Zhou, Yi. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 153-168). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.2 / Table of Contents --- p.6 / Introduction --- p.8 / Chapter Chapter One: --- Return to the Parole --- p.22 / Chapter 1.1 --- The Language Dilemma and Appeal of Asian American Literature --- p.23 / "Language: Community, Nation and Power" --- p.24 / Claiming a Right to Standard English --- p.29 / Claiming a Right to Multiple Tongues --- p.32 / Problems with Previously Mentioned Ways of Resistance --- p.36 / Chapter 1.2 --- Kingston´ةs Language Choice and Writing Strategies --- p.40 / Poetic Language: From Kristeva to Kingston --- p.41 / Heterogeneity: Kingston as a Bilingual Writer --- p.44 / Diversity： A New Fusion Language --- p.51 / Dialogism: From Words to Culture --- p.58 / Chapter Chapter Two: --- Return to the Body --- p.73 / Chapter 2.1 --- From Parole to the Body --- p.76 / "Langue, Parole, Subject" --- p.77 / Deconstruction of the Subject: The Maternal Body --- p.79 / “Chora´ح-- A Bodily Metaphor for Resistance to Langue --- p.81 / Chapter 2.2 --- Body-Based Writing --- p.83 / Let the Body Speak --- p.84 / "Female Writers, Body Consciousness" --- p.87 / Kingston´ةs Bodily and Life Experience --- p.90 / Chapter 2.3 --- Gaze on the Body´ؤKingston's Body Writing on Male --- p.93 / Objectification: Seeing and Being Seen --- p.94 / Objectified Body-From Body to Flesh --- p.96 / Objectification as Alienation --- p.99 / Body´ةs Spontaneous Resistance: Pain --- p.103 / Chapter Chapter Three: --- Return to the Minor --- p.111 / Chapter 3.1 --- Speech Act: Another View on Resistance to Langue --- p.113 / Austin: Speech Is Itself a Form of Action --- p.113 / "Derrida: “Iterability""" --- p.116 / Judith Butler： A Politics of the Performative --- p.119 / Chapter 3.2 --- The Revolt of Minor Tongue: On Language Appropriation --- p.122 / "Performing a “Twin Skin""" --- p.123 / The Stereotypical Linguistic Reality --- p.127 / "Insurrectionary Speech Act: Towards a “Parasitic"" Language" --- p.130 / Chapter 3.3 --- One Man Play: On Minor Writing as Felicitous Political Speech-Acts? --- p.134 / A Performance of Identity Politics --- p.136 / Minor Writing: A Site for Felicitous Performance? --- p.138 / Conclusion --- p.145 / Bibliography --- p.153

The potential confrontation of Oriental and Occidental values represents one of the most important topics of scholarship since the twentieth century. Within this debate, American-born Chinese female writers occupy a unique position in their preoccupation with the two seemingly irreconcilable cultures. On the one hand, their Western upbringings entices the distortion of China from an Orientalistic perspective, on the other hand, they find their desire to come to terms with their ethnic cultural heritage to be equally difficult to supplant. It is a dilemma which sparked conflicts even within the Chinese American community, and begs the redefinition of the Chinese American female identity. It is thus, by applying Simone de Beauvoir’s ethical notions about Self/Other relations to the writings of Chinese American female writers, I consider how subjectivity is not substantive but a situated experience of selfhood in movement, and argue that Chinese American female writers may still be internalizing and perpetuating oriental stereotypes in their works, when they too have started re-orienting and hence, re-orientalising China and their Chinese identity. The United States of America is to Chinese American women as alienated at times as China. Under the framework, I further consider the futility of disputing the dual identity of Chinese American female writers to the extent to which identity can be considered as an ambivalent and ambiguous notion that has a temporal element in it. As a writer writes first and foremost about his or her own singular experiences in relation to the world, this thesis tackles the above question by examining how elements of anguish, solitude, and death, as noted by Beauvoir, and that are often present in Chinese American female writers’ accounts of their singular experiences, connect them to others. Through the evocation of such elements to establish the connection between Self and Other, which constitutes the authenticity of self-expression as opposed to suppression of self-assertion, one’s struggle with separation and one’s own truth is represented. In this sense, it is not, the ultimate result or triumph of an individual’s struggle with unity or individuality that matters; but rather, the process of self-struggle that corresponds to the dignified human existence within Beauvoir’s philosophical framework. The three elements of situation anguish, death and solitude are dealt with in this project in the following context: in Chapter Two, Ann Mah’s anguish over Chinese and American food is examined in connotation to the relations of herself with others around her that coerces her to reflect upon her ethnic and cultural affiliations. In Chapter Three, death is explored through the discussion of the footbinding notion in which the death of the foot signifies the end of docile acceptance as well as the beginning of transformations. Solitude is elucidated in Chapter Four through Maxine Hong Kingston’s warrior woman conceptualization that adopts and later re-orientalises silence. In all three situations, I pay attention to the way re-orientalisation is achieved in the Chinese American female project of selfhood in movement towards the Other. / published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Indiana University of Pennsylvania. / Includes bibliographical references.

