| How do we make babies? How do we talk about making babies? And how do these narratives participate in the social construction of the Asian American subject? This dissertation examines the multiple ways narratives of human reproduction shape what it means to be Asian American. To consider narratives of reproduction is to take up reproduction as performance---a social technology by which the body is both made, and made socially recognizable. Historically, Asian Americans have been systematically denied access to this recognizability, as we have been denied access to the practices of heteronormativity. Consequently, we must expand our understanding of how, exactly, we take up the material production of the body.; A number of case studies illuminate the workings of reproduction as performance. Chapters one, two and three write an alternate Asian American genealogy, moving from the 19th century performances of Chang and Eng Bunker, the original Siamese Twins, to the celebrity persona of 1960s starlet Nancy Kwan and a 2001 revival of Frank Chin's play The Year of the Dragon (1976). The fourth chapter examines an assortment of contemporary narratives addressing genetic engineering, cloning and other futuristic forms of reproductive technology. Finally, the project concludes with a nod to a next generation, found in a current science fiction television serial, Battlestar Galactica.; Edward Said's argument that Orientalism produces a fundamentally unregenerative "Orient" underpins each chapter. Freaks, queers, hybrids: the reproduction of Asian Americans has been consistently constituted as deviant. Rather than petulantly argue that Asian Americans are not freaks, queers or hybrids, I look at the ways we are deviant, asking how embracing this deviance might result in a general rethinking of the terms of lineage, ancestry, family and self. |
