CHAPTER ONE

Introduction: Multiethnic Fragmentation

and Womens Community

We are taught that the body is an ignorant animal; intelligence dwells only
in the head. But the body is smart (Anzalda, Borderlands 38).
[T]he trauma of racism is, for the racists and the victim,
the severe fragmentation of the self (Morrison, Unspeakable 16).
To my daughter Rebecca
Who saw in me
what I considered
a scar
And redefined it
as
a world
(Walker, Dedication to
In Search of Our Mothers Gardens).

When Victor Frankenstein is asked to create a partner for his hideous and
dangerous male monster in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelleys Frankenstein
(1831), the doctor reluctantly begins the project of creating a female form.
However, before the female creature becomes a complete body, Frankenstein
decides he cannot, in good conscience, create another being potentially as
monstrous as his first creation. Therefore, the voiceless female form is
destroyed by the doctor and thrown into the sea while the male monster
angrily watches (127). While the scene focuses on the doctor and his male
creature, the forgotten female figure remains forever without speech,
identity, and subjectivity. She is forever incomplete, a mere collection of

The Fragmented Female Body and Identity

fragments that has been envisioned, created, and destroyed at the hands of
males. This broken female figure haunts me as I continue to read much later
womens writing. In particular, it seems that the incomplete female body is
poignantly echoed in multiethnic American womens novels of the mid1970s through the 1990s. This rich, diverse postmodern literature explores
the theme of bodily fragmentation that begins, for women, long before
Shelley tackled the issue nearly two centuries ago. What I have noticed is
that bodily fragmentation is effectively reflected, in postmodern multiethnic
American womens novels, in narrative fragmentation. This fractured,
ruptured writing, I believe, suggests a history of fragmented bodies and
identities. As Rosi Braidotti argues, fragmentation has been womens
historical condition (121). My goal in this book is to explore how
fragmentation has defined womens position in the United States, and how
recent, multiethnic American women authors have embraced a disjointed,
postmodern writing style both to reflect and to resist their historical state of
fragmentation. In many novels, women writers from diverse ethnic and
racial heritages, including African American, Asian American, Chicana,
Native American, and Jewish American backgrounds, explore wounding and
scarring as forms of bodily fragmentation. In these postmodern multiethnic
womens novels, the graphic symbols of the wound and scar become
manifestations of various forms of oppression. However, these wounds and
scars also act as the vehicle through which female charactersacross their
differencesrecognize their shared oppressions, unite in female community,
and reclaim their bodies, histories, and identities.
The novels I place into conversation in this analysis are Toni Morrisons
Beloved (1987), Theresa Hak Kyung Chas Dicte (1982), Phyllis Alesia
Perrys Stigmata (1999), Gayl Joness Corregidora (1975), Emma Prezs
Gulf Dreams (1996), Paula Gunn Allens The Woman Who Owned the
Shadows (1983), and Kathy Ackers Blood and Guts in High School (1978)
and Empire of the Senseless (1988). In each of these postmodern, feminist
novels, the fragmented female body becomes the means through which
women recognize their shared historical wounds and can thus potentially
unite in order to resist oppressions caused by patriarchy, racism, and
heteronormativity. For example, in Beloved and Dicte, the female
protagonists are connected to their mothers, daughters, and female
communities via bodily scars that represent specific, racialized heritages.
Sethes and Beloveds scars connect them to the horrific past of slavery, but
furthermore, in their recognition, these same scars eventually connect the
women of the community. Dictes bodily fragmentations represent the

