earticle

영어

T his paper analyzes cultural and political implications in some novelistic and critical representations of A sian masculinity. Frank Chin is almost representative of a group of critics who argue that the representations of A sian man in such Asian American women writers as A my T an and Maxine Hong K ingston replicate and reproduce the racist bias of the mainstream white culture. A t the same time, however, Chin’s arguments reveal the self- consciousness and insecurity of A sian men who feel threatened by the white majority, as well as a masculinist prejudice regarding the authenticity of cultural heritage. T he story of T ang A o in Maxine Hong K ingston’s China M en symbolically illustrates the extent to which Chinese men who emigrated early in A merica were put under political oppression and physical, as well as psychological, pain. A lthough K ingston uses strategies that make it more mediated and implicit than Chin’s discourse, her work effectively portrays and critiques the disempowerment and symbolic castration that many A sian A merican men underwent in the history of A merican immigration. Simultaneously, through a vivid sketch of the pain and sufferings of a man who has to live as a woman, she also succeeds in pointing out the problems of women’s position in patriarchy. While K ingston discloses the history of violence committed by the complex mixture of racial hierarchy and sexist inequality, Marguerite Duras’s T he Lover offers a new type of Asian man- - a maternal man, who refuses and subverts the dual system of racist and sexist ideologies. By studying selected works of the three writers mentioned above, I analyze their respective discursive strategies. In so doing, I explain how each of them criticizes, and further attempts to revise, racist and sexist tendencies that they perceive in representations of A sian masculinity in the West. Such an endeavor ultimately leads to a reconsideration of the nature of political practice that literature can perform.