UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Between Asian Girls Minor
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.
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