Ciencia Política

Mutual Aid Carnivalesque

By “mutual aid carnivalesque,” I mean an aesthetic that both represents and performs the sociopolitical and affective dimensions of mutual aid. This aesthetic, furthermore, is best encapsulated by the topsy-turvy absurdism of Bakhtinian carnival, a classic formulation in performance and comedy studies that becomes nakedly obvious in the social context produced by the opening year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Bakhtin’s carnival, elaborated variously across his classic Rabelais and His World (1984), describes a topsy-turvy world of revelry in which the standard social order liminally reverses its standard power relations, until order is restored at the end of its duration. However, to better comprehend the notion of mutual aid carnivalesque, we must first briefly discuss the subjects of mutual aid and comedy, and then appreciate their conceptual intersection.

We can begin with Patricia Nguyen’s (2022) formulation of “mutual aid aesthetics” in her recent article “Abolition as Durational Performance: Mutual Aid Aesthetics in Chicago’s Southeast Asian Neighborhood.” Describing her own arts & mutual aid work with her organization Axis Lab in Chicago, Nguyen explains that mutual aid operates from “the tenet of ‘solidarity not charity,’” manifested through the “Food Not Cops” program, which itself drew from decades of Southeast Asian refugee mutual aid support systems that emerged in Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s (2022, p. 470). Nguyen describes Axis Labs’ efforts as “providing basic necessities and public art for the community” (2022, p. 477), combining efforts to distribute food and other essentials with the creation of public art that sensorially intervenes into the urban space. For example, Axis Labs would distribute food, but needed to relocate repeatedly in response to police intimidation; later, they developed a public art project called “Argyle Storybooth,” which mounted portraits of residents on the metal gates of “burglar bars” considered blight by the city (2022, p. 478- 479). Residents, moreover, provided oral histories and engaged directly with the public display. In a sense, mutual aid aesthetics, in Nguyen’s article, describe the development of public community art that emerges in conjunction with the practice of redistribution, both materially and epistemologically.

Through performance studies, we can grasp the multi-sited levels of intervention occurring in a project like “Argyle Storybooth,” although what I ask here is: how precisely do we characterize the aesthetic qualities themselves? Is the truly remarkable work of Nguyen and Axis Lab, strictly speaking, aesthetic, even if it is unquestionably art, and art done alongside/through mutual aid? ² Jennifer Ponce de León (2021) offers clarity on these matters by considering “[a]n other aesthetics ” as: a materialist understanding of aesthetics that is not based on the presumed specificity of what is socially designated as “art” and pertains, instead, to the composition of a sensorium, which is both mental and perceptual. It is based on the recognition, central to Marxist thought, that subjects’ experienced lifeworlds are produced, reproduced, and transformed through social practice (p. ⁴ ).

Moreover, writes de Leon, “the production of experienced lifeworlds via material practices operates within a complex social totality that is overdetermined by the social relations of production” (2021, p. ⁵ ). However, de Leon makes a key distinction between “art” and “aesthetics,” which are distinct despite their overlap. While art refers to a specific set of techniques and practices, aesthetics engages in shaping social worlds that extend well beyond these boundaries and encompass broader social practices (de Leon 2021, p. ⁵ ). De Leon rejects “mimetic conceptions of art” in favor of understanding “how aesthetic practices are constructive of social reality” (2021, p. ⁶ ). In this respect, de Leon provides a materialist-Marxist language for describing a central concept in performance studies: the capacity of aesthetic practice to produce the social rather than merely serve as the superstructural symptom of a separate materiality. A public art project like Argyle Storybooth seeks not beauty but intervention. In fact, it moves its participants and its practitioners away from the fantasy of beauty and derives a sense of irony and recognition from its table-turning. The imposing outsideness of the metal gates is covered by the intimate insideness of the portraits. By denaturalizing the public and private together, their artificiality and their constructedness are exposed. In this respect, Argyle Storybooth’s aesthetic character, I would argue, is carnivalesque.

If there is an art practice of mutual aid, or accompanying mutual aid, I suspect that it lies not in art’s most rarefied sectors, but in aesthetics’ most grotesque and kinesthetic zone, that is, humor. There may, in fact, be something conventionally anti-aesthetic about mutual aid; however sublime we may find the transitory utopianism of its exchanges. Mutual aid –and I say this admiringly– may seem to resist the aesthetic merely by virtue of its decentralized solidarity. There is no veil but the bareness of need and the capacity to give. It may seem that if there is an affective ontology of mutual aid, then it lies closer either to the sobriety of bare life or, alternatively, to the subversive mischief of the carnival.

