Recontextualizing Asian American Domesticity: From Madame Butterfly to My American Wife!

From the Eaton sisters’ literary works at the previous turn of the century to Gish Jen’s 2004 novel The Love Wife, Recontextualizing Asian American Domesticity explores the ways in which the trope of American domesticity is experimented, resisted, and reinvented in Asian American women’s literature. In order to contextualize Asian American women’s writing within the terrain of American cultural and literary history, this book considers how the trope of domesticity is deployed in constructing Asian American women’s subjectivity, especially through the tension and dynamic between Asian and white American womanhood. Seung Ah Oh’s focus is specifically placed on the female homosocial bond and conflict around the notion of Asian American domesticity, both as a gendered and a national site with the conflicting desires within and behind Asian American women’s voices, endlessly shifting the notion of Asian American home and domesticity. Recontextualizing Asian American Domesticity is appropriate for all students and scholars.