About the Work
“Organs Without Bodies” is a peer-reviewed academic journal article by Zicong Fan, a Graduate Student of English Language and Literature at Hebei University, China. The article was published in the International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences, Vol-9, Issue-6, November-December 2024. The full title of the article is “Do Bodies Without Organs Feel Shame? An Affective Approach of Identity Crisis in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese.” The work is a scholarly analysis that examines the graphic novel American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang, applying a theoretical framework that combines affect theory with the philosophical concepts of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, particularly the notion of the “body without organs” (BwO). The article is structured as a formal academic paper, containing an abstract, an introduction, and several analytical sections that build a sustained argument about identity, shame, and racial marginalization as depicted in Yang’s graphic novel.
Context
The article situates itself within the broader tradition of Chinese American literature, noting that identity issues of the Chinese American community have been a central concern for Chinese American writers since the beginning of this literary tradition. The author engages with a substantial body of theoretical and critical work, drawing on the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, particularly their collaborative works Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, where the concept of the body without organs is developed. The article also incorporates the affect theory of Silvan S. Tomkins, who conceived shame as one of nine basic affects and a foundational component of emotional life, and the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who expanded on Tomkins’ theories with her concept of the double-movement of shame. The analysis is further informed by contemporary scholars in Deleuzo-Guattarian studies, including Somers-Hall, Buchanan, Kolyri, Pinti, Ibrahim, and Whitlock, as well as the affect theory of Brian Massumi. The article positions Yang’s graphic novel as a text that lends itself to Deleuzo-Guattarian study due to its use of magical realism and its splitting of the protagonist into two extreme images, Danny and Chin-Kee, which embody the tensions of cultural and racial identity.
Structure of the Book
The article is organized into several distinct sections that progress from introducing the theoretical framework to applying it to specific scenes and characters in the graphic novel, culminating in a discussion of the resolution of the protagonist’s identity crisis. The structure begins with an abstract that outlines the central argument, followed by an introduction that presents the novel and its themes. The subsequent sections are titled “The Occluded Flow and Identity Crisis,” “Trans-Fo-Ma Kills the Flow,” and “Shame as an Event,” which examine different aspects of the protagonist Jin Wang’s experience. The article then moves into a detailed discussion of shame and infant development, Sedgwick’s double-movement of shame, the schizoid and the BwO, and Jin’s failure to produce difference. The final sections address an experiment by Hertha Sturm on affect and intensity, the resolution of the three storylines in the novel, and the implications of this resolution for understanding the body without organs as an ongoing process. The article concludes with a summary of the argument that American Born Chinese depicts the identity crisis of a Chinese American youth as a process of de-territorialization and entry into the state of the body without organs, driven by changing intensities of affect.
Detailed Section-by-Section Summary
The article opens with an abstract that establishes the central thesis: since the beginning of Chinese American literature, identity issues have concerned Chinese American writers, and Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novel American Born Chinese depicts protagonist Jin Wang’s identity crisis stemming from his Chinese American ethnicity. The author argues that using an affective model of shame and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the body without organs, the genesis and resolution of Jin’s identity crisis can be understood as a process of de-territorialization and entering the state of the body without organs, driven by changing intensity of affect. This process, the article contends, depicts the authentic living conditions of people of color who are dissociated and marginalized from white American society.
The introduction presents the novel’s success and its interweaving of three characters’ storylines: the Monkey King, Jin Wang, and Danny. The article reveals that at the end of the novel, it becomes clear that Wei-Chen is the Monkey King’s son, and Danny is the white-male image that Jin creates to transform into. The themes of the novel include Asian stereotypes, emasculation of Asian males, racism, and cultural and racial identity. The author notes that Yang uses magical realism, splitting Jin into two extreme images, Danny and Chin-Kee, which lends itself to a Deleuzo-Guattarian study.
