UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Between Asian Girls: Minor Feminisms and Sideways Critique Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2717x391 Author Tran, Sharon N. Publication Date 2017 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Between Asian Girls Minor Feminisms and Sideways Critique A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in English by Sharon N. Tran 2017 © Copyright by Sharon N. Tran 2017 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Between Asian Girls Minor Feminisms and Sideways Critique by Sharon N. Tran Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Los Angeles, 2017 Professor Rachel C. Lee, Chair This dissertation expands existing accounts of the history of Asian racialization in the United States by examining the various discursive, symbolic, and affective economies through which the “Asian girl” has been trafficked. I mobilize the “Asian girl” as a critical framework for attending to an especially vulnerable, young female population and girlification as a particular mode of racialization. I examine the Asian girl queered by militarization, the kawaii (cute) Asian girl, the cybernetic/transgenic Asian girl, and the feral Asian girl as critical sites for seriously grappling with material conditions of political constraint and dependency. The project identifies girlish vulnerability as a structure of disavowal/contempt in a historically masculinist minoritarian politics that emphasizes autonomy, sovereignty, and militant resistance and takes forms of vulnerability as a basis theorizing an alternative affective politics. My research draws on the works of Asian/American novelists, poets, and visual artists for how they (re)imagine Asian girls in lateral associations of compoundedness, eroticism, and nascent political solidarity. ii As the title, “Between Asian Girls,” suggests, this dissertation seeks to recuperate theorizations of female homosociality, famously dismissed by Eve Sedgwick, as overly “intelligible”—thereby too facile for investigation—and at the same time, as politically illegible. I offer a postcolonial, critical race studies intervention to theorizations of female homosociality. Engaging with Asian Americanist scholarship by David Eng, Gayatri Gopinath, Jodi Kim, among others, I trace how histories of racialization, militarism, and imperialism intimately structure relations between Asian girls. This project also redefines the stakes of theorizing homosociality through a focus on the girl, a liminal figure that is heavily sexualized in U.S. culture but is simultaneously not allowed to be sexual. I take up the Asian girl as a critical framework for thinking queerness in terms of minor(itized) bodies, how girlification is a mode of racialization indexed in the construction of figures such as the “Asian sissy” and “China doll.” My project is thus in conversation with girl studies and recent queer critique on the child. Responding to Lee Edelman’s polemic on the politics of reproductive futurism organized around the child, I follow Kathryn Bond Stockton and J. Jack Halberstam in probing how minor girl “acts” can shift our understanding of the political. Instead of a politics for the child, I take the child and Asian girlification as a point of departure for theorizing minor feminisms. The Asian/American cultural productions I analyze foreground various structuring conditions that inhibit the Asian girl from growing up, in the heteronormative sense, to become an autonomous adult human, and lead her to instead, “grow sideways” (cf. Stockton 2009). I probe how these works stage the Asian girl’s queer bonding with other contingent, proximal objects and organisms and provide critical imaginaries for theorizing alternative forms of social and political collectivity. My opening chapter examines how Sarah Bird and Nora Okja Keller deploy the trope of lateral birth in their fiction as a means of critiquing and negotiating histories of gendered militarized violence, while later chapters mine the possibilities of a compound iii political subjectivity in depictions of kawaii collectivity across different genres from Japanese anime to Chang-rae Lee’s novel On Such a Full Sea, stinky multispecies assemblages in the speculative fiction of Larissa Lai, and her collaborative ecopoetics with Rita Wong. This dissertation also seeks to further develop and enact a mode of sideways critique taken up by some feminist and queer studies scholars (cf. R. Lee 2014). Argumentation typically entails a logic and expectation of verticality, the linear ordering and building up of ideas to some final culmination. In each of my chapters, I perform variations of sideways reading practices that mine the contingent, lateral points of connection between texts for how they can move us sideways toward queer critical terrains. iv The dissertation of Sharon N. Tran is approved. Lowell Gallagher Ursula K. Heise Valerie Matsumoto Rachel C. Lee, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2017 v To my twin—this could not have been written without you. