Construction Of Subjective, Hybrid, And Fluid Female Identity In Diaspora: A Study Of Gish Jen’s Mona In The Promised Land

The variety of ethnicities in America implants the multicultural features in its literature. With the development of ethnic political movements, ethnic literature and diaspora literature have become hot research issues in cultural studies and attracted the attention of current domestic and foreign scholars on culture studies; therefore, Chinese American literature bearing the dual-cultural features deserves more attention in American literature. Ethnic identity has always been the motif of Chinese American writers’ writings; furthermore, the construction of ethnic identity has changed from monistic cultural identity to multicultural identity. In these C hinese American writers, Gish Jen focuses on the construction of multicultural identity that makes Mona in the Promised Land a prominent work in Chinese American literature. With her humorous and insightful writing style, she describes the bewilderment, confusion, and comprehension of Mona, a second generation of Chinese American, in the construction of the minority female identity in diaspora; therefore, it is worth a further study on the construction of her identity. This study adopts the theories of post-colonialism and feminism to probe the construction of the multicultural, hybrid, and fluid female subjectivity identity of Mona, who is a minority female in the diaspora. Edward Said’s Orientalism is beneficial to the comprehension of the Orientalist ideology in the white dominant American society and of the source and the state of discrimination towards the minorities; the researches on the third world female social status and identity in Gayatri C. Spivak’s feminist theories contribute to the analysis on the journey of Mona’s female subjectivity exploration; Homi Bhabha ’s the “Third Space” theory in The Location of Culture can be applied to the construction of Mona’s hybrid identity negotiated within C hinese, Jewish, and American cultures; besides, Stuart Hall places cultural identity into the dynamic developing history, which can be used into exploring Mona’s fluid cultural identity.