Transpacific Femininities

Catalog description

As theoretical framework, archival method, activist practice, transpacific femininities places gender and sexuality at the center of Asian American literature, culture, and Pacific Rim geopolitics. Since at least the 19th century, femininity has played a critical role in the material and discursive mediation of transpacific relations: from the circulation of feminized Asian commodities and the migration of sex workers, care workers, and other female laborers to the idea of the Orient as the feminine counterpart to the masculinized West. Yet, because Asian and Asian American women have been subject to extensive and aggressive fantasizing in the American imagination, they remain, in many ways, proximal to dominant narratives, occluded by the abstract significations they carry. We will test the parameters of transpacific femininities as an approach for contending with complex networks of relations within and between multiple competing nations and empires.