Sexing the city: Contemporary U.S. women writers and the global metropolis

This dissertation revises accounts in American literature and in cultural theory which have discussed the post-WWII American city through a narrative of decline, perceiving urban space to be a dystopic crucible of alienation, fragmentation, cultural conflict, or postmodern dispossession. My project argues for an alternative matrix of women's city writing from the late 1950s to the present, which recognizes and engages with urban problems but also writes the city as a site of matrilineal empowerment, creative connection, multicultural catalytic energies, and diasporic homecoming. Drawing on the urban theorist Jane Jacobs, and a tradition of women writers consisting of Grace Paley, Paule Marshall, Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, Bharati Mukherjee, Jessica Hagedorn, and Karen Tei Yamashita, this study uncovers a specifically female lens on the city. In and through reconfigurations of female identity in urban space, women's writing of postwar urban space embraces and anticipates the problematics of American ethnicity, transnationalism, and the globalization of the city as these have come to shape the current moment."Sexing the City" contributes to the study of women's urban literature pioneered by Susan Merrill Squier and Liz Heron, while building on scholarly works in feminist cultural geography by critics like Janet Wolff, Elizabeth Wilson, Dolores Hayden, Doreen B. Massey, and Christine Stansell. Moving beyond the nineteenth-century and modernist periods of their purview to incorporate unexplored voices of U.S. ethnic writers in the postwar decades, particularly Asian American, it adds new material that places the American city in dialog with current scholarship on U.S. imperialism and globalization. My readings complicate paradigms based on influential modern theories of space by Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and Michel Foucault.