6 Femme Aggression and the Value of Labor

The film starts with a close up of plastic doll furniture. A yellow dresser, blue chairs, and a pink couch are arranged as a living room set on a small white rug. After the camera lingers on these objects, it pulls back to reveal a pair of legs in yellow, strappy, patent-leather espadrilles walking toward the set. We hear the heels click toward the furniture and suddenly—a cut. One foot crushes the couch, the other the green television. More steps and destruction follow. The camera zooms in on moments of impact to show rubber soles enacting plastic destruction. The legs lift and come down again—breaking things and kicking away the detritus. The legs are relentless. They seek out objects with pointed toes, only to crush them anew, even using the rug—a knitted square—for leverage. The legs walk away only after each object has been thoroughly crushed and kicked, so that all that remains is some debris and the knit square.

This is not the only film of its ilk. Maureen Catbagan’s series Crush (2010–2012) consists of multiple such videos. Each features Molly Caldwell in different patent leather heels crushing plastic toys in different rooms. In one she wears a pair of burgundy high-heeled Mary Janes to stomp on a yellow plastic saxophone. It breaks apart across a white tiled bathroom floor. In another, her legs are clad in black lace tights while her silver strappy stilettos act as the instruments of destruction. In yet another, Caldwell wears large-holed fishnets and black peep-toe pumps. The small brass buttons on the shoes offset the toy’s exposed electronic control panel.

These films traffic in feminine aggression. One of the ways we see this is through the emphasis on the size difference between legs and furniture. Though Caldwell’s legs would appear large in comparison to the small toy furniture, Catbagan’s decision to position the camera at eye level with the furniture at a medium distance amplifies the sense of Caldwell as a looming, destructive—yet also feminine—presence. In some ways this is a confounding piece to use to think about brown jouissance—its central object is white femininity; yet, I suggest we think about Catbagan, who is Filipino, as illuminating the excesses of affective labor, which transforms our perceptions of femininity, the fetish, and mimesis. Crush ultimately shows us the possibilities of invisibility and lingering with materiality.

Artifice and Misery: Narratives of White Femininity

Through the imaginary of Caldwell as giantess, Crush recalls the 1958 film Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman. Famous as a B-movie and sci-fi classic, the film attracts admirers for its artifice and emphasis on feminine excess. It stars Allison Hayes as an heiress (Nancy Archer) in an unhappy marriage with Harry, who is cheating on her with Honey. Honey and Harry plot to get rid of Nancy and keep her money. Honey suggests various ways to make Nancy believe that she is mentally unstable, so that she is readmitted to the asylum where she spent some time after a previous separation from Harry. Chance intervenes in the form of satellites that fall into the California desert before Nancy’s eyes. No one believes her story of a giant man in search of her diamond, so she asks Harry to accompany her into the desert in order to track him down. They find the giant, and Harry, scared, runs away and abandons her. The next morning, Harry is with Honey, and Nancy has been found on the roof of the pool house, where she remains unconscious. Harry, feeling fortunate, celebrates with Honey. This, however, is short-lived as Nancy begins to grow and become a giant. In this state, she is desperate and seeks out Harry—destroying much of the town in the process. Eventually she finds him and ends up crushing him, after which she is killed by an exploding power plant.

The film’s popularity is due to its ridiculousness. The plot, the low-budget special effects—papier-mâché hands and projections of giants roaming the California desert, which recall early cinema’s spectacles of distraction—and portrayal of white domestic femininity as pathological, which we see through the frequent discussion of the protagonist as unbalanced and irrational, combine to make audiences feel as if they are in on the joke.1 Whereas Kara Walker’s giant Sugar Baby indexes feelings of vulnerability for many spectators, Nancy mobilizes aggression; she is the threat. Further, in this movement away from realism, the film plays as a quasi-feminist rejoinder to patriarchy.

This tarrying with affective distortion positions the B-movie alongside pulp and camp as a minoritarian genre. Pulp’s popular narratives bring together lust, danger, and a whiff of the tawdry, providing a glimpse of unconventional and (potentially liberated) femininity by emphasizing domesticity’s discomforts. Camp offers critique through artifice and exaggeration. Susan Sontag writes, “Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization.”2 Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman’s emphasis on threatening femininity brings together domestic unhappiness and artifice to highlight the ways that the constellation of white femininity is affectively undergirded by misery and ontological insecurity.

The fundamental instability of white femininity, which Joan Riviere appears to admit in the middle of her 1929 essay “Womanliness as Masquerade,” has been very attractive to feminist interpreters. Riviere writes, “The reader may now ask how I define womanliness or where I draw the line between genuine womanliness and the ‘masquerade.’ My suggestion is not, however, that there is any such difference; whether radical or superficial, they are the same thing.”3 Stephen Heath argues that this statement reveals femininity’s fundamental relationship to artifice through its emphasis on mimicry, thus positioning the essay to provide a political intervention into femininity, performance, and social norms.4 This conflation of white femininity and artifice is often emphasized when scholars turn to drag. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler draws on Esther Newton’s description of drag’s play on the difference between inner and outer selves to argue that “drag fully subverts the distinction between inner and outer psychic space and effectively mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion of a true gender identity.”5 What Butler draws from Newton and what is integral to this theorization is that camp’s reliance on the distance between “real” and “artificial” femininity reveals the very artifice of femininity and gender more broadly.6 As Butler writes, “in imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency.”7 From this perspective the reveal of artifice functions as a critique of discourses that would seek to argue that domestic femininity and patriarchy—its structuring force—are “natural” and should be replicated without question because of this naturalness. This denaturalization of gender, described here specifically in relation to white femininity, though potentially liberatory, also produces an ontological insecurity that manifests itself through misery.

