Disdain Is The Norm

Badiucao, February 19, 2020, #wuhandiary 

We have all seen the footage of female medical staff getting their heads shaved in Wuhan. The propaganda footage is meant to carve out the efficiency with which the situation is handled and the dedication of the staff to that end.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, poster for "Memories
de l'Abbé Faure, au pied de l'échafaud", 1893.

Only female nurses are left bareheaded. What about their male co-workers? Would cutting their hair short to the length of the men not suffice? In fact they were already doing a great job before the virus took off with their hair still intact?

The footage bears the elements of a public execution. Although turned away from us, the most vulnerable part of the human body is exposed to the hand leading the operation in the cover for the #wuhandiary by Badiucao. No blade of any kind need be shown. It is the same hand and neck that make the poster of Toulouse-Lautrec so arresting 150 years later. The head of the wretched is in each case pushed forward in our direction. The pain within the clenched jaw and closed eyelids is now ours.

Today is March 8, and the present diary entry for which the cover was made above focus on how one half of the population is willfully ignored on every level from the state propaganda to the question of their basic needs. The exposing of the neck is the exposure of the premises onto which a society is founded:

"For women here, talks about menstruation and pads in public are filled with shame. Here when volunteers brought period underwear and pads they bought for female medics to their hospitals, the head of the hospital would turn them down saying “we have no need for it”. 

Here female medics would have their long hair shaved off in front of the camera like an execution, the lense points at their faces capturing their sorrow, almost teary expression, for materials promoting “unity” and “the fight against the epidemic”.

In reality, the female medics being used for propaganda aren’t the only ones who are in these kinds of predicaments, the people in infected areas are in similar situations. With supermarkets no longer allowing individual customers to enter, many communities are organizing groups to buy supplies. Most groups are out to buy groceries, a few are for household products. Unfortunately I haven’t seen a group for buying period pads, at the same time there are girls in my local WeChat group asking around for where they can buy pads every day.

If the female medics were the only group being neglected, then blame could be placed on those in power lacking empathy. But when you look at the daily supply purchase groups neglecting feminine products, you can tell that disregarding women is the norm, and within people who practice these norms, there are women too.

The exploitation of female medics, which was supposed to be a tribute to the authorities, became a topic of anger and doubts in mainland China. But I think that the neglect of women’s need in acquiring daily supplies is more representative of the norm. Especially in times like this where “women’s rights” are maliciously slandered within the great firewall, a woman naturally, gracefully stating her needs, something as simple as that is met with obstacles after obstacles… This isn’t just “women’s right”, it is “human’s right”.

Takeshi Kitano, a Japanese filmmaker that I admire, once said: “a disaster is not one event that kills twenty thousand humans; it is one human-killing event that happens twenty thousand times”. I think this quote tells people to understand and empathize based on a “human” perspective, rather than to treat humans as the background of a grand narrative".

The diary is to be followed at #wuhandiary on Twitter, but lately it can be read in Chinese and English at the homepage of Badiucao too, such as the entry above here