Transgressive Transcripts: Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Chinese Canadian Women’s Writing(150 Cross/Cultures)

Transgressive Transcripts examines the construction of women’s subjectivity and the textual production of Canadian female voices orchestrated in history, culture, ethnicity, and sexuality. The book, stressing the dissemination and re-inscription of femaleness and femininity in Chinese Canadian history, employs critical models that defy the sexual/textual imaginary of the Canadian literary scene. Four fields of study are conjoined: feminist theories of the body, gender and sexuality studies, women’s writing, and Asian North American studies. Analysing four writers, SKY Lee, Larissa Lai, Lydia Kwa, and Evelyn Lau, the book anchors its thematic and theoretical concern with female sexuality in the context of Chinese Canadian writing. Feminist narratives and gender politics in contemporary Asian North American literature are highlighted via the trope of ‘transgression’.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Prologue Spatial Transcript: SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café Morphological Transcript: Larissa Lai’s When Fox Is a Thousand Genealogical Transcript: Lydia Kwa’s This Place Called Absence Hypersexual Transcript: Evelyn Lau’s Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid and Inside Out: Reflections on a Life So Far Epilogue Works Cited Index

Review :
"Transgressive Transcripts offers sophisticated readings of recent Chinese Canadian women’s writing as a form of powerful agency that resists stereotypical representations and opens up new possibilities for heterogeneous feminist and queer identity formations. Building on a comprehensive critical overview of the current state of Asian Canadian literary studies, and combining studies of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender, the interpretations are illuminating, provocative, and original." – Donald Goellnicht, Professor, Department of English and Cultural Studies, Associate Dean, School of Graduate Studies, McMaster University "This book, a substantial contribution to an understanding of the ways sexuality mediates histories of national and transnational belonging, helps constitute the field of Chinese Canadian women’s writing yet resists turning that writing into an object of knowledge or writers into informants. Of central interest is textual agency and the critical spaces literature opens within minority and feminist studies. Engaging with thorny, silenced issues such as how to write about sexuality and subjectivity, Fu uncovers transcripts subtending dominant culture and unacknowledged within Chinese Canadian culture. Particularly compelling is the analysis of processes of hyper-feminization, desexualization, exoticization, demonization, and abjection that have come to stand phantasmically for Chinese Canadian women’s sexuality." – Lianne Moyes, Professor and Chair, Department of English Studies, Université de Montréal