When we return to Riviere, we see that the affective underside of masquerade is unhappiness, an unhappiness produced by femininity’s constraints—especially those of the domestic variety—despite the promises suggested by its instability. As Butler argues, this means that “the process of gender incorporation [is located] within the wider orbit of melancholy.”8 Indeed, Riviere’s essay is as much about misery as it is about masquerade. While melancholy and misery are certainly not reducible to each other—melancholy refers to the unhappy affect produced by the inability to separate from the lost object, while misery refers more generally to a state of discomfort—this aura of unhappiness is the dominant current in understanding the relational aspect of the masquerade. Indeed, the lack of “pure enjoyment” is what detaches womanliness from its masquerade. In her analysis of psychoanalytic patients suffering from this form of unhappiness, Riviere takes pains to note the flawlessness of these women’s performances, writing that they “maintain social life and assist culture; they have no lack of feminine interests, e.g. in their personal appearances, and when called upon they can still find time to play the part of devotees and disinterested mother-substitutes among a wide circle of relatives and friends. At the same time they fulfill the duties of their profession at least as well as the average man.”9 Against this portrait of success, however, Riviere argues that womanliness is attached to these women’s unhappiness because it “did not represent [their] main development, and was used far more as a device for avoiding anxiety than as a primary mode of sexual enjoyment.”10 Interestingly, this lack of sexual enjoyment does not foreclose orgasm, which Riviere notes, happens frequently, but this orgasm is deficient in that “the gratification it brought was of the nature of a reassurance and restitution of something lost, and not ultimately pure enjoyment.”11 Although Riviere does not specify what exactly does constitute pure enjoyment, its absence leaves the feminine subject’s unhappiness diagnosable vis-à-vis her sexual self. This important schism links sexuality with subjectivity explicitly and articulates womanliness/femininity with passivity and happy objectification. Butler interprets this objectification as part of the difficulty of the heterosexual matrix, which refuses to grant women the status of active sexual subjects. Butler writes that the woman’s appropriation of masculine sexual desire (signaled by her nonenjoyment of womanliness) is “the predicament produced by a matrix that accounts for all desire for women by subjects of whatever sex or gender as originating in a masculine, heterosexual position. The libido-as-masculine is the source from which all possible sexuality is presumed to come.”12 Mary Ann Doane positions this conflict about activity and passivity in the realm of spectatorship: “When she masquerades, Joan Riviere’s famous patient renounces her status as the subject of speech (as a lecturer, as an intellectual woman with a certain amount of power), and becomes the very image of femininity in order to compensate for her ‘lapse’ into subjectivity (i.e., the masculinity in Riviere’s analysis) and to attract the male gaze. Masquerade would hence appear to be the very antithesis of spectatorship. Subjectivity.”13 These interpretations of Riviere reveal that the instability of the feminine position is about the relationship between being and doing—and woman’s capacity to do has always been mediated through other subjects.

This agency through mediation is a form of ontological insecurity, and it works to produce femininity as synonymous with objectification, which also helps us to understand the racial contours of Riviere’s analysis more clearly. In the space between pure enjoyment and misery, the social is injected into the frame of analysis. When Riviere’s central analysand chafes at her social position and the limits of the external world, the outside world becomes marked as hostile, threatening, and immiserating. In this situation womanhood becomes linked with Sara Ahmed’s trope of feminist killjoys, who “disturb the very fantasy that happiness can be found in certain places: it is not just that feminists might not be happily affected by the objects that are supposed to cause happiness but that their failure to be happy is read as sabotaging the happiness of others.”14

Riviere’s essay produces an analysis of white womanhood that pivots on the inability to achieve “full enjoyment.” We can connect this space of unhappiness with Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman’s Nancy Archer, a character whose unhappiness is prevalent enough to have been medicalized and is remarked upon by all of the characters. Even when she is transformed into a giant, Nancy is waiting—waiting for Harry to come home after his trysts with Honey, waiting for their marriage to get better, and waiting to become happy. She is in the midst of a performance of unhappy passivity. While Riviere restricts her subject’s unhappiness to the guilt that she feels for wielding the phallus, the social aspects of misery creep in when one delves more deeply into the racial context that Riviere narrates, but does not parse. Amidst Riviere’s description of the masquerade, two imagined scenarios appear in rapid succession, both of which complicate our understanding of how guilt and misery are functioning in this situation. The first is a recurring childhood fantasy in which the woman is attacked by a black man and defends herself by succumbing to his advances. The second, an elaborate dream, positions the patient alone in a house, washing clothing when a black man enters the home, and she endeavors to seduce him. As Ann Pellegrini and Jean Walton note, this appetite for destruction recalls Fanon’s analysis of white women’s fantasies of being raped by a black man—“a Negro is raping me”—in Black Skin, White Masks, fantasies that derive their power from female masochism.15 This interpretation allows us to read Riviere’s patient’s fantasies as a mode of securing her desired punishment. This appeal to masochism further sutures white femininity to misery since this masochism would be a mark of “pure enjoyment.”

