Un)Doing The Missionary Position, Vol. 158 »

PHILLIPA KAFKA is Professor of English Literature and Former Director of Women's Studies at Kean College of New Jersey.

This is the first full-length work of feminist literary criticism of such contemporary Asian American women's writing as Amy Tan's The Kitchen God's Wife, Fae Myenne Ng's Bone, R. A. Sasaki's The Loom and Other Stories, Gish Jen's Typical American, and Cynthia Kadohata's The Floating World.

Booknews

Explores how selected contemporary Asian American women writers inquire into the power relations that require the feminine to be suppressed. Representing feminist, allegorical, and post-feminist approaches, they include Amy Tan, Fae Myenne Ng, Gish Jen, R. A. Sasaki, and Cynthia Kadohata. They all portray older women, usually mothers or grandmothers, as suffering and struggling as individuals embedded with their historical culture before the 1970s, while daughters or other younger women take the privileges and freedoms won by feminism for granted. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.