Introduction: Multiethnic Fragmentation and Womens Community

ruptures of Korean American identity and of Korea itself, yet they, too,
connect daughters and mothers. In Stigmata and Corregidora, wounds and
scars symbolize a haunting reenactment of foremothers oppressive
experiences. The recognition of these (sometimes shared and sometimes
differing) experiences, however, allows for connections and resistance.
Along comparable lines, Gulf Dreams and The Woman Who Owned the
Shadows celebrate lesbian relationships while the protagonists fragmented
bodies and identities critique the patriarchal, heteronormative societies that
condemn them. On the other hand, Ackers novels completely remove the
mother and other female companions, and the female protagonists wounds
and scars thus point to a loss of identity devoid of the ability for healing. I
examine these eight novels because they work together to generate a similar
trajectory for feminist discourse. Their focus on reclaiming the female body
and using it as a means of womens (re)connectivity provides a positive
feminist direction for womens literature and for womens relationships in
general. By examining this set of novels, I wish not to generalize about the
authors or protagonists experiences, but to suggest that these authors and
protagonists diverse cultural backgroundstheir race, ethnicity, geography,
sexual orientation, class, spirituality/religionin concert with the novels
focus on bodily and narrative fragmentationin fact confirm the historical
fragmentation of women and demand new forms of writing, female
collectivity, and historical memory as means of feminist resistance against
patriarchy, racism, and heterosexism.
I pause here to define and clarify some of these terms. This analysis is
largely influenced by several feminist theorists, whose collective work
informs my definition of feminism. Importantly, my interest in language
and bodily representation reflects my reading of Hlne Cixous, while my
focus on corporeality evokes Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz. Yet my
strongest feminist influence is bell hooks, and as I define feminism for this
study, I begin with her definition. According to hooks, feminism in its most
basic form is the struggle to end sexist oppression (Feminist 26), and I
expand this definition to include the unity of women, for only in unity can
women overturn patriarchy and end sexist oppression. Hence, feminism, in
this study, celebrates womens bonds as means through which oppression
can be contested. A bond, meanwhile, means connection or solidarity.
Therefore, feminist bonds can include any loving and empowering
relationships between womenrelationships which undermine patriarchy
including lesbian relationships, friendships, and ties between family
members.

The Fragmented Female Body and Identity

Another term I should clarify is multiethnic, which I use in several

ways. First, I define the genre of literature examined in this book as
multiethnic novels because the grouping of works here emerges from
various ethnic and racial backgrounds. Hence the genre itself is classified by
multiplicity of race and ethnicity. Moreover, the authors themselves are
often products of multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural backgrounds;
their characters, likewise, are often at the crossroads of ethnic and racial
identities. Chas Korean American communities, for example, struggle at the
margins of American society, while Allen and her characters are inflected
culturally, ethnically, and spiritually by both European and Native American
(which itself is a complex and non-homogeneous label) cultures and
traditions. Therefore, the authors, their characters, and the genre itself are
multiethnic on several levels. I choose not to use the term multiracial
because this term does not necessarily include cultural differences, nor do I
use the term multicultural because this term does not necessarily attend to
diversity of ethnicity. The term multiethnic, while it still has its own
slippages of meaning, includes cultural differences as well as ethnic
diversity.
A few other terms should be defined. I use the term novel rather
loosely in this study, as several of these works of literature (including Chas
Dicte and Prezs Gulf Dreams) include elements of autobiography, poetry,
and other genres. But this complication of the novel genre only strengthens
the study of these works as (postmodern) novels, for the authors challenge
and subvert the traditional characteristics of the genre. Thus, they question
the idea of authoritative objectivity, and they reclaim the subjective I,
while moving in a feminist and postmodern direction; one shared
characteristic of feminism and postmodernism is, after all, their rigorous
challenge to authority and convention. This point begs the question of
postmodernism and its definition in this study. The term postmodern is
used in both a stylistic and a periodizing sense, signifying a group of artistic
strategies, including disjointed narrative, shifting perspectives, pastiche, and
a challenge to authority, which occurs most frequently in the second half of
the twentieth century. I abridge the definition here because this term is
defined in depth later in this chapter.
Another key term, fragmentation, is a purposely broad, umbrella term
indicating not only a disjointed style of writing, but also the state of womens
bodies, identities, memories, and relationships in a patriarchal era. Examples
are the lack of full reproductive rights and the socially compelled
competition between women for male approval.
These and other