Yet we may find a particularly aesthetic vision for mutual aid when we examine its universalist arguments. We may go all the way back to the 1902 monograph, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, by the anarchocommunist Peter Kropotkin. This first major academic study of mutual aid, drawing from both zoology at the turn of the century and early anthropology, argues that mutual aid is as critical –indeed more so– for species survival and evolution. It is worth noting that Kropotkin begins his argument not with a materialist analysis, but with an examination of feelings and drives. In the scenario of seeing his neighbor’s house on fire, he feels driven to help bring a pail of water, not due to any particular love for who is inside, but because of a broader inherent sense of human solidarity. Although it borders on sentimentalism, Kropotkin (1902) asserts:

But it is not love and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind. It is the conscience –be it only at the stage of an instinct– of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependency of every one’s happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own. (p. xvi) Kropotkin surveys a range of non-human and human examples to prove this larger philosophical point, thus painting a far more optimistically communal portrait of the “state of nature” than the violent one hypothesized by Thomas Hobbes and other Enlightenment social contractarians. For Kropotkin, mutual aid is not only a specific form and practice of organizing resource distribution, but an inherent quality to human and nonhuman societies at large, something that has only been observed at an exponentially greater scale and sophistication over the following century. It is indeed stating the obvious that life would not continue to exist without symbiosis between plants, animals, and fungi at a microscopic level. ³ But we might consider Kropotkin’s “conscience… of human solidarity” to have an aesthetic impulse not far from that described by de Leon, that is, one that simultaneously envisions a more global sociality (even if “at the level of instinct”) and provides in turn a sensory satisfaction, an intertwining of individual and collective happiness. It is not just the material resources that must be collectivized, but also the affect of joy. Indeed, we may find this sensibility in the ASS mask-making itself, a creative expression found in the stitching, design, and production of the crafts that would also save lives. Besides, in the case of NAMII (2024), it becomes a retinue of performance, as seen in their artist-scholar piece Delusions of Grief: Why Death Should Become US, which features spoken word performed over a reenactment of their sewing for the ASS.

Notably, a Chinese American anarcho-communist intellectual tradition is also more than a century old. As Jane Mee Wong documents, Chinese American anarcho-communists organized in San Francisco Chinatown as early as the 1920s under the Pingshe group, a branch of the Equality Society, and helped organize and empower proletarian workers of the local community (2008, p. 134). As an internationalist organization, Pingshe was equally invested in Chinatown organizing as it was in anarchist revolutionary thought in China, thus making key connections between struggles across the diaspora. The great Chinese author and anarchist revolutionary Li Feigan/Ba Jin, 4 an ideological leader in the Equality Society who was in regular contact with Pingshe, saw mutual aid as the natural state of human beings, but it was impeded by government and private property. He wrote: “we are supposed to practice mutual aid with our compatriots all over the world, but the government tells us to compete with each other” and “property originally belonged to all human beings, but a small number of people, by means of their power and knowledge, took public property as their own” (Li Feigan, 2005, p. 361). ⁵

Moreover, Pingshe took a particular interest in organizing Chinatown garment workers. According to Jane Mee Wong, Pingshe was particularly invested in supporting majority-women garment workers’ strikes. One of their flyers reads: “Liberation has arrived for Chinese Workers / Zhongxing Garment Workers are at the frontline / All American workers unite in Struggle” (Wong, 2008, p. 142). Pingshe, and its leader Ray Jones/ Liu Zhongshi, saw the organizing of Chinatown garment workers not only as a labor struggle, but as one for women’s liberation that also gestured to a potential for multiracial alliance and solidarity, as they “projected their struggle as a nation-wide struggle alongside other American workers of ‘different genders, races, and nationalities’” (Wong, 2008, p. 142).

