Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women's Literature (review)

Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women's Literature opens with two notorious examples of "traitorous" women—Yoko Ono, the Japanese artist who supposedly seduced one of the Beatles, John Lennon, and Iva Toguri d'Aquino, who was convicted for treason against the United States as the WW II radio personality "Tokyo Rose." For Bow, both are examples of how feminine sexuality and racial/ethnic differences interweave with dominant cultural representations of feminine seduction and betrayal for Asian and Asian American women. The book demonstrates very well how accusations of betrayal and infidelity, embodied in women's performances of femininity and sexuality, are used to explain, maintain, and signify cohesion or crises along and across the borders of masculinist nation-states as well as the bonds among men or women, or among racial-ethnic, social-economic or political communities in the United States and internationally. The defining and regulating of Asian American women's gender and sexuality in the United States can be used to constitute and maintain a variety of traditional and/or progressive social and political discourses, agendas and practices that impact on Asian and Asian American women and their multiple communities and political allegiances here and abroad (i.e., in negotiations with postcolonial nationalisms, repressive state regulations of women/people and anti-imperialist projects, especially in relationship to the influences of the West/"First World," global capitalist market economies, U.S. liberal feminisms, or Americanized sex-gender norms). At the same time, Bow indicates that the "betrayals" or "infidelities" by a range of women in Asian American women's writing have varying potential to challenge oppressive narratives and strictures that attempt to delimit or erase their agency, multiple affiliations and responsibilities, and struggles to articulate more radically liberating and transformative projects in the United States and elsewhere. Her research is intensely engaged in unraveling the dynamics of betrayals, allegiances and acts of subversion in Asian American women's writing.

I want to analyze the charge of cultural betrayal as it comes to regulate group belonging. To be cast as a traitor, as beyond the pale of an at times unspoken collective, is to confront the fact that such affiliations have terms of admission, that they are neither natural nor, at times, uncoerced. The flashes of consciousness in the literary vignettes that follow precipitate an awareness of the way sexual identity overlaps ethnicity and national affiliation—and may appear to challenge it. With the recognition that disloyalty to group ties become sexualized through charges of infidelity, this study looks at the ways in which expressions of sexuality both signify and interrogate political alliance and ethnic collectivity. (8)

In a nutshell, the theorizing introductory chapter sets forth the broad and complex frameworks for Bow's more specific study of the gendered literary rhetoric of political appeal. She is not interested in a reductive, automatic, naturalized and/or universal valorization of women's writing and culture. Rather, Bow's study meticulously excavates "how mechanisms of affiliation are constituted and analyzes the stakes of their maintenance, particularly for women who transgress borders drawn by multiple loyalties." (3)

Five chapters tease out of Bow's ideas, exploring the diverse constructions of gender and sexuality as they intertwine with the rhetoric of betrayal and allegiance on multiple imaginative and geopolitical terrains (i.e., U.S., China, India, Vietnam, Burma, and Singapore). In each chapter, she grapples with reductive binaries of modern/progressive/liberal/Western "First World" vs. traditional/backwards/"Third World" discourses, with contentious national and transnational sites regulating and disciplining people or collectivities in exploitative globalized market economies, with repressive, patriarchal nation-states, and with the profound and diverse understandings of women's roles, feminist solidarities, especially as they are vested in certain delimiting and homogenizing discourses of feminism, multiculturalism, narrowly privatized...