Proquest Dissertations
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University of Alberta Fashioning Identities: The Semiotics of Dress in Asian American Literature by January Yee Hiong Lim (C) A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Department of English and Film Studies Edmonton, Alberta Spring 2008 Library and Bibliotheque et 1*1 Archives Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de I'edition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A0N4 Ottawa ON K1A0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-45556-2 Our file Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-45556-2 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives and Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par Plntemet, prefer, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans loan, distribute and sell theses le monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, worldwide, for commercial or non sur support microforme, papier, electronique commercial purposes, in microform, et/ou autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. 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Canada Abstract This dissertation is an interdisciplinary investigation into the mutually constitutive relationship between dress signifiers and Asian American identities in Asian American literature in the 1990s. It extends Roland Barthes' concept of "written clothing" and draws on insights of fashion theories to unpack the representations of identities within dress signifiers and to contextualize them within larger discursive structures and embodied practices. The dissertation reads Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters (1990), Mavis Hara's "Carnival Queen" (1991), and Chay Yew's A Language of Their Own (1994) and A Beautiful Country (1998) in order to argue that there is no grand narrative of progress, or a totalizing Asian American history, but diverse narratives and affective experiences refracting Asian American negotiation of and resistance to the embedded meanings of race in the construction of national identity and the U.S. nation. These literary texts turn to a network of dress references to remember Asian American immigration history, U.S. imperialist interests in Southeast Asia, and their resulting taxonomy of identities. This study suggests that the relationship between the Asian American body and dress these texts describe functions as an archive of memory as well as a resource to understand and trace the historical and demographic shifts in U.S. society in the 1990s. In this sense, these texts not only interrogate the management of national identity and the discourse of hygiene within and beyond the spatial borders of the U.S., but they also raise the matter of connective histories that interlink mainland U.S. to Hawaii and countries in Southeast Asia such as the Philippines. Acknowledgements This dissertation would not have been possible without the generous support and patient guidance provided by my supervisory committee. I am especially grateful to Teresa Zackodnik who always made the time and effort to read my drafts again and again. Through her scholarship, incisive questions, and intellectual guidance, she helped me understand different theoretical approaches as well as reminded me the political relevance of my study. For intellectual advice and critiques, I thank Mark Simpson and Cecily Devereux. I am grateful to Donald Goellnicht for his generously responsive readings of my work and for his insightful feedback. I would also like to thank Susan Smith for her helpful and constructive suggestions. Table of Contents Introduction: Dress, Fashion Theory, and Asian American Literature 1 Chapter One: Reading Through Clothes: Dismantling History and 38 Constructions of Identity in Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters Chapter Two: "Royal representatives of our school": Technologies of Dress 126 in Mavis Hara's "Carnival Queen" Chapter Three: "My Makeover Life in America": Language, 194 Sartorial Connection, and Bodily Grammar in Chay Yew's A Language of Their Own and A Beautiful Country Closing Thoughts 268 Works Cited 278 1 Introduction: Dress, Fashion Theory, and Asian American Literature In the frontispiece of The Language of Clothes, Alison Lurie inserts W. Miller's drawing of a man in a T-shirt with "I WEAR THIS THEREFORE I AM" printed on the front.1 Drawing attention to dress as undergirding self-fashioning, Miller's print raises the question, what does it mean to try to attain an ideal embodiment of identity through clothes? In turn, my project asks, what is the advantage of drawing together the field of dress and fashion theory with Asian American literary studies? One effect of such an inquiry is to show the ways in which material practices of the everyday can generate debate and discussion about Asian American subject formation as well as the adequacy of Asian American itself as a category or identity. Initially a category for the government to allocate economic and political resources in the 1960s, "Asian American" became a familiar term by 1976. Yet, the pervasive racial-discourse around Asian bodies, the internal diversity of Asian America, and the varied material conditions of Asian Americans' lives today need to be considered in the context of a larger past that includes imperialism over there and U.S. legislation out here. What grounds Asian American critics' emphasis on the heterogeneity within Asian America, as well as disidentification among Asian American ethnic communities, is not simply that Asian America comprises diverse ethnic communities with multiple differences, but also the historical racial discourse of Asian bodies in the U.S. that continues to view them as essentially the same. Without the homogenizing racial 1 The drawing originally appeared in The New Yorker Magazine on May 22, 1978 (Lurie 267). 2 discourse of Asian bodies and a dominant conception of a monolithic, essentialist Asian America, Asian American critics might not have to belabour the point of difference and heterogeneity within Asian American community. Sandra Weber and Claudia Mitchell provide a useful means of entry into dress as tool to comprehending the past in their account of what they call "memory prompts" (256). They write: "Some people seem to remember events in greater detail when they begin with sartorial details, and tell more compelling stories when they stop to attend to clothes" (256). Given this conception, I would argue that "clothing memory" has the potential to address the complexity of Asian American interests and needs, as well as reimagine the question of identities now and for the future (257). Clothing memory and the past it invokes are important because they are also "narratives of resistance, submission, intergenerational conflict, weakness, pain, loss, power, and empowerment" (267). In what ways and to what ends do clothing memory and dress narratives complicate the negotiation that Asian American communities undertake to distinguish themselves from one another and dismantle misrecognized Asian American bodies? It is in light of the diversity and internal heterogeneity of Asian America that I want to use clothing as a means of exploring the ways in which Asian American communities and individuals of different classes within these communities negotiate their positions in Asian America and beyond U.S. borders. This study presupposes that dress practices frame and are framed by historical moments, and explores the ways in which characters in Asian American texts re-present Asian American identities by covering or embellishing their 3 bodies or by dressing against the grain in relation to race and sartorial discourses at particular moments in order to complicate representations of Asian Americans and foreground Asian Americans as active agents in the production of identities. I take my cue from Roland Barthes, who took fashion literature seriously and analyzed the "written language of Fashion" in fashion magazines from 1957 to 1963 (11). In "History and Sociology of Clothing," Barthes argues that both dress and language are "a system and a history" (8). "An article of clothing may seem to be 'meaningless' in itself," Barthes writes, "so we must then, more than ever, get at its social and global function, and above all its history; because the manner in which vestimentary values are presented (forms, colours, tailoring, etc.) can very well depend on internal history of the system" (14). Barthes's emphasis on the connection between dress and its historio-social functions offers a productive way of extending his notion of "written clothing" to reading Asian American literature (Fashion System 18). I will examine how Asian American literature uses written clothing as a theoretical, critical, mnemonic, and narrative device to attend to questions of racial identity as a condition of belonging and/or not belonging. In my project, I will consider how Asian American writings are grounded in developing a critical and constructive view of Asian American subjectivity and the establishment of cross-cultural affiliations.