Introduction: Multiethnic Fragmentation and Womens Community

fragmentations contribute to a feminized lack of wholeness, and they are

often symbolized fictively as bodily fragmentations, or physical wounds,
scars, and mutilations. The specific kinds of oppressions that are examined
here are patriarchy, racism, and heterosexism. Patriarchy, or rule by the
father, manifests itself in various forms, specifically via male dominance
within the family, government, church, and other social institutions.
Patriarchy is largely maintained and reproduced through heteronormativity,
the normalization of heterosexuality, which serves to reproduce the
conventional family unit. Heterosexism, then, includes the multitudes of
discrimination, mistreatment, and oppression that emerge from
heteronormativity. Finally, racism in this study involves the belief in the
inherent superiority of the white race; each of the authors presented here
critiques the position of other that her ethnic group has been forced to
assume within American culture. This terminology, given a rather hasty
overview here, will be elaborated, deepened, complicated, and clarified
throughout this book.
Theoretical approaches for this study include postmodern conceptions of
aesthetics, politics, and identities, and feminist theories of embodiment,
difference, and sisterhood. Moreover, I problematize issues of race,
ethnicity, class, and sexuality. To accomplish these readings, I make use of
theoretical lenses provided by Braidotti, hooks, Cixous, Grosz, Gloria
Anzalda, Trinh Minh-ha, Judith Butler, and Gilles Deleuze and Flix
Guattari, among others. Extending from these theorists, I suggest that
womens historical fragmentation is reflected in many postmodern, feminist
novels, and that bodily wounding and scarring become metaphors for
womens historical fragmentation. Moreover, I argue that the symbol of the
bodily wound or scar effectively connects women, through its recognition, to
their daughters, mothers, grandmothers, lovers, or other women, and
suggests sisterhood, matrilineage, and community as potential solutions to
historical fragmentation.
In the United States, the twentieth-century proliferation of metaphors
such as the melting pot and the cultural mosaic deceptively advertises a
national shift toward inclusiveness. Landmark events such as the success of
the Womens Suffrage Movement in 1920 and the Civil Rights Movement of
the mid-1950s through the 1970s suggest a move toward acceptance and
equality. However, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, the
increasing economic gap between the wealthy and the poor, the escalated
discrimination and racism against immigrant communities, the denial of
basic rights to the gay and lesbian community, and the continued debate over

The Fragmented Female Body and Identity

womens reproductive rights indicate that inequalities persist. The most

harshly victimized, of course, are those who have typically been silenced
the women of racial and ethnic minority groups. For much of the United
States history, white women were denied education, property rights, legal
representation, and voting privileges; but for women of racial and ethnic
minority groups, these oppressions have been even further escalated.
However, despite continued assaults on womens subjectivity and civil
liberties, women from diverse backgrounds and histories have found resistant
ways of continually challenging the patriarchal status quo politically,
academically, socially, and artistically.
The women who represent these experiences through writing, then, must
take on the challenge of aesthetically portraying twentieth-century American
life from the othered position of the ethnic woman. How does one present
a history that is rife with struggle, protest, oppression, and resistance?
Interestingly, many contemporary, multiethnic women writers often write in
purposefully fragmentary ways, taking the modernist style of the early
twentieth century as a springboard and reworking it into a uniquely feminist,
postmodern voice. Not only does a feminist postmodern style claim a history
for these marginalized groups, but it also acts as a tool for resistance and
empowerment of multiethnic women. Fractured, disjointed narrative is not
new, of course, for the modernists who emerged after World War I
rigorously exercised the style of fragmentary narrative. Virginia Woolf,
Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and others challenged the fixed, linear plot of
the conventional novel and found new ways of exploring and portraying their
worlds. Their unconventional writing was part of a larger social and artistic
movement that came to be known as Modernism, which stretched at least
until the end of World War II and perhaps through the 1950s.
However, the social and political shifts of the 1960s inaugurated a
movement that differed in many ways from the Modernism that
characterized the first half of the century. The ability to destroy life on a
massive scalean ability that emerged around World War IImay be one
contributing factor in the intellectual and artistic shift. Another may be the
social and political upheavals of the mid-1950s through the 1970s.
Explanations vary, but theorists tend to agree that Postmodernism, as a
movement, emerged in or shortly after the 1940s. For one influential
postmodern thinker, Jean-Francois Lyotard, the postmodern is the
incredulity toward metanarratives (xxiv), or stories defining a culture, and
it is World War II that marks a shift toward this decline of narrative (37).
Another key postmodern theorist, Fredric Jameson, disagrees with Lyotards

