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Writing \that other, private self\: The construction of Japanese American female subjectivity
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Writing \that other, private self\: The construction of Japanese American female subjectivity
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Dissertation
Writing \that other, private self\: The construction of Japanese American female subjectivity
1994
Overview
This study examines the autobiographies, fiction, essays and poetry by Japanese American women writers from the l940's to the present. It argues that the construction of the self as subject for these women is crucially shaped by the intersections of race, gender and national identity. Informed by feminist, postcolonial and cultural studies theories, I contextualize Japanese American women's literary tradition historically and socially, paying particular attention to raced gender constructions, in order to explore formal strategies for creating resistant texts. Because Japanese American women have been consistently conflated with the figure of the infantilized and hyper-feminized figure of the Japanese woman, I begin by exploring, through travel narratives and films, how the Japanese woman has been constructed as a metonymic representative of Japan and the ways in which gender representations are a key element in the West's imperialist ideologies relative to Japan. The prevalence of the \"geisha-izing\" of Japanese American women suggests that any discussion of their subjectivity must address how they both differentiate from and reappropriate Japanese femaleness and the tactics of agency they employ to do so. Within this theoretical context, the second half of this study looks at the textual strategies Japanese American women writers adopt in order to articulate the complex specificities of their subjectivity. I argue that the trope of masking and the multiple signifying possibilities of silence are crucial means through which these writers claim voice and agency, particularly in autobiographical and fictional narratives. I extend this discussion in the final chapter, which focuses on Japanese American women's poetics. Though varying widely in style and content, the three poets I discuss all self-consciously address issues of nationalism, essentialism and sexuality in ways that both contradict and reply to the earlier tradition of Japanese American women's writing.
Publisher
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
Subject
ISBN
9798645412708