Even if mutual aid is a transhistorical trait of animal and human societies, Axis Lab and the ASS both demonstrate that it is also inherent to marginalized, dispossessed, and otherwise minoritized communities, emerging from necessity. Indeed, perhaps inadvertently, the ASS found itself echoing ideological and material aspects of Pingshe’s legacy, albeit for mutual survival rather than workers’ empowerment. This is evident from the anthology documenting the work of the ASS, co-edited by Mai- Linh Hong, Chrissy Yee Lau, and Preeti Sharma (2021), which contains reflections not just from Wong but also from members of the entire ASS network. Like Wong in Sweatshop Overlord, the aunties often draw from a wide range of diasporic and indigenous heritages to inspire and historicize their mutual aid efforts. Examples abound in the anthology (Hong et al., 2021): “Superauntie” Constance Parng references her Hakka ancestors from China as inspiration for her heroic organizing efforts to procure supplies for indigenous nations (p. 108), co-editor Mai-Linh Hong draws from her background as a Vietnamese refugee (p. 132-133), Badly Licked Bear connects to her Native American and Jewish American roots (p. 100). As Rebecca Solnit begins in her contribution to the volume,

If aunthood is at its best a form of mutual aid, perhaps mutual aid at its best is a form of aunthood, and both can be forms of resistance to patriarchy and capitalism. That is, they can be more fluid, less linear, transactional ways in which love, resources, and power move in and out and through a life, a group, a society (Hong et al., 2021, p. 168).

The aunty herself is a uniquely important subject in the role of this formulation of mutual aid. As Kareem Khubchandani adroitly describes,

Aunties are women, femme, and queer figures adjacent to or at the periphery of a nuclear family formation—the nuclear unit here also stands in as a metonym for other boundaried institutions such as the university, corporation, or nation that reproduce heteropatriarchal, capitalist ideologies and structures (Hong et al., 2021, p. 223). And indeed, referencing Wong and the ASS, Khubchandani writes: The ASS project, … The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice, and the play Sweatshop Overlord teach us some ways to theorize aunties: a social figure (overlord and caretaker), an affective force (offering reality checks and genuine sweetness), and laboring body (sewing, delivering, haggling) (Hong et al., 2021, p. 222-223).

Moreover, Wong makes this explicitly clear in the Sweatshop Overlord performance. Forming a montage of the ASS projected onscreen, Wong opines:

That’s a lot of Asian women! Is this a coincidence? No! Sewing was passed down to us from our mothers and grandmothers who did it as a rite of passage to America! [Slide: me and my Yin Yin in their laundry] My Yin Yin holding me, her grandbaby, at their laundry and alterations business in San Francisco. Now, nobody ever dreams of doing other people’s laundry for a living, but when the Yellow Peril came to America, WHITE people didn’t like that immigrants were coming for their jobs. So laundry was the only work Chinese people could do at the time, because it was considered women’s work. And in me, their college educated granddaughter, their dreams of GOLD MOUNTAIN have come wildly alive! (p. 10-11) The Asianness of the majority (though not entirety) of the ASS, not to mention Wong, is particularly notable given the widely documented rise of xenophobic anti-Asian violence during the height of the pandemic, with the demonization of China resulting in an intensification of a yellow perilist sentiment that associated Asians in the United States with public health risks going well back to the 19 th century. However, sinophobia in the 21 st century takes on additionally sinister dimensions beyond its predecessors; rather than discourses of decay and ruin. With China associated with opium dens and old-world backwardness, the geopolitical strength of the Xi-era China elevates the nation to an economic and military threat to the state, thus inspiring (post)modern techno-orientalist anxieties alongside the older ones. Accordingly, the ASS is one particularly conspicuous example among many in which Asian Americans drew upon their ethno-racial heritage to combat the pandemic and thus alter the conventional narrative, with Asians exercising community care to ensure public health rather than being the source of the disease’s spread. It also mobilizes an empowered feminized domesticity, undermining the grand narrative of a sinister and faceless geopolitical rival manipulating biological warfare from afar. ⁶

Thus, what is particularly powerful and moving about the ASS’s efforts is their derivation from a lineage of diasporic survival, both formalized (like with Pingshe) and ad hoc deployed (through organic community practice) in solidarity with other fellow dispossessed communities of color similarly marginalized and exploited by systems of racial capital. But how might we consider the work of the ASS and Wong’s aesthetics, both during and after the collective’s efforts, as forming a praxis that might instantiate not only a pan-diasporic solidarity effort, but a broader anarchist sociality? As historian Zoe Baker (2023) has recently described, many historicist and transhistoricist definitions of anarchism offer a vision of a nonhierarchical, mutualist, anticapitalist, and noncoercive society. Baker ultimately prefers a historicist definition, describing a “historically specific form of anti-state socialism that first emerged in nineteenth-century Europe” (2023, p. 17) and convincingly explains the rhetorical necessity for that specificity, lest all forms of socialist imaginings get folded, undifferentiated, into anarchism. And yet, Baker’s description of this nineteenth-century European anarchism bears parallels to the operations of the ASS in their formulation of a political vision:

