Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body (review)

Abstract

630 Biography 22A (Fall 1999) envisions respectful distance and invites partial palpability" (124), which her book achieves in impressive fashion. Vincent A. O'Keefe Traise Yamamoto. Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body. Berkeley: U of California P, 1999. 317 pp. ISBN 0-520-21034-4, $17.95. In the wake of challenges made by contemporary cultural theory to previously unquestioned assumptions of subjecthood in literary studies, historically underrepresented voices are entering the arena of scholarly inquiry. Using the tools of feminism and cultural studies, they ask questions about who may be a subject, how a subject may be recognized, and how it may be embodied in a text. In a book that asks whether a specific group may find subjecthood, the question of "Is the experience of this particular group unique as a topic of inquiry?" implicitly asserts that it is. The monograph, then, becomes a defense of this assumption. In her introduction to Masking Selves, Making Subjects, Traise Yamamoto describes the contradictions in her methodology: This study grounds itself in the awkward juncture between two claims: that identity is a highly contingent and constructed category, one that for marginalized subjects must necessarily reference the ways in which the individual body is marked and circulates in the social and discursive arenas; and the somewhat contradictory assertion that for all the language of postmodern subjectivity, there remains a place for the self, that which is often rather condescendingly referred to as the product of backwards humanism. I retain the language of the self in conjunction with that of the subject, conjoined in what one might call a critical humanism, in order to discuss modes of agency that disrupt and cannot be causally or directly traced to the social or discursive constructs that would seem to determine the subject in all its modalities. (3) Masking Selves, Making Subjects is the result of this project, in which the fiction of Japanese American women writers is read as a defense of the writers' selves against the contingencies that endeavor to define them. Yamamoto's work is the first to engage with current debates in literary theory in an examination of post-World War II Japanese American women's writing. She argues that these writers Reviews 631 have dealt with the various encroachments on their identities as defined by their gender, nationality, and ethnicity, by using these very encroachments and assumptions as a "mask" beneath which they may continue to exist, and more importantly, act. As the first of its kind, Masking Selves, Making Subjects bears the burden of presenting as comprehensive a study of the topic as possible, attempting to cover history, personal accounts, theoretical expositions, and textual analysis. Perhaps as a result of the ambitious nature of this task, the book reads somewhat like a collection of five thematically related articles rather than a comprehensive whole; connections are sometimes clumsily made and require that the reader untangle the reasoning behind her arguments. This criticism notwithstanding, these chapters, especially the last three, offer a wealth of information and interpretation on a hitherto untouched topic. Using Edward Said's theory of orientalism as a point of departure in her study, Yamamoto considers how the gaze of the "west" has imagined Japan and subsequently Americans of Japanese descent, especially women, who embody a hyperfeminine vision of the already feminized "east." The first two chapters of this book follow the mathematics behind the lumping together of Japanese American women with Japan through a long history that reaches its defining moment during the Second World War. Yamamoto reveals the western assumptions of the duplicity of the Japanese, who are thought to hide their true selves beneath a veneer. In her readings of film and travel narratives, Yamamoto points out the troubling ways in which the gaze of the (male) west determines to see Japan as a mysterious woman. Yamamoto continues to demonstrate how these assumptions easily were transferred to those whose physical appearance betrays and overrides their nationality as American citizens. The "mask," then, is not a mask that has been designed by its wearer, but one that has been forced upon her by those who view her. What interests Yamamoto is what...