Introduction: Multiethnic Fragmentation and Womens Community

master narrative theory (Postmodernism xi) and suggests instead that

postmodernism is the consumption of sheer commodification as a process
(x). Jameson sees postmodernism as both a periodizing and a stylistic
concept, which emerged in late capitalism as a reaction to modernism in the
end of the 1950s or the beginning of the 1960s (Postmodernism xx). While
some disagreement exists about postmodernisms definition and inception,
the accepted view is that postmodern thinking and aesthetics were in full
swing by the 1960s.
The postmodern era involves some specific artistic and literary shifts. In
terms of art and literature, Jameson notes, modernist works by James Joyce
and Pablo Picasso are no longer seen as ugly, but rather, as realistic due
to their canonization and academic institutionalization in the 1950s
(Postmodernism 4). In other words, modernist art and literature become the
rule rather than the exception, with the new generation seeing it as the
establishment style of their modernist-era parents. Therefore, postmodern
art and literature represent a new shift into an era in which, as Jameson notes,
art, literature, and architecture acquire a new depthlessness and a
weakening of historicity (Postmodernism 6).
Similarly, in
Postmodernism and Consumer Society, Jameson notes that postmodernism
often involves the disappearance of a sense of history and the
fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents (Postmodernism
125). This argument suggests that postmodernism lacks a sense of historical
connection, and therefore, according to Jameson, postmodernism precludes
the possibility for political activism (Postmodernism 125).
While Jamesons celebrated studies of postmodern art and society are
extraordinarily helpful and thorough, the multiethnic, feminist women
authors presented in this study clearly challenge some of his claims.
Contrary to what Jameson argues, not only can postmodernism engage with
history, but it can also act as a political tool, particularly when combined
with feminist concerns. As Ann Bomberger notes in an article on Kathy
Acker, postmodern fiction is distinctive not only stylistically for its blending
of genres, but also for its blatant politicism (189). She points out that
postmodern writing seems to be an easy match with feminism because it
engages issues fundamental to feminism: sexuality, political voice, and
languages relationship to authority (189). However, as Bomberger notes,
postmodern theorists often doubt that postmodernism can be political
because of capitalisms ability to co-opt and render useless any political
attack (189). Jameson would agree with Bombergers claim here, but many
feminists, including the writers presented in this study, would disagree with

The Fragmented Female Body and Identity

Jameson, embracing postmodernism as a powerful, political, activist,

feminist tool. As Ian Gregson notes, Toni Morrison (and I would argue all
of the writers in this study) sharply rebukes the depthless, affectless,
ahistorical vision of postmodernity (14).1 Likewise, as Laurie Vickroy
points out, In order to reveal the effects of slavery through characters
fragmented consciousness and memories, Morrison had to jettison linear or
chronological approaches to narrative (177). And I add, of course, that
traumas faced by other characters in these novels also demand the
jettisoning of conventional narrative structures. Moreover, theorists such
as Linda J. Nicholson, Nancy Fraser, and Donna Haraway have successfully
argued that feminism and postmodernism are strongly allied. The point here
is that a postmodern aesthetic can act as an effective means of feminist,
political, and social critique. Certainly, each of the authors discussed in this
study creates a fragmented aesthetic style that is uniquely her own but which,
in every case, is strongly historicized and political.
As a postmodern strategy, the fragmented novel is embraced by these
authors, and it is necessary to delineate what exactly constitutes a fragmented
novel. A helpful study by Carol Clark DLugo offers one of the most
comprehensive explanations of the fragmented novel. Although she
discusses only Mexican novels, she so thoroughly defines the fragmented
novel as its own genre that I briefly offer here her analysis:
The most basic definition of a fragmented novel is a work that is broken into
sections, with spaces or gaps that separate the pieces of prose. These spaces can be
blank or filled with a variety of designs [.]2 Other examples of textual
fragmentation are experiments with spacing between words, the repeated use of
sentence fragments, and the graphic depiction of disordered thoughts. (xi)

The novels in my study certainly offer these textual experiments with

spacing, images, and ostensible disorganization. DLugo continues by
noting that most fragmented novels follow a basic notion of linearity in that
sections are generally read in the normal ordering sequence of first, second,
and so on in a syntagmatic arrangement until the end of the novel, but she
complicates this idea when she notes that some authors have further
experimented with the ordering of the fragments, offering a choice of reading
patterns or refusing any guidance whatsoever (6). This experimentation is
visible in Chas Dicte and in Ackers Blood and Guts, when the reader must
actively determine, in places, whether to read down the page or to jump back
and forth between two pages of alternating text. DLugo also says there is
often a haphazard jumping among past, present, and future (7), and indeed,

