The internet is definitely changing things up, and I’m excited to see it enabling us to create connections so that we can mobilize for change. Haha…the funniest thing is that these Kingstonians are so entrenched, just sitting in their ivory towers looking down on all of us. Despite the public availability and low cost of the internet, they don’t even see us coming.

The other issue with the Asian American movement (and the feminism emanating from it) is that it’s the peculiar product of the late 60s. There’s good and bad with it, but clearly the post-structuralist/neo-Marxist/deconstructionist ”theory” has not yielded political power for the left generally.

I think Dialectic has written some stuff about this. If you haven’t already, check out his stuff on the “mean green meme” in the forum. For women and African Americans, it helped to destroy sexist and racist norms, but it didn’t have any solid ground to reclaim that power because, as you point out, they only know how to deconstruct. They still suffer from this.

Are you interested in Asian American movements? If so, please stay around, get to know people, and continue to contribute. We need smart people here! We’ve got some plans for the future which we hope to implement. It’s all about connections and movement.

This is problematic, and we see how it turns into the endless campaigns for Asian American recognition in the media, the reactive campaigns against gaffes by major media figures and so on. Not that there’s anything wrong with that– it just seems to be a little limiting. It’s good to see the folks on this site pushing into new territory.

And I think, that the rise of information technology is dissolving the hierarchy of Asian American studies in the same way that it’s breaking down barriers elsewhere. The other issue with the Asian American movement (and the feminism emanating from it) is that it’s the peculiar product of the late 60s. There’s good and bad with it, but clearly the post-structuralist/neo-Marxist/deconstructionist ”theory” has not yielded political power for the left generally. It’s been a failure– if it hadn’t failed, you wouldn’t have seen 30 years of neo-conservative/theocon ascendancy in US politics.

I always knew who Frank Chin was, but I saw his ideas pretty marginalized by the mainstream of Asian American studies…and it’s hilarious that the rise of the internet/webforums/blogging has empowered those who were marginalized to find each other and to revive interest in the man’s work. Good stuff. I guess we could call it a dynastic cycle, with yesterday’s revolutionaries becoming today’s orthodoxy =)

However, that said, one of the most interesting legacies of the 1960s Asian American movement has been the development of extremely strong Asian American student organizations on many of the UC and CSU campuses throughout California. It is interesting to me to see how many students (many of whom, admittedly will go on to relatively ‘conventional’ corporate careers) are nonetheless being exposed to what is, by any measure, relatively sharp cultural critiques of the mainstream. And not only that, they are learning to have a sense of their own agency and identity.

Now that we have these political institutions, the question is, what will people do with it?

There was this book called “Asian American X” edited by Arar Han and John Hsu. You can see it over here. Arar and John were either college kids or recent graduates when they edited and published it. It was ALL about identity. I flipped through it at Costco, and they had some crazy ass deconstructionist identity-searching bullshit from some of their multiculturalist essayists. Good effort, and I applaud the young kids who put the book together, but as it is, identity-search just takes people in all kinds of useless directions.

I’m kinda torn on this. Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins would say that each group of feminists, while sharing an over-arching interest in the advancement of women, has a separate agenda tied into race and ethnicity. So Caucasian feminists, for example might be concerned with constantly being “the trophy” or frowned upon by their male counterparts for bearing a child of color. Black and Latina feminists may be concerned with be ignored. Asian American feminists could, in theory, be concerned with combating fetishism, exoticism, and try to educate their fellow Asian American women AGAINST automatically assimilating into the Caucasian world.

Then again, y’all are right…all these women could accomplish this under the simple title of “feminist.” After all, being female IS the common denominator here, and in some way, the root of all these problems.

Sure, some Asian American males are sexist, but no more sexist than other American males.

I don’t see a reason for “Asian American feminism” at all… if anything, I think it’s selfish - it seems that it’s only focus is issues that affect Asian American women, but ignoring the issues surrounding Asian American men. It’s like if I were only interested in the Chinese head tax, while ignoring the Japanese internment.

This can be exemplified in the support for “Falling For Grace”… at the surface, it may seem like it’s a positive movie overall for Asian women - many Asian women have to deal with feeling embarrassed by their own culture while dating a non-Asian guy. Well this movie helps with that issue. But it also ignores two other Asian American issues - Asian men are portrayed as sexually undesirable, or rather, they are “below white men” in the hierarchy of desirable partners. And secondly, that Asian women are easy and can’t exist without being with a white man.

You wouldn’t believe the number of dumb comments I’ve heard from white guys - “Asian women are easy - especially Filipinos”, “Asian women are hot and horny”, …yeah, all of this is without the girls around.

Anyways, my point echoes Xian’s point and that Asian American females should give up the “Asian American feminist” label, and just call themselves, an “Asian American activist” and/or a “feminist” and include issues facing Asian American males as part of their agenda.

All groups should address all injustice, but in my completely uninformed, non-female opinion, it would be more logical for Asian feminist groups to focus on Asian patriarchy and Asian American feminist groups to focus on American patriarchy.

But then again, maybe Asian American women need a space of their own. Maybe they could achieve things (i.e. through acting non-defensively) in their own Asian American female spheres without Asian men interfering.

These are just ideas. Asian American women would probably be best qualified to decide this sort of thing themselves. The only thing that I would say is that there needs to be a focus on truth, otherwise it usually veers off in the wrong direction.

I can’t say that I know for certain that there are any issues that can’t be addressed through feminism or AA empowerment. That would actually be something for Asian American women to decide. But any movement has to be based on truth and mutual desire for empowerment rather than what “AA feminists” historically have been doing.