Moving beyond Rangoon: The construction of disabled bodies in twentieth-century colonial, postcolonial, and Asian American literature

This study encompasses the fields of Disability Studies, Asian American Studies and Postcolonial Studies. I examine the intersections between Asian American and Postcolonial literature through Disabilities Studies, which considers issues of able-bodiedness and normalcy, against which certain identities and characteristics are considered deviant, disabled and disruptive. I examine the ways in which compulsory heterosexuality has been working in and around these three fields of study by considering how heteronormativity fails because queerness is also working in and around these three fields of discourse. I move Disability Studies further into Globalization Studies with an inclusive analysis of Asian American and Postcolonial theory and literature. To situate Disability Studies as a theoretical link between Asian American and Postcolonial literature, I move beyond the established, Orientalizing narratives of Burma, and examine the colonial body, the colonized body and the postcolonial body to position disability as a unifying trope that at the same time shows different material and historical conditions. I examine George Orwell's Burmese Days, Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter and Helie Lee's Still Life with Rice to analyze compulsory systems of heterosexuality and able-bodiedness, theories from Adrienne Rich and Robert McRuer, respectively, to set up Disability Studies as a linking field. I discuss Wendy Law-Yone's The Coffin Tree to connect Postcolonial and Asian American literature. I analyze Ma Ma Lay's Not Out of Hate, Aung San Suu Kyi in Freedom From Fear and Letters from Burma, and Pascal Khoo Thwe in From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey, to describe the various kinds of disabled bodies being produced from colonial Burma to the present-day authoritarian, Burmese military government.