• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.54 no.4
• /
• pp.579-597
• /
• 2008

This article discusses David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly as a suggestive text for examining Western masculinity in crisis in the post-imperialist age, in which territorial imperialism is no longer valid. Previous scholarship on M. Butterfly has centered around the interlocking dynamics of imperialism, racism and sexism. Such critical attentions focus on how Hwang deconstructs racialized significations of the East and the West. In these discussions, the issue of gender is often addressed merely as a trope to represent the power relations between the East and the West. As such, gender as well as sexuality is highlighted as the very source of subversion of the power relations. My discussion departs from a critique of the gendered trope of the East and the West, highlighting a postmodern agent, the allegedly feminized character Song Lining: a Chinese actor who passes for a woman for political purposes in postcolonial China. Remaining an "inappropriate/d other" in the gendered imperialist discourse, Song becomes an emergent subject, who is capable of playing gender ambiguity for reclaiming a devalued identity, that of homosexual Asian man. Discussing how the central character Rene Gallimard's masculine identity is constructed in a cross-cultural space and how it evolves, I also argue that Gallimard's melancholic death signifies a historical unsustainability of imperialist masculinity in the postmodern/postcolonial age since World War II.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.64 no.1
• /
• pp.61-76
• /
• 2018

This essay examines Toni Morrison's African-American characters' struggle in The Bluest Eye (1970) and Home (2012) through the lens of heteronormativity, arguing that they suffer double victimization due to both their race and gender. The Bluest Eye portrays a family tragedy caused by an African-American husband and wife's failure to live up to images of gender as represented in white, middle-class media. Written forty-two years later, Home describes an African-American man and woman who establish their own lives away from gendered standards after striving to meet social expectations and becoming traumatized in the process. Their adversities stem not only from the deeply rooted racial discrimination in American society but also from subtle gendered norms implanted by heteronormativity. Morrison's characters in her earlier narrative face a tragic denouement, ultimately destroying their children's lives. By contrast, Morrison's later characters explore more utopian ways of life unfettered by heteronormativity, overcoming hardships imposed by white-centered heteronormal society. By portraying socially victimized characters, Toni Morrison problematizes the power behind the discriminatory nature of heteronormativity and suggests a more gender-neutral, egalitarian way of organizing society, free from the constraints of heterosexuality and from violence created by normalized gender rules.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.64 no.3
• /
• pp.329-345
• /
• 2018

Sun Yung Shin's poetry collection Skirt Full of Black (2007) brings the author's personal history as a Korean female adoptee to bear upon poetic language in daring formal experiments, instantiating the liminal state of being shuttled across borders to land in an in-between state of marginalization. Other Korean American poets have also drawn on the experience of transnational adoption and racialization explore the literary potential of English to materialize haunting memories or the untranslatable yet persistent echoes of a lost home that gestures across linguistic boundaries, as seen in the case of Lee Herrick or Jennifer Kwon Dobbs. Shin however dismantles the referential foundation of English as a language she was transplanted into through formal transgressions such as frazzled syntax, atypical typography, decontextualized punctuation marks, and phonetic and visual play. The power to signify and thereby differentiate one entity or meaning from another dissipates in the cacophonic feast of signs in Skirt Full of Black; the word fragments of identificatory markers that turn racialized, gendered, and culturally contained subjects into exotic things lose the power to define them as such, and instead become alterities by departing from the conventional meaning-making dynamics of language. Expanding on the avant-garde legacy of Korean American poets Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Myung Mi Kim to delve further into the liminal space between Korean and American, referential and representational, or spoken and written words, Shin carves out a space for discreteness that does not subscribe to the hierarchical ontology of differential value assignment.

• Journal of Korean Academy of Nursing
• /
• v.29 no.6
• /
• pp.1336-1354
• /
• 1999

Researchers have rarely explored menopausal experience in the context of the totality of women's lives, subsequently making the picture of menopause incomplete, discrete and fragmented. Respecting the totality of women's lives, this study addressed how a vulnerable group of women-low income Korean immigrant women-experience menopause within a context of multiple transitions. This is a cross-sectional study using methodological triangulation. A sample of 119 first-generation Korean immigrant women aged 40 to 60 years, who were in low-income jobs, was recruited using convenience sampling methods. From the total sample, 21 peri-or post-menopausal women were recruited for in-depth interviews following the collection of the survey data. Questionnaires, short interviews, and in- depth interviews were used to collect data. The quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. Thematic analysis was used to interpret interview data. The findings indicate that menopause was given the lowest priority amidst women's multiple and demanding roles within a gendered multiple transitional (immigration, work and menopause) context. The lack of language clarity to describe women's experience, cultural background, inadequate knowledge, and lack of social supports made menopause hidden, invisible, and inaudible. Conclusions and implications for nursing practice are guided by the goal of understanding women's experiences and meanings of menopause and supporting women through reflecting these experiences into their health care.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
• /
• v.19
• /
• pp.271-293
• /
• 2010

