'For every gesture of loyalty, there doesn't have to be a betrayal': Feminism and cultural nationalism in Asian American women's literature

This dissertation examines the ways in which Asian American women create gendered consciousness within the bounds of one pervasive paradigm, that feminism represents a betrayal of cultural nationalism. As biculturalism becomes expressed as the tension between acculturating and upholding Asian tradition, their writing reveals that national identity is formed out of response to contested territory over women's roles, the parent/daughter relationship, and, more specifically, feminine sexuality. This work suggests that as Asian American women writers posit varying views of feminism as resolutions to the conflicts they experience mediating between ethnic and American cultures, hybrid national identity becomes negotiated through gender issues.; The dissertation links sexuality to the formation of national identity, looking at the ways in which the body is constructed as a site of national divisions and loyalties. In the face of this construction, Asian American women's textual negotiation of biculturalism exhibits the complex ideological tension between feminine accommodation and feminist resistance. As American "freedoms" become posited against a repressive home culture, liberal feminist tenets of equality and individualism are equated with Americanization. This opposition between cultural nationalism and emerging feminist consciousness must be reconciled within the process of narration. Other texts challenge the opposition between ethnic and feminist alliance by articulating the interconnection between race and gender in the formation of collective consciousness. The dissertation's conclusion locates issues of identity politics, critical positioning, and authority within the territories and agendas marked by feminist theory, ethnicity theory, Cultural Studies, and Asian American Studies, focussing on the way in which structures of opposition and alliance seem enforced by disciplinary lines.; Through readings of texts by Jade Snow Wong, Amy Tan, Le Ly Hayslip, Bharati Mukherjee, Maxine Hong Kingston, Sky Lee, Janice Mirikitani, Merle Woo, Mitsuye Yamada, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Cynthia Kadohata, Jessica Hagedorn, Joy Kogawa and others, the dissertation develops a theory of acculturation that has resonance for the texts of other women of color. By looking at the relationship between feminism and nationalism, it reflects upon the complex cultural negotiation that Asian American women confront in constructing identity within overlapping discourses of race and gender.