Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body

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Review: Traise Yamamoto clearly builds on earlier feminist works in her concern with the narrative and ontological effects of silence or-in the case of the body-"masking" in Japanese American women's writings. Yamamoto's study establishes the complex means by which "masking" their purposes or selves served these women writers who, despite the racialized and gendered discursive networks in the west that curtailed their articulation, both legally and socially, nonetheless often succeeded in achieving a sense of subjectivity or agency. Approaching the reading of Japanese American women's texts in a manner attentive to "the specific ways in which Japanese American women construct themselves as subjects and their simultaneous construction as objects in an orientalist discourse" (65), Masking Selves more than does justice to the rich tradition of feminist scholarship that precedes it, while it also puts forth its own intriguing and particular arguments for the study Japanese American women's writings. This book should be required reading for any one interested in feminist literary theory and Asian American studies.