Introduction: Multiethnic Fragmentation and Womens Community

times overlap in many of the novels in this study, including Perrys Stigmata,
Joness Corregidora, Prezs Gulf Dreams, and Allens The Woman Who
Owned the Shadows. Finally, it is important to mention DLugos belief that
fragmentation serves to destabilize the patriarchy, both in literary and more
abstract social terms (10). Certainly, a primary goal of the novels in my
study is to undermine patriarchy, and the writers do so partly by subverting
the traditional novel genre. DLugos explanation of the fragmented novel,
while it explores only Mexican novels, does provide a helpful description of
exactly what constitutes a fragmented novel.
The texts discussed here are explicitly postmodern in terms of both their
periodization and their stylistic concerns. DLugo notes that fragmentation
of American novels peaks in the 1960s (187), but this statement marginalizes
American (particularly multiethnic) womens writing, in which there is a
unique, stylistic fragmentation emerging in the 1970s and continuing through
the 1990s. All the novels included in this study were written in the decades
of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, with the earliest, Joness Corregidora,
published in 1975, and the latest, Perrys Stigmata, published in 1999.
Historically, this period certainly calls for a resistant form of womens
writing. With the conservative backlash following progressive Civil Rights
advances of the 1960s and 1970s, women and minorities saw many of their
hard-won victories challenged or revoked. Moreover, women saw the
stoppage of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982, a blatant reminder for
feminists that their battle continues.
As Acker notes in an interview, [A]rt and the political processes of the
community should be interwoven (Apparatus par. 6). Accordingly, the
novels considered here use postmodern aesthetics to narrate specific
womens ways of overcoming historical and contemporary oppressions.
Though they do so in different ways, each writer in this study uses
postmodern narrative that shifts in time, space, and narrative perspective.
The polyvocal styles of these authors allow for the perspectives of multiple
characters, as opposed to earlier realist or naturalist American novels. 3
Often, the authors criticize Western philosophy itself, which has encouraged
belief in the inferior status of women and their bodies. Moreover, contrary to
Jamesons claims that postmodern aesthetic lacks a connection to history,
these women use their subversive style of writing to reclaim, critique, and
celebrate their personal and collective histories. It is helpful here to
emphasize that in the United States, women are socialized to compete with
one another for male approval. As hooks argues, Patriarchal thinking
normalizes competition between women (Communion 128), and it tells us

10

The Fragmented Female Body and Identity

that solidarity will never exist between us because we cannot, should not,
and do not bond with one another (Feminist 43). This competitive nature,
in which women see each other not as partners but as rivals, arises from
patriarchy and capitalism, which reinforce heteronormative family structures
and which specifically oppress women of ethnic and racial minority groups. 4
In contrast, the writers in this study reclaim and celebrate bonds between
women.

The Fragmented Female Body and Feminist Bonds

As the novels in this study show, a postmodern aesthetic is used by many
contemporary women writers across ethnicities to reclaim their histories.
These women attempt, as Cixous urges, to write in subversive and resistant
styles, as they question and challenge the fragmentation of womens bodies
and identities through their use of unconventional writing. Minh-ha argues
that [g]athering the fragments of a divided, repressed body and reaching
out, and writing themselves are ways for women to voice all that had
been silenced in phallocentric discourse (37). Significantly, each of these
postmodern novels contains at least one fragmented female body. The
fragmented body is often wounded, scarred, or mutilated in some way,
symbolizing a violent history of oppression based on gender, race, ethnicity,
class, or sexuality. As Anzalda notes, Chicana women are marked: they
are carved and tattooed with the sharp needles of experience (Making xv).
Similarly, Carol E. Hendersons groundbreaking study, Scarring the Black
Body, which will be looked at more closely in Chapter Three, points out that
wounds and scars can appear in many forms, including decay or disease,
mutilation or fragmentation, or textualization in the shared experiences of a
community (114). In other words, the fragmented body itself is not a
symbol of resistance or empowerment. Likewise, as Laura Di Prete argues
regarding what she calls corporeal trauma narratives, the body is the main
referent, and the body in its unquestionable materiality enters these
narratives as a visible remindernot unlike physical scarsof what has
been (14). But these critics raise the question of how women cope with
these painful bodily wounds. One solution comes from Ashraf H. A.
Rushdy, who notes regarding Corregidoras Ursa that a character can learn
to survive oppression not by making herself a monument to the sufferings
of the past, but rather by healing herself and leaving only the scar tissue
and not the open psychic wound as evidence of the horrors of history

