The Shadow Erotic: Inarticulate Pleasures in Asian/American Women's Literature and U.S. Empire

Abstract

Feminist and Asian Americanist critique has historically pointed out how representations of Asian/American women’s racial-sexual injuries reveal the mechanisms of U.S. imperial violence as much as the patriarchal underpinnings of nation-states. As a consequence, Asian/American women’s sexualities have been over-emphasized as abject and exemplary sites of pain such that their capacities for erotic joy have been difficult to imagine. This dissertation addresses the lack of critical insight on representations of Asian/American women in states of erotic ecstasy and passion; it demonstrates how expressions of such heightened feeling and desire reveal the various liberatory visions that Asian/American women seek to materialize. These visions speak to the particularities of their historical-material contexts and their incommensurability with one another, the inadequacies of the very category of Asian/American women, and how Asia and Asian-ness persist as products of an Anglo-European colonial-imperial imaginary.

The Shadow Erotic further names how abject joy informs these liberatory visions. Audre Lorde outlines the erotic as a resource that resides in a deeply spiritual plane, which takes shape as the non-rational knowledge of feeling. Adding the shadow to Lorde’s concept clarifies how the hegemony of colonial-imperial epistemologies positions the erotic as an inferior counterpart to the rational and secular plane of materialism. However, shadows also evoke the power of mystery and inchoate formations to bring chaos to any established order of material reality. The Shadow Erotic approaches how representations of Asian/American women’s erotic joy initially appear abject and inarticulate for challenging the realm of possibility within colonial-imperial imaginaries; the force of its strangeness grows to disorganize colonial-imperial sensibilities and nurture the liberatory visions of Asian/American women.

Elaborating on the above, I conduct historically informed close-readings of novels situated in the transnational contexts of U.S. imperial interventions in the Philippines, Korea and Vietnam. The chapters analyzes how the shadow erotic manifests in each novel, which cites specific events of U.S. racial-sexual violence against Asian/American women and the forms of erotic joy that are made im/possible as a result: the postnational erotic between a Korean/American War Bride and ghost of a Korean survivor of military sexual slavery in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman (1997); the interracial erotic between two girls—a Vietnamese adoptee and her White neighbor—in Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth (2010); the biblio-erotic between a Chinese-Filipino woman and English Literature during the rise and fall of Ferdinand Marcos’ U.S.-backed dictatorship in Gina Apostol’s Bibliolepsy (1997); and the vegetal erotic between a Korean woman and plants in The Vegetarian, which occurs in the face of U.S. imperial and neoliberal interventions that facilitate the rise of Korea’s meat consumption. These case studies ground our understanding of Asian/American women’s sexualities within the sensual materiality of their historical entanglements beyond victimhood. The Shadow Erotic concludes with an elaboration of how racial-sexual justice involves imagining and materializing erotic joy at sites of historical and structural violence despite joy’s seemingly frivolous and fleeting nature.