The theory and practice of the anarchist movement were not invented by a single founding father who developed the ideology in full and then transmitted it to workers. Anarchism was instead cocreated over several years by an international social network that formulated its common program through a process of debate and discussion…. In 1926, the Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad declared that anarchism was born, not of the abstract deliberations of some sage or philosopher, but out of the direct struggle waged by the toilers against Capital, out of the toilers’ needs and requirements, their aspirations toward liberty and equality (Baker, 2023, p. 29).

Similarly, although Wong served as the titular (with comically authoritarian taxonomy) “sweatshop overlord,” 7 she played this role strictly from the standpoint of volunteer logistical coordination, rather than extractive exploitation, with the ASS community by collectively developing their principles through shared democratic practice. Since most of the communication and coordination transpired via a Facebook group, Wong served as the voice of urgency to ensure the needs of communities were met, without this necessarily stopping the group from internally debating its direction and ideology. Wong briefly references this in Sweatshop Overlord: “‘I don’t like the jokey use of the word sweatshop in this group! Can we use another word?’ Aunties. Aunties. Aunties. We don’t have time for the social justice conference right now! We need order” (p. 11).

That said, it is also important to note that the efforts of the ASS were always understood to be finite in temporal scope. Wong repeatedly states throughout Sweatshop Overlord that she is eager for the federal government to assume their work, so they are no longer burdened with the exhausting, uncompensated volunteer effort. In this respect, the mutual aid organization of the ASS was also carnivalesque–in Bakhtinian terms, as it produced (as much as it reflected) a topsy-turvy world that only exists within the durational limits of the carnival. It is worth having skepticism over the carnivalesque’s revolutionary potential; Umberto Eco, after all, states his position on Bakhtinian carnivalesque rather bluntly: “Such a transgressional theory has many chances to be popular, today, even among the happy few…. There is but one suspicion to pollute our enthusiasm: the theory is unfortunately false” (p. 27). The reason is simply because, as Eco explains, the transitory nature of the carnival is intrinsic to its form and requires the establishment of penitent norms to have any effect. The temporal endurance of carnival would lead to its undoing: carnival as status quo would cease to produce its subversive effect, which is why it must be an exception and thus incapable of institutionalization. Its temporal boundedness is intrinsic to its subversiveness; as a durational embodiment, as a posture. The carnival of mutual aid can only be topsy-turvy insofar as the world right-side-up is understood as normal.

In this respect, neither the ASS nor Sweatshop Overlord is altogether anti-state. Although the mutual aid work is framed as a corrective to the state’s failed promises, there is implicitly an understanding that the state should assume the role of guarantor of well-being. Onstage and off, the ASS and the performance seek not to abolish nor supplant the state altogether, but loudly demonstrate the state’s insufficiencies. As Wong states in Day 35 of Sweatshop Overlord, “Among them... ASS WANTS to be obsolete. We don’t have dreams of ‘becoming a non-profit’ or paying ourselves ‘salaries’ or making cute ‘fundraiser’ masks because we don’t want to do this work ever again” (p. 14). Of course, the physical work of the ASS may be better characterized by exhaustion and crisis management than the revelry of carnival, even if the aunties sometimes found joy in community through their labor. It is in the retelling, in the performance of mutual aid, that this revelry finds form, one that can in turn complete the critique of state power even beyond its own text.

Vaginal Cysts, the Pandemic Grotesque, and the Great Leveler

Laughter is no matter for joking, and we shall not give up our right to it…. In church, in the palace, on parade, facing the department head, the police officer, the German administrator, nobody laughs. The serfs are deprived of the right to smile in the presence of the landowners. Only equals may laugh. If inferiors are permitted to laugh in front of their superiors, and if they cannot suppress their hilarity, this would mean farewell to respect. To make men smile at the god Apis is to deprive him of his sacred rank and transform him into a common bull. (A. I. Herzen, as cited in Bakhtin, p. 92)

Laughter can be a great leveler. Bakhtin, writing on medieval laughter, believed that the victory of laughter over fear

clarified man’s consciousness and gave him a new consciousness.

