In-Person Panel PS2.1

Narratives of Health and Disability: Intimacy, Awareness, and Mobility

HIV, Intimacy, and Memory: Reading Ta-wei Chi’s 1990s 

Yahia Ma 

This paper aims to analyse the Taiwan writer Ta-wei Chi’s short stories “Hao jiao” (嚎叫 1998, trans. by Yahia Ma  as “Howl”, 2021) and “Xiang zao” (香皂1995, trans. by Fran Martin as “The Scent of HIV”, 1998) which deal with homosexuality, fantasy, and HIV/AIDS in the face of contemporary Taiwan’s entrenched homophobia and HIV/AIDS stigma. Through close reading of the two stories with a particular attention on HIV as a central issue, this paper offers a critical evaluation of how “Howl” and “The Scent of HIV” exposes the social reception of HIV through conditions of sickness, transmission, and exclusion while reveal those homosexual men’s inner life, secrets and their desire for the “riskiest” yet the most intimate relationship. This paper ultimately argues that, as an instance of queer writing, Ta-wei Chi’s short stories also offer a gateway for the reader to glimpse the past for the purpose of a critique of the present.

Propaganda Artists Raising Awareness of Disability in the DPRK 

Jasmine Barrett

This paper analyses the work of artists with disabilities in the DPRK and the role they play in raising awareness of disability, while at the same time working as propagandists praising socialism and the DPRK regime. The artists whose work is examined are primarily members of the Korean Art Association of the Disabled (KAAD) and include dancers, musicians, visual artists, and a poet. Their disabilities include deafness, blindness, and physical disabilities. Articles about artists with disabilities written by non-disabled journalists and published in the DPRK state media are analysed to gain an understanding of the state narrative of disability. These are contrasted with works produced by artists with disabilities themselves. Sources of data include state media, domestically produced publications, and videos. Emerging themes include praising socialism for looking after people with disabilities, and socialism empowering people with disabilities to overcome their disability. The impact of their efforts on the broader society is unclear, but the fact that their work continues indicates that the DPRK authorities believe they are serving their purpose.

Latah, Revisited: Pathologies of Imitation in Globalised Indonesia 

Nicholas Long 

Latah is an ostensibly ‘culture-bound’ neuropsychiatric syndrome found across the Malay World. The classic form of latah that has preoccupied researchers to date involves a heightened startle response followed by compulsive imitation and/or a state of high suggestibility. Yet Indonesians also speak of a ‘second type of latah’ hitherto unacknowledged in the literature, in which the startle of novelty leads to the (allegedly) mindless and compulsive imitation of foreign cultural forms. This paper investigates what it is at stake in using the idiom of latah to comment on cultural transformations, and how such usage can influence attempts to mould or safeguard “Asia Futures”. For some Indonesians, the latah idiom grounds globalisation in such an inherently mimetic ethnopsychology that the only way to protect Indonesian culture is to shelter its population from foreign startle. Others use hypnosis to propagate Islamic forms of latah as a prophylactic against immoral foreignness. The paper thus shows the navigation, evaluation and affective experience of cultural transformation to be significantly mediated by ethnopsychologies of imitation and the neuropsychiatric ecologies that give rise to them. It further shows how anxieties about global futurity are, in turn, reshaping how ‘classic latah’ sufferers are viewed and treated.

Prophetic speculations: AIDS in China and China in the world in Ye Yonglie’s The Disease of Love 

Tyler Gleason 

In 1985, popular Chinese author Ye Yonglie 葉永烈 (1940-2020) wrote the one of earliest Chinese-language pieces of literature on HIV/AIDS: a speculative-fiction novella called The Disease of Love 愛之病. At the time, the novella struggled to find a publisher due to suggesting the arrival of AIDS in China and causing so-called ‘news chaos’. The novella has since appeared in Ye’s collected works, where he describes it as being ‘prophetic’ for predicting the so-called importation of AIDS to China. The novella is also prophetic regarding other central pre-occupations for contemporary China: the global HIV/AIDS pandemic, Chinese medicine, Xinjiang as a Northwest borderland, Han-centrism, foreign espionage, and the image of a morally corrupt United States.  

By exploring the context of the text’s publication and through textual analysis of the novella itself, this paper examines emergent ethno-nationalist narratives through which a political economy of AIDS, as a so-called foreign contagion, was shaped in China in the mid-1980s. This was a moment when China was opening up to the outside world, and a time when the world was starting to realise that AIDS would become a global phenomenon.