In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Silence and Public Discourse: Interventions into Dominant National and Sexual Narratives in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman and Anchee Min’s Red Azalea Women’s sexuality has been conceptualized as a site of and for both pleasure and danger. In recent years, feminist theorists have attempted to interrogate the multiple roles sexuality perform in women’s lives in relation to categories of identity as well as social, historical, political, and economic contexts and transitions. As Carole Vance suggests, “Sexuality is simultaneously a domain of restriction, repression, and danger as well as a domain of exploration, pleasure, and agency” (1). To focus on either pleasure or danger at the exclusion of the other leaves women at risk of overlooking either the oppressive, patriarchal contexts of their lives or the ways in which women demonstrate agency as well as resistance to oppression. For Asian American women, sexuality must be contextualized against This night will forever remain outside articulation. . . . —Hershini Bhana, “How to Articulate the Inarticulable I, II, and III” a history of denigrating stereotypes about Asian women’s deviant sexuality , erotic sensibilities, and exotic sexual practices.1 Linked to these images are representations constructed by Western feminist writers, in which Asian and other Third World women are conceptualized only as victims, especially where sexuality is concerned.2 Also, globally, Asian women bear a unique relationship to prostitution and the sex industry not only because of stereotypes but also through imperialist and capitalist expansion into Asian nations, United States and other Western powers ’ occupation of and subsequent demand for prostitution economies within Asian countries, and the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century U.S. history of unequal sex ratios, bachelor communities, and enforced prostitution among, especially, Chinese immigrant communities. Given such histories, it is hardly surprising that there exists a highly publicized market for the sexual services of Asian women, both in the United States and abroad, comprised of mail-order bride businesses, massage parlors and brothels, and racialized pornography, in which Asian women are most often portrayed as victims of abuse and torture.3 In a context in which Asian and Asian American women’s subjectivity is consistently questioned and/or undermined, Asian women have attempted to resist notions of passivity and to assert their own sexuality in multiple ways. At the same time, they have also examined the ways in which sexuality has been a site of victimization and pain. In acknowledging such histories and in claiming the “pleasures” of sex and sexuality , Asian American women pose significant questions about the interactions of race, gender, and sexuality. In this chapter, I interrogate the role of historical and textual silences regarding Asian American women’s narratives of sexuality, specifically the textual ways in which sexual silences are reproduced and/or transformed in cultural spaces. In Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman (1997), silence is used both thematically within the narrative and as a literary device by the author to highlight ways in which sexual oppression and victimization have been treated in public discourse. More specifically, Keller explores the historical role of silence surrounding the “comfort women” system in Japan, Korea, and other parts of Asia during World War II and the silences deployed by comfort women themselves, in this case through the character “Akiko” Bradley. Anchee Min, in her autobiographical work, Red Azalea (1994), also problematizes the silences surrounding sexuality, but she is most concerned with the issues of sexual desire, pleasure, and same174 s i l e n c e a n d p u b l i c d i s c o u r s e sex intimacy between women contextualized against China’s Cultural Revolution. Her own use of silence, when it comes to description and terminology for women’s same-sex desire, offers both reinforcement and an implicit critique of the dominant narratives of heterosexuality, Western discourse of same-sex sexuality, and Cultural Revolution– inspired nationalism. In both Comfort Woman and Red Azalea, silence offers a means through which the authors may problematize sexual relations, sexual identities, sexual violence, and sexual desire. Also, Keller and Min both explore the role of sexuality in contained and confined spaces. In Comfort Woman, “Akiko’s” sexuality is controlled (along with her body) during World War II within the parameters of institutionalized rape in a military “comfort” camp. In Red Azalea, Min’s sexual desire for another woman is awakened while she is confined at a socialist labor camp, Red Fire Farm. In both...

Share