This truth was ephemeral; it was followed by the fears and oppressions of everyday life, but from these brief moments another unofficial truth emerged, truth about the world and man which prepared the new Renaissance consciousness (1984, p. 91).

Laughter provided the temporary affect of counternarrative, a space for clarity before the sobering reality of feudal exploitation would return. Through laughter, writes Bakhtin, “all that was terrifying becomes grotesque” (1984, p. 91), and thus, fodder for mockery and amusement rather than misery.

These are, of course, all massive generalizations, and it is worth discerning precisely why and how the humor in question is funny in order to understand this transformation into grotesquery. Wong’s humor often veers into the zany, the silly, and indeed, the overtly grotesque —as previously mentioned, one of Wong’s signature costumes in previous performance works is a massive vagina bodysuit. It is also useful here to turn to Enjoyment of Laughter, a classic text from 1936 by Max Eastman, which, despite its age and correspondingly outdated joke examples, still provides some of the most valuable frameworks for humor analysis. Among Eastman’s many observations, there are two interrelated poles of laughable things: the witty and the ludicrous. Whereas the witty corresponds to a Kantian definition of the comic, “ an expectation that comes suddenly to nothing ”; the ludicrous corresponds to an Aristotelian one, “ something ugly or distorted but not painful ” (Eastman, 1936, p. 49; original emphasis). Both, argues Eastman, still derive from the same underlying logic, which is, in essence, a pleasant disappointment that undergirds all laughter. However, the most exquisite jokes, he continues, are those able to combine the ludicrous and the witty, the hideously nonsensical and the ironic.

In effect, Sweatshop Overlord is a play that excels at transforming grave disappointment into pleasurable disappointment, and Wong does so through applying a grotesque sensibility. The second act, entitled “WE ARE NOW AT WAR WITH THE GOVERNMENT,” begins with the backdrop of far-right protesters storming the Michigan State House projected against the wall, immediately transitioning to Wong staring at her groin and exclaiming: “What the hell is that on my labia?!” She winces and continues: “Another Biblical plague-- BOILS! An embodied manifestation of those armed assholes protesting at the Michigan State House demanding to be set free” (Wong, 2021, p. 15). She quickly slips her palm in between and out of her thighs, addressing the aunties and declaring the possibility of right-wing anti-maskers infiltrating their ranks to sabotage their supply chains, and noting the need to carefully screen new aunties who join the group. She places a balloon between her thighs to represent the cyst, inflating it gradually as her monologue continues.

Figure 2: Wong inflates a balloon at her crotch, representing a cyst on her labia, and waddles around onstage.

Source: Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord (2021), dir. Chay Yew.

She goes on about the national retaliation against mask mandates, all while the balloon representation of her cyst gets comically larger, and giggles sprout from the audience. Eventually, the distraction of the vaginal cyst grows unbearable, so she calls an advice nurse at Kaiser Permanente, who advises her to abstain from wearing underwear for a few days after she sends her a photo of the cyst through her phone.

Wong then proceeds to waddle, cartoonishly clasping the balloon between her legs, narrating meeting one of the aunties, Amy, but, overcome with pain, she tells Amy her vaginal situation. Amy immediately insists on taking Wong to the clinic, with Wong insisting, “No, we can’t go in that building, it’s filled with Covid! I could get us both killed! Just the car ride alone could be a super spreader (no pun intended)” (Wong, 2021, p. 14-15). Then, the stage is awash in red, with hand-to-hand battle sounds playing overhead, and Wong enters the persona of a war diarist with a vague and intermittent southern accent, sliding back along the floor and sword-fighting her scissors in the air:

Dear World, as we approach the enemy bunker that is the Kaiser Permanente building, I feel the enemy virus all around me. The 100,000 dead Americans. Infections doubling every few days. If I can make it out of here with most of my crotch, I hope we do not contract covid and taint (no pun intended) these masks headed in the Navajo Nation relief vehicle.

Lord forgive us if we create Smallpox Blankets part ² . If I perish, at least I learned what a true friend is. A true friend is someone you met in a rideshare years ago, added on Facebook but didn’t really talk to since. Then, during a pandemic, volunteered to do spreadsheets and mask deliveries.

