Gender, Race, and Internal Colonization: An Asian Americanist Review of Traise Yamamoto's "Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body"

Abstract

In Asian American studies, it generally is presumed that what binds an otherwise extremely heterogeneous minority population is its historical, legal exclusion from the American body politic. In the nation's imaginary and laws, Asian Americans' claim to citizenship is a fragile thing-something abjured, withheld, and forged most dramatically during national crises. Traise Yamamoto's Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body underscores the continued necessity for Asian Americans to claim America, a nation that incarcerated Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. That juridical vulnerability has particularly harmful repercussions for Asian American women, whose subjectivities and struggles against patriarchy, nativism, and racism are structurally circumscribed by what the Black feminist theorist Deborah King calls "multiple jeopardy." Yamamoto's study is an exceptionally eloquent example of an Asian Americanist contribution to the critical race feminism movement in the U.S.