Differing bodies, defying subjects, deferring texts: Gender, sexuality, and transgression in Chinese Canadian women's writing.

详细信息   

• 作者：Fu ; Bennett Yu-Hsiang.
• 学历：Doctor
• 年：2004
• 导师：Moyes, Lianne
• 毕业院校：Universite de Montreal
• 专业：Literature, Canadian (English).;Women's Studies.;Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies.
• ISBN：0494000414
• CBH：NR00041
• Country：Canada
• 语种：English
• FileSize：14248724
• Pages：247

文摘

Chinese Canadian women's sexuality has a long history as a fantasy structured by conflicting, yet coexisting, stereotypes and distorted images. This dissertation investigates various transgressive representations in Chinese Canadian women's writing to demystify the docile or dangerous models that have come to stand for Chinese Canadian women, their gender roles, and their sexualities. The work argues that modern Chinese Canadian women writers neither attempt to speak for, nor give voice to, a collective identity. Rather, they participate in a transgressive commitment to undermine the long established, but unquestioned sexual normality; they write as resisting subjects to craft rhetoric for their own positions in Canadian and Chinese historical trajectories. These writers' texts explore the interplay between the female body, gender construction, textual production and sexual representations. These writers and the female subjects in their narratives engender their own discourse, which affirms the body's agency and epistemology.;This dissertation brings together four fields of study: feminist theories of the body, gender and sexuality studies, women's writing, and Chinese Canadian Studies. The introduction examines the ways in which female subjectivity is embedded in the discursive formations of history, ethnicity, and sexuality. Chapter One starts with Sui Sin Far (1865--1914) and examines in Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912) the author's biracial identity and identification through internalized sexual transgressions. Chapter Two analyzes SKY Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe (1990) and scrutinizes how "racialized" sexualities reimag(in)e their particular relation to multiple familial and national sites and how diasporic parameters intervene in the racialized and sexualized space. Chapter Three contextualizes the discourse of lesbian desire and the fox-femme fatale motif in Chinese mythology to situate the female voice in cultural disruptions in Larissa Lai's When Fox Is a Thousand (1995). Lai's narrative transgresses and dismantles the binarisms of East-West, present-past, fiction-reality and introduces a new female voice to the discourse of boundary-crossing. Continuing the lesbian leitmotif, Chapter Four analyzes Lydia Kwa's This Place Called Absence (2000) through the lens of abjection, arguing that abjection looms as a transgressive representation in which exile, genealogy, and language are layered with queerness to engender perverse subjectivity. Chapter Five discusses deviant sexuality in Evelyn Lau's Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid (1989) and Inside Out: Reflections on a Life So Far (2001). Lau's deviant positioning as prostitute/runaway/drug addict unfolds another transgressive terrain and provokes difference and defiance in a new direction. The conclusion points toward the necessity of establishing critical models in Chinese Canadian literature and begins with a genealogy of Chinese female sexual and textual bodies performing on the Canadian stage.;By inscribing a new definition of femininity, the five writers under scrutiny circulate a form of their reintegration into the discourse of the creation as "subject to" as well as "subject of." They defy the traditional gender role as the "good subject" and transgress normative conventions to reconstruct a sexual utopic site in textual productions. Each differing body opens up spaces for other defying bodies to engender new discourses in the deferring texts. By recovering a hidden lacuna in the history of Chinese women's writing in Canada, this dissertation offers a stepping stone for the development of Chinese Canadian literature in English as well as for the dissemination and re-inscription of female sexuality in Chinese Canadian history.