I Cannot Find Her

The Oriental Feminine, Racial Melancholia, and Kimiko Hahn's The Unbearable Heart

Bibliographic Data

ID4052501
AuthorsJuliana Chang (corresponding author)
Year2004
Volume4
Issue2
Pages239-260
Publication date2004-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueMeridians (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1536-6936 • E-ISSN: 1547-8424
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2979/mer.2004.4.2.239
OpenAlexW2003249098
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited18

The Asian American female inhabits a position in the U.S. national unconscious that I will call the oriental feminine, a femininity produced by orientalism. Edward Said and others have noted that the "Orient" was produced discursively and epistemologically as a feminized location, (im)penetrable by the West. The metaphorical feminization of the Orient resulted in the metonymic hyperfeminization of "oriental women," as if culture compounded gender. This oriental femininity does not correspond to the status of a subject; rather, it is a negative, enabling other of the modern subject. It is the legacy of a modernity that constructed the European male subject as the universal, representative subject of history and produced as a remainder the colonial other that remains outside history and modernity. In this essay, I explore how the Asian American [End Page 239] female subject, as symbolized by the speaking subject of Kimiko Hahn's book of poetry The Unbearable Heart, inhabits a melancholic position that signals a racial return of the national repressed. American-born and-raised, this Asian American woman is ostensibly a legitimate citizen-subject of the U.S. nation-state, a legible subject of modernity. In reading Hahn's book, however, we find that this subject of modernity and nation nevertheless remains haunted by a specter of modernity's "other": the oriental feminine, which remains outside of modern history and modern subjectivity. The gendered racialization of the Asian American female as oriental femininity introduces an other temporality: that of the primitive, the traditional, the antique, the alien. We can thus see how racial difference forms and deforms the inhabitation of a presumably abstract and universal national citizenship.1 Citizenship would seem to produce the Asian American female as a coherent, modern subject of the U.S. nation-state, but national racialization as well as the legacies of colonialism result in a remainder that disrupts this coherence. It is this haunting remainder that I will explore in this essay by employing the psychoanalytic concepts of melancholia and jouissance

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Boarding school · Daughter · Fantasy · Femininity · Girl · Literature · Modernity · Nightmare · Orientalism · Racialization · Sister · Sociology · Subjectivity · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Asian Culture and Media Studies · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Media, Gender, and Advertising · Philosophy · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society

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