Unsettling appetites: Asian American women writing food and subjectivity
Abstract
This dissertation focuses on narratives centered on culinary and consuming practices in contemporary Asian North American literature as fruitful texts that negotiate the complexities of race, gender, embodiment, and belonging. This dissertation examines an archive of texts employing gastronomic motifs not as articulations of race or ethnicity, but as disrupting and complicating processes of assimilation and consumption typically associated with Asian populations in North America. Specifically, this project is interested in texts that relish problematic food practices, the unappetizing and the seemingly inedible, as productive sites of resistance and survival for marginalized subjectivities. Drawing on not only ethnic American criticism, but also feminist theory, queer theory, animal studies, postcolonial theory, and queer ecocriticism, my research complicates binaries often explored in Asian American studies of cultural assimilation vs. resistance, that are often articulated through metaphors of consumption: incorporation vs. abjection. Drawing on a variety of texts which includes Ruth Ozeki's novel My Year of Meats (1998), Nora Okja Keller's novels Comfort Woman (1997) and Fox Girl (2002), Bich Minh Nguyen's memoir Stealing Buddha's Dinner (2007), June Kim's manga-style graphic novel 12 Days (2006), and Patty Chang's video and performance art, this project suggests that unsettling and at times repulsive culinary practices can function as strategies for subjectivity formation for disempowered racialized subjects.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Sagar, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Asian American Studies|Womens studies|American literature
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