English-edition note: This conversation was first published on 11 May 2023. Its plans, deadlines and invitations refer to that time.
Over the May Day holiday, Wangzhe Linrenbu’s feminist translation group held a tea party, with most of its core translators and proofreaders joining the conversation. This article shares excerpts from their discussion (as a work of nonfiction—yeah, right), and invites interested people with skills to contribute to the exciting “vaporware” project we have brewing—
A: Calling it a tea party is a way of saying we don’t want to treat what we do as some kind of saint’s ascetic drudgery. Any undertaking involves hard work, of course. But translation and our other production work are things we do because they interest us, not to meet performance targets. That’s how they connect with the leisurely image of a tea party.
B: This has something to do with some people’s interests in anime, manga and game fandom and their dōjin projects. Rather than describing ourselves as a newspaper’s editorial office, though, a dōjin circle might be closer—like those fiction and manga enthusiasts’ clubs in postwar Japan that edited and published their own dōjinshi.1
C: So what sort of mysterious outfit is Wangzhe Linrenbu, anyway? Could you introduce it?
A: The Phantom Thieves of Hearts of philosophy, the social sciences and the humanities. Now, let’s count up the sins of the academic establishment…
B: Stop, stop, stop. Basically, Wangzhe Linrenbu is an online community of philosophy enthusiasts, just like the 114514 reading groups and totally-for-real little philosophy circles that come and go. Except that we’ve committed ourselves to a more meaningful kind of production. From entries in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to introductory books on schools of philosophical thought, and then feminist writing, we’ve earned a measure of credibility through our work.
D: We’re just an online amateur group, with no government, university or corporate backing. And certainly no 500,000 yuan in funding.2
A: And we’re careful not to foreground any individual’s public persona or manufacture an influencer. “If friends and family in Luoyang ask after me: a heart pure as ice within a vessel of jade.” Upright, honorable people will judge us fairly when they see what we’ve produced.
B: We’ve seen enough public personas come crashing down, haven’t we? In collective work, trying to construct a moralistic persona—whose morality? What kind of morality?—is unnecessary and dangerous. In fact, we don’t know one another nearly well enough to guarantee that everyone’s character is spotless.
C: Anyone in this world who claims to be utterly spotless—that’s what’s truly terrifying.
A: Precisely because no one can be spotless, each person is always, we might say, a subject bearing infinite ethical responsibility in Sartre’s sense. Or, as Lu Xun put it, the countless people far away are all connected with me. Especially if you’re someone who calls yourself an intellectual: how can you ignore your responsibility toward the 【world】? To press on through the mire: this is our fated blessing.
B: A scholar must be broad-minded and resolute: the burden is heavy, and the road is long.
C: Let’s get back to translation. This project was daunting from the outset. An anthology the size of a brick: even after translating more than a hundred pages of introductory material, you’re nowhere near done. Most of the selections have no Chinese translation yet, so those still need translating. Isn’t that beyond the capabilities of a small circle of volunteer translators?
B: The Way is not alone; virtue is sure to have neighbors.3
A: Enough showing off your classical Chinese. Of course everyone initially felt it was an almost impossible task. Even a publisher going through the commercial publishing process and paying translators might not find anyone willing to take it on. And even if they approved the project, who knows how many years it would take.
A: But you have to feel the light of possibility at Axis…4
D: What anime thing are you talking about?
A: We have to believe in human possibility. There’s an anecdote about some literary-history textbooks that needed writing in the 1950s. The old professors all said it would be very difficult or take a very long time. But a group of university students put together a workshop, something like what we’d now call a game jam, pooled their ideas and efforts, and wrote the textbooks in just a month or two. I think that’s excellent.
B: A Stakhanovite movement in volunteer translation and popularizing ideas—an intellectual literacy campaign? Is that it?
A: You can see it in our “requirements” for joining the translation work. We don’t ask translators to have a philosophy background or professional English-language qualifications. A passing level in CET-6—the College English Test’s Band 6—is enough. What matters more is enthusiasm and care.
C: The requirement for an acceptable first draft is that the Chinese read smoothly. Even if you use machine translation, you must at least edit it into something basically accurate that reads without errors of meaning or grammar.
A: Our way of organizing production is a mass translation movement. Go all out, get things moving—more, faster, better and more economically. And the more we do, the more confident we get. We can now say we’re very confident about completing the anthology’s translation as a whole. We’ll finish next year at the latest.
E: What do you consider when choosing what to translate?
