School of Culture and Communication - Theses

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    Beneath the Long White Cloud: settler Chinese women's storytelling in Aotearoa New Zealand
    Yee, Grace ( 2016)
    This thesis analyses settler Chinese women’s storytelling in Aotearoa New Zealand in order to articulate a conception of autonomous subjectivity within the context of hegemonic Colonialist Orientalist narratives. Utilising a bricolage methodology that combines the researcher’s creative writing with critical analyses of spoken and written stories, including interviews with authors, it focuses on Chinese women’s lived experiences and the narrative strategies they deploy. The prolonged absence of the feminine voice is barely acknowledged in extant studies of the settler Chinese community in New Zealand. Chinese women’s stories did not emerge in the public domain until the 1990s. While increased recognition of this writing appears to point to the country’s progress, Colonialist Orientalist narratives have continued to characterise Chinese women as either exotic and Oriental or assimilated and invisible, subordinating them in accord with a an enduring prototype: ‘Chinese woman’. I contend that the insidiousness of this prototype is reflected in its integration into settler Chinese women’s subjectivities, and in the stories they tell: both ‘inside’ the Chinese community, and ‘outside’ in the Pākehā mainstream. As such, it appears that there exists no space within which these women can express an autonomous subjectivity and thereby assert a ‘separate’ identity. This thesis is concerned with identifying such a space. Framed by key premises drawn from Judith Butler’s critical analysis of subjection, and with reference to Rey Chow’s analysis of Chinese woman’s subjectivity, Linda Alcoff’s positional feminism, Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical schema and Mary Ann Doane’s theory of femininity as ‘masquerade’, this research analyses the stories that settler Chinese women have told in diverse contexts including personal interviews and in their published writing. In these analyses, in which I conceive of storytelling as performance, I identify a range of narrative strategies through which autonomous subjectivities may be articulated and validated, and which have the potential to ground claims for previously unrecognised subject positions. The more explicitly imaginative creative writing in this thesis is also interrogative, and as such, has more than adjunctive value to the (more overtly) critical discussion. Chapter Five demonstrates a range of counterhegemonic narrative strategies in its juxtaposition of multiple genres including fictionalised autobiography, poetry, images and excerpts from mainstream New Zealand newspapers. Creative writing is also utilised to articulate an intimate conversation among Chinese women in Chapter Two, and in the autoethnographic narrative threads integrated into the critical discussion in most of the other chapters. The incorporation of this creative writing into the body of the thesis is intended to demonstrate that the language of traditional academic discourse alone is inadequate for the task of illuminating settler Chinese women’s subjectivity. It also reveals how the autonomy and agency of this Chinese woman writer – in the capacity of researcher – may be grounded in the transformation of the very language that has produced her as ‘Chinese woman’.