Feminism and Racial Homosociality in Carlos Bulosan's America Is in The

Feminism and Racial Homosociality in Carlos Bulosan’s America Is In the Heart 107 Feminist Studies in English Literature Vol.21, No. 3 (2013) Feminism and Racial Homosociality in Carlos Bulosan’s America Is In the Heart Jeehyun Lim (Yonsei University) In Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, Cynthia Enloe summarizes a salient issue in feminism in the following sentence. “Living as a nationalist feminist,” she says, “ is one of the most difficult political projects in today’s world” (46). Enloe’s statement points to feminism’s turn to transnationalism, arguably one of the most notable developments in U.S. feminism in the last decade and half. Feminism’s disillusionment with nationalism, in Enloe, is based on the knowledge feminism has produced on the intersections of nationalism and colonialism in modern-day politics and poignantly communicates feminism’s commitment to exposing the mechanism of gendered violence and exploitation. The challenge of being a nationalist feminist, however, becomes a more complex problem in the case of nationalisms that are associated with and mobilized for anticolonial (or decolonial) movements and sentiments. The critical reception of Carlos Bulosan’s America Is In the Heart (1946) is a place where one can see the tension between feminist analyses 108 Jeehyun Lim and a left critique that is attuned to cultural nationalism as a method of social resistance against hegemony. In this essay I examine Bulosan's text, which has both been celebrated as a text that is illustrative of Asian American resistance to state-led exclusion and racism and been criticized for its replication of the masculinist logic of nationalism, to see what points of convergence remain between a feminist approach and a cultural nationalist approach to narrating resistance. I suggest that the representation of gender and sexuality in Bulosan’s text evades the ontological categories of men and women that often subtend feminism’s understanding of gender and sexuality, hence making it possible for a contingent deployment of gendered subjects for the purpose of collective action.1 Instead of a binary of women as victims and men as victimizers, Bulosan shows gender and sexuality as social processes that reflect the negotiations of power through his reconfiguration of the triangle of desire, first articulated by René Girard in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel and subsequently developed by Eve Sedgwick in her study of male homosocial desire in English literature. I argue that when read this 1 Carole Vance’s diagnosis of the contradictory uses of the category of women within feminism from the perspective of social construction theory also points to what I call the ontological assumptions about men and women that subtend feminism. “ One goal” of feminism, she says, “is to attack the gender system and its primacy in organizing social life, but the second goal is to defend women as a group. Defending women or advancing their interest (in equal pay, abortion rights, or child care, for example) emphasizes their status as a special group with a unique collective interest, distinct from men, thus replaying and perhaps reinforcing the very gender dichotomy crucial to the system of gender oppression” (31). Feminism and Racial Homosociality in Carlos Bulosan’s America Is In the Heart 109 way racial homosociality in America Is In the Heart, which is the very object of feminist critique, becomes an alternative to hegemonic nationalism if for limited duration.2 Initially published in 1946, rediscovered in the 1960s in the wake of the Third World Liberation Front, and now one of the most widely taught texts in Asian American Studies courses in U.S. universities, Carlos Bulosan’s America Is In the Heart is the personal account of a young Filipino man who journeys from a small village in the Philippines to the U.S. to become first a migrant laborer and later a writer in the interwar years.3 It has been widely embraced by critics of the left both in ethnic studies and in American studies. Epifanio San Juan, Jr.’s reading of a “profoundly radical, anti-Establishment motivation” in America Is In the Heart probably best captures the gist 2 An explanation on how I use the terms hegemonic and counterhegemonic nationalism may be in need here. By hegemonic nationalism I refer to the kinds of nation-building efforts headed most often by the state (but not always necessarily) that construct a unified image of the nation, its people, its past and present, for the purpose of increasing or maintaining the influence, political and economic, of those in power. In contrast counterhegemonic nationalism can be seen in situations where nationalism is not hegemonic but is being used as an oppositional strategy, most often in decolonizing states and in minority movements that are organized along the line of race or ethnicity. 