This thesis focuses on runaway daughters from Vietnamese American refugee immigrant nuclear families and asks, “Why do the daughters choose to leave the household?” I attempt to answer this question using a critical refugee studies framework in combination with intersectional feminist studies, specifically erin Ninh’s Ingratitude: The Debt Bound Daughter of Asian American Literature. I position the runaway parallel to the refugee as both figures try to escape institutions that produce that produces docile and subservient bodies, i.e., the family and nation. My thesis analyzes these themes through two contemporary memoirs, The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui and The Gangster We Are All Looking For by lê thi diem thúy, both of which have a runaway daughter who attempts to escape the filial pressures of a Vietnamese refugee family. My thesis analyzes why these young women reject the forced gifts of life and obligation from their parents.

The title is a play on words. The first part is the imperative “Run away,” which is a command to the girl to run away from the nation as a refugee. It is only later that she runs away from her family, which makes her a “runaway daughter.”

The Netflix superhero show Iron Fist (2017-2018) is widely known and critiqued in U.S. mainstream media for its whitewashing controversy and cultural appropriations of Asian culture. Much of the focus has been on the protagonist Danny Rand (played by white actor Finn Jones) and how the show could have been both progressively and critically better if the character had been Asian American. However, little attention has been directed to the Asian actors and actresses of Iron Fist in terms of how they contend with and resist the Orientalist legacy of the show through their performances, and how the show helps to enable their resistance work.

This paper argues that Iron Fist as a platform enables Asian Americans to use their performances as a means of negotiating their representation in Hollywood and enacting resistance against Orientalism and stereotyping. Conversely, this paper also argues that these performances and resistances are also being filtered through the Yellow Peril/Orientalist framework of the show, which troubles and complicates the representation work of Asian/Americans. To support these points, I will examine the performances of three Asian actors/actresses who play prominent roles on Iron Fist, how they conduct their resistance work, and how the show influences their resistance. Ultimately, this paper seeks to substantiate resistance work as not necessarily victories nor hopeless cases, but acts that create sites of significant and complex strategy-making, deliberation, compromise, conflict, invention, and rumination.

Focusing on intimacy, this study is situated at the intersection of Food Studies, Critical Refugee Studies and Gender Studies. Centering on cơm tháng (monthly rice), a meal delivery service that mimics the format of traditional Vietnamese family meals, this project interrogates Vietnamese American women’s agency and negotiation of gendered labor within the private realm (the home and the family unit) and the quest for home through food consumption. The analysis of this study is drawn from materials collected through oral interviews, English and non-English materials, including printed, online newspaper articles, blog posts and online forums. The gendered and patriarchal relations of a home are manifested in the mundane acts of cleaning, cooking, grocery shopping and even driving, all of which are integral to food preparation. Cơm tháng provides an entry point to the domain of intimacy; it sheds light on shifting family structures, gendered labor roles, Vietnamese women’s agency, and fissures within the Vietnamese diaspora. Cơm tháng illuminates the affective labor and the double shifts performed by women that are often invisibilized, shows that cơm tháng's providers participate in the patriarchal construction of the home while exerting their agency and helping other women fulfilling their second shifts. The consumption of cơm tháng also presents a form of forced queering of the heteronormative home.

