Race and Ethnicity Commons^™

[Review Of] Phillipa Kafka. (Un)Doing The Missionary Position: Gender Asymmetry In Contemporary Asian American Women's Writing, David Goldstein-Shirley

Ethnic Studies Review

Phillipa Kafka's clever book title turns on her deconstruction of what she sees as a simultaneous patriarchal and racist orientation of some contemporary literary criticism, akin to the unquestioned, naturalized supremacy presumed by agents of political imperialism such as missionaries. By focusing on what she sees as feminist and postfeminist writing by contemporary Asian American women authors -- specifically, their attention to gender asymmetry -- she demonstrates that we can read these works as a collective strike against the sexism of much (male) postcolonial, Marxist, and deconstructionist criticism and the racism of much (white) feminist criticism. Her readings of Amy …