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Acknowledgements viii Vita xi Prologue // On Being Nonsingular Double 1 Introduction // Minor Interventions 5 Reimagining, Recuperating the Oriental Girl Chapter One // “She was pregnant, my child in her belly” 55 Encountering Militarism’s Lateral Ghosts Chapter Two // Kawaii Magical Girls Save the Day 101 Animating a Minor Politics of Care Chapter Three // The Smell of Solidarity 139 Multispecies Assemblages in Salt Fish Girl and sybil unrest Conclusion // Feral (Non)becomings 196 Inhuman Socialities and Imaginaries for Asian American Studies Bibliography 223 vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS These pages are dedicated to the numerous people who helped shape, transform, and nurture this project to life. First, I want to extend my sincerest gratitude to my advisor Rachel Lee, who believed in the value and possibilities of my work from the very beginning. Your encouragement sustained me through the most difficult stages of this process and your rhizomatic, lateral thinking has been a continual, vital source of inspiration. Thank you for giving me the confidence to take my research to new, unexpected, and even uncomfortable critical terrains. I am also thankful for the support and brilliant insights I received from my committee: for Lowell Gallagher, who provided me with the benefit of his expansive theoretical expertise and for pushing me to step out of my Aristotelian comfort zone to engage more deeply with literary form; for Ursula Heise, who offered especially thoughtful, incisive comments on my drafts and taught me how to situate my research in broader critical conversations; and for Valerie Matsumoto, who expanded my historical thinking through her scholarship on Japanese American girlhood and for being a model of intellectual generosity. I am grateful to the UCLA English department for providing the intellectual home for this project as well as the additional institutional and financial support I received from the Center for the Studies of Women and the Asian American Studies Center. The following scholar-mentors helped create, in both minor and major ways, the conditions of possibility for this project: Duncan Faherty, Caroline Hong, Seo-young Chu, Jesse Schwartz, and Karen Weingarten, who recognized my potential and encouraged me to pursue a doctoral degree in English. Thu-Huong Nguyen-Vo, Mark Seltzer, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, King-Kok Cheung, Helen Deutsch, Sianne Ngai, Kandice Chuh, and Laura Kang, whose teaching, mentorship, and ideas have influenced my intellectual development and this dissertation in more ways than they are probably aware. viii Various peer communities also helped stimulate and sustain the creative, physical, and emotional energy needed to bring this project to fruition. I am so thankful for the study group I quite literally stumbled into and formed with other UCLA graduate students at Weyburn during my first year: Naveen Minai, Carlos Cantú Garcia, Dana Linda, and Arreanna Rostosky—you helped me stay on top of my coursework and kept me sane with our coffee, food, and dance party breaks. I also feel incredibly grateful to have been adopted by the gender studies cohort: Jessica Martinez-Tebbel, Naveen Minai, Morgan Woolsey, Jacob Lau, and Dalal Alfares. Thank you for allowing me to experience what it means and how it feels to be truly accepted and part of an intellectual community. Jessica and Naveen, our mental health Fridays were the highlight of my week and rejuvenated my soul more and better than I could have ever imagined. I am grateful for the supportive interlocutors and political allies I found across various other venues, including, Sharon Chon, Chris Eng, Wendi Yamashita, Melissa Phrukaschart, Sarah Walsh, and Aujean Lee. I want to especially thank Chris for his relentless, endearing avocation of my scholarship and Sharon for being there in the very final stages of this project—our research exchange deadlines kept me on task and enabled me to meet my timeline for completion. Finally, my utmost gratitude goes to the people who constitute the vital fixtures of my everyday life and helped me through the mundane struggles. My parents, Sanh and Colleen, who supported me and my dreams from afar. Thank you for all the phone calls and care packages, for making sure that I would never starve for love or food. My twin sister, Frannie, who has been my constant confidante and sounding board through it all—the bursts of creativity and intellectual triumphs as well as the doubts, tears, frustrations, and darkest academic moods. Thank you for providing me comfort and validation when I needed it most. I can say with absolute certainty that this project could not have been written without you. My brother Kevin, who taught me the importance of taking breaks, how stepping away from work will allow me to return with more ix clarity and focus. My nonacademic friends, Steph, Jenn, JB, Art, Em, and Jay, who patiently listened to me vent about the pressures and struggles of academia and also made sure to not allow academia to consume my entire life.