New battlefields: How Do Bodies Negotiate Between States and Corporations in Neoliberalism

By Menghang Wu (Department of Dance)

The research on neoliberalism has grown in impact in recent decades. In the May 2021 conference “Worlds in Contention: Race, Neoliberalism, and Injustice,” a group of scholars from interdisciplinary fields presented their research on the embodiment and mobility of capitalism and neoliberalism all over the world. Their studies stressed the affect and resilience of racialized communities. No matter whether located in Asia, Latin America, or East Europe, neoliberalism penetrates and crosses borders and reforms the geography of these areas. The presentations dove into the topic through different perspectives of neoliberalism, focusing on dimensions like race, gender, class, nature, and society.

The conference provided valuable resources and inspirations for my research, given its relation to gender, race, representation, nationalism, and “the people.” I work on sexism and racism under neoliberalism in China through contemporary Chinese dance performances. Through the dance, my research inquires into the following questions: how does sexism and racism transform and function in the Chinese nationalist narrative? How do the aesthetic choices, choreographic style, and performing presence constitute the racialization of female bodies in contemporary Chinese dance? How does the spectacle of presentational and exoticized bodies become a sexist stereotype in the post-Mao era? I describe how choreography and performance exhibit female bodies as propaganda. Moreover, I build upon Eric Hobsbawm’s “invented history” to explore how Chinese dance techniques served to invent modernity. Focusing on Ètienne Balibar and Michel Foucault`s gender, race, and class theory I explore how the alignment of the historical and indissoluble bond between racism and nationalism meant that Chinese nationalism tried to recreate the culture of “the other” in itself and coded femininity as the “signifier” that characterizes this racialization. My research has three goals: to provide a critical perspective of sexism in Chinese performance and cultural discourse; the show the iterative and crucial role that women played in revolution and revolutionary literary works; and to explore the revival of conservativism in Chinese gender politics through as seen through the Chinese, women, and performing bodies.

First, regarding the discussion of nationalism in my research, Mary Taylor and Hyun Ok Park’s presentations updated my viewpoint of nationalist and fascist ideology. Taylor analyzes nationalism under the postsocialist and neoliberal conditions in Eastern Europe. By exploring the far-right government of Viktor Orbán and the Fidesz party in Hungary, Taylor reflects on the history of mobilization and the shifting meanings of the concept of “the people” in Hungary and brings up the possibilities for an inter/nationalism. On the other hand, Hyun Ok Park’s work offers a new angle to view the phenomenon I analyze by bringing post-fascism into the conversation. Park maps industrial capital, finance capital, and the crisis of party politics in South Korea. Based on those, Park brings neoliberal capitalism and fascism together and asks what kind of social relationship could resist fascism. Park’s research prompted me to consider how can I reveal the agency of dancers and how do dancers negotiate with neoliberalism through their performance.

Second, Amy Offner and Inés Valdez’s attention to geographical resources, labor, nature, society, and regional politics helped me to articulate in my research the function of female social reproduction in performance. Offner investigates the autonomy, regionalism, and environmental issues during the 1980s by explaining how struggles over land and water resources reveal the relationship between government and indigenous’ understanding of political concepts. Offner’s view has inspired me to reconstitute the relationship between ideological apparatus and people’s viewpoint of political instructions through the performance. Further, Valdez maps the brown family separation crisis from a historical perspective and she situates it within the social reproduction system of the US. As Valdez points out, the segmentation of brown labor and destruction of brown families lead brown laborers to undertake physically strenuous works from which white workers were exempted. These coercive labor regimes depended on the uneven relationship between the US and Mexico. The argument here solidifies how I articulate the otherness through colonialization in my research.

Third, the exchanges during the Q&A for Park and Thea Riofrancos elicited very interesting conversations, which helped me articulate different relationships in neoliberalist capitalism and the roles of bodies within them. As a historical stage of democratization, Park reveals that the sovereign power of capital is rendered invisible unconsciously through the narrative of the successful transition to democratization. Riofrancos relates this rendering process with the copying policy taking place in China and the rest of the world. Riofrancos points out that there is an eagerness to impugn China for deviating from the Liberal International world order. However, at the same time, in the realm of economic and industrial policy, incumbent industrialized powers aspire to copy China and its deviations from the neoliberal order in industrial policy, including extraction rights.

Finally, scholars ended the sessions by proposing many open questions including: How do corporations navigate their violence? Do they profit from it? Do they reduce violent activities to consider consumer activists’ concerns? How do corporations navigate the geopolitical terrain? How do they shape geopolitics and geoeconomics? How do they respond to policymakers? Are onshoring industrial policy and reterritorialization of economic activities a mutation or departure from neoliberalism? Riofrancos’ work points out that although corporations are paving their ways to profit through new terrains of extraction and under the rubric of onshoring, they profit both from the continued practices of neoliberalism and from the departures from neoliberalism. If they continue externalizing environmental costs even while they pursue green technologies, not much is really changing. In summary, the departures from neoliberalism open new battlefields between states and corporations. With the help of these conversations, I understood better how dance companies negotiate with national policymakers on the political representation in dance performances.

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