Gender And Sexuality In The Works Of Chinese American Literature

A survey of the thematic concerns of Chinese American literature shows that not onlygender and sexuality have been repeatedly portrayed by a large number of ChineseAmerican writers in their artistic imagination but Chinese American literary study almostbegins with gender and sexuality issues. The studies that have been done mainly focus onthe racialized gender and sexuality repression, but less concern the flexibility andvariability of gender and sexuality in Chinese American literature separating from thecategories of the binary opposition and oppression hypothesis.This dissertation takes three representative works in the third period of ChineseAmerican literature including David Henry Hwang’s drama M. Butterfly (1988), FrankChin’s Gunga Din Highway (1994), Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Fifth Book of Peace(2003) as cases. With reference to the methodology of history, culture, psychoanalysis andethnography, this dissertation explores the feature of kaleidoscope of gender and sexualityunder scrutiny.This dissertation unfolds itself along three central conceptions of gender theory withseven sections. Apart from introducing the main arguments and the organization of theproject, and clarifying conception and the significance of this study, the first chapter makesa survey of the emergence, the development and the study which have been done both inAmerica and mainland China.The second chapter attempts to highlight those male writers who are ignored by criticsalong with women writers in the long-standing literary war in different races which isgenerally considered as the war between women writers and male writers so as toemphasize complex connotations of gender and sexuality traversing races.The third chapter reviews several works relevant M. Butterfly with intertexual effect,and illustrates different connotations of “Butterflies” which reflect the nonlinearcharacteristics of gender culture and discontinuous features between gender and sexuality.Particularly sexual drive and cultural costume make the existence of body detach fromeach other as a certain gender/sex based on a series of patriarchal regulations in M. Butterfly. Chapter four attempts to interpret the process of Ulysses’ gender socializationfrom a six years old child to a fifty-one grown-up in Gunga Din Highway (1994) withpsychoanalysis and cultural study, and tries to represent Frank Chin’s progress in feminismperspective. But those Chinese American male images the writer attempts to highlight withthe powerful sexual drive are full of contradictions and limitations, that is, sexuality itselfis not seen to be prioritized over gender (masculinity) that the writer manages to restore.The fifth chapter illustrates the social mechanism and conventions that genderegalitarian generates based on fundamental notions of spatial, temporal context and thewebs of significance that the human beings depend on in daily life in Kahalu’u which is theway generally applied in anthropology. Kahalu’u, a disconnected place external to theEuropean capitalist globalization context with “multiple” and “peaceful” as its social andcultural impetus, is a place that Wittman renunciates the given white male models by thewhite patriarchy and shapes a totally new complex masculinity beyond norms in theprocess of pursuit of his unique political stance “American Pacific”.Based on systematical analysis of central conceptions of gender and sexuality in thesethree representative works, the conclusion summarizes the whole project and points out theinspirations and significance of the three texts in different aspects.