C: Thanks for asking. The introductory material from Feminist Film Theory and Pretty Woman explains the historical connections between feminism—particularly feminist cultural critique—and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and gives a sufficiently thorough account of concepts such as the “male gaze,” which people argue over every day. Reading Feminist Theory: From Modernity to Postmodernity, meanwhile, offers a more recent overview of the general history of Western feminist thought. (Some introductions to feminist intellectual history currently available in Chinese are rather old. Take Tong’s Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction: the Chinese translation is based on the 1998 English edition, and its treatment of psychoanalysis is very poor [we’ve also translated some chapters from Tong’s fifth edition to bring things up to date].) The overview also connects with the anthology’s selections, leaving plenty of room for further research.5
A: None of this is available in books published here in China so far. These works have distinctive value, and if we don’t do them, probably no one will. That’s why we translate them. As for the popular figures, leave those to publishers’ commercial logic.
D: I hear there have been plans lately for some original projects beyond translation?
B: Yes, that’s the idea. One is an independent game; the other is cultural criticism. There’s already quite a bit of the latter on the video platform Bilibili, actually. Plenty of popular takedown videos expose and criticize the ways vulgar, lousy TV dramas objectify and stigmatize women in their plots. That’s valuable work, though sometimes they don’t dig deep enough.
A: All those popular romance and original danmei (male–male romance) novels and audio dramas really are a gold mine for criticism in East Asia. Of course, we’ll be careful not to make arguments just to show off our learning. The takedown videos on Bilibili actually do a lot very well. We shouldn’t try to make up for their shortcomings by veering into dry academic fare. Cultural criticism on video isn’t a journal article. It has to entertain.
C: So we need to recruit video makers and scriptwriters. A prerequisite, of course, is that we all consume popular TV dramas and some of those novels and audio dramas. And obviously we don’t want to set off divisive “island-universe” flame wars, so we’ll avoid excessively controversial subjects—guess which ones?6 Ah, protecting your freedom means destroying my peace. Culture wars.
D: Someone in this group has even produced boys’ love audio dramas, so I don’t think that’ll be much of a problem. As for the independent game, are you talking about making an East Asian Disco Elysium?
A: Sort of, but definitely not a CRPG. More of a dōjin-scale JRPG like Ib, the horror art-gallery game. We’d just smuggle in some of our philosophical preoccupations, as Disco Elysium does. For the enjoyment of it.
B: We say we’re making a game, but that doesn’t mean shutting ourselves away right from the start and grinding through six months or a year of development. Think of it more as a dōjin project built around original characters, with the game as one of its media forms.
A: Exactly. We’ve already found the person we have in mind as the main artist. We could start by releasing some character portraits of the protagonists, hand-drawn videos, things like that. Dōjin audio works are possible too. Let’s have some fun with a media-mix project.
C: Where’s the budget coming from?!
D: Obviously it would be great if some rich women or men wanted to sponsor us directly. Angel investment. But we can’t count on anything that dreamy.
A: The current idea is to cover—or reimburse?—expenses through the creator-funding platform Afdian. People who believe in the game project can contribute as they please. We could offer some character merchandise in return. And of course, some form of participation in the project would be fine too.
D: Could you give us some idea of what the game would be like? Otherwise, who’s going to know what you’re talking about?
A: Two female leads—Scatterbrain + Grumpy.7 A fictional version of 1980s Tokyo and a film-noir detective-story style (a way to set the plot in motion; an atmosphere with a palpable sense of existence). Supernatural abilities and dreams (cases aren’t solved by outwitting or overpowering opponents, but by entering artistically shaped dream-labyrinths that have touches of horror and suspense and refract various forms of intersectional suffering: family-of-origin troubles, school bullying, workplace sex discrimination, domestic violence, and so on). Theory and ideas (thinkers appearing as NPCs in dreams; some jokes worked into items and skills). Of course, at this stage all these sketches could still be scrapped.
B: Is making a game really that simple? Won’t the budget run to a million yuan or more?
C: No, not that much… A few tens of thousands of yuan is enough for a dōjin game. How much did horror JRPGs like Ib and The Witch’s House really cost? Some of us do have relevant experience that would be enough to back this up—ahem—if we could talk about it publicly. We just can’t.
A: All right, we’ve spent too long on the game. In short, we’re confident. We need game writers, artists, designers to handle systems and implementation, UI designers and programmers. We’ll try to offer some payment, but we can’t promise any.
B: Some people will also ask: don’t you intend to do more? Don’t you have a responsibility to do supposedly “more practical, real-world work”?
