“Within the Gates of the Master, Is There Any Such Thing as a Prime Minister?”

A Space without Frames in the Zhuangzi

The Zhuangzi, one of the two main classics of Daoist philosophy (along with the Daodejing) is a collection of reflections, dialogues, and anecdotes replete with surprises and striking imagery. It is attributed to the philosopher of the same name, who lived around the fourth century BCE, although there is close to a consensus that the complete collection is the work of several authors. [1] Reading the Zhuangzi, we are drawn into a whirlwind of transformations, confusions and clarities; into a free-flowing perspectivism that seeks to cultivate openness towards all existences, a going by them through a forgetting of the self and a cultivation of an appropriate response. Rigid framings, be they social, moral, or even spatial, are under general threat of dissolving in this water-like free flowing. However, the Zhuangzi does not simply abandon the world of human forms, interactions, and roles. Part of the richness of the text lies in its wrestling with how to live in the human and social world while resting securely right in the whirlwind of transformations. One anecdote in chapter five of Zhuangzi makes this tension particularly vivid. It is the encounter between the ex-convict Shen Tujia and the famous prime minister Zichan in the halls of their common master, Bohun Wuren (Eng.: Uncle Dim Nobody/Non-human), who instructs them in the Daoist practices of “sitting and forgetting,” of resting in the bright mirror-mind and the “tranquil turmoil” of continuous transformations. [2] First, we will explore the anecdote. This will naturally give an opportunity to elucidate the Daoist practices in question and their complex relation to social space, while moving through a series of reversals and questions typical of Daoist philosophy. Following this, we will transpose gleanings from this discussion onto the parallel problems between the social and the meditative in contemporary meditative practice. Here’s the short anecdote, slightly abridged: Shen Tujia, a one-footed ex-convict, was a fellow student of Zichan under Uncle Dim Nobody. Zichan said to him, “When I leave, you wait behind for a while, or if you leave first, I’ll wait behind.” The next day they were again seated side by side in the same small hall and Zichan said, “I said you should wait behind when I leave, and I’ll wait behind when you leave. Now I'm about to go—will you wait behind or not? You see a holder of political power and you don’t give way—do you think you’re…

Reframe

Breaking through the White Gaze, Photographic Traditions in African Countries

1_Introduction In 2016, a photo of a woman from the Himba tribe in a Namibian supermarket circulated on social media. She was wearing the usual red-ochre-colored body protection and had her hair covered in a mixture of ochre and grease, resembling pictures in calendars and travel guides. Nevertheless, a media outcry followed. Lower-tier, sensation-seeking tabloid newspapers went as far as to suggest that the woman was looking at washing powder because of the mud on her skin [26] For many people in the West, it was unimaginable that a woman could follow such traditions and enter a modern supermarket at the same time. For them, it was an oxymoron whose elements were too far apart to exist together. This scene is seen/witnessed almost every day, even in Namibia’s capital, Windhoek. A scene that almost everyone who lives in Namibia has seen and can imagine. This example epitomizes a larger problem in the Western perception and documentation of African countries, including Namibia. Apart from the pictures of the Himba people—an indigenous tribe in Namibia—travel guides and calendars rarely depict people. Spectacular savannahs, endless expanses, towering dunes, or the Etosha Pan—these are the images that a Western audience associates with Namibia. These are landscapes that can be romanticized. Anyone looking at the history of photography will not be surprised by the iconographic expectations of the Western public. The camera came to the African continent with the colonial rulers. And with it, the white gaze. Although almost everyone owns a camera today, there is comparatively little documentary photography in Namibia, especially practiced by Namibians, not visitors. Even two well-known photographers who documented the Namibian liberation war did not originally come from Namibia. John Liebenberg was a South African photojournalist who depicted Namibia’s bloody liberation struggle in Ovamboland and later went on to cover the civil war in Angola. Next, Tony Figueira was a photographer of Angolan-Portuguese descent based in Windhoek documenting the protests leading up to Namibia’s independence as well as Sam Nujoma’s, Namibia’s founding father, return from exile. There has always been a social hierarchy and intimacy involved in the relationship between a photographer and their subject. But there is a lack of Namibian photographers taking an active part in documenting Namibian everyday life. This means that narratives are strongly characterized by an outsider and often Eurocentric perspective. Parachute journalism, in which Western journalists are flown into countries to report on pressing…

“The (In)Visible Man”