The section titled “The Occluded Flow and Identity Crisis” introduces the Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy that defines all things as flows desiring to flow unconstrained within the body without organs. Jin’s flow is occluded, preventing free flow until he resolves his crisis. At the start of his storyline, Jin’s parents’ faces are half-covered by text bubbles or cut by frames, and they remain so until Jin transforms into Danny. This visual technique indicates the internalization of “cultural loss that are ungrievable.” Jin willingly or reluctantly identifies with racial affronts and internalizes racist thinking patterns. This internalization is described as stratification, which withers the body’s affective power and turns it into an organism. The body desires free movement on the “plane of consistency,” which is the “unformed, unorganized, nonstratified, or destratified body.” Bodies are continually stratified, and the body without organs complains: “They’ve made me an organism! They’ve wrongfully folded me! They’ve stolen my body!” This explains why Jin, eating a sandwich rather than dumplings, coldly rejects Wei-Chen’s friendly Chinese greeting in English. The article references Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphor of God as a lobster with pincers, explaining that strata come in pairs, each stratum double, selecting and stratifying in double-articulated form and content. The body without organs is described as a “misnomer,” more accurately a “non-organismic body,” opposing the stratified organization of organs. The question is not how to build one’s body without organs but “how to dismantle the full, organized body.” The body without organs is a repertoire of a body’s full potentiality, and Jin lost access to it due to his inability to break his organism’s shackles, since from existence we absorb societal values through language, desire, belonging, and love.
The section titled “Trans-Fo-Ma Kills the Flow” examines how Jin completely kills his flow when he realizes his dream of being a transformer. Beings are examined affectively, as “human beings are beings of the affect, which is in constant metamorphosis.” Jin’s transformation into Danny is the decease of his flow. Under constant racism, Jin internalizes organismic patterns of racial discrimination. Danny, introduced as independent, is revealed to be Jin. After failing to court Amelia, the white girl, Jin loses self-control, kisses Suzy Nakamura, Wei-Chen’s girlfriend, refuses explanation, and rejects that he and Wei-Chen are brothers and “blood.” That night Jin becomes Danny, leaving everything Chinese behind to become Chin-Kee. The article discusses Deleuze and Guattari’s approach of asking not what a book means but what it functions with, and the question of how desire gets actualized, constituting desiring-machines or assemblages, which are “existing forms of desire.” Desire is not Oedipally repressed but autonomously assembled, and “there are no internal drives in desire, only assemblages.” Schizophrenia is described as a process, not an illness. Desiring-production is immediately consumption and recording without mediation, and everything is production. Desire does not exist except in desiring-machines or assemblages. The relationship between desire and desiring-machines, organism and body without organs, suggests quantum physics, as “reality itself…reduced to the collapse of the virtuality of wave oscillations.” Ironically, the herbalist’s wife tells Jin he can become anything if ready to forfeit his soul, and by becoming what he wants, Jin kills his flow, surrendering to the organism and losing access to the body without organs’ repertoire, which is the summit of his identity crisis.
The section titled “Shame as an Event” identifies the scene where Wei-Chen confronts Jin about kissing Suzy as pivotal for understanding the crisis as an event of shame. Affect is transindividual, “ontogenetically prior to the distinction between the individual…and the collective.” This leads to de-substantialization, where an affect becomes a “free-floating event” not attributable to persons. The article introduces Silvan S. Tomkins, who conceives shame as “one of the nine affects…the starting kit of subsequently emergent emotional life.”
The article then moves into a discussion of shame and infant development, explaining Tomkins’ theory that shame occurs at a very early stage of human development. The subject must be at least three to seven months old, because before that age the infant cannot identify its care-taker’s face. The interaction between infant and care-taker is mutual communication, not the child being a mere recipient of signals. When the child cries, it signals distress to activate the care-taker’s anxiety; when it smiles, it informs the care-taker its needs are satisfied. If the smile is not responded to, the child reacts with a “loss of feedback from others, indicating social isolation and signaling the need for relief from that condition,” shown as the infant “hanging the head and averting the eyes.”
The article then presents Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s double-movement of shame, illustrated by a thought experiment from her lectures: an unwashed, half-insane man wanders into a lecture hall, mumbling loudly and accusatorily, publicly urinates, and leaves. Everyone else looks down, wishing to be elsewhere, burningly aware of being inside their own skin, yet unable to stanch the “hemorrhage of painful identification” with the misbehaving man. This is shame’s double movement: “toward painful individuation, toward uncontrollable relationality.” The audience’s looking down recalls the infant’s primordial head-hanging and eye-averting.