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The following study compares and contrasts the ways three women writers craft narrative selves in their autobiographical texts. Each of the women, the Metis author Maria Campbell, the Chinese-American writer Maxine Hong Kingston, and the Irish lyric poet Eavan Boland, calls on oral techniques to write her autobiography. The study examines how each of the women draws on the oral traditions of her mother-culture, subsequently using characters from culturally distinct mythologies to express her own growth as writer. The methodologies that inform this study are a combination of postcolonial theories about identity and language, and closely related feminist theories about power relations between women and colonialism and women and patriarchal power. Structuralist and feminist theories about mythologies, as well as analysis of the psychodynamics of orality have also influenced the analysis undertaken in this thesis.<p> The research conducted provides evidence that each woman writes a narrative self structured on the framework of the heroic, but infused with culturespecific heroic characters and characteristics from the mother-culture's oral traditions. Maria Campbell's Half-Breed shows distinctly oral influences both in its narrative structure and in its characters. For example, by comparing Maria's character to Wesakaychak's character from Nehiyawak Trickster cycles and other Native North American Trickster cycles, the study shows how Campbell's character resembles the character from oral tales. The Trickster, and consequently, Maria, destabilizes boundaries and unsettles domains of knowledge, therefore, questioning colonial and patriarchal discourses and imagery. In Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston likewise battles limiting stereotypes held by both her Chinese-American community and the mainstream community she inhabits. The character Maxine imagines herself as both woman warrior and a warrior poet, characters she hears about from her mother, and in the process of chronicling her own training as a woman warrior, she also chronicles her training as a word warrior. Eavan Boland, in Object Lessons unsettles the conventions surrounding the hero-bard whose shadow falls over Irish lyric poetry. While she is marginalized in different ways than either Campbell or Kingston, she shares their desire to show women as active agents in their own lives. These writers show that foremothers exist in other storytelling traditions, even if the textual record does not reflect the influence that female storytellers have had on it. As the women (re)construct themselves in their autobiographies, they work within and against conventional Western heroics, building characters who enrich and redefine what it means to be heroic.

The following study compares and contrasts the ways three women writers craft narrative selves in their autobiographical texts. Each of the women, the Metis author Maria Campbell, the Chinese-American writer Maxine Hong Kingston, and the Irish lyric poet Eavan Boland, calls on oral techniques to write her autobiography. The study examines how each of the women draws on the oral traditions of her mother-culture, subsequently using characters from culturally distinct mythologies to express her own growth as writer. The methodologies that inform this study are a combination of postcolonial theories about identity and language, and closely related feminist theories about power relations between women and colonialism and women and patriarchal power. Structuralist and feminist theories about mythologies, as well as analysis of the psychodynamics of orality have also influenced the analysis undertaken in this thesis.<p> The research conducted provides evidence that each woman writes a narrative self structured on the framework of the heroic, but infused with culturespecific heroic characters and characteristics from the mother-culture's oral traditions. Maria Campbell's Half-Breed shows distinctly oral influences both in its narrative structure and in its characters. For example, by comparing Maria's character to Wesakaychak's character from Nehiyawak Trickster cycles and other Native North American Trickster cycles, the study shows how Campbell's character resembles the character from oral tales. The Trickster, and consequently, Maria, destabilizes boundaries and unsettles domains of knowledge, therefore, questioning colonial and patriarchal discourses and imagery. In Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston likewise battles limiting stereotypes held by both her Chinese-American community and the mainstream community she inhabits. The character Maxine imagines herself as both woman warrior and a warrior poet, characters she hears about from her mother, and in the process of chronicling her own training as a woman warrior, she also chronicles her training as a word warrior. Eavan Boland, in Object Lessons unsettles the conventions surrounding the hero-bard whose shadow falls over Irish lyric poetry. While she is marginalized in different ways than either Campbell or Kingston, she shares their desire to show women as active agents in their own lives. These writers show that foremothers exist in other storytelling traditions, even if the textual record does not reflect the influence that female storytellers have had on it. As the women (re)construct themselves in their autobiographies, they work within and against conventional Western heroics, building characters who enrich and redefine what it means to be heroic.

Even in the context of the multicultural scholarship, there is a lack of psychological research addressing the in-law relationship experiences of East Asian American daughters-in-law (DILs) residing in the U.S., specifically with regard to the emotional impacts and resiliencies that these women may experience in the face of potentially conflictual family dynamics. The primary purpose of this study was to contribute to the multicultural psychology literature by exploring the cultural, relational, affective, and coping experiences of these women, especially with regard to their unique social location and cultural contexts of Confucian and European American influences. The present study utilized a consensual qualitative research (CQR) methodology to analyze the narratives of 12 Korean and Chinese American women who identified as 1.5 and 2nd generation and as DILs within their family network in the U.S. The results shed light into the affective and relational duress that they experienced due to their in-laws’ differing cultural values and traditional expectations. In particular, the participants reported that they often used indirect coping strategies to manage these stressors. The study offers multicultural training and practice recommendations for mental health service providers to consider when working with Korean and Chinese American women and their families.

Chinese female immigrants were active cultural contributors and participants in nineteenth century America, yet Americans often simplified their roles into crude stereotypes and media symbols. The early western accounts concerning females in China created the fundamental images that were the basis of the later stereotypes of women immigrants. The fact that a majority of the period's Chinese female immigrants became prostitutes fueled anti-Chinese feelings. This thesis investigates the general existence of Chinese prostitutes in nineteenth century America and how they were portrayed in the media. American attitudes toward white women and their images of Chinese women created the stereotype of all Chinese female immigrants as immoral. Thus, they became unconscious pawns of nineteenth century American nativist forces wanting to limit and prevent Chinese immigration based on prejudicial and racist attitudes.

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of English