A: The stupid claim that theory and real-world practice belong on opposite sides of a divide doesn’t need a special rebuttal. All we need to clarify is that our aims and tasks here, in this part of the work, are translation, criticism, and literary and artistic production. Some people get all worked up and insist that people working in publishing and writing should be cooking or driving instead, right here in this part of the work. Besides, an amateur community has very little power to begin with. If someone wants to reproach us for being so limited, I’ll say: you’re right. I admit it.
E: When a double-standard troll’s that far gone, all you can do is humor it.
B: Will there be a little “personnel renewal” on the translation side soon, too?
C: We’ll recruit new translators through trial translations, move to a new chat group and let the lurkers naturally drop out. A very gentle rectification.
A: The trial translation has already filtered out most of the saboteurs and opportunistic spectators who just come to watch. Yet somehow plenty of people still join the group without taking on any translation. They don’t say a word or translate a thing for months—what did they even come in for?
E: Here’s my dark-hearted suspicion: maybe they’re thinking they can slip in and put it on a CV for applying to study abroad. “Translation project lead”! Hahaha.
A: If you’ve done the work, of course you can put down what you did, no more and no less. You earned that. If you make things up, I’m speechless. It comes down to whether someone is sincere and upright. With strangers on the internet, what else can you do?
D: Is this what the online gaming industry calls community management? Now we’ve secured the foundation of the elite-Chinese study-abroad track, deployed the socialite-climber one-two punch, and achieved closed-loop petty-bourgeois synergy.8
A: The “Enframing” of cyberspace! Heidegger’s philosophy has reached its consummation. Heh. Feminist socialite climbers, women in finance starting businesses, Web3, blockchain, decentralized empowerment, is that it? Some of these elite Chinese really need to give it a rest.
B: All right. Unity—struggle—renewed unity. All that harmony without principles or struggle is reactionary. Since we’ve come to this, shouldn’t we also talk about how we organize ourselves and make decisions?
A: Freedom, equality, democracy, liveliness. We use reason and persuasion to win the majority’s agreement. I utterly loathe the habit in some totally-for-real philosophy groups of rattling off academic credentials like dishes on a menu. Spare us your precious status as a candidate for an Ivy League bachelor’s degree or a fully funded PhD. The machinery of the scholarly establishment has no shortage of cogs with symbolic status. A doctoral student is no better than a politically conscious junior-college student.
B: The lowly are the smartest; the exalted are the stupidest.9 In other words, among us, your power to persuade doesn’t depend on how prestigious your qualifications or published papers are. Those things aren’t important. This isn’t an academic journal’s editorial office.
D: On that basis, we aren’t afraid of leaders emerging through the work, especially women leaders. That doesn’t mean building an influencer persona.
A: Whether it’s translation, game-making or cultural criticism, you can’t do without someone taking the lead. Call them an editor-in-chief, a project lead, a producer, an organizer—whatever you like. The relationship between those who take the first steps and the multitude isn’t an elitist hierarchy of superiors and inferiors. It’s an explosive, productive encounter between constellations. What is liberated is everyone’s own equal transformative potential.
B: Obviously, we expect women to be the team’s main participants and its backbone, and we’re putting that into practice.
C: That more or less brings this tea party to an end. We’ve mainly discussed translation work, the team itself, cultural-criticism videos and independent game production.
① If you would like to join the translation work, translate the following English passage into Chinese and send it to the email address below.10 (Once again: English-to-Chinese translation ability at CET-6 or an equivalent level. No academic background or specialization in philosophy or theory is required; what we need is care, attention and some of your time. Unpaid.)
② If you would like to join the work on literary and artistic criticism or game-making, write an email introducing yourself with whatever information you think necessary (work samples? skills? enthusiasm? interests?), and send it to the same address: lab_on_roof@163.com.
You can see how neoliberalism easily leads to postfeminism: the conviction that men and women are already so equal that feminism is no longer necessary, that it might in fact be the enemy of female empowerment because it propagates defeatist messages about gender inequality that threaten to undermine women’s confidence in their ability to compete in the professional realm. You can also see how contemporary media culture participates in this mentality. As Susan Douglas points out in The Rise of Enlightened Sexism (2010), the continuous parade of tough action heroines and savvy female professionals in today’s movies and television shows generates fantasies of equality that cover over social realities of persistent inequality.
How many black female judges are there in the real world? If television shows are to be believed, being black and female is one of the prerequisites for becoming a judge. In this way, media fantasies obscure the fact that black women still find it disproportionately difficult to enter prestigious professions, and that women, generally speaking, still earn less than men do on average. In the next chapter, I’ll argue that many of us are able to retain a degree of critical distance from the media images we consume. Still, Douglas is right to suggest that media portrayals that communicate that women have made it—and that feminism is therefore obsolete—can mask “how much still remains to be done.”