According to Tomkins, shame and enjoyment-joy are the two affect patterns “highly developed in man but weak or not present in other mammals.” Shame occurs only when enjoyment-joy is partially reduced, because shame indicates the subject still desires to rebuild the broken link with the other, despite rejection. The infant averting its eyes shows awareness of rejection in the mutual gaze but also expresses hope the care-taker will respond later. Shame exists as a site where identity questions arise due to “the endopsychic rigor mortis of shame that outlines the individual as a self-identical member of the social.”
Applying this to American Born Chinese, the article notes that Jin is rejected by Greg while courting Amelia. Greg and Amelia represent Jin’s attempt to adapt to white American society. Jin’s shame indicates a residue of his wish to rebuild the lost mutual connection. Jin experiences shame as “the affect of indignity, of defeat, of transgression, and of alienation.” He responds by transforming into Danny, a figure belonging to the community that objects him, blocking the part that reminds him of his ethnicity. Chin-Kee is the incarnation of the blocked racial identity. Danny’s parents’ visages are unidentifiable in ethnicity, blocked by Jin’s subconsciousness. Melanie, Danny’s fantasized girlfriend, is a close anagram of Amelia.
The article then discusses the schizoid and the body without organs, noting that Deleuze and Guattari promoted not schizophrenia but the schizophrenic subconscious drawing freely on the body without organs. Jin’s transformation is an act of building his body without organs, but he risks the empty and cancerous body without organs. Deleuze and Guattari clarify three types: the empty, the cancerous, and the full. The full body without organs is the only productive one; the empty body without organs results from destratification too sudden, “empties bodies of its organs,” as seen in hypochondriac, paranoid, and schizo-catatonic bodies. Jin makes the cancerous body without organs, the most dangerous. Deleuze and Guattari define the body without organs as “what remains when you take everything away”—phantasy, significances, subjectification. Psychoanalysis botches the body without organs by converting everything into phantasy. The cancerous body without organs resides on strata, proliferates after selecting homogenized contents, playing only one song from the infinite repertoire forever, a “cancer of the stratum.” Jin fails to de-stratify or de-territorialize, making himself a cancer of capture points of racism. The herbalist wife’s promise that he can become anything consolidates Jin’s stratum, and splitting into two entities commits him to becoming only the ideal white male image.
The article then addresses Jin’s failure to produce difference. Jin’s reaction to racism is giving up his ethnicity piece by piece, such as rejecting Wei-Chen’s Chinese greeting and stopping Chinese food. He behaves differently but produces no difference; he conforms to racist social values, reifying the Chinese stereotype. After transformation, Chin-Kee reaffirms the biased idea that Chinese students are strange. Danny is haunted by Chin-Kee and cannot escape him, since the removal process is the cancerous body without organs’ mechanism. This failure resembles psychoanalytic desire, which Deleuze and Guattari revolted against with schizoanalysis. Freud’s unconscious is described as “a rowdy guest one has ejected…who continues to hammer on the door,” and the goal is for the unconscious to “produce desire in harmony together” with the Ego and Id.
The article then discusses an experiment by Hertha Sturm and her team, who used three versions of a film to study differences in influence on audiences. The versions were the original wordless film, one with a factual voice-over, and one with an emotional voice-over. Different groups of nine-year-olds rated the films on two scales: happy-sad and pleasant-unpleasant. The result was that subjects rated the sad scenes as the most pleasant. Researchers concluded “the sadder the better,” demarcating a “gap between content and effect” of affects, citing Massumi, who describes this gap as “the autonomy of affect,” a disconnection from the signifying order. The passage clarifies that disconnection does not mean no connection at all; the connection is not a conventional indexing of the image received by the subject. The autonomy of affect demonstrates a sequencing of meanings on a parallel level of intensity, where sadness is registered as pleasantness. Massumi defines intensity as “the strength or duration of the image’s effect.”
