity. Perhaps the notion of sexuality
as male-active/female-passive is not only damaging to female participants, but
also to men. In this framework, guilt and confusion over the damage caused by
patriarchal sexual structures results in violent, exaggerated depictions of the
masculine. This can be seen in South American culture as Machismo, and also in
these war films that depict violent deconstructions, and often destructions, of
men who embody modern notions of masculinity.
Academic discourse about commonalities between South America
and East Asia are unfortunately rare. I hope to see more of this in the future.
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