| Chapter 1: | The Cultural Production of Controversial Women Writers |
On the other hand, canonical tokenism in turn promotes and encourages the equation of literary representation with the actualities of Third World nations and ethnicities, since the included one or few are the only available cultural text(s). This theoretical mechanism imposes impossible political and cultural burdens that “no single work is capable of performing under any condition”31 and certainly limits the variety of critical interpretations on these literary works.
A tool to maintain the hierarchy of power between the Third World and the West, the discourse of “representational inevitability” is not only nationalistic but also ultimately male-centered, and depends much on the control of women, especially women’s bodies.32 Underlying the question of whether women authors of color represent or misrepresent their ethnic communities is a discursive competition between Western Orientalist nationalism and Third World nationalism for the power to control the hierarchical structure of racial and national relations. In addition, it is essentially a competition between Western masculinity and Third World masculinity, both of which are necessarily heterosexual. As a result, their power and victory has much to do with their in / ability to define the meanings of Third World women’s bodies. However, this is not a level playing field from the outset. The internalized burden of Third World inferiority and Western superiority is fully embodied in the discursive trap of “representational inevitability,” often putting Third World critics on the defensive. Not questioning the assumed superiority of the Western men, they are trying to prove that they are just as good. While it is women authors of color who are in the middle of cultural controversies, the real controversy is actually about the legitimacy and status of Third World manhood as opposed to that of the Western men.
This is exactly why controversial authors of color are not necessarily women. Male authors are also faced with the accusation of cultural misrepresentation as long as their works do not promote positive images of nationalistic masculinity. Two male authors come to mind. David Huang, author of M. Butterfly is criticized for feminizing Asian American men for one simple reason.