Bodies Under The Operation:A Study Of Disciplinary Power In Sky Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe

Disappearing Moon Cafe,as Chinese Canadian author Sky Lee's representative novel,won the 1990 City of Vancouver Book Award and was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award,after its publication in 1990.Through reviewing the history of the Wong family,this novel narrated by the fourth-generation Kae vividly describes Chinese immigration history,the development of Chinese community and the collision and assimilation of different cultures.Moreover,as a female author,Lee displays the living condition and fate of the four generations of the Wong women and even early Chinese Canadian women.This thesis analyzes the relationship between the body and disciplinary power in Disappearing Moon Cafe from the perspective of Foucault's disciplinary power.It elaborates the space that guarantees the operation of disciplinary power,three means that discipline bodies and the consequences of the functioning of disciplinary power.In Disappearing Moon Cafe,the ubiquitous gaze makes every Chinese immigrant who stays in the Panoptic Chinatown live under the eye of power.Meanwhile,the mainstream discourse and a series of laws and documents not only regulate Chinese Canadians' behaviors,but also further reinforce their internalization of those discourses.Consequently,disciplinary power unnoticedly and unceasingly exercises on bodies and reaches into them,which turns Chinese immigrants to be docile and even to defend the operation of power spontaneously.However,as disciplinary power also arouses resistance,reflected in the process of the characters' resistance in the novel,this thesis also discusses the possibility and significance of resisting being disciplined.From the interpretation between disciplinary power and the body in the novel,it can be realized that the docility or resistance of the body is derived from the cooperation of the multiplicity of force relations and a set of undetected mechanism and strategies in the immigration period.Briefly,interpreting Disappearing Moon Cafe with Foucault's disciplinary power brings a new angle to the study of the novel and also provides a profound understanding of the life of Chinese Canadian immigrants,especially Chinese Canadian women.