“Coalescence” takes readers to 1921 Shanghai, site of the Fifth Far Eastern Championship Games. At the Games, athletes from China, Japan, and the Philippines gathered to compete in team sports, such as volleyball, soccer, baseball, and basketball; individual sports, such as tennis and swimming; and track and field events. This chapter follows not only the athletes and coaches who participated in the competitions on the fields, but also the pundits and observers who used those performances to create new meanings and spin new narratives. For instance, it highlights how pundits and observers used the lenses of race and gender to explain away defeat, account for victory, and claim ownership of civilization and modernity. It focuses in particular on how the male gaze dissected women’s dress and comportment in athletic demonstrations and carnival competitions alike. 1921 was a year of coalescence, and this chapter also treats the Far Eastern Championship Games as a window into a broader world of Sino–Philippine interaction. This chapter traces, for example, the concomitant study tours of Gan Bun Cho and Camilo Osias, the campaign against the Bookkeeping Act, and anti-Japanese politicking – all topics explored in earlier chapters.

This chapter examines the peculiar practice, common in late antique epic poetry, of comparing a character to a divinity stripped of their visual attributes. From the works of Claudian, Nonnus, and Colluthus it analyzes three case studies that epitomize this form of comparison and illustrate its use in a specific literary and cultural context. Such comparisons are shown to rely on the reader’s familiarity with visual representations of the pagan gods and to reflect a growing interest in and engagement with the visual arts in late antique literature. In defining characters by attributes they do not possess, the poets draw attention to their visual ambiguity and vulnerability, and allow internal and external audiences to gaze at them uninhibitedly. Female characters in particular are thus proffered as objects of the lusting gaze and are denied individual visual identities and narrative agency. This literary emphasis on artistic beauty, stripped of its attributes and, by extension, divine power, resembles contemporary Christian attempts to de-contextualize pagan artworks by removing their religious attributes and associations, reframing them as purely aesthetic objects.

Following Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America regards mores or manners as of the utmost significance for democracy. Tocqueville further attributes to women and especially mothers the primary role of inculcating democratic habits of equality. His portrayals of women in Democracy in America are suggestive of the many ways in which gender, race, and class intersect with one another in Jacksonian America. Looking ahead, Tocqueville also anticipates what contemporary feminist theorist Judith Butler describes as “gender troubles.” In Botting’s view, both Tocqueville and Butler appreciate the complex ways in which women and their sexuality shape the mores and manners that animate the culture of democracy. In Tocqueville’s case, the transformation of American girls from objects of sexual desire coveted by the male gaze to mothers who bear primary responsibility for the transmission of manners takes place between volumes 1 and 2 of Democracy. Botting further suggests that Tocqueville’s shifting attitude toward women parallels his own marriage and an increased ability on his part to identify with the sacrifices of young American wives.

Sartre’s play No Exit is described in order to demonstrate the nature of imprisonment that results from looking at oneself via the mirrors of social judgment. In a similar vein, the “male gaze” is analyzed as the imprisoning reduction of the female body as an it-position in the service of the pleasure of the male viewer. This is followed by a discourse about racial discrimination in which the powerful and discriminating other is not simply an “objective” reality outside the self but an organizing part of it. Furthermore, it is argued that positions are not always fixed but, under specific circumstances, flexible as exemplified by a series of psychological experiments investigating the so-called rubber hand illusion. The flexibility of positioning and repositioning is further explained by the story of James Griffin who changed his skin color from white to black. Finally, the dialogical self is described as inherently social, spatial, temporal, and historical.