Renegotiating Asian American Masculinities in the 21st Century

1_Context The experiences of Asian American [27] masculinities throughout US history should attract attention from artists and scholars. From 1875 to 1965, a series of exclusion policies and legislation enacted by the US government, which limited the immigration of Asian women into the US and prohibited miscegenation between Asian American men and White [28] women, led to the celibacy of Asian American men en masse. [29] The image of these men doing ‘feminized’ jobs in laundromats, restaurants, or service sectors created the stereotypes of Asian American men as effeminate, submissive, asexual, or even hypersexual. [30] In American cultural products of the 19th and 20th centuries, Asian American men were either portrayed as supervillains like Dr. Fu Manchu, who lacked heterosexuality but posed great danger to White women, or effeminate subjects in movies such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) or Sixteen Candles (1984), the sitcom series The Simpsons (premiered 1989), the play M. Butterfly (premiered 1988), or the novel The Joy Luck Club (1993). [31] All these features developed into emasculated stereotypes of Asian American masculinities and gave birth to remasculinization movements in Asian American literature. Pioneering this were the masculinist cultural projects in the late 1960s and 1970s helmed by Asian American male authors, such as Frank Chin, Jeffrey P. Chan, Gus Lee, and others, who called for a radical reconstruction of Asian American masculinities in art and literature (even though the projects are now viewed as androcentric and nationalistic). [32] The 21st century has witnessed notable changes in representations of Asian American masculinities in cultural products. With increasing economic and cultural exchanges between (East) Asia [33] and the US, contemporary literary approaches to Asian American masculinities now choose to embrace intersectionality and substantially deviate from masculine norms. Features once marked as masculine shortcomings such as ‘bottomhood’, or being ‘effeminate’ or ‘submissive,’ and are now turned into a new power, challenging boundaries and dimensions of masculine ideals. Critically acclaimed and commercially successful films such as Searching (2018), Crazy Rich Asians (2018), Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), and Past Lives (2023), and literary works by authors like Julia Otsuka, David Chang, Ocean Vuong, Ken Liu, John Yau, etc. have helped to bring Asian American narratives into the mainstream, and shift perceptions towards Asian American masculinities. Recent empirical research also reveals that Asian American men are increasingly perceived as more “desirable romantic partners” in the US, as “soft” masculinities are now…

Making Queer Content Visible

Media Framing of Queerness in Serbia

1_Introduction I love Serbia. It is a beautiful and hospitable country in the heart of Europe, the home of my ancestors and family, and I have many fond childhood memories of it. The country, which has been a candidate for EU membership since 2012, is developing steadily, but there are often obstacles that slow it down. One such example is the questioning of traditional norms and values. Queerness is a difficult topic in Serbia. Even in my family it is considered a taboo subject. My family avoids talking about it and prefers keeping quiet, which includes me—I keep quiet. I don’t dare talk to them about it. What if they reject my attitude and opinion? What if they reject me? Looking at the representation of queerness in the media does not improve the difficult situation. As this _Perspective will show, the LGBT+ [58] community in Serbia faces rejection from various actors. To find out how Serbian society perceives, understands, and reacts to queerness, I use the concept of media framing from media, communication, and sociological research. As media scholar Robert Entman puts it: Framing essentially involves selection and salience. To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described. [59] Therefore, people employ frames of reference or interpretation in order to categorize, interpret, and evaluate facts, events, or actors. [60] The utilization of such frames by parties, different groups, social movements, or even journalists is referred to as framing. [61] The resulting effects on recipients are in turn categorized as framing effects. [62] This means that the way information is presented can significantly influence people and the way they think about and interpret the world around them. Frames themselves are a kind of interpretive lens through which information is processed. These lenses can be understood as cognitive structures that guide an individual’s understanding and response to new information. The concept was popularized by the book Frame Analysis, by sociologist Erving Goffman, who argued that people use frames to organize their experiences and make sense of the world. [63] Framing, in this sense, is the (subjective) selection and emphasis of certain aspects of reality while omitting or downplaying others. Media framing is therefore a powerful tool for influencing public…

Trash as a Means of Religious Communication

Warm Greetings to the General Heathen Public from the Toxic Temple

Fig. 1: Mundane ritualistic life at the Toxic Temple, Donaufestival 2023, © David Visnjic Trash inhabits an ambivalent, almost contradictory discursive place in our society. On the one hand, ‘trash’ is what we consider not-worthwhile, ephemeral, and uninteresting. Movies, novels, or other products regarded as ‘trash’ are believed to contain little of lasting value—one might enjoy consuming them, but they will have no historic or cultural impact. Similarly, in consumer goods, ‘trash’ is often what is wrapped around the desired product, protecting one’s purchase from the outside world; once its seal is broken and the product obtained, its packaging loses all value. When you rush into the supermarket to pacify your bodily needs—buying a premade sandwich, for example—what encloses your desired good hardly registers your attention; you tear the plastic open and gulp down the sandwich, noticing little about the wrapping before you dispose of it in a nearby trash-can. …That is, you would act that way if you were still what we of the Toxic Temple [133] consider a ‘heathen’: somebody who has not yet recognized our modern consumer trash as communication with the afterlife, and every act of disposing of it as a prayer to eternity. Whereas within a still-majoritarian, individualist consumer logic of heathens, trash is ephemeral and epiphenomenal, from a larger-than-human, geological point of view, trash is what will outlive us. Trash is the durable and lasting element of our consumer culture. The plastic wrapping of my sandwich will leave traces on the face of the Earth for almost infinitely longer than the time I spent enjoying my sandwich, longer than the time my meandering intestines took to digest it and shit it out again, even longer than it will take the body that once held these intestines to decay and decompose, next to the shit that I produced as long as I was alive. In the Toxic Temple, we try to reconcile our lost ways of ecocidal modern consumer life with these cosmological consequences: we whisper humble prayers when we bid farewell to the plastic container of our frail organic nutrition—solemnly admiring the longevity of its material and the long-lasting effects it has on the order of the cosmos turned chaosmos. What heathens consider ‘trash’ in fact embodies our culture itself—in all its achievements and failings—for far longer than do the human bodies and minds that are conventionally considered to be the agents of cultural production.…