Then risks her life, to let you ride in her backseat with no panties on, to get you safely to the hospital before your crotch explodes. Thank you Auntie Amy, for showing me true friendship. (Wong, 2021, p. 15)

We can dissect each of Wong’s jokes individually for their microand macro-operations. The broader frame of the deadpan war narrative circumscribes the entry into the clinic within an asymmetric genre, an unexpected and irreverent yet plausible analogy. The context of the situation is the bodily taboo of the vaginal itch, “my crotch”, as the delightfully vulgar asset to be saved. The even more irreverent and macabre historical comparison to smallpox blankets in settler colonial genocide as a threat to avoid is all due to the absurd situation caused by the vaginal itch. Finally, a satirical yet sincere reflection on friendship is formed with unspectacular mundaneness, yet proven through dedication in the face of embarrassment.

Wong’s humor is often characterized by a vaudevillian silliness, which bears some similarity to what Sianne Ngai (2012) calls the zany. As Ngai explains, zaniness bears some opposition to productivity:

On first glance, zaniness seems purely a symptom of the perform-orelse ideology of late capitalism, including its increasingly affective, biopolitical ways of meeting the imperative to endlessly increase productivity. Yet for all its spectacular displays of laborious exertion, the activity of zaniness is more often than not destructive; one might even describe it as the dramatization of an anarchic refusal to be productive (p. 12).

The balloon-cyst moment does not quite reflect the frenetic comic desperation of Lucille Ball (balloon/Ball coincidence notwithstanding), emblematic of the zany. However, Wong’s carnival-grotesque slapstick movement of cyst-waddling and scissor-fighting still bears a similar anarchic quality, conveying fatigue, exasperation, and anxious itchiness all at once. But the comic and the earnest fold into one another repeatedly. There is the greater, globally traumatizing absurdity of the justifiable fear of entering public buildings when COVID was at its most menacing peak, and the fear of spreading the virus to indigenous communities (via “Smallpox Blankets Part ² ”) that the aunties were working hard to protect, all while Wong is tortured by the cyst on her labia. The goofiness of analogizing normally mundane tasks made potentially life-threatening in the peak of the pandemic as war drama, all with the singular objective of getting Wong’s vagina to urgent care, punctuated by a series of quips, produces a scene that is as absurd as it is poignant.

Moreover, the sociality that emerges from this humor also recalls Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai’s essay, “Comedy Has Issues”. Partially drawing from Arpad Szakolczai, Berlant and Ngai state that comedy is “at the heart of the public sphere” (2017, p. 237). Moreover, they assert:

Thus comedy isn’t just an anxiogenic tableau of objects disrupted by status shifting, collapse and persistence, the disruption by difference, or a veering between the tiny and the large. Nor is it just a field of narrative expectation punctuated by the surprise of laughter or vertiginous enjoyment. It is also epistemologically troubling, drawing insecure boundaries as though it were possible to secure confidence about object ontology or the value of an “us” versus all its others… Comedy helps us test or figure out what it means to say “us.” Always crossing lines, it helps us figure out what lines we desire or can bear. (p. 235).

Comedy and laughter produce a collectivization, one that can be empowering, troubling, or more often than not, some combination of the two. But in circumstances of desperation or despair, such as the first months of the pandemic, that collectivity and mutual recognition can be a panacea to loneliness. Moreover, the kinesthetic physicality of laughter, the involuntariness of its arousal, produces a shared, live sense of having been acted-upon, far more pleasurably than a pandemic, a repetition of polar difference.

In addition, the carnival-grotesque of this moment cognitively maps the global absurdity of the pandemic onto the absurdity of the balloon cyst and Wong’s slapstick waddling. Bakhtin’s discussion of the grotesque image of the body, key to the carnivalesque aesthetic, is instructive here:

The grotesque body… is a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body. Moreover, the body swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world…. This is why the essential role belongs to those parts of the grotesque body in which it outgrows its own self, transgressing its own body, in which it conceives a new, second body: the bowels and the phallus…. All these convexities and orifices have a common characteristic; it is within them that the confines between bodies and between the body and the world are overcome: there is an interchange and an interorientation (1984, p. 317).

