Bennett Yu-Hsiang Fu. Transgressive Transcripts: Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Chinese Canadian Women’s Writing.
Year: 2012
Type: article
Abstract: Bennett Fu's Transgressive Transcripts studies the ways four Chinese Canadian women writers-Sky Lee, Larissa Lai, Lydia Kwa, and Evelyn Lau-produce "hidden transcripts," defined as a "critique of power spoken behind the back of the dominant" (James C. Scott qtd. in Fu 1).Fu situates the re-evaluation of female bodies and sexuality within the larger context of Canadian history and culture, arguing that these women "translate their personal experiences into texts that articulate the heroines' sexual desires, fantasies, and practices in an explicit manner.In other words, they participate in the discursive formations of history, ethnicity, and sexuality.More precisely, in an attempt to highlight the 'bad subject,' they engage with the notion of transgressive sexualities" (8-9).Largely influenced by the sexual/textual politics of the 1980s and early 1990s, Fu employs the feminist theories of Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Elizabeth Grosz, Judith Butler, and Foucault's History of Sexuality, using such recognizable notions as "two lips" (Fu 75), "abjection" (96), "chora," (107), and "M/other" (114) to read subversion in his texts.The book is divided neatly into four chapters with a chapter for each author.The chapter on Lee is entitled "Spatial Transcript" and "deals with how migrant female bodies perform in various locations and how defined and confined spaces intervene in alternative sexualities" (29).Fu writes, "Lee creates a genealogy of female characters who transgress normality; in particular, the female bodies in Lee's novel traverse the hyphenated space by subverting established patriarchal laws to claim their subjectivity" (29-30).This first chapter looks at the way the multi-generational family saga of Disappearing Moon Café, which follows families of Chinese Canadians from 1892 to 1986, moves from confinement to mobility, using both "historical facts and literary magic realism" (30).Fu contends that "space is the condition and milieu in which corporeality is socially, sexually, and discursively produced.Space . . . is a crucial factor in the social production of sexed corporeality: the built environment provides the context and the coordinates for contemporary forms of the body" (34).Thus, by the fourth generation, Kae and Beatrice reverse the trajectory of the female immigrant experience as they are "illuminated in Hong Kong" rather than B o o k R e v i e w s
Source: Ariel
Author: Eleanor Ty
Language: English
Topic: Gender and Feminist Studies
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Gender equality
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2994075162
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