• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.4
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• pp.579-597
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• 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text for examining Western masculinity in crisis in the post-imperialist age, in which territorial imperialism is no longer valid.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
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• v.58 no.6
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• pp.1143-1165
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• 2012

Tinted with ontological concern, Ted Hughes passes through an existential climate, eventually confirms death( or nothingness) as the new foundation of his poetry, and explores the various paradoxical effects of nothingness. Nihilism, fraught with rather negative and traumatic themes such as death, melancholy, and despair can, however, generate being (even in multiple modes), animalistic vitality, and insubstantial specters. Among these new functions of nothingness animality and spectrality are the most notable in Hughes's poetry. A considerable number of animals and bioorganisms that Hughes introduces exhibit the enormous energy derived from the dignity of death, from subversive challenges against the established hierarchy, and from new and dynamic multifaceted sources of nothingness. In other words, Hughes's animals, yield surplus power beyond themselves, as if they are demi-gods; in short, they feature the sublime as unidentified terrifying effects of nothingness. In a sense, animality means allowing some level of violence without legal sanction. Hughes inaugurates this kind of all bigotry-eradicating violence and attempts to subvert higher beings such as humans and gods, and existing doctrines: thrushes rise up against the animal and human worlds; a rush of ghostly crabs at night press through the human world. Hughes also resists the highest being, God, employing the technique of rewriting God's theology. Dirty, anomalous crows attack, subvert, and dismember the delicate, indurate, and thorough system of logos. Hughes, of course, does not place the animals merely in lofty regard, aware of the ulterior deprivation of the sublime animality, the trace of existential negativity. Thus, a seemingly omnipotent crow can become a mere beggar guzzling ice cream from the garbage bin on the beach. In addition, the violent and dignified aspects of nothingness can be transformed to reveal the thin and trivial traits as unreliable specters. Dark, heavy, and terrible nullity lessens its own volume and mass, and exposes the airy waves of shadows or specters. However, owing to nullity's untraceable track, the scarcity and unfamiliarity of the phantoms inversely display their foreign gigantic effects such as fantasy and violence.