Asian American women have long dealt with charges of betrayal
within and beyond their communities. Images of their "disloyalty"
pervade American culture, from the daughter who is branded a
traitor to family for adopting American ways, to the war bride who
immigrates in defiance of her countrymen, to a figure such as Yoko
Ono, accused of breaking up the Beatles with her "seduction" of
John Lennon. Leslie Bow here explores how representations of
females transgressing the social order play out in literature by
Asian American women. Questions of ethnic belonging, sexuality,
identification, and political allegiance are among the issues
raised by such writers as Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Bharati
Mukherjee, Jade Snow Wong, Amy Tan, Sky Lee, Le Ly Hayslip, Wendy
Law-Yone, Fiona Cheong, and Nellie Wong. Beginning with the notion
that feminist and Asian American identity are mutually exclusive,
Bow analyzes how women serve as boundary markers between ethnic or
national collectives in order to reveal the male-based nature of
social cohesion.
In exploring the relationship between femininity and
citizenship, liberal feminism and American racial discourse, and
women's domestic abuse and human rights, the author suggests that
Asian American women not only mediate sexuality's construction as a
determiner of loyalty but also manipulate that construction as a
tool of political persuasion in their writing. The language of
betrayal, she argues, offers a potent rhetorical means of signaling
how belonging is policed by individuals and by the state. Bow's
bold analysis exposes the stakes behind maintaining ethnic,
feminist, and national alliances, particularly for women who claim
multiple loyalties.
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