Cynthia Wu

Asian American Feminism’s Alliances with Men: Reading Hisaye Yamamoto’s “Seventeen Syllables” as an Antidraft Tract

Fiction writer Hisaye Yamamoto has commonly been read as an author who tackles the complex interplay between racism and sexism in Asian America. Much of the literary-critical scholarship on her work focuses on the multiple oppressions her female characters face and the strategies they use to maneuver the limited spaces of agency that are open to them. This interpretive logic has overlooked how Yamamoto also provides a keen critique of the violence affecting Asian American men. Through a close reading of one of her most popular short stories, “Seventeen Syllables,” this article argues that—long before debates about gender erupted in literary Asian America—Yamamoto had begun to stake a claim that the oppression of men of color is a feminist issue.

“Give Me the Stump Which Gives You the Right to Hold Your Head High” — A Homoerotics of Disability in Asian Americanist Critique

This essay performs a reading of John Okadas novel No-No Boy that examines the latent homoeroticism between the two main characters, one a disabled veteran and the other a draft resister. It shows how male-male desire may heal ruptures among Japanese American men in the wake of World War II. In doing so, this essay urges a rethinking of the terms on which Okadas novel was embraced by Asian American literary cultural nationalism in the 1970s.