Unwrapping Orientalist Constraints: Restoring Homosocial Normativity to Chinese American History

Abstract

Since the publication of his pathbreaking treatise, Said's theoretical Orientalism itself can be said to loom as large in the fields of literary, postcolonial, and cultural studies as ideological Orientalism. Many Asian American Studies scholars, including myself are indebted to Said, for as American Orientals, we grapple with the same intellectual confinements as does Said, a western-trained Oriental: many ways my study of Orientalism has been an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals. In this article I respond to Said's directive to inventory Orientalism's effects by examining how it has restricted our thinking about Asian Americans. I address the failure of Asian American Studies to understand the bachelor era of Chinese American history on its own terms, as a homosocial community and space, rather than as a discomfiting deviation from heterosexual, family norms.

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