Asian American

Footbinding and First-World Feminism in Chinese American Literature This article traces the trope of footbinding in Chinese American literature and argues that it primarily appears framed within a first-world feminist perspective that largely condemns it as oppressive, exotic, patriarchal, and/or sexualized. While not condoning this cruel and inhumane practice, this article suggests that a first-world critique of footbinding does an injustice to Chinese women by making them appear to be homogenous and monolithic objects who, through powerlessness and oppression, perpetrated this custom on themselves for a thousand years. The author calls for an activist Asian American literature that gives a better understanding of why reasonable women would have capitulated to such maiming, one that thoroughly illustrates the complex relations of dignity and power symbolized by such a practice. Interdisciplinary cultural studies approach used, including literary criticism, post-colonial theory, psychoanalysis, and historical analysis.

Some of the literature about teaching issues of race and racism in classrooms has addressed matters of audience. Zeus Leonardo, for example, has argued that teachers should use the language of white domination, rather than white privilege, when teaching about race and racism because the former language presupposes a minority audience, while the latter addresses an imaginary or presupposed white one. However, there seems to be little discussion in the literature about teaching these issues to an audience that is in fact predominantly minority. Leonardo assumes that minority students need little convincing about the reality of white domination, but students of color are not a monolithic group. The paper addresses some specific challenges the author has faced teaching theories of white domination to a predominantly minority student audience in New York City. Leonardo is right that audience matters, but audience turns out to matter in ways that defy...