Japanese Give and Receive Verbs are divided into "YARU", "MORAU" and "KURERU". These are influenced by the subject, speaker's viewpoint and meaning. Three verbs are used in a different way depending on who is the giver and who is the taker. I analyze "YARU" and "KURERU" Verbs used in TOUSEISYOUSEIKATAGI. It focus on politeness, gender, and meaning when combined with 'TE'. As an expression of politeness, 'Yaru' is to give to a person of lower social status or an animal or plant. 'Ageru' is to give to an equal ora person of lower social status nowadays. However, 'Ageru' which is treated as elegance of the language remained expression of respect, 'Yaru' is used when the receiver is a person of lower social status and equal social status in TOUSEISYOUSEIKATAGI. 'Kureru' is used when the receiver is a person of lower social status and equal social status, 'kudasaru' is used when a person of higher social status gives the speaker something in TOUSEISYOUSEIKATAGI. Women speakers use 'oyarinasai' 'oyariyo' 'ageru' 'okureru' and men speakers use 'yaru' 'kureru'. Speech patterns peculiar to men are 'kuretamae' 'kurenka'. If the verbs are joined to "TE", they obtain abstract meaning as well as a movement of things. They express some modality for action of the preceeding verbs. The modality has the following meanings ; good will, goodness, benefits, kindness, hopeness, expectation, disadvantage, injury, ill will and sarcasm. In addition, 'TE YARU' expresses the speaker's strong will, 'TE KURERU' expresses the speaker's request.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.56 no.6
• /
• pp.1281-1294
• /
• 2010

In Written on the Body, by creating the narrator's ungendered and unsexed identity, Winterson makes her text open to the reader's assumption of the narrator's sexual and gender identity. Thus, this novel has been read, on the one hand, as a lesbian text by those who assume that the narrator is a female and, on the other hand, as a suspicious text colluding with patriarchal and heterosexual values by those who define the narrator as a male. Those readings of the narrator as one of either sex/gender, however, demonstrate how (academic as well as general) readers have been accustomed to the gender-based reading habits in which textual meanings are dichotomously arranged along the lines of sex and gender of characters. Challenging those dualistic "gendered" readings, this paper reads Winterson's Written on the Body as a queer text which interrogates, troubles, and subverts the heterosexual concepts of narrative, desire, and body without reducing the narrator's identity to the essentialist sex and gender system. More specifically, this paper examines how the narrator's 'un-/over-' determined sexual and gender identity queers the narrative structure of author-character-reader; how the narrator's queer (fluid) desire is passing and traveling across categorical contours of (homo-/hetero-) sexual desires; how Winterson challenges the concept of a coherent body and queers the concept of body as a hermeneutic text with myriad textual grids which are not coherently mapped by power but randomly inscribed by nomadic desires.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.64 no.4
• /
• pp.565-584
• /
• 2018

The pedagogical dynamic dramatized in Shaw's Pygmalion, which sets man as a distinct pedagogical authority and woman his subject spawning similarly patterned plays many decades later, has been relatively overlooked in the play's criticism clouded by its predominantly mythical theme. Shaw stages Eliza's pedagogical subordination to Higgins followed by her Nora-esque exit with the declaration, "I'll go and be a teacher." The central premise of this article is that the pioneering modern playwright and feminist's pedagogical rewriting of A Doll's House sets out a historical dialogue between Eliza, a new woman who repositions herself as a teacher renouncing her earlier subordinate pedagogical position that is culturally ascribed to women while threatening to replace her paternal teacher, and her immediate precursors, that is, Victorian women teachers whose professional career was socially "anathematized." Through a historical probe into the social status of Victorian women teachers, the article attempts to align their abortive career with Eliza's new womanly re-appropriation of the profession of teaching. With Pygmalion as the starting point of its query, this article conducts a historical survey on the literary representation of pedagogical women from the mid to late Victorian era to the turn of the century. Reading a wide selection of novels and plays alongside of Pygmalion (1912), such as Jane Eyre (1847), A Doll's House (1879), An Enemy of the People (1882), The Odd Women (1893), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), it contextualizes Eliza's resolution to be a teacher within the history of female pedagogy. This historical contextualization of the career choice of one of the earliest new women characters in modern drama helps appraise the historical significance of such choice.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
• /
• v.29
• /
• pp.391-411
• /
• 2012

Request expressions can be defined as expressions that demand or ask the other person to do certain movements. There are direct request expressions that ask the other person to do certain movements directly and indirect request expressions that ask the other person to do certain movements by describing the speaker's condition. The study analyzed gender and hierarchy of speakers and listeners who used 'tekure' and 'tekudasai' in dialog examples of the Meiji Period and the Taisho Period. In those periods, the modern Tokyo dialect was formed and established. "Toseishoseikatagi"in Meiji 10s,"Ukigumo""Natsukodachi""Tajotakon"in Meiji 20s,"Hakai""Botchan"in Meiji 30s,"Huton""Inakakyoshi" in Meiji 40s and "Aruonna"in the Taisho Period were analyzed for the study. 'kure' was used more by male speakers than female speakers. Examples by female speakers were shown on the novels after Meji 30s. In case of male speakers, they often used it to listeners with an equitable relationship at "Toseishoseikatagi"in Meiji 10s but they often used it to younger listeners at "Hakai"in Meiji 30s. 'okure' was used more by female speakers than male speakers. Listeners were varied from older ones to younger ones. In case of female speakers, 'okure' was used more often at "Aruonna"in the Taisho Period than the other novels. In case of male speakers, 'okure' was used only at "Ukigumo""Natsukodachi"and "Hakai". 'Okurenasai' was used outstandingly by female speakers on the form of 'okun_'. In case of 'kudasai', female speakers used it more than male speakers at "Toseishoseikatagi" and "Aruonna"but male speakers used it more than female speakers at "Tajotakon"and "Hakai". Listeners were varied from older ones to younger ones. 'o~kudasai' was not shown until Meiji 20s but shown after Meiji 30s among the analyzed novels. According to gender, it was used a little bit more often by female speakers than male speakers. According to hierarchy, listeners were usually older than speakers. 'o~nasatekudasai' was used more often by male speakers than female speakers. Listeners were also usually older than speakers.