"Kingdoms of manly style": Performing Chinese American masculinity, 1865-1941
Description
During the period between the building of the first North American transcontinental railroad and the beginning of World War II, Euro-American discourses stereotyped Chinese and Chinese American men as emasculated 'pets' and as hypermasculine representatives of the 'yellow peril.' This dissertation addresses the quandaries involved in this situation and analyzes some performative responses to it, emphasizing the importance of intertextual and historical context. Chapter one situates this argument within current Asian American studies scholarship. Chapter two explicates the contradictions involved in stereotyping Chinese American men as both emasculated and hypermasculine, arguing that these stereotypes reflect Euro-American anxieties about masculinity and imperialism at the same time that they justify contradictory actions vis-a-vis Chinese in North America and China. Reading political cartoons associated with the debate over Chinese immigration, Henry Grimm's The Chinese Must Go: A Farce in Four Acts (1879), and Pierton W. Dooner's novel, The Last Days of the Republic (1880), chapter two traces the main sources of contradiction to differing Euro-American class interests. Subsequent chapters study how Chinese Americans respond sometimes by appropriating both Chinese and U.S. models of masculinity. Chapter three juxtaposes Tombstone Anti-Chinese League parades with ritual performances by the Tucson Chee Kung Tong, or 'Active Justice Society,' to illustrate how both groups of men, each anxious about its authority on the unstable stage of territorial Arizona, reassured themselves and their audiences through performing versions of masculinity. Chapter four reads the autobiographies of Yan Phou Lee (1887) and Yung Wing (1909) as politically resistant attempts to defend national character through dignified representation of individual masculinity. Chapter five reads H. T. Tsiang's And China Has Hands (1937), arguing that it revises earlier notions of masculinity to address less gender-specific and more class-conscious concerns. Ultimately, this dissertation concentrates on an understudied period of Asian American experience and challenges previously dismissive evaluations of its literature. From Frank Chin's perspective, most writers and performers before 1946 contributed no 'kingdom of manly style.' This study shows that when these early works are read in context, they exhibit many kingdoms of manly style, each appropriate to its author's specific goals and circumstances