In the fight scene of the novel, Chin-Kee’s head falls to the ground, turning out to be a mask used by the Monkey King as his disguise, serving as the twist that converges all three storylines. In their conversation, the Monkey King tells Jin that he should realize how good it is to be himself. Jin’s parents’ visages are no longer covered, making it easy for the audience to tell their ethnicity. The schizoid Jin transforms into is cured through de-territorializing schizoanalysis. As a Chinese American, Jin cannot be straightforwardly Chinese nor American; he needs to let the two co-exist in harmony, with flows traveling between them, with the intensity of the two identities interacting in dynamic balance. Jin needs to build his own body without organs to access “a state of metamorphosis,” allowing the self to be “open to all its potentialities.” With the revealing of Chin-Kee’s real identity, Jin returns to his true self. Chin-Kee and Danny have merged by physical connection, the punch Danny delivers to Chin-Kee, allowing Jin to transform from an organismic state to a “non-organismic” state, the state of the body without organs. Jin gains “the courage to face the bewildering space of liminality and to do the work of constructing a hybrid identity without relying upon the false security of an essentialized finite principle.”
The final twist converging the three storylines is described as pure magical realism. The resolution of Jin’s identity crisis being magical realist is imaginable since the Monkey King is introduced at the beginning as a main character. However, this magical touch leaves potential danger for Jin, a remnant of his identity crisis. The article cites Deleuze and Guattari: “[a] plateau is a piece of immanence. Every BwO is made up of plateaus. Every BwO is itself a plateau in communication with other plateaus on the plane of consistency. The BwO is a component of passages.” In the final pages, where Jin reconciles with his Chinese self-identity and Wei-Chen, only three characters are involved. The Monkey King is a magical character, Wei-Chen is the humanoid incarnation of the Monkey King’s son, and only Jin is a human being in the real world. This indirectly confirms that the resolution of the identity crisis merely happens in Jin’s mind or phantasy world. The trans-individuality of affect makes it impossible for a body without organs to exist on its own. As a body without organs, Jin is open to full potentiality, but he is also assumed to continue to experience racism, since the environment and his classmates have not changed. The body without organs is in constant metamorphosis, meaning sedimentation is incessantly happening. Affect is stratified by an abstract machine, described by Deleuze and Guattari as the organism: “a phenomenon of accumulation, coagulation, and sedimentation that, in order to extract useful labor…imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchized organizations, organized transcendences,” which “reduces complexity in producing a body composed of homogeneous layers.” Jin may fail to communicate with other bodies on another plateau, or botch again once another organism is formed. “Becoming BwO as anti-racism line of flight is a dynamic, ongoing process; one is always and forever in search for it, it can never be attained once and for all.” The process is a peregrination, “beyond the organism and at the limits of the lived body.” Deleuze and Guattari contend: “You never reach the Body without Organs, you can’t reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit.” Jin still faces threats from other bodies and his own body. The conclusion summarizes that American Born Chinese tells a story of identity crisis and its resolution through the framework of the body without organs and affect theory.
Main Arguments
The central argument of the article is that Jin Wang’s identity crisis in American Born Chinese can be understood as a process of de-territorialization and entering the state of the body without organs, driven by changing intensity of affect. The author argues that Jin’s crisis is not merely a psychological or social phenomenon but an affective one, rooted in the occlusion of his flow and his internalization of racist thinking patterns, which stratify his body and turn it into an organism. The article contends that Jin’s transformation into Danny represents the death of his flow and his surrender to the organism, constituting a cancerous body without organs rather than a productive one. The author further argues that shame is a pivotal affect in understanding the crisis, as it reveals Jin’s residual desire to rebuild the broken connection with the white society that rejects him. The article maintains that Jin’s failure to produce difference, instead conforming to racist social values, reifies the Chinese stereotype and prevents him from accessing the full repertoire of the body without organs. Finally, the article argues that the resolution of the crisis, achieved through the magical realist convergence of the three storylines, is a de-territorializing schizoanalysis that allows Jin to let his Chinese and American identities co-exist in harmony, but this resolution is precarious and ongoing, as the body without organs is a limit that can never be fully reached.