3 Sylvia Yanagisako cites Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart alongside Victor Nee and Brett de Barry Nee’s Longtime Californ’ and Ronald Takaki’s Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835-1920 as the three “canonical texts of Asian American history” (183). 110 Jeehyun Lim of the leftist critics’ investment in the text (San Juan, Jr. 11).4 For the purpose of this essay, however, the most important aspect of the text is its representation of racialized gender and sexuality. As a text set during the era of Asian exclusion (1882-1952), when U.S. immigration laws prohibited Asians from immigrating to the U.S. and U.S. citizenship racially excluded Asians, America Is in the Heart reveals the world of Asian bachelor communities that formed where Asian migrant labor resided.5 As is well documented by Asian American historians, the exclusion laws created communities of Asian migrant laborers that were almost exclusively male, as the exclusion laws prevented Asian women from entering the U.S., including the wives of the Asian men who immigrated before the exclusion laws, and anti-miscegenation laws prohibited interracial marriages between Asian men and white American women (Ngai, Ting). From the perspective of white American heterosexual norms, these bachelor communities were stigmatized as sexually deviant and Asian men were stereotyped as being effeminate, something that was compounded by the feminine jobs they held as the kitchen wait staff and laundry workers (Ngai 109-116, Eng 168-169). Additionally, Bulosan shows in the text that as colonial subjects—the legal status of Filipinos were “U.S. nationals,” an in-between status that made them neither U.S. citizens nor aliens—Filipinos were also subject to the 4 See also Libretti and Denning for the place of America Is In the Heart in the criticism of U.S. working-class literature. 5 I date the beginning of Asian exclusion to 1882 when the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed and view its end as 1952 when the Immigration and Nationality Act repealed the ban on immigration from Asian communities. Feminism and Racial Homosociality in Carlos Bulosan’s America Is In the Heart 111 feminization that accompanies the loss of sovereign power, a kind of “racial castration,” as David Eng terms it, which paradoxically coexisted with the hyper sexualized stereotype of Filipino men as desirous of white women. In the gender economy of America Is In the Heart, power does not necessarily correlate with the masculine gender as the construction of white heterosexuality as normative takes place through the castigation of racialized masculinity. Racial homosociality, in this context, appears as a critique of normative white heterosexuality and exposes the schism within national fraternity along the line of race. My analysis of the trope of racial homosociality in America Is In the Heart as a kind of feminist approach may seem counterintuitive in light of extant feminist criticism on the text. Mostly, feminist critics have identified a male-centered perspective in Bulosan's text, an androcentrism that may buttress the socialist aspirations in the text's commitment to issues of racialized and exploited Filipino migrant labor yet is unattuned to the intersections of racial and sexual oppression (Lee, Higashida, Koshy). Feminist readings of America Is In the Heart, therefore, have centered on either exposing how Bulosan's "dream of fraternity," as Rachel Lee calls it, takes place by naturalizing women's subordination or examining female characters who emerge as political agents despite the textual “silence” around patriarchal violence and the caricatures of womanhood that can be found in the narrative (Lee 18, Higashida 54). In this critical terrain, Melinda de Jesús's queer reading of America Is In the Heart possibly initiates a new line of inquiry on the representation of gender and sexuality in Bulosan's text by arguing that we reexamine our own 112 Jeehyun Lim “compulsory heterosexuality” and suggesting that we look for the text's awareness of the production of norms and normativity as the place for “describing and dismantling entangled discourses around identity, sexuality, and power” (93, 92). My reading of Bulosan’s text picks up where de Jesús leaves off as I use Eve Sedgwick’s discussion of homosociality to delve into the significance of the trope of racial homosociality de Jesús points to as an example of the text’s queerness. The queer optic is at once a check against the ossification of the category of women in feminism, or the assumption that “all women, across classes and cultures, are somehow socially constituted as a homogenous group identified prior to the process of analysis” which Chandra Mohanty astutely observes characterizes many feminist analyses, and a call to expand our understanding of feminism’s potential for social critique by a more nuanced engagement with the social construction of gender and sexuality (22).

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