Abstract:

Countless reiterations of violent narratives circulate throughout contemporary U.S. culture, rendering injury routine, even banal. Yet in this moment of increasing numbness to violence, the injured bodies of those caught in the crossroads of global capital, transnational immigration and U.S. sexual and racial orders are ever present. As U.S. ethnic groups marked by movement across borders--either due to recent immigration, to continuing visits to a country of origin, or because they are seen as foreigners regardless of their generational status--Chicana and Asian American women travel along these crossroads and the violence that appears in their literature reflects the danger of these paths. The question becomes how Chicana and Asian American women's literature keeps its narratives of bodily injury from being submerged into the banality of violence that permeates U.S. culture.

When sexual violence, disease, and death in racial communities are distinguished from the glut of bad news, these racial injuries are often presented as inexplicably excessive. In other words, racial injury is seen as gothic--associated with potentially threatening racial others who inexplicably disturb the rational and ethical multiculturalism of the United States. However, this gothic rendering of injury as inexplicable is complicated by another use of the gothic--the American gothic tradition that Teresa Goddu understands as excavating the hidden horrors that lurk beneath the rhetoric of American innocence and equality. The gothic can thus operate in two ways, both framing racial and gendered injuries as inexplicable and recuperating injuries that might otherwise go unseen.

While the gothic serves as a touchstone throughout the dissertation, the emphasis is not on the gothic itself but on its conjunction with other genres such as drama, documentary, epistolary, magical realism and detective fiction. In disrupting generic expectations, texts with intermixed genres can undo the banality of violence, rendering injury meaningful once again. My dissertation examines the varied relationships between genre and injury in Chicana and Asian American women's literature: in the texts I examine, the mode of portraying injury becomes a crucial means to reimagine injury.