This dissertation investigates how men on the racial margins, whose ownership of masculinity is contested within the American context, co-opt, subvert, and rupture that is disidentify with conventional registers of American manhood. José Esteban Muñoz explains disidentification as a survival strategy by which those outside the racial and sexual mainstream aim to negotiate and ultimately transform the cultural logic from within (11). While Muñozs work concentrates on the disidentification process of queer subjects, I theorize his paradigm in regards to Asian American literature by close-reading Frank Chins _The Chickencoop Chinaman_ (1981) which, I believe, best exemplifies disidentifying Asian American men in action. In addition to Chin, this dissertation reads works by three Asian American male authors Younghill Kang, Gus Lee, and Leonard Chang in order to elaborate on how these authors rewrite the dominant script of American manhood; these writers seemingly contend that the most effective way to disarticulate the majoritarian discourse that emasculates Asian American men is to for them to embrace black masculinity, which connotes hypermasculinity. These writers, nonetheless, elide that hypermasculinization of black bodies is the flipside of the same strategy that feminizes Asian American bodies, one that is mobilized to emasculate all nonwhite males. Thus I also delve into the slippage that occurs during the convoluted processes of disidentification. Along these lines, I critically assess (and, at the same time, embrace the shortcomings of) how Asian American men interrogate, reconcile with, and extenuate the prevalent definition of American masculinity. Acknowledging the possibility that disidentification may be an imperfect solution to remasculinize minority male subjects, theorizing literature by Asian American men through disidentification enables me to extensively critique the fixity of race and gender as categories.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-11282005-115711 |
| Date | 28 November 2005 |
| Creators | Chung, Hyeyurn |
| Contributors | Cecelia Tichi, Sheila Smith McKoy, Tina Chen, Jay Clayton |
| Publisher | VANDERBILT |
| Source Sets | Vanderbilt University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu//available/etd-11282005-115711/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Vanderbilt University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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