Introduction: Multiethnic Fragmentation and Womens Community

11

(Relate 277). Rushdys somewhat optimistic observations are helpful, but

I want to complicate the symbol of the fragmented body further by arguing
that these bodily fragmentations, when recognized by other women, serve as
points of identification and connection. I agree with Butlers observation
that the body, while it is socially constructed, is not a passive site of
inscription, but rather, is an active and performing agent (Gender Trouble
129). Indeed, the multiethnic women in this study find the body to be a
textthe site on which historical oppressions are carved, but these women
also take an active role in deciphering, sharing, and healing these wounds.
We will see at least a few forms of fragmentation in the coming chapters;
examples include the fractured bodies of Sethe and Beloved in Beloved, the
poetic and actual wounds in Dicte, the enslaved and mutilated bodies of
Lizzie and Ursa in Stigmata and Corregidora, the oppressed and fragmented
sexualities and bodies of the nameless narrator, the woman from El Pueblo,
Ermila, and Ephanie in Gulf Dreams and The Woman Who Owned the
Shadows, and the diseased and destroyed Janey and Abhor in Blood and Guts
and Empire. But, while Elaine Scarry argues that another persons pain is
characterized by unsharability (4), I believe that the female characters in
these novels not only empathetically share each others pain, but they also
understand it to the extent that they can help heal the wounds. 5 The wounds
and scars of these characters become symbols of oppression, but more
importantly, they offer the potential for recognition, sisterhood, healing, and
resistance.
Connections with women allow for the contesting of patriarchy that has
fragmented their experiences and bodies. Even though women are socialized
to be competitive and to seek male approval, as hooks optimistically notes,
women often bond if they have a shared problem (Communion 130), and I
argue in favor of hookss concept of Sisterhood, a bonding between
women which strengthens resistance struggle (Feminist 44). These sisterly
connections, in this study, often come in the form of close relationships with
mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers.
Such matrilineal
connection is the case with Beloved, Dicte, Stigmata, and Corregidora. The
connections also come in the form of relations with other female relatives,
such as Lizzies cousin and aunts in Stigmata. Another kind of bond is the
complex lesbian relationship between Gulf Dreamss young woman from El
Pueblo and the novels narrator, and the relationship between The Woman
Who Owned the Shadowss Ephanie and Elena, loving relationships which,
due to the heteronormativity underlying each of the characters respective
settings, are unable to come to fruition. These tragically unfulfilled

12

The Fragmented Female Body and Identity

relationships point to the need for bonds between women, and they show the
danger of failing to realize those female bonds. Unfulfilled relationships are
exacerbated in Ackers works, which demonstrate the chaos and
unsustainability of a life entirely bereft of female connection; Ackers works
generate a scathing critique of patriarchy through the near-absence of women
and the destruction of those present. Ackers male characters may have
discovered what Adrienne Rich tellingly notesthat intense relationships
between women in general are profoundly threatening to men (226), and
therefore, womens relationships are carefully monitored or destroyed.
Therefore, I argue that a new understanding of shared female experience
helps women unite in resistance to patriarchy.
As mentioned earlier, the symbol of the fragmented bodymarked by
the wound, the mutilation, or the scaroften represents historical traumas of
a person or community. Yet as Di Prete argues, the traumatized body may
also become the vehicle through which trauma is told and, possibly, worked
through (2). While it is possible to work through these wounds on ones
own, I contribute here the additional layer of recognition. Womens
recognition of shared wounds often catalyzes the healing process in these
novels, for recognition and the resulting bonds between women become the
means through which women can heal, and more importantly, can begin to
contest those wounds. One example is Amy Tans The Joy Luck Club.6
When An-meis mother rubs the scar on An-meis, neck, it is as though she
were rubbing the memory back into my skin (38). An-mei notes that
women share memories through one another: It is shou [collection] so deep
it is in your bones (41). An-mei believes that forgetting the physical pain
that caused the wound allows one to remember what is in her bones (41).
Below a womans skin, she believes, is that of her mother, and that of her
grandmother, which, if peeled off, leaves a woman with nothing. No scar,
no skin, no flesh (41). In other words, recalling her matrilineage allows her
to overcome the bodily fragmentation she has experienced. This brief
example suggests that women can connect through internal memories and
experiences, of which scars are the external, recognized symbol.
Within these novels, the body becomes an active agent in remembering
history. Cixouss reading of the body provides a helpful inroad. Cixous
believes the female body and identity must be won back from the male,
arguing, If she is a whole, its a whole composed of parts that are wholes
(878)or a state of perpetual fragmentation. Cixouss belief is that women
must write in order to free their bodies from this fragmentary state. One way
to do so is to embrace a new insurgent writing which allows her to reclaim

