Compositional Subjects

In Compositional Subjects Laura Hyun Yi Kang explores the ways that Asian/American women have been figured by mutually imbricated modes of disciplinarity, representation, and knowledge production. Kang's project is simultaneously interdisciplinary scholarship at its best and a critique of the very disciplinary formations she draws upon. She shows how several disciplines-including literature and cinema studies, history, and the social sciences and political economy-mediate the parameters of knowledge about Asian/American women. Kang begins by showing how different disciplines construct the figure of the Asian/American woman, each privileging different modes of subjection. She explores the issue of writing the self, studying the Asian/American woman as autobiographical presence through the vexed and voluminous writings about Maxine Hong Kingston's book The Woman Warrior. Kang then turns to cinematic representations of Asian/American women. She looks at three films where an Asian/American woman is the heroine and desired body, and then turns to the broader issue of representing and interpreting Asian/American women through distinctly American modes of cinematic production. Moving from cinema studies to history, Kang looks at the ways that the Asian/American woman emerged as a U.S. citizen over the past 150 years or so, reading immigration policies from the mid-nineteenth up through the present. Next Kang reads several notable recent texts by social scientists interested in discourses about transnational assembly line work, sex tourism, and military prostitution; she finds that these texts tend to naturalize the very exploitation of the Asian women workers that they critique. In her final chapter Kang studies selected scholarly and artistic works by Korean women (living in Asia, the United States, and Canada) which acknowledge and actively engage with the fraught issues regarding identity and representation that Kang explored in her first four chapters.