Wong’s vaginal balloon cyst, inflated before the audience, absolutely embodies this “act of becoming,” mirroring the unruly virus that has upended all social life, but with less fatal consequences. What Bakhtin implies here, however, is the grotesque body’s capacity for deterritorialization. Bakhtin unsurprisingly chooses the phallus as a “second body” that extends beyond the grotesque body, but Wong’s balloon cyst queerly serves this same phallic function, perhaps doubly so beyond what a cis phallus would. As a prop, the balloon cyst is essentially akin to a strap-on dildo, and represents the potentiality for “interchange and an interorientation.” The balloon cyst accomplishes this in much the way that Bakhtin describes, evoking laughter from the audience that emerges from an exquisite merging of abject disgust and empathetic recognition, the I-am-and-am-not vaginal cyst.

But these “interchange and interorientation” are moreover reflected in the exposition itself. It is the presence of the cyst that causes Wong to be in the vulnerable position of asking for personal assistance, as opposed to serving as the taskmaster to ensure that others are assisted. The cyst deterritorializes the space between Wong and Auntie Amy, between Wong and the Kaiser Permanente clinic, and between Wong and the audience, thus narratively transforming Wong from provider to recipient. The grotesque body closes the mutual aid loop by opening oneself to both diegetic care and the extradiegetic invitation to laugh. Accordingly, it is within the drama of the vaginal cyst that we see mutual aid carnivalesque manifested in its purest form. Interchange and interorientation are as applicable to the grotesque as they are to mutual aid; therefore, both narratively and aesthetically, Wong embodies “solidarity, not charity” in this scene.

There is, moreover, irony in the zaniness’s resistance to productivity, when Wong and ASS’s mutual aid work demands productivity, not for capital but for community protection. Naturally, much of Sweatshop Overlord does not consist of narrating the actual sewing, but rather, of interruptions of the sewing, the liminal moments in between the ongoing daily grind. Productivity occurs offstage in the material reality of the masks, while Sweatshop Overlord occurs principally when Wong’s fingers take a break to reflect on new developments and national events: the murder of George Floyd, the outcome of the 2020 elections, the deaths of Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Corky Lee, or the arrival of vaccines. All these events are familiar signposts marking the passage of linear time in the undifferentiated temporality of pandemic isolation. And indeed, this is reflective of wide swaths of people given stay-at-home orders during the height of pre-vaccine COVID-19; the days of malaise blend together in memory, and are principally interspersed by Turnernian social dramas.

Still, war is the principal scenario of Sweatshop Overlord, evident from the moment we see Wong’s thread spool bandolier slung diagonally across her pink and gray camo spaghetti tank top. Or, more specifically, the war film: it serves as, in Diana Taylor’s words, “a meaningmaking paradigm that structure[s] social environments, behaviors, and potential outcomes” (2003, p. 28). Sweatshop Overlord ’s war film frame is satirical yet achingly familiar upon reflection, by adding a sense of urgency and life-and-death fear to what would normally be mundane actions due to pandemic conditions. Yet the war film scenario seamlessly transitions from silly to sincere. In Day 289, with the campy soundtrack of a military snare drum and a series of slides of specific aunties, Wong tells their stories of sacrifice in sequence:

Next. Auntie Constance, AKA Auntienie Fauci. You will drive from state to state to buy a used ambulance for Standing Rock. Right now they only have 5 relief vehicles that serve an area the size of Connecticut. Auntie Cenders, my gratitude to you for returning to your machine after the loss of your sister. So many Aunties have been grieving the loss of loved ones right now. We put that grief into our threads (2021, p. 22).

Wong blends a punny quip (“Auntienie Faucie”) with an earnest testimony of the aunties’ dedication through dire personal hardship, before declaring, “Call me crazy but we will win this war. If this is the end! We go down sewing!” and screaming a warcry described in the script as “ a la QAnon Shaman ” (2021, p. 22). Then, lit by the flickering shadows of a battlefield, she frantically throws boxes across the stage, each one landing with the sound of an explosion and Wong announcing each destination: “Forty five masks to Standing Rock! Ten knit caps from Auntie Beverly to the Navajo Nation! Two hundred twenty seven masks to Migrant Head Start!” (2021, p. 22). She ducks behind the cover of her sewing machine and a prop of an oversized pumpkin-shaped pincushion, coordinating with the aunties over radio like an army commander, with a vaguely science fictional laser-gunfire blasting in the background.

