Racial And Gender Transgressions In Contemporary Asian American Literature

Transgression is not simply the border-crossing. Based on the definitions and interpretations given by Bataille, Foucault and Bakhtin, transgression is an on-going, open-ended dialogue with the limits, which should function as the marks of differences rather than antagonism or separation. In the process of transgressing, the limit is a borderland for exploration, reflection and critique. Transgression is also a mode of resistance that resists the binaries through the reversal and hybridization of the binary opposites so as to challenge and overthrow the authorized hierarchy. Transgression as a mode of resistance does not work in a well-organized, unifying way for a resistant force strong enough for revolutions, but remains discursive and deconstructive and engages in self-reflection and self-critique. Hence, transgressive writing works in a more subtle way by chipping away at certain modes of thinking that contribute to the perpetuation of oppressive political structures.The term "Asian American" was coined by Yuji Ichioka in the late 1960s. Thus this dissertation sets the start of "contemporary Asian American literature" in the late 1960s. The term "Asian American" marks a new unifying identity for ethnic groups with Asian origins. However, it may also become an encaging limit for individuals. From the 1960s till the present, the development of contemporary Asian American literature can be divided into two periods:the first period is from the 1960s to the 1980s, within which Asian American transgressive writers like Maxine Hong Kingston and Frank Chin try to find or establish their own racial and gender identities and free themselves from the "either-or" situation by refusing to assimilate into white mainstream society as the "model minority" and renouncing their Asian cultural heritages as oriental relics; the second period is from the 1990s till the present which is marked by Lisa Lowe’s key words, "heterogeneity, hybridity and multiplicity". Within this period, the voices of Asian American queer writers catch attentions with their wanton play and parody with fixed identities in their transgressive writings. Meantime, in this post-identity era, many Asian American writers also experiment with literary genres and use multigeneric structures as metaphors for the equality and peaceful conversations among true selves free from any group-based racial and gender identities.This dissertation draws on the conception of transgression and applies the methods of close-reading and textual analysis to the study of racial and gender transgressions in contemporary Asian American literature. The dissertation will discuss how contemporary Asian American writers use the transgressive writing strategies including linguistic transgressions, bodily transgressions and generic transgressions in their respective works to reveal their critical thinking and reflection on their racial and gender identities and their transgressions over these identities.This dissertation includes six parts:introduction, four chapters and conclusion. The introduction will give a brief survey of the conception of transgression and the development of contemporary Asian American literature followed by a literary overview of studies of racial and gender transgressions in contemporary Asian American literature that have been conducted recently at home and abroad. It will also introduce the research content, methodology and significance of this dissertation. Chapter One will define the term transgression and trace the trajectory of the development of its conception along with a detailed overview of racial and gender transgressions in contemporary Asian American literature. Chapter Two will study the linguistic transgressions in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Frank Chin’s The Chickencoop Chinaman. As the representatives of the first period, they both choose speech disorders, ankyloglossia and logorrhea as signifiers for their racial and gender identity crises and hope with the control over their tongues/languages they will be able to transgress the limit of being "Asian" or "American" and find their own identities. Chapter Three will focus on bodily transgressions in two contemporary Asian American queer writings, Russell C. Leong’s Phoenix Eyes and Other Stories and R. Zamora Linmark’s Rolling the R’s. This chapter will analyze how Asian American queers in the borderlands marginalized by American mainstream society and Asian American communities transgress the geographical boundaries in the trend of globalization and the racial, gender and class hierarchies and flaunt the multiplicity of their racial and gender identities through transgressive ways such as fusion, hybridization, drag and gender performances. Chapter Four will study two multigeneric works in the "post-identity" era, Kenji Yoshino’s Covering and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Fifth Book of Peace. The chapter will exhibit how Yoshino and Kingston through the generic transgressions challenge and break apart their readers’ preconceptions and encourage them to free their true selves from the limits of group-based racial and gender identities and to perceive the world and define the civil rights and world peace from a universal perspective. The conclusion will summarize the dissertation and reemphasize the significance of the conception of transgression in the development of contemporary Asian American literature.The significance of the conception of transgression lies in its exploration and reflection on the limits and its constant going beyond the limits. Inspired by this conception, contemporary Asian American writers persist in their self-reflections and self-critiques, and they keep on transgressing the racial and gender boundaries in their writings with ceaseless inventions in such aspects as themes, contents, genres and techniques. This dissertation hopes to transgress the current studies on contemporary Asian American literature and offer a new perspective.