Through a Burmese looking-glass: Transgression, displacement, and transnational women's identities

Using Burma as a unifying example, this dissertation traces how gendered racial identities are articulated against each other. The Burmese women examined here write against their material and discursive "prisons" by using "flexible tactics of displacement" to counter competing systems of authority; Western ideologies and Burmese cultural signifiers become tools used to disrupt intersecting repressive hegemonies. Part I highlights the "damage" done to Burmese female subjectivities by Westernization and "modernity" by comparing George Orwell's Burmese Days to Ma Ma Lay's Not Out of Hate; Part II focuses on Aung San Suu Kyi and Wendy Law-Yone's Irrawaddy Tango to illustrate how Burmese women tactically and flexibly invoke the global/West to serve local and "minor" agendas. Maneuvering between Orientalism and globalization and demonstrating discursive dexterity in transnational circuits of power, Burmese women translate their discursive imprisonment into states of productive constraint.; Chapter 1 demonstrates how Burmese Days illustrates the displacement of Burmese women and prefigures the rise of venal masculinity in contemporary Myanmar. The novel's portrait of Late British imperial Burma lays the foundation for Burmese women's invisibility and hypervisibility. Chapter 2 tracks how Not Out of Hate articulates writing and Buddhism as feminized spaces of resistance against a deleterious "modern" patriarchal paradigm that forces Burmese women and "tradition" into positions of subordination. Chapter 3 compares representations of Aung San Suu Kyi with how she writes herself. The Burmese democratic leader transforms androcentric paradigms to serve her agenda of change and reconciliation. Utilizing and deconstructing familiar notions of identity, nation, and gender, Aung San Suu Kyi tactically combines global and local discourses to articulate her "flexible" politics of resistance. Chapter 4 analyzes Wendy Law-Yone's portrayal of Third World women as survivors defying Western and Asian regimes of authority. Irrawaddy Tango explores how authority, cruelty, and oppression on both sides of the Pacific reflect each other. Law-Yone reframes "subaltern" agency and explicates the dilemma of crafting an ethnic minority subject position for Burmese in the West.; In conclusion, I recap how Burmese women use diverse cultural grammars toward liberatory ends and outline how these narratives of Burma critique complacency, hegemony, and power.