As Elizabeth Wilson argues in Gut Feminism, most narratives of feminine aggression suggest that it turns inward to become depression or masochism.16 In Riviere’s essay we see this as melancholy and misery, but reading with the minoritarian gives us another perspective. While Sontag’s theorization of camp has often been imagined to be synonymous with upper middle-class gay male life (here we might consider David Halperin’s How to Be Gay as an updated articulation of these constellations of white middle-class gayness), José Esteban Muñoz argues that camp can be employed as a strategy of disidentification for minoritarian survival.17 Muñoz argues that camp should be read, not merely as a style, but as a strategy for dealing with the dominant culture: “It is a measured response to the forced evacuation from dominant culture that the minority subject experiences. Camp is a practice of suturing different lives, of reanimating, through repetition with a difference, a lost country or moment that is relished and loved. Although not innately politically valenced, it is a strategy that can do positive identity- and-community-affirming work.”18 For Muñoz the distance that camp provides is not between artifice and sincerity, but between the dominant culture’s dictates of representation and a self-presentation that is otherwise. Camp offers an alternative to the status quo’s assignation of unhappiness to particular subjects. Camp provides a way of feeling embraced by remaking objects in ways that better suit survival.

It is through the lens of camp and other minoritarian genres, then, that I suggest we view Catbagan’s Crush as trafficking in overt aggression rather than misery. As a director, Catbagan accomplishes this transformation in optics by undoing the heterosexualization of white femininity and introducing the specter of the femme. While Riviere’s analysis of white femininity relies on the repression of homosexuality, which haunts all public women, Catbagan and Caldwell embrace this queerness. Caldwell’s femme-ness is manifest not only in her patent-leather shoes, but in Catbagan’s framing of her.

While sexual orientation is best understood relationally, normative assumptions link gender performance to orientation. This produces confusion when it comes to the femme, whose performance of femininity is assumed to connect her to heterosexuality. Generally, femmes are made visible as queer women when they are seen as part of a couple. Historically, femmes have been most recognizable when paired with butches, whose overt masculinity marks the relationship as legibly sexual, in part because the butch-femme dynamic is assumed to recall heterosexual norms of attraction. By making explicit the sexual economy that she is a part of, the butch makes the femme recognizable as something other than heterosexual. From this perspective, we see that having Catbagan at the helm is part of what produces Caldwell as femme. Though we do not see them, we can understand Catbagan as inhabiting a queer position, both because of their Filipino-ness and because of their (non-white male) inhabitation of the director’s role—that is, of the one who controls the camera’s gaze.

When we read Caldwell’s performance as femme, instead of attaching to potential narratives of misery, her stomping registers as a form of feminine agency. Some of this agency is related to the reveal of gender’s masquerade and its subversion through desire. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler describes the terms of this subversion as queering heterosexual identity: “Lesbian femmes may recall the heterosexual scene, as it were, but also displace it at the same time. In both butch and femme identities, the very notion of an original or natural identity is put into question; indeed, it is precisely that question as it is embodied in these identities that becomes one source of their erotic significance.”19 Here, we see that femme identity is examined as a performance that subverts gender norms by illuminating the performative nature and nonoriginality of all gender. Madeline Davis also makes explicit this connection between femmes and subversion, writing that femmes are queer because they are “women who look and act like girls and who desire girls. We’re just the queerest of the queers. It makes me laugh, but it also makes me feel so different. For butches, their masculinity makes them seem more ‘normal.’ We’re kind of like those women in the ‘lesbian’ porn movies—long hair, lipstick—except we’re real. We desire everything about our butches—even their womanness. I think that’s pretty queer.”20 These readings of the femme emphasize the ways femme-ness can be a space of performance, play, and subversion. Through its invisibility, femme identity acts as a critique of heteronormativity and normativity in general. Lisa Duggan and Kathleen McHugh argue that this invisibility offers a twist on how one can understand the normal: “although seemingly ‘normal,’ [the femme] responds to ‘normal’ expectations with a sucker punch—she occupies normality abnormally.”21 Indeed, Caldwell’s performance of stomping on toys offers a rejection of domesticity in literal ways. Her heels suggest that social immiseration is not going to be handled passively, but instead dealt with as an immediate radical rejection of domestic norms.

Caldwell’s performance of femme-ness is not sui generis. It arises from citations of normative gender identity, which themselves are embedded within a particular historical moment. The citational nature of femme-ness has two important simultaneous effects: it creates a present that differs from the past, and it reifies a certain version of the past. As Elizabeth Freeman notes in Time Binds, this iterative process “consolidate[s] the authority of a fantasized original, even if citationality itself unsettles the idea of an origin.”22 We see this in Crush’s subtle recall of 1950s femininity as manifest in Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman, which itself (most notably through its iconic poster) recalls pulp, and lesbian pulp, in particular. Ostensibly produced for a male audience, the genre, according to Yvonne Keller, facilitated the production of American lesbian identity by presenting a world of possibility for its readers. Pulp widened access to representations of lesbianism and presented same-sex relationships as erotic rather than pathological.23 Access, positive representation, and information made pulp especially appealing in the homophobic environment of the 1950s. Keller argues that this is especially illustrated through cover art, which signals the genre’s coherence more than the actual content.24 Such covers, Keller writes, were “sensationalist and overtly lesbianism, or at least ‘deviant’ or overly sexualized.” These fierce women offered portraits of unconventional and potentially liberated femininity—femininity that occupied a strikingly different world compared to the femininity that circulated outside of the books. Jennifer Worley writes, “Embedding a desire for escape from normative mid-century gender roles in sensational stories of queer passion and urban adventure, these narratives produced the position of the lesbian as not simply one of sexual preference, but as one of profound dissatisfaction with the culturally proscribed apparatus of heterosexuality: Marriage, motherhood, domesticity, and family.”25 In other words, the protagonists of the pulps illuminated possibilities for feminine non-normativity and feminism in addition to making visible female queerness. Reading Caldwell as femme not only makes explicit the implicit critiques of patriarchy and heteronormativity present in these 1950s texts, but also offers us a way to read femme-ness as a strategic resignification of femininity to express aggression.

