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Productive Estrangement: Racial-Sexual Continuums in Asian American as Southern Literature
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| 159 5 Productive Estrangement Racial-Sexual Continuums in Asian American as Southern Literature You are a stranger here. I can tell by the way you do. Sexuality is an overdetermined category in southern discourse. As Patti Duncan bluntly puts it, the perception is that “southerners have this really perverse, fucked up sexuality” (2001, 38). Donna Jo Smith asserts that the “terms southern and queer both come laden with a host of stereotypes” so much so that “the term southern queer is redundant.” She asks, “Since the South is already an aberration, what is a southern queer but deviance multiplied ? In other words, did Truman Capote really need to tell the world that he was a pervert? After all, he was from south Alabama” (1997, 370). Such an insight complicates Duncan’s own claims to sexual difference as an Asian lesbian living in the South. She notes regarding Asian and Pacific Islander lesbians in Atlanta, [C]laiming that we’re sexually different in the South . . . raises all kinds of issues for me, here we are being told that the South already has this really deviant sexuality, and then here we are as queer women and as Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders being told that our sexuality must be perverse or different, that we’re hypersexual . . . somehow sexually wrong. (2001, 38) Embracing “deviance” does not authenticate her regional identity despite C. Vann Woodward’s reference to the South as “the perverse section” of the nation (1951, xi); instead, Duncan’s sense of herself as Asian and lesbian is continually measured against her claim to belonging. For her and the other members of her Asian lesbian support group, such a claim is symbolically contested by the intensity of scrutiny from both whites and blacks on the 160 | chapter 5 most basic of levels: “It’s like, Is it a boy or a girl? Is it black or white?”( 2001, 37). The obsessive attention causes them to question, “Is it because we’re dykes?” [or is it that] “we’re just foreign” (37)? The speculation, dykes or foreigners, offers a symmetry of exclusions: both transgenderism and Asianness are categories of difference that confuse understanding of normative oppositions—boy/girl, black/white—that locate her in southern culture. Her outsidedness is rendered somewhat ironic by the symbolic role that immigrants play in the New South; they testify to its cosmopolitanism, its connection to the global. As Bharati Mukherjee ventriloquizes a white, southern yuppie, “Dear old redneck Atlanta is a thing of the past, no need to feel foreign here. Just wheel your shopping cart through aisles of bok choy and twenty kinds of Jamaican spices at the Farmers’ Market , and you’ll see that the US of A is still a pioneer country” (1988, 79). The portrayal invigorates aberrant southern regionalism with national resonance: the new migrants render its purported parochialism into a vision consistent with America itself, dislodging its antiquated reputation. But the cheerful disclaimer that all Americans were once foreigners belies the specificity of Duncan’s meaning. A seeming outsider to the South’s sexual and racial mores, she is a figure of forced intelligibility. Representing as neither a boy nor girl, she becomes a site of cultural anxiety in more than one arena; she becomes an occasion of interpretive necessity. But in what sense can this uneasiness signal a site of productive reinvisioning ? In the context of segregation, one’s outsidedness might be gauged by a failure to apprehend local racial etiquette—a perhaps felicitous failure. In the 1940s, sociologist Charles Johnson recounts an anecdote about an African American traveler from the North who takes his place in line with white patrons at a post office in Mississippi. “This was so unusual that it attracted the attention of both Negroes and whites,” Johnson writes. “The surprised white people made no comment, but one of the Negroes who [was] patiently waiting until the white people were through remarked to the visitor, ‘You are a stranger here. I can tell by the way you do’” (1943, 38). The actions of the unschooled visitor mirror the cultural norms of place in discomfiting ways. The outsider not yet assimilated into established modes of behavior and expectation unsettles the surface of convention, or, to echo Park in the previous chapter, breaks the “cake of custom” (1928, 885). In Johnson’s anecdote, the stranger literally cuts the line, assuming an unsanctioned place within the established hierarchy. Defined as that which is “introduced from outside into a place where...