| In political and cultural histories, illness as a social construct, and not a medical edict, has often cast difference negatively, particularly along the lines of race, ethnicity, and gender. In literary representations of what I call socially sanctioned diseases, illness is often an ideological script positioning the body as a meeting ground for social and cultural narratives. Because the body is invested with meaning, as well as with history, illness and diagnosis readily inhere on a bodily terrain that can be read in accordance with a political/social body; figurative diseases are created for ethnic Others in order to fulfill political ends, creating "logical" reasons for discriminatory attitudes and their subsequent actions. Included in historical, critical, and medical studies is the crosscultural designation of women as invalids: as weak, "naturally" passive, and in need of care. In Asian American literature, characters are scripted by racism, by contradictory gendered expectations, and by the inability to self-narrativize. The results are a series of ills, from schizophrenia, to attempted suicide, to depression. These characters' discursive reconstructions on their road to self-healing attempt to write over culturally-scripted bodies and socially-sanctioned diseases.; Illness, then, becomes a trope by which to investigate narratives of ethnicity and gender. Through the works of Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton, Hualing Nieh, Wendy Law-Yone, and Chuang Hua, I investigate how conscious or unconscious resistance or acquiescence to embedded social narratives result in embodied malaise: who gets ill and why? where does invalidism arise and when? how is it used in the text itself as a narrative point of departure? Tropes of disease magnify problems of social hegemony and ideology through marginalized characters. How do invalid protagonists approach individual desire and ideological scripting? Are they successful in healing themselves? What impact, if any, do they wreak on their American surroundings? The rhetoric of pathology surrounding Asian American characters and their subsequent self-pathologization begs a crucial question regarding who is really ill: society or the individual?... |
