The Endangered White Heterosexual Masculine American National Identity in David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly

데이비드 헨리 황의 『엠. 나비』에 나타난 백인 이성애 미국인 정체성의 위기

By reading the main character, Rene Gallimard, in M. Butterfly as a spatial metaphor of America, this article examines how homogeneous American national identity of heterosexuality and white masculinity has been reinforced since the cold war and has constituted a crisis of hegemony with the decline of imperialism and how its pathological symptom is shown through the melancholic suicide of Gallimard. This article also argues how the feminine attributes implied in race, gender and sexuality in M. Butterfly are designated and allegorized as an impure, contaminated and ahistorical marker of national integrity in pthe social and material status of the heterosexual American white male. To develop my argument, I read M. Butterfly from a psychoanalytic point of view. Therefore I depend on Freud, Lacan, and Bhabha's psychoanalysis as the theoretical basis. In this paper, I also argue that the homogenized and fixed national identity is splitted and collapsed from within as shown in the Gallimard's melancholy and in the process of splitting the "Third Space" of hybrid subjects for the marginal and the emergent like Song Liling, a homosexual Asian man, can be built "from a space in-between." Therefore Hwang calls into questions conventions of fixed, essentialist identities through the shifting gender identities between Song and Gallimard in M. Butterfly and how identities in the plural are constructed variously in throughly historicized, politicized situations, and these constructions can be complicated by relations of power.