Not only that, you will daily reaffirm your commitment to the mark. Seen through this lens, the queue is the more brutal enforcement technique: “You will wear the mark. hair queue n: US (single braid of hair down back) natte nf : tresse (de cheveux) nf: join the queue v expr: UK (wait in line) faire la queue loc v: print queue n (backlog of documents to be printed) (Informatique) file dattente dimpression n : Alice checked the print queue to see how long she might have to wait for her document. If my face is tattooed by a conqueror, I can plausibly deny my consent in the conqueror’s absence. The queue (Chinese: Binzi) was a male hairstyle worn by the Manchus from central Manchuria and later imposed on the Han Chinese during the Qing dynasty. One quick addendum: compare the queue to a face tattoo: both can be used to signify an ingroup and outgroup, but the face tattoo does not required a daily re-affirmation of allegiance / subservience. Maybe then the short provides a daily reminder, a renewal of loyalty. The long provides that durable externally verifiable seal of allegiance. The queue is simultaneously the extreme of long and short. Will they be executed? Will the Qing be forgiving? This drama is played out in Lu Xun’s Storm (風波), as villagers contemplate their fate and punishment, having shaven their queues to appease some invaders, waiting for the Qing to return. Where the enforcement announces itself: anyone who betrayed the Qing will need another three or four years before they can pass themselves off as Qing-loyal again, until their hair has fully regrown. Ideally, the male villagers are expected to resist unto death, never to forfeit their queue. When the Qing retake the town, they can readily identify who has betrayed them. Any man allowing his queue to be shaved thereby breaks his symbolic allegiance to the Qing. This is the mechanism of this technology of enforcement: when bandits invade the village, queues signify loyalty to the Qing. In China during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) men were required to have the queue hairstyle, where the hair on top of the scalp is grown into a long single. ‘Those with a full queue are loyal to the Qing, those without are enemies” ![]() Hair that is either shaved, long and unkempt, unbraided, or a long beard are contrasts with normal. The solution was to grow a symbol on the top of each subject’s head, a symbol that takes years to fully develop, and suffuse that symbol with the significance of loyalty. For women, it is long and braided into a single queue. ![]() How can the ruling power enforce loyalty? How can the ruling power retroactively discover who among the villagers betrayed them in their absence? Depending on a certain Brownian motion, some months of the year the town is occupied by bandits, others by the Qing. It goes like this: imagine an outlying village, somewhere outside the direct zone of Qing military and political control. Reading Lu Xun’s Storm (風波) I learned that the queue was a form of loyalty-enforcement. I used to puzzle over this blanket imposition: why would the Qing be so committed to a single hairstyle?
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