Key Concepts
The article relies on several key concepts from Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy and affect theory. The body without organs, or BwO, is the central concept, defined as the “unformed, unorganized, nonstratified, or destratified body” and described as “what remains when you take everything away”—phantasy, significances, subjectification. The article distinguishes between three types of BwO: the empty, the cancerous, and the full, with the full being the only productive one. Stratification is the process by which bodies are organized into organisms, imposing “forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchized organizations” that reduce complexity. De-territorialization is the process of dismantling the organized body to access the BwO. The plane of consistency is the field of unformed potentiality on which the BwO operates. Desiring-machines, or assemblages, are “existing forms of desire,” and desire is not Oedipally repressed but autonomously assembled, with “no internal drives in desire, only assemblages.” Schizoanalysis is the method Deleuze and Guattari propose to replace psychoanalysis, promoting the schizophrenic subconscious drawing freely on the BwO. Affect is defined as transindividual, “ontogenetically prior to the distinction between the individual…and the collective,” and intensity is “the strength or duration of the image’s effect.” Shame, following Tomkins and Sedgwick, is one of the nine affects, occurring when enjoyment-joy is partially reduced, and it has a double-movement “toward painful individuation, toward uncontrollable relationality.” The autonomy of affect, following Massumi, is the disconnection of affect from the signifying order, demonstrating a “gap between content and effect.”
Themes
The article explores several interconnected themes. The theme of identity crisis is central, examining how Jin Wang’s Chinese American ethnicity leads to a crisis of self that is depicted through his transformation into Danny and the incarnation of Chin-Kee. The theme of racism and marginalization is pervasive, as the article examines how Jin internalizes racist thinking patterns and conforms to racist social values, reifying the Chinese stereotype. The theme of shame is developed through the application of Tomkins and Sedgwick’s affect theory, showing how shame functions as an event that outlines the individual as a self-identical member of the social. The theme of the body and its potentiality is explored through the Deleuzo-Guattarian framework, contrasting the stratified organism with the full potentiality of the body without organs. The theme of magical realism is addressed in the context of the novel’s resolution, where the convergence of the three storylines through the Monkey King’s mask is described as pure magical realism, raising questions about whether the resolution of the identity crisis is real or merely a phantasy. The theme of hybridity emerges in the conclusion, where the article argues that Jin needs to let his Chinese and American identities co-exist in harmony, constructing a hybrid identity without relying on an essentialized finite principle. The theme of the ongoing nature of the process of becoming is also present, as the article emphasizes that the body without organs is a limit that can never be fully reached, and Jin still faces threats from other bodies and his own body.
The Author’s Conclusions
The author concludes that American Born Chinese tells a story of identity crisis and its resolution through the framework of the body without organs and affect theory. The genesis and resolution of Jin Wang’s identity crisis is a process of de-territorialization and entering the state of the body without organs, driven by changing intensity of affect. This process depicts the authentic living conditions of people of color dissociated and marginalized from white American society. The resolution of the crisis, achieved through the magical realist convergence of the storylines, allows Jin to return to his true self and construct a hybrid identity, but this resolution is precarious. The body without organs is in constant metamorphosis, and sedimentation is incessantly happening, meaning Jin may fail to communicate with other bodies on another plateau or botch again once another organism is formed. The author emphasizes that becoming a body without organs as an anti-racism line of flight is a dynamic, ongoing process that can never be attained once and for all, and Jin still faces threats from other bodies and his own body.
Significance
The article contributes to the scholarly conversation on Chinese American literature by applying a Deleuzo-Guattarian framework and affect theory to a contemporary graphic novel, demonstrating how these philosophical concepts can illuminate the lived experience of racial marginalization. The article’s significance lies in its synthesis of affect theory, particularly the work of Tomkins and Sedgwick on shame, with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the body without organs, offering a novel approach to understanding identity crisis as an affective and ontological process rather than a purely psychological one. By focusing on the graphic novel’s visual elements, such as the covering of Jin’s parents’ faces and the transformation of characters, the article shows how the medium of the graphic novel lends itself to the exploration of these theoretical concepts. The article also contributes to the understanding of American Born Chinese as a text that engages with complex questions of race, identity, and belonging, and it offers a framework for reading the novel’s magical realist resolution as both a successful de-territorialization and a precarious, ongoing process. The article’s emphasis on the body without organs as a limit that can never be fully reached underscores the ongoing nature of the struggle against racism and the continuous work required to construct a hybrid identity in a society that remains stratified by racial categories.