In 1833, a group of Indian women dancers petitioned the colonial government to abolish the regulation that prohibited their traditional practice of “purchasing” children. Citing the anti-slavery policies of the government, the presiding British officer declined their request. Half a century later, in 1881, another group of women performers, petitioned the government for wrongfully designating them as “common prostitutes” under the provisions of the Indian Contagious Diseases Act. This time, the government had to cede to their demands. In 1898, another dancing woman petitioned the state demanding justice on behalf of her performer granddaughters, who faced immense hardship on their England tour. The final judgment on this case, however, remained inconclusive.Tracking three key moments of colonial legislative and regulatory interventions–abolition of Indian slavery, implementation of Contagious Diseases Act, and the initiation of South Asian presence in international exhibitions–this dissertation examines how Indian women performers directly engaged with the British colonial state from the early nineteenth to the first decades of the twentieth century. It explores how Indian women performers’ active contestations of the criminalizing colonial labels of “slaves” and “prostitutes” across different registers of state regulation, surveillance, and abolition to assert their professional identity as performers exposed the fragility of the colonial state. Throughout the nineteenth century, using the method of writing legal petitions, the women performers continued arguing for restoring their rights of “purchasing” children, reclaimed property from the state, obtained permission for holding performances, contested allegations of engaging in “clandestine prostitution,” complained about European agents’ misdemeanors—while repeatedly asserting their professional identity as performing artistes. By documenting such repeated marks and methods of articulations of Indian women performers left in the colonial archive, this dissertation pushes against the idea of the unchallengeable hegemonic nature of the colonial state and contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the frailties of empire as engendered through the daily acts of negotiations of the marginalized. Drawing on a range of colonial correspondence and reports, newspapers and institutional records, this dissertation emphasizes the centrality of Indian women performers in shaping major colonial discourses and decisions surrounding slavery, venereal diseases, and imperial exhibitions. The dissertation’s opening chapter examines how the process of criminalizing dancers as “slaves” remained incomplete owing to the colonial state’s own administrative inconsistencies brought about by the dancers’ objections through petitions. Continuing in the same vein, chapter two explores how dancers’ petitions played a significant role in the workings (and failures) of the Indian Contagious Diseases Acts in the colonial western India. With a microhistorical approach, the final chapter documents how dancers’ continuous assertions as professional performers (as opposed to “prostitutes”) in the precarious circuits of colonial exhibitionary spaces exposed the hypocrisy of the colonial state which chose to earn revenues from the labor of Indian dancing women in the metropole while simultaneously marginalizing and criminalizing them as “common prostitutes” in India. By centering Indian women performers’ everyday negotiations with the state, this dissertation seeks to provide a new reading of the limits of colonial control into the realms of gender, sexuality, and performance

ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS

Tao Po: Finding Filipinx-/American Twitter

by

Manuel Demetrio De Leon

Master of Arts in Asian American Studies

University of California, Irvine 2020

Professor Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Chair

This project utilizes the online platform of Twitter to investigate the diasporic identity formation of 1.5 and 2nd generation Filipinx-/Americans. The socially constructed phenomena of “Filipino Twitter” serves as an abstracted stage where Filipinxs collaborate, (re)negotiate, and contest the varying interpretations of “Filipinxness.” Select tweets by and interviews with active contributors on Twitter reveal a collective conversation on the complexities of the Filipinx identity. Navigating through the overlapping uncertainties and anxieties around authenticity and belonging, these dialogues indicate a burgeoning consciousness distinct to this generation.

Transgressing Trans analyzes the formation of the wrong body narrative (a man trapped in a woman’s body and vice versa) within sexological discourse. Drawing from sexological literature, anti-abolitionist texts, theology, black studies and transgender studies, this dissertation attempts to address the role (anti)blackness played in the creation of the wrong body narrative. How does the depoliticization of the wrong body narrative continue to inscribe trans politics and identity with anti-black racism?

Utilizing a Foucauldian genealogy, I reinterpret the history of sexology by showing how certain events were indeed historical processes caught in specific cultural, political, and economic times. Karl Ulrichs was the first person to construct a scientific theory of same-sex desire (he coined the term “Urning,” who was a male-bodied individual with a female soul) in 1864, around the time that the trans-Atlantic slave trade was “abolished” (1859) and the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859). I posit that these landmarks are not coincidental; the notion of being trapped in the “wrong body” became legible through the structures of slavery and the scientific racism that followed.

Organized around a series of case histories, the first chapters examine the historical, political, and cultural context of the formation of the “scientific” field of sexology, specifically through the early manifestations of the “wrong body” narrative within nineteenth century American and European biological science, psychiatry, theology, and anthropology. In the later chapters, I move to the 1950s when the term transsexual first became popular in both medico-science and the media in the United States, and then to the 1980s when transsexuality became an official mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual III (DSM-III). The discourses used to describe the transsexual continued to rely on the language of degeneration and pathology through reiterating not only the spirit/flesh duality, but also incorporating narratives of the primitive and the savage within the codification of transsexuality.