The transformation of misery into aggression that we see in Crush has to do with harnessing the affective distortions of the minoritarian genres of B-movies, camp, and pulp, so that the ontological instability of white femininity is oriented toward femme aggression. The possibility that is unleashed through white femininity’s instability allows us to see the transformative power of affective labor and think more critically about the relationship between labor and value. Lingering in the space of aggression also presents us with a particular formation of feminine pleasure. Caldwell’s performance of aggression is about an extension of herself outward; her affect travels, and the boundaries between self and other break.

Fetish, Labor, and Destroying the Domestic

While Caldwell’s performance is integral to Crush’s presentation of femme aggression, Catbagan’s presence also impacts our understanding of the stakes of the films. We must be mindful that it is Catbagan’s vision as director—their edits, their zooms, their soundscapes—that frames the way we can understand Caldwell’s performance. The decision to frame the films in relation to the idea of the fetish allows us to think about the relationship between objects and labor while reading through their Filipino identity complicates the scenes of domesticity that Caldwell smashes.

Playing with the idea of the fetish is an explicit part of Catbagan’s aim as a director. In describing Crush on their website, they write that the videos illustrate the fetishization of feminine destruction: “Visceral feminine destruction is fetishized as toys are demolished by specifically chosen heels.”26 Indeed, the title of the series refers to a fetish in which people respond sexually to women in heels crushing objects—be it toys, insects, or even small animals. In the versions of these fetish videos that circulate via YouTube, women in high heels are shown in static long shots stomping on objects such as routers, cigarettes, or food items. The allure of the videos is their unedited nature, which draws out suspense about whether the object will bend or break and whether the heels or the floor will be ruined. Catbagan’s highly edited films with fast cuts and close-ups of destruction are a different beast altogether. They forego suspense in favor of focusing on aggression. But it is through these contrasting images of destruction that we see an alternate vision of embodied sensuality.

In psychoanalysis, the fetish acts as a metonym. In an early articulation of fetishism, Sigmund Freud argues that these cherished objects, generally shoes, velvet, or underwear, are stand-ins for a phallus.27 He later refined this definition to argue that fetishism is the result of a boy’s horror at realizing that his mother does not possess a penis. Unable to deal with his mother’s “castration,” the boy imagines an object to be his mother’s missing phallus. According to Freud, the fetishized object is a “substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and—for reasons familiar to us—does not want to give up.”28 These fetish objects, then, represent the mother’s phallic power while simultaneously acknowledging her lack of power. In the transfer of affection from mother to object, the phallus retains its power, and femininity’s relationship to objectification is further reified. In making humans into objects, however, Freud’s discourse of fetishism also reveals the complex falseness of the dichotomy between humans and objects.

To think the fetish in relation to the object is to make it disappear under the weight of human desire, displacement, and fantasy. David Marriot writes: “Fetishism (or at least its structure) always has to do with repudiation and loss. That it commemorates a loss, but a loss that is simultaneously recognized and denied (perhaps it is recognition that it denied?), but substituting a sign, a sign that preserves the loss it effaces like ice preserves the muddy footprints of passersby.”29 Marriot emphasizes the desire for this object’s disappearance despite the actual impossibility of this act. Thinking with Freud, Emily Apter suggests that his fetishist operates within “the realm of the simulacrum, generating a copy or surrogate phallus for an original that never was there in the first place.”30 These shifts between avowal and disavowal reveal fetishism to be “an ambiguous state that demystifies and falsifies at the same time, or that reveals its own techniques of masquerade while putting into doubt any fixed referent.”31 This version of fetishism is about masquerade and the ability to become-object or embody passivity. Already, we see echoes between this version of the fetish and the imaginary that surrounds white femininity. Both pivot around the idea of ontological insecurity.

Crush highlights the ways that white femininity, as an opaque object, is fetishized, thereby illuminating the overlap between discourses of fetishization and racialized desire.32 In his discussion of the fetishization of black men, Frantz Fanon argues that racial fetishism is at the root of stereotype and phobia, both of which are discourses that traffic in distance from reality.33 On the one hand, this provides the possibility of opacity, which Marriot describes as a form of freedom: “Politically, fetishism leaves us unfree within our representations but frees us from the presuppositions and outcomes of mutual exposure to ourselves and others.”34 On the other hand, the possibility generated by this opacity is also deeply feared. Anne Anlin Cheng describes this anxiety as invisible, pervasive, and deeply threatening to a modernist order that wants to categorize: “As a psychical structure that signals, rather than averts, the contagion between the known and the unknown, the material and the imagined, the visible and the invisible—fetishism may signal more than a symptom of colonial desire, it may index a set of tenacious problems underlying what it means to value someone or something.”35 Fetishism, then, is about the deep comingling of these anxieties with pleasure. It is about the pleasures of difficulty—difficulty in understanding what constitutes an appropriate relationship with objects, fantasy, and difference. It provides us with a narrative of constraint (in its flattening), possibility (through opacity), and value.

