1 Counterpublic - an act to counter normative temporality and space
Sho and Novia are both greatly influenced by J. Halberstam’s book In a Queer Time and Place, in which Halberstam explores and challenges heteronormativity through a queer lens. Queerness strays away from heteronormative temporality and often poses a threat to heterosexual lifestyle as it rejects a normative timeline, which is governed by adulthood, marriage, reproduction, child rearing, retirement and death. Women, particularly, are forced to believe that the scheduling of reproductive time is natural and desirable. In legal terms, if a homosexual marriage is not sanctioned by the government, that suggests the couple continues to live a life of no future, not only in relation to reproductivity, but also not entitled to inheritance, policies or benefits that have been granted to a heterosexual couple. If viewed under the normative temporality, queer time is viewed as a crisis.
This way of understanding queerness as defiance to normative temporality also coincides with the theory of space. Martin (2003) illustrates how the theory of space divides places into two categories: the public and the private. The private space is associated with family, property, intimacy, sexuality, and reproduction and those associated with the political, the state, citizenship, rationality, and production are the 'public’. The primary concern here is the relegation of “sexuality” to the realm of the private and hence it is presumptively apolitical. In a similar vein, domestic violence is frequently viewed as a private matter, and even nowadays in some societies, it’s deemed shameful and thus perpetuates the vicious cycle of silencing.
In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere written by J. Habermas (1989), he documented the historical emergence and the fall of what he called the bourgeois public sphere. According to Habermas (1989), this was a space where individuals gathered to discuss with each other, and sometimes with public officials, matters of shared concern. These gatherings allowed the bourgeoisie to use their reason to determine the boundaries of public and private and to self-consciously develop the “public sphere” (Habermas 1989).
Equality was definitely key to the public sphere. Membership in the public sphere meant that no one person was above the other and all arguments were similarly treated and scrutinized. Second, the principle of universal access was crucial to the formation of the public sphere. However, the public sphere was much less open and much less equal than what Habermas suggests in the first place. Nancy Fraser (1990) remarks that “the official public sphere rested on, indeed was importantly constituted by, a number of significant exclusions” (emphasis mine). Typically, what represents the interests of a ‘public’ is those of a masculine, white, middle-class, heterosexual and able-bodied subject.
Counterpublics arose alongside them as spaces where those excluded could engage in similar practices. Counterpublic BÎru strives to engage in the conversations and cultivate space in which the participation of the marginalized members of different race, gender, class, sexuality, religion and ability is valued and respected.
References:
Fraser, Nancy. 1990. "Rethinking the Public Sphere." Social Text 8(3):56.
Habermas, Jürgen, Thomas Burger, and Lawrence Kert. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Halberstam, Judith. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. Vol.3.
Martin, Fran. 2003. Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
2 In the Pursuit of (In)authenticity
Sho talks about the method of mixed culture fermentations and solera style blending as it intersects with diasporic identity.
Mixed culture fermentation appealed to me from when we started to brew. With a mix of wild and domesticated yeast, lactobacillus, pediococcus, and whatever else that might sneak in, the beer changes flavour as it ages. It’s a dynamic process, where the dominance of one microbe is challenged as the beer enters a new stage and different aromas and flavour compounds are produced as a result.
This complexity and fluidity of mixed culture beer seemed like a fitting method of production for diasporas like us. What I’ve found is that the longer time I spend in migration, the less certain I am of our sense of cultural belonging. I guess that’s because diasporic lives constantly require the gradual redefinition and renegotiation of authenticity. Of course, there are studies like the one by Youna Kim that some migrants strengthen their sense of cultural belonging to their home country after moving away. At times this is true, even for me, but it is more of a reactive mindset that’s created when I feel alienated and recognize my difference from the hegemonic North American culture. Like when I’m buying ingredients for dumplings while suffering through the ubiquitous Christmas music, or sucking in soba noodles on New Years while listening to the fireworks outside.
But the reality is, the longer I stay here and the more knowledge I accumulate about North American sitcoms or bar counter banter etiquette, the less I feel I belong either here or there. You know how people say “my people?” Must feel lovely, there seems to be so little ambiguity about who “my people” are. I’m pretty sure my “my people” are not Japanese at this point. If anybody can be called “my people,” it’s the in-betweeners. People who are distanced from their original cultural background while struggling with a growing acknowledgement that they won’t fully belong in their new one either. When I speak with other migrants from other countries living outside of North America, we can find some common ground in our mutual experience of not knowing where we belong, not sure who we are, and dealing with a fluid, dynamically shifting identity that’s neither here nor there.
So that’s why working with and drinking mixed culture beer creates, for me, a sense of intimacy to the process and product. The singular space of the tulip glass holds a bunch of cultures, a bunch of flavours, that are ever-changing. I feel it provides some sort of imaginary itinerary for my own identity where the discomfort of internalizing different cultures, values, and ideologies fades away and melds into one delicious, funky, sour, bretty mess. I’d be ecstatic to find one day that when I sniff my duvet I breathe in aromas of pineapples, overripe stone fruit, and some underlying whiff of the petting zoo at closing time.
And it’s also that mixed culture beers take all of the stigmatized characteristics or “off-flavours” from monocultural beers and flaunt them, resignifying what’s conventionally offensive to something attractive. I love mixed culture beers because it’s a long-winded, half-assed display of self-affirmation. Something that reframes all of the faults that I’ve accumulated, being in between and indecisive about what I’m about and where I belong. So I like mixed cultures, I like pidgin English, and I like localized versions of American snacks.