Introduction: Multiethnic Fragmentation and Womens Community

13

her rupture[d] history (880). This new linguistic resistance will enable
woman to liberate herself individually and will allow her to make a
shattering entry into history, which has always been based on her
suppression, in Cixouss words (880). But according to Cixous, with rare
exceptions, there has not yet been any writing that inscribes femininity
(878). While I agree with Cixouss statements about the bodys fragmentary
state, I also believe that the writers presented in this study have discovered a
specific, feminist writing style, which they use as a means of subversion and
resistance. Their postmodern writing challenges both the conventional novel
genre and even some key postmodern theorists. Moreover, their shared
literary emphasis on the fragmented body indicates a need for collectivity
with other women. Significantly, these relationships are not presented as
perfectly harmonious relationships. In fact, these relations are often fraught
with what Victoria Burrows calls the trope of ambivalence (3), as will be
shown. Therefore, I do not wish to portray matrilineal, sisterhood, or female
bonds as being without conflict. Rather, I wish to show that the recognition
of wounds and scarsas symbols of shared oppressionoffer meaningful
ways for women to come together in communal resistance.

Overturning Western Philosophical Thought

Beyond the reclamation of history, matrilineage, voice, and subjectivity,
the resistant writing these authors employ goes even further. In fact, the
narrative style these women use challenges some of the most basic premises
of Western philosophical thought. In many cases, these authors describe the
remembering body, or their protagonists physically experience a memory.
This bodily memory calls into question the duality between body and mind,
which has so dramatically affected philosophical thought in the West. As
Christine Everingham notes, feminists have worked to deconstruct the
Enlightenments key dichotomies of nature/culture and mind/body (5).
Everingham points out that these culturally engrained dichotomies have
been shown to enhance mens emancipation at the expense of constraining
womens because these concepts are portrayed as mutually exclusive and
opposing categories (6). Everingham is correct to note that feminists have
questioned these dichotomies, and the authors in this study certainly do
likewise. Particularly problematic to these authors is the perceived split
between the mind and body, because this dichotomy prohibits a holistic
understanding of identity. Of course, physicality is integral to and

14

The Fragmented Female Body and Identity

inextricable from identity; therefore, the protagonists of these novels endure

historical oppressions that affect them in the form of bodily wounds,
mutilations, and scarscorporeal fragmentations that equally affect mind
and body (and all other elements of selfhood).
By criticizing the mind/body duality, these authors challenge the very
basis of Western thoughtthat of dualism. To support this claim, a brief
overview of the Western philosophical division between body and mind is
necessary.7 When Plato tells the allegory of the cave in his Republic, he
gives an image to the division between body and spirit that he imagines
(7.518). Moreover, this binary becomes hierarchizedwith one half
privilegedbecause
Plato
crystallizes
the
division
between
light/soul/knowledge/goodness and those things that are perceived to be their
opposites: darkness/body/ignorance/evil (7.518). These divisions have
developed distinct associations with gender (male and female), race, (white
and other), and sexuality (heterosexual and LGBTQ). Continuing this
philosophical tradition, Aristotles influential thinking characterizes male
and female as diametrically opposed (and certainly hierarchized) beings. He
notes in The Generation of Animals that women are weaker and colder in
nature, as opposed to mans stronger, warmer nature (4.6). Men are the
active agents, while women are the passive recipients (4.2), and men are
characterized by capacity, while women, incapacity (4.1). Ultimately,
according to Aristotle, we must look upon the female character as being a
sort of natural deficiency (4.6). These early philosophers succeed not only
in creating a lasting division between body and mind, but in linking this
division to our very identities as women and men.
Later, Descartes connects these binaries to existence itself, separating the
soul from nature by distinguishing two types of substances, an intellectual
substance (the mind) and an extended substance (the body). These two
substances are part of a dualistic system in which mind and body are distinct
and separable, and in which mind is privileged over body (Sixth
Meditation). According to corporeal feminist Elizabeth Grosz, Descartes,
in short, succeeded in linking the mind/body opposition to the foundations of
knowledge itself, a link which places the mind in a position of hierarchical
superiority over and above nature, including the nature of the body (6).
This concept has become a staple of Western thought, constituting our
identities in the twenty-first century as a natural part of human existence.
The Christian tradition, of course, has only perpetuated these binaries,
linking the soul to purity and salvation, and the body to sin and damnation.
Because women are more closely associated with the body vis--vis these