Yet Catbagan transforms this story. By presenting femme aggression rather than lingering lovingly on the objects, Crush highlights the evacuation of female agency within the conventional fetish videos and shows us something else. In addition to addressing fantasies of white femininity, Crush brings us toward thinking about the circuits of labor that the fetish invokes. When we watch the high heels destroy the toys, are we witnessing an impulse to decouple capitalism and desire, a rejection of the commodity, or a privileging of the flesh? Does the hardwood floor domesticate the uncontainability of the flesh, the visceral, in all of its destructive glory? In showing us the potential fury that underlies femininity, Catbagan unveils our desire to see femininity as an active agent in addition to illuminating the labor that femininity performs. This process of showing labor is part of what shifts concepts of value away from the object toward affect.

In this choreography of destruction, the toys are stripped of the magic of the commodity, and we see, instead, feminine labor and aggression. Perhaps Crush is Catbagan’s version of a critique of commodity fetishism? Commodity fetishism is Marx’s mode of making sense of the difference between an object’s objective value and its value as a commodity, which is to say its value becomes inflated beyond its use-value and separate from labor. The process of commodification transforms the object into “a thing which transcends sensuousness” in that the object is severed from its connection to actual laboring hands.36 Capitalism’s ability to transform labor into an abstract value—money—obscures the social interactions underlying these transactions, making value inhere in the objects rather than the labor that produced them. This creates a relationship with objects instead of people and renders human relationships alienated: “Men are henceforth related to each other in their social process of production in a purely atomistic way; they become alienated because their own relations of production assume a material shape which is independent of their control and their conscious individual action.”37 Marx’s elaboration of the fetish does not contain anything of the language of substitution that we see in Freud; instead, it hews toward thinking with magic and animism to understand how objects become infused with human properties and social relations to become desirable. For Marx, the commodity calls up a form of false idolatry because it obscures the relationship between labor and objects. It is problematic because it makes men into atoms, which is to say isolated entities separate from each other and from the fruits of their labor.

Crush’s performance of feminized labor is especially arresting because the objects that Caldwell destroys—plastic domestic scenes—are imbricated within the realm of the commodity in several ways. First, the objects themselves are part of the global economy of plastic trinkets, which are manufactured in the global South and circulate as toys before becoming waste. In this way, they usher both race and class onto the scene through the reminder of the commodity’s movement and the racialized component of labor that has gone into the production of these objects. This shift toward the global invokes race in a way that is not about skin color and the potentiality of opacity, but about the specific affective and material work of laboring bodies in multiple geographies. Additionally, the objects are also representative of the instruments of domestication that transform women into commodities. This double valence brings race and gender onto the scene in ways that show their complex relationship to labor, specifically the domestic labor that women have performed or are expected to perform. This labor is different from the labor of decoration or masquerade that Riviere invokes. The feminine labor that Catbagan rejects is that of keeping house and reproducing the family—labor that some 1970s feminists demanded be classified as work. Kathi Weeks writes, “Feminists insisted that the largely unwaged ‘reproductive’ work that made waged ‘productive’ work possible on a daily and generational basis was socially necessary labor, and that its relations were thus part and parcel of the capitalist mode of production. What had been coded as leisure was in fact work, and those supposedly spontaneous expressions of women’s nature were indeed skillful practices.”38 While Catbagan’s intervention into these debates is through the matrix of destruction, it is important to keep this feminine labor and domestic work in mind as we focus on the heels rebelling against that world order.

Catbagan’s critique gains extra charge because of Filipina migrants’ role within the field of domestic service. Rhacel Salazar Parreñas describes Filipino women as “the quintessential service workers of globalization” because of the disproportionate number of women who leave the Philippines to perform domestic service in other countries.39 This migration has been spurred by processes of globalization that have created turmoil within the Philippine economy and created demand for service workers elsewhere. Because of its colonial history in the Philippines, the United States is a particularly popular destination. Importantly, the work that many of these migrants perform (though proportionally fewer in the United States than elsewhere) is feminine labor, what Parreñas describes as “the labor needed to sustain the productive labor force. Such work includes household chores; the care of elders, adults, and youth; the socialization of children; and the maintenance of social ties in the family.”40 Through this lens we see that Catbagan’s critique of domestic labor also carries with it a colonial history and a complex understanding of gendered labor and work, since the presence of the Filipina domestic worker enables other women to enter the workforce through a different economy in what Parreñas argues “could be read as a process of rejecting gender constraints for different groups of women in a transnational economy.”41 In this portrait of feminine labor, it is not just that feminine labor is tied to the domestic, but that it is profoundly tied to dislocation.42

This geopolitical spatialization of labor also serves as a reminder that brown jouissance itself is the product of black and brown labor. Because this labor is born from the flesh, however, its fleshiness disrupts the assumption that labor is ever a straightforward form of value added. Denise Ferreira da Silva argues that this excess fleshiness disrupts the characterization of the feminine body as an economic and symbolic given within the confines of productivity. Da Silva writes, “For her body only enters accounts of racial violence as always already in the juridical, economic, and ethical register of coloniality-patriarchy-slavery, that is, in accounts of domination, in bondage, marriage, and rape. My intuition here is that the sexuality of the female body refers to a power other than the sovereign’s . . . one that is beyond and before the re/productive capabilities of the fe/male native/slave body.”43 Black and brown flesh enters the scene as a Thing, which, da Silva argues, “hosts the possibility of violence, of that which threatens to undo any resolution; because it is a mediator, it necessarily unsettles the limits of justice itself.”44 Da Silva urges us to stay with this violence because it offers the possibility of unsettling categories, disrupting assumptions about value, and transforming labor into something else—namely, desire. This appropriation of desire—the concept deeply tethered to interiority and the sovereign subject—by fleshiness unleashes a new world of possibilities for da Silva. She writes:

I am interested in a frame of intervention that appreciates the body as a referent of The Thing, without (outside) modern signification, that is, one that exposes precisely that referent Hegel’s version of sovereign reason has protected in interiority, namely, desire. To be sure, by evoking the body in the register of excess (value [form and force] + violence), I do no more than to track its disavowal, to indicate how, when desire threatens to become a descriptor of the Other as Subject, the racial subaltern subject (the affectable I), it is immediately returned to the proper place, to the white side of value, from where authorized violence is done in the name of a regulated desire.45

This territory of Thingness is that which is inhabited by blackness and brownness. It is the space where the power of materiality and violence are illuminated and transformative. These transformations are how brown jouissance offers a way to rethink labor and value. If the commodity is produced when the labor that produces objects is absented, remembering that brown jouissance is labor allows us to revalue labor as an entity unto itself instead of dwelling on the commodity. This focus on labor and its fleshiness—its affective excess—is distinct from the fetish’s emphasis on objects and the logic of substitution. It does not rely on ontological insecurity, but rather insists on valuing the unruly (possibly aggressive) fleshiness of materiality.

The Question of Value

A radical praxis would then stay with The Thing, exposing the constitutive violence; it releases free radicals and virtual particles, which by unsettling—through affection, intention, and attention—expose the relationship that is knowledge itself and its effects.

—Denise Ferreira da Silva, “To Be Announced: Radical Praxis or Knowing at the Limits of Justice”

While Catbagan’s body does not appear anywhere in the frame, it is their flesh, their materiality that frames the films. In this way, I suggest that we view Caldwell as a proxy for Catbagan because she enacts aggression on their behalf without the distraction or spectacle that angry black and brown bodies produce. In her discussion of the unhappiness that angry black women cause, Ahmed writes, “It is not just that feelings are ‘in tension’ but that the tension is located somewhere: in being felt by some bodies, it is attributed as caused by another body, who thus comes to be felt as apart from the group, as getting in the way of its organic enjoyment and solidarity.”46 This to say that this form of racialized anger elicits irritation because it interrupts the fabric of social belonging. The aggression that Catbagan shows through Caldwell’s performance is that which rejects the status quo, but it is not the anger of an outsider. Rather, it is the aggression that comes with familiarity. This familiarity is two-fold. It is produced through Caldwell’s white femininity and through Catbagan’s status as Filipino, which connects them to a country that has a particularly complex relation to the United States because of its status as former colony. Sarita See writes, “A racial formation that emerges out of the colonial construction ‘foreign in a domestic sense,’ Filipino America is a simultaneously inassimilable and assimilable entity in the ‘house’ of the American empire.”47 Yet, within both identitarian—white and Filipino—constructions of “belonging,” the films highlight affective excesses that disrupt. Here, I read the performance of Caldwell’s femme aggression alongside (and perhaps as a proxy) manifestation of Catbagan’s rebellion against model minority status, which Christine Bacareza Balance describes as “the punk aesthetic of ‘gleeful opposition to decorum and propriety’ by expressing itself in ways that ‘fl[y] directly in the face of the “polite Asian”’ stereotype.”48 These forms of rage, Balance argues, help to specify the incoherence of the term “Asian American” while also announcing possibilities for resistance under its umbrella: “As a mode of identification, [‘Asian American’] holds the possibility of being a ‘deliberative and motivated thing: experiential rather than biological, grounded in the present as much or more than in the past.’”49 Balance translates this form of protest into an “attitude,” which “performs the affective labor of transforming alienating episodes into common understanding.”50 From this perspective, Caldwell’s femme-ness becomes important for Catbagan because she enables Catbagan to locate aggression in and through the familiar.

In particular, Catbagan’s rejection of the fetishization of white feminine misery and their mobilization of Caldwell as femme introduce ambiguity about the value of whiteness, which we might register as an aspect of “the familiar.” In her analysis of neoliberalism and the Philippines, Neferti X. M. Tadiar uses Marx to argue that the alignment of blackness and brownness with corporeality and labor has led to a valuation of whiteness as that which is unmarked. This, in turn, produces value through an alienation from this corporeality. She writes, “Value reflects the racialized relations of its production, in particular the alienation of and from racialized labor as a suprasensible ‘quality’ of unmarked, immaterial, even spectral power. The white subject is, simply put, the realization of the subjectivity of the vanishing mediator.”51 For Tadiar this separation of whiteness from materiality signals a particularly American form of imperialism. It results in enterprise, which Tadiar describes, citing Richard Dyer, as a process in which “the white spirit organizes white flesh and in turn non-white flesh and other material matters: it has enterprise. Imperialism is the key historical form in which that process has been realized. Imperialism displays both the character of enterprise in the white person, and its exhilaratingly expansive relationship to the environment.”52 For Tadiar this separation between the material and the unmarked has particular resonance for the Philippines because it signals the ways in which whiteness continues to have value despite (or because of) its reliance on black and brown materiality.

