Paper short abstract:

This paper describes and analyzes how Falun Gong - both illegal anti-China 'evil cult' and Chinese cultivation practice of physical/ethical refinement and redemption - is transnationally mediated, embodied and reconciled through what I refer to as the 'aesthetics of conviction.'

Paper long abstract:

Since the Chinese government's campaign of persecution, de-legitimization and iconoclasm against Falun Gong, the movement has established an informal 'Middle Kingdom' in New York - the global city from where various transnational practices and media seeking to contest, persuade and 'save' Chinese people and the world have been authorized by Falun Gong's guru, Master Li. Using theories of religion, media and body, I draw upon my ethnographic PhD research in New York and Hong Kong concerning contestations over mediating Falun Gong and how people are being incorporated. This paper contextualizes and analyzes both Chinese state and Master Li's mediations of Falun Gong and (particularly) how they are reconciled through practices/forms of cultivation: what I refer to here as an 'aesthetics of conviction'. While 'aesthetics' is approached as authorized conglomerates of space, media (broadly defined) and practices which compete for bodies and loyalties, 'conviction' is approached simultaneously as the everyday embodied processes through which people are convicted as criminals/persecuted, cultivate certainty and convictions, and seek to convince others. The paper emphasizes the necessity of analyzing the transnational, contested and experiential dimension of the aesthetics of illegality/criminality so as to grasp how authority is contested and established but also how people subject to and reconcile competing forms of aesthetics as part of accessing new life-worlds of imagination, ethics and belonging.