Introduction: Multiethnic Fragmentation and Womens Community

15

binaries, they are perceived as more connected to the natural world and to the
lower functions of the body. They are viewed as more nurturing, since
their bodies prepare them for childbearing, and as less capable of higher
orders of thinking, which Jacques Derrida points out are associated with the
phallus or logos (81). Unfortunately, as Grosz observes, three hundred years
of philosophy have yet to overturn the dualisms that Descartes has instituted
(6).
However, as French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty points
out, the body is the necessary vehicle through which we experience the
world, and bodily and psychological processes are therefore inextricable
from and necessary to one another (29). As I argue later, many of the
authors in this study, including Cha, Perry, Prez, and Allen, subversively
use Christian elements, particularly those of the Roman Catholic tradition, to
critique the body/mind split and the denigration of the body (particularly the
female body and female sexuality). Moreover, all of the authors in this study
challenge Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes by generating remembering or remembered bodies. These bodies demonstrate that the psychological
processes of the mind are inseparable from the bodys responses. This
reconnection of body and mind not only calls for a re-evaluation of the body,
but it also deconstructs the foundational binaries of Western philosophy,
upon which many forms of oppression are based.

Summary of Chapters
The novels selected for this study connect postmodern, feminist,
fragmented writing with poignant depictions of the fragmented female body.
The novels are paired thematically such that each chapter discusses two
novels entailing similar concerns, though the major concern is always the
eradication of sexist oppression, to paraphrase hookss definition of
feminism (Feminist 26). Before I begin the detailed chapter summaries, I
clarify the books organizational rationale. In the second chapter, the novels
entail discussions of mother/daughter bonds. Relationships between mother
and child, as we will observe, are often complex and troubled, yet they are
generally the initial relationship formed by a human being. Hence, I begin
with this most primary of relationships as a springboard for exploring many
kinds of female bonds. The third chapter moves further into matrilineage by
exploring relationships not only with mothers, but also with grandmothers,
great-grandmothers, and great-great-grandmothers. Thus, the scope of

16

The Fragmented Female Body and Identity

feminist bonds becomes more deeply ancestral in this chapter. This third
chapter closes with the protagonists overturning of the convention of
childbearing, a useful segue into the fourth chapter, which expands these
concerns to examine the heteronormative demand for specific familial
structures. This fourth chapter investigates lesbian relationships and
critiques the heteronormative structures that devalue them. The novels in
this chapter suggest alternatives to traditional families and encourage
social acceptance of othered forms of female bonds, though we see the
trauma resulting from womens inability to maintain bonds. And finally, the
study leaves us, in the fifth chapter, with the prospect of having no female
bonds whatsoever. Hence, the trajectory of the study moves from original
mother/daughter bonds to foremothers bonds to other/ed womens bonds
(which are precluded by society) to no womens bonds whatsoever.
Likewise, it also moves from the matriarchal families of Sethe, Denver, and
Beloved, and Theresa and Hyung Soon Huo (Chas mother), to Janey
Smiths and Abhors entirely patriarchal families (fathers Johnny and Bud
are extremely abusive). The goal of this organization is to expand womens
feminist bonds from the original mother/child relationship outwards to
include all forms of womens bonds.
Chapter Two, The Fragmented Body and Maternal Healing: The
Examples of Toni Morrisons Beloved and Theresa Hak Kyung Chas
Dicte, connects two novels that entail similar thematic concerns. These
two novels present the experiences of diasporic communities, Chas focusing
on the Korean colonial and immigrant experience and Morrisons on the
African American experience during and after slavery. Both novels are
strongly resistant, and both present the empowerment provided by
matrilineal bonds in an ethnic American community. Both celebrate and
complicate matrilineal bonds, and they each find a means of contesting
historical fragmentation via these and other womens bonds. Morrisons
Beloved acts as both a springboard for this chapter and a model for the entire
study. Although much scholarship exists on this brilliant, award-winning
novel, Beloveds emphasis on bodily fragmentation and communal healing
gives it a prominent place in my study. Sethes and Beloveds scars in
particular show that the experiences of the past have left a visible, physical
presence on the characters present identities. Yet it is female community in
particular that helps each of these wounded characters to heal. Exploring
some parallel concerns, Chas Dicte critiques dominant patriarchal and
militaristic histories. This nonlinear novel is highly fragmented with short
stories, autobiographical sketches, photographs, ideographs, poetry,

Introduction: Multiethnic Fragmentation and Womens Community

17

diagrams, charts, and maps, yet it is held together as a cohesive novel by its
consistent themes and by the inextricability of any one chapter from the
whole. In every section, Cha criticizes the masculine, militaristic episodes
that take primacy in written history, specifically the Japanese colonization of
Korea. Like Beloved, Dicte urges womens bonds, particularly those with
ones mother, as a means of contesting these histories.
Chapter Three, Reliving African Matrilineage: Re-Membering the Past
in Phyllis