This scene from Sweatshop Overlord and the labor of ASS that it recounts bear a virtuosic dimension —and I mean virtuosic in both senses described by Shannon Jackson (2012), that is, the lay sense of requiring exceptional skill, and an inverse sense of virtuosity. Drawing from the ideas of Paolo Virno, Jackson (2012) writes that:

The result is a dispersed virtuosity that uses the linguistic and cognitive “talents and qualifications” that used to be associated with “political action,” but that are now incorporated into the everyday post-Fordist work force…. Virtuosity here is thus decidedly not unique and exceptional but democratized and awkward, something that all of us have the capacity to access. Indeed… you can deliver a mediocre performance and still be a virtuoso (p. 16-17).

Wong’s aesthetic is deceptive: silly, goofy, unpretentious, with self-awareness such as to present the front of de-skilling and strategic amateurism, but actually requiring enormous crafting ability and time. The very act of organizing a nationwide mutual-aid-masking-effort is virtuosic in both the lay sense and the Virnoian sense: mobilizing feminized labor at a grand scale with massive endurance, but in a widely distributed, democratic way, and drawing from a meticulousness not enshrined by rarefied critique but from immigrant and indigenous legacies. The goofy spectacle of lobbing brown boxes of masks across the stage like grenades —Wong does this with no particular acrobatic flair and, nevertheless, performing exhaustion— carnivalizes both of these virtuosities intersecting. Inserting this within the scenario of the war film comedically overtheatricalizes the mask distribution, while simultaneously conveying the very real desperation of frantic completion in a period of ongoing, slow trauma.

Auntarchist Theory

What might Sweatshop Overlord offer our broader contemporary thinking on mutual aid, political organization, and aesthetic form? One very clear conclusion, which we can draw plainly from the writings of Wong and the aunties themselves, is that the social practice of aunties from a wide range of racialized, immigrant, and indigenous social positions converges in solidarity to produce an organic mutual aid praxis. Clearly, Kareem Khubchandani’s ongoing work on “auntologies” and “critical aunty studies” ambitiously maps and theorizes this work at length.

But to deploy a different pun, I consider Sweatshop Overlord and its mix of grotesqueness, zaniness, and documentary to be an exemplary work of auntarchism, a work of theory itself. Although in opposition to anarchism, Marx’s definition of theory is applicable here: “the self-clarification (critical philosophy) of the struggles and wishes of the age” (1992, p. 209) that attempts to “discover the new world through the critique of the old” (1992, p. 207). Sweatshop Overlord is a staged retelling of a durational mutual aid effort facilitated by a performance artist, but we can conceptualize the work of the ASS and Wong’s show as a singular unit. On the one hand, the ASS performatively produces masks to fulfill an actual need within a finite span; and on the other hand, Sweatshop Overlord socially reorganizes its community through the carnivalesque joy of humor. The collective of the Auntie Sewing Squad volunteers hunched over sewing machines asynchronously across the country, then, by mailing, distributing and driving without state guidance or coordination, create new social realities through the reiterative application of their feminized intergenerational inheritance, and, through this care, enact a ruthless critique of a state breathtakingly insufficient at fulfilling its role of the social contract. And through the mutual aid carnivalesque of Kristina Wong, the performance of labor becomes the labor of performance.

It may be true that both the ASS and Sweatshop Overlord still hold hope for the state, properly reformed, as the savior that can relieve them of a role unjustly assumed. Yet, to quote our age’s most prominent utopian writer, José Esteban Muñoz, “it helps us imagine the future without abandoning the present” (2009, p. 56). Muñoz writes this in regards to CLR James’ description of factory workers producing ephemeral, miniature utopias through their social interactions, and we can see this apply just as clearly to the carnivalesque collectivity cohered around a cartoonish vaginal cyst. Muñoz (2009) continues to say:

The state understands the need to keep us from knowing ourselves, knowing our masses. It is ready, at the drop of the proverbial dime, to transform public transportation into policing machines, to call out thousands of cops to match thousands of activists, to wield clubs and fists (p. 64).

Within and between its silly antics, Sweatshop Overlord understands this, providing a vision of freedom through ebullient hilarity. It performs as a work of theory, providing a repertoire of relationality that may be temporally bounded by crisis but transhistorical in its vision of who we can become, and how.

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