Disoriented: Asian Americans, Law, and the Nation-State

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One America An Essay in Three Parts [C]an we become one America in the 21st century? —President Bill Clinton, June 21, 1997 In the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is American. —Justice Antonin Scalia, in Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena Racial Cross-Dressing I’m not Latino. But I could be. One feature of Latino identity is that Latinos may be of any race. I can imagine a different family history that would have placed my ancestors as laborers in Latin America or the Caribbean.1 I can imagine a secondary migration in the Asian diaspora that would then have brought them to the continental United States, and I can imagine the various identity crises they might have undergone. I can imagine intermarriage as that which took place between Punjabi Indian immigrants and Mexican Americans.2 The children would not look like me, but perhaps they would not be so different. You cannot tell by my features that I am not Latino. In what context could a person who looks like me claim a Latino identity ? This question assumes that at some level, there will be resistance to such an identification. This resistance may be internal as well as external. But by invoking the history of Chinese contract laborers in Latin American and Caribbean countries, I open up the space for such an identification, even if I don’t actually claim to be Latino. But what if I were to make that claim? What are we to make of claims to seemingly inapposite identities? Can a man claim a lesbian subject position? Can a white Euro-American woman 8 123 claim a Latina subject position? Would they simply be confused over their racial/gender/sexual positions? Francisco Valdes explains that he has, with careful qualifications, at times “claim[ed] inclusion in the lesbian category,” doing so “to poke at the sex/gender essentialisms that rigidly and absurdly confine us all.”3 He goes on to argue that “[g]ender-bending is important and (sometimes) rewarding political work.”4 But while gender-bending— and for that matter, race-bending—may indeed “do” important political work, we must approach such performances with caution. They may represent instances of appropriation—as in misappropriation—just as easily as they may represent claims to solidarity that may then operate as a basis for collective political action. Stated differently, moments of cross-dressing contain within them oppressive as well as emancipatory possibilities. The difficulty lies in telling them apart. Elaine Showalter examines the oppressive possibilities in her brilliant essay, “Critical Cross-Dressing; Male Feminists and the Woman of the Year.”5 She examines the film Tootsie, which stars Dustin Hoffman playing Michael Dorsey, a failing actor whose aspirations to stardom are realized only after he dresses in drag and transforms himself into Dorothy Michaels. As Dorothy Michaels, he becomes a television star and a role model for women.6 Indeed, one film critic, Molly Haskell, calls “Dorothy ‘the first genuinely mainstream feminist heroine of our era.’”7 Showalter comments that Michael Dorsey’s success as Dorothy comes primarily, the film suggests, from the masculine power disguised and veiled by the feminine costume. Physical gestures of masculinity provide Tootsie’s comic motif of female impersonation. Dorothy Michaels drops her voice to call a taxi, lifts heavy suitcases, and shoves a hefty competitor out of the way. Dorothy’s “feminist” speeches too are less a response to the oppression of women than an instinctive situational male reaction to being treated like a woman. The implication is that women must be taught by men how to win their rights. In this respect, Tootsie’s cross-dressing is a way of promoting the notion of masculine power while masking it.8 Showalter then moves from the film to the recent involvement of certain male critics in feminism, calling this male feminism a form of “critical crossdressing .” She observes: If some of them are now learning our language, all the better; but there is more than a hint in some recent critical writing that it’s time for men to step in and show the girls how to do it, a swaggering tone that reminds me of a 124 | One America recent quip in the Yale Alumni Magazine about a member of the class of 1955, Renee Richards: “When better women are made, Yale men will make them.”9 Both examples show the...