Gender and Sexuality in Asian American Literature

Abstract

his essay aims to provide an overview of representations of gender and sexuality in Asian and of the developments in Asian cultural criticism that have made the study of such representations possible. The difficulties of the task are manifold, for there is no satisfactory theoretical vocabulary for the interconnectedness, mutual constitution, and operational simultaneity of race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. In academic investigations each of these has a history of serving as a discrete analytic category, but it is in fact impossible to separate their workings, and Asian cultural critics have long struggled to characterize their complex interrelationships and to resist their separation. Mitsuye Yamada deplores the notion that and womanhood are at war with each other and resents the pressure on women of color to choose between the two (1981, 73); Elaine Kim speaks of the American tangle of race and gender hierarchies and describes Asian political and sexual objectification as having been tightly plaited (1990b, 69); and Sau-ling Wong considers gender and ethnicity fused: Ethnicity is, in some sense, always already gendered, and gender always already ethnicized (1992, 126). Analyzing Asian women in global capital, Lisa Lowe asserts in that throughout lived social relations, it is apparent that labor is gendered, sexuality is racialized, and race is class-associated (1996, 164), and King-Kok Cheung states that from the beginning, race and gender have been intertwined in Asian history and literature