Contingencies of Dispersed Identity in Lydia Minatoya's "The Strangeness of Beauty"

Abstract

This essay examines the relationship between local and global to ask how feminists may best engage the questions of race, class, and gender in the study of transnational, postmodern subjects. What common ground can be found among women from widely different locations, particularly in understanding the oppression of many different groups of the world’s women? The essay looks chiefly at the novel by Asian American author Lydia Minatoya to read the hybridity of transnational states of identity. The essay argues that Minatoya incorporates the history of Japanese empire-building in her fiction and memoir to demonstrate how identity is racialized and gendered in a particular locale and in historical and social context, thus suggesting that such identities occupy multiple sites of being.