In displaying white femme labor and rendering their own body invisible, Catbagan challenges the status of whiteness as unmarked and immaterial. In part this is because Caldwell’s labors do not circulate within the realm of productivity—except insofar as they produce waste. But, the question of value emerges from Catbagan’s removal of self from the frame—thereby denying the contemporary liberal desire to see black and brown subjects at work, creating the surplus labor familiar to many of us as the labor of diversity. Grace Hong narrates this transition, writing that “racial capital transitioned from managing its crises entirely through white supremacy to also managing its crises through white liberalism, that is, through the incorporation and affirmation of minoritized forms of difference.”53 Catbagan’s refusal of the spectacle of racial difference and the labor of diversity work makes the question of value central. Drawing on Lindon Barrett, Lisa Marie Cacho argues that, “the ‘object’ of value needs an ‘other’ of value because ‘for value “negativity is a resource,” an essential resource. The negative, the expended, the excessive invariably form the ground of possibilities for value.’”54 This to say that the production of value is reliant on relegating something (some people) to the periphery and making it (them) invisible, while also hiding the violence of this disavowal, as Barrett argues in relation to his discussion of the relationship between race and value: “Violence is posited as the subsequently occluded origin of value. This model understands value as a principle of order that concertedly overlooks its forceful, initial intervention into what it constructs as ‘disorder,’ a principle that subsequently sublimates its ineluctable violence through the fetishization of boundaries.”55 Catbagan’s critique of the discourse of fetishism and mobilization of Caldwell as proxy acknowledges this violence, yet it also rejects the boundaries that it might produce.

To this, we might ask what type of value Catbagan is asking us to reflect on? What lies between the valued and the valueless? One immediate register is the shifting value of disposability, which brings to mind the toys that Caldwell crushes and those who made them. Hong describes these workers of the global South as “nonlaboring subjects, that is, the populations that are surplus not to production but to speculation and circulation” and are “useful for their intrinsic lack of value.”56 This lack of value facilitates capital’s flexibility and hovers adjacent to abjection. However, Catbagan doesn’t actually ask us to stay with these objects and imagine their place in the universe; instead, Crush allows us to ask what the production of valueless (disposable) objects suggests about the value of labor itself. The invisible, material surplus of these acts of destruction, I argue, offers insight into the affective reorientations of the value of brownness.

By employing Caldwell as proxy, Catbagan uses Caldwell’s femme-ness to destabilize the value of whiteness while also reorienting our relationship to the labor that Caldwell performs. As a vehicle for enacting Catbagan’s rage, Caldwell shows the utility of white femme labor in terms of Tadiar’s discussion of whiteness as the vanishing mediator. As concept, however, proxy does more than suggest a certain type of white fungibility, and instead allows us to think with the concept of mimesis—that popular postcolonial term for the pedagogical process of approximation, for which the Philippines is often singled out as exemplar. This, in large part, is due to its history of multiple colonizations, but it is also because of the Phillipines’s history of exporting certain types of labor. Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns argues that mimesis is a particularly Filipino strategy of performance. She writes, “The recognition of Filipinos on the global stage rests on and wrestles with their remarkable ability to ‘perform back’ what they have imbibed through their colonial education.”57 Against the idea of mimesis as a form of automation—here we see the difference between the films of Crush and those of Patty Chang and Nao Bustamante—I am interested in mimesis’s affective excesses in relation to similarity. In this, I follow San Pablo Burns, who writes, “My interest in mimesis, used here interchangeably with imitation, consequently lies specifically in the material and affective labor it takes to imitate.”58 San Pablo Burns’s instruction to stay with the material and affective labor of imitation—its fleshiness—brings us back to aggression. Catbagan’s work shows us how aggression transforms acts of citationality—that of the fetish videos and white femininity—into something else. Catbagan’s use of aggression as the primary affect in the Crush series illustrates mimesis’s cutting edge and the ways that mimesis can be transformative. Aggression, here, shores up the self as agential, creative, and material. This aggression is both a recognition of indebtedness to these citational sources and a critique of them. In her description of Filipino art strategies, See argues that “these artists unexpectedly reverse dominant American narratives of immigrant assimilation. According to the ‘immigration mythography’ of assimilation, racialized subjects undergo a transformative process of adjustment and accommodation proper to successful absorption into the body politic, a process that reinforces the nation-empire. In contrast, the Filipino Americanist integrationist desire for America paradoxically leads to the disintegration of the empire.”59 This is to say that the mobilization of assimilation, which is where we might position acts of mimesis, is actually what reveals the cracks of imperialism. In contrast to Chang’s critique of assimilation through her embrace of foreignness, what we see in Catbagan’s work is an inhabitation of assimilation that produces excessive affect—aggression—as critique.

These endless possibilities of proliferation and excesses of affect, in turn, bring us to the viral. It is notable, I think, that Catbagan offers not just one film of Caldwell’s acts of destruction. This multiplicity intensifies Crush’s play with the transformational powers of mimesis and speaks to the ways that virality functions to undercut the question of value. In her analysis of YouTube virality in relation to Asian American identity, Balance argues that the videos must contain an emotional hook, which often hinges on a certain produced vulnerability. Balance writes, “In other words, to catch an already distracted viewer’s attention, viral videos must exude an air of amateur production—versus the slick, professional, and therefore controlled aesthetics of mainstream Hollywood or television sources—and mobilize key signifiers that resonate with a particular community or subculture.”60 Balance’s foregrounding of the amateur qualities of the videos returns us to a consideration of the role that B-films, camp, and pulp play as intertexts for Catbagan’s films. Although their films are edited and polished so that they are not amateur, this summoning of minoritarian genres and their relation to subculture (here we should also include the YouTube fetish videos as well) positions them within its affective orbit. These viral Youtube “performances of affect and participation,” Balance argues, “point to this virtual diaspora’s simulated and representational elements and, in turn, to the performative and affective dimensions of the ‘symbolic ethnicity’ of Asian Americans.”61 This is to say that virality, as a performative dimension, brings into question the notion of value by emphasizing the symbolic nature of cohesion—in Balance’s argument through the sign of the “Asian American”—the relation between virality and replication, and the intangibility of vulnerability. Virality cannot be just about labor; it is about the materiality of the body and the ways that that materiality penetrates the viewer—we might recall briefly the spectacle of Ibarra’s gloved hands. The viral is, after all, often characterized as “corruptive, mobile, and infectious.”62 In virality, excessive affect is smuggled in under the guise of the familiar.

In the absence of consumable racial difference and productive labor, Catbagan offers mimesis, but this is mimesis with a difference, albeit of a very different sort than Carrie Mae Weems’ labors of affective reproduction. What we see is not that mimesis—which Catbagan’s films contain multiple strains of in their mobilization of camp, pulp, the femme, and the YouTube video format, including the film’s existence as a series—produces subversion, but that mimesis reorients value. Tadiar argues that mimesis can “carry out new imperatives and possibilities of consumption in an age of ‘mechanical’ or technological reproducibility though in a labor-intensive, rather than capital-intensive form.”63 What we witness in Crush is the wasteful labor of aggression, a labor without product, which offers instead value in its affective charge and in its ability to make brownness signify differently, or rather to defer the question of its signification by insisting on the material in conjunction with the affective. This is an unusual position; traditionally the question of material value is considered in relation to labor power, and it circulates separately from that of the value that stems from desire. Meg Wesling builds on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to develop the concept of “queer value” to “suture together two domains too often understood to operate autonomously: the psychic realm of desire and the material realm of accumulation and exchange.”64 Queer value is useful, Wesling argues, because it enables us to think with multiple economies simultaneously.65 For Wesling this means an interrogation of the question of complicity between intellectuals and the global circuits of labor that enable their work. Crush illustrates these forms of complicity while also illuminating the power of the flesh.

Invisibility and Brown Jouissance

Thinking with the proxy and mimesis brings us toward invisibility, which, it is important to note, is not the same as absence. I have traced the ways in which Catbagan’s materiality can be located in directorial choices and the excessive affect that emerges from Crush. The films’ use of the sonic offers another mode for us to think with invisibility. In the films, we hear the crush of the toys as they are ground into the floor, the sound of heels hitting the ground, and hiss of objects falling apart all set against a backdrop of Catbagan breathing. The sonic excess, I argue, leads us to rethinking the commodity, the fetish, and becoming-atomic. In the crush of destruction, we hear what Fred Moten describes as the commodity’s scream. Moten reads Marx’s ventriloquization of the commodity as a mode of arguing that value emerges from exchange: “The commodity discovers herself, comes to know herself, only as a function of having been exchanged, having been embedded in a mode of sociality that is shaped by exchange.”66 Against this, however, Moten argues that the commodity’s value preexists exchange and that the resistance of the object can be located in the scream—notably that of Frederick Douglass’s Aunt Hester, whose scream upon being whipped “embodies the critique of value, of private property, of the sign.”67 The commodity’s scream is the space of brown jouissance; it illustrates the oscillation between subject and object and the fleshy excess of the sonic. In relation to questions of value, the crunch of the toys may register as the excess of the object’s materiality, but it is also symptomatic of its excision from exchange—its embeddedness within a circuit of un-useful labor. As such, this “scream” emerges as a symptom of both Caldwell’s wasteful labors and Catbagan’s affective framings. We hear these sounds because Catbagan wants us to; they remind us that we are in their world, where visibility does not occupy a privileged space.

When we think with the noise generated by these crushed toys, we can register the commodity’s scream as critique and creation. The act of destruction at the heart of these videos—stomping—is also one of creation—the creation of more, the creation of waste, excess, the unwanted, but possessed. In its activation of an alternate economy of value, this production of excess is a mode of working through the collapse between the material and the maternal that Moten argues blackness occupies. This iteration of brown jouissance accepts the maternal (the literal creative force here) as the material, even as it exists in a space of excess and lack, which is to say that there is both an excess of objects and a lack of desire. Catbagan has created a universe populated by objects that beget other objects outside of the circuits of desire. In fact, we have an “excess of lack,” which circulates to the sound of crushed objects. This destruction does, indeed, illuminate “the fetish of desire.” Value cannot circulate in the object, but is located in the invisibility of Catbagan’s and Caldwell’s affective labor.

This value of invisibility is further underscored by the persistence of Catbagan’s breath, which we hear throughout. Their breath signals bodily presence without a body—a trace of personhood, a trace of flesh. Their breath also reminds us simultaneously of the vulnerability of personhood and the triangulation of voyeurism. Both of these elements bring us back to the spatial. Crush invites us to think with global economic circuits in addition to the atomic and the cosmic. Catbagan mobilizes these related, but slightly oppositional registers in two ways: through the scream of the commodity and through their own breath, which marks not only their presence but also the potential of invisibility. This is a different becoming-atomic than Marx describes in his complaint about the absence of connection to the worker. The destruction of toys gestures toward becoming-atomic by emphasizing the smaller and smaller fragments that are created through destruction—the material maternal means that we are all atomic—while Catbagan’s breath brings us toward the register of the vibrational. That we can hear/feel the breath but not see Catbagan suggests that the invisible is what holds the universe together and what provides the conditions of possibility for being. This rescripts the excess of lack as its own form of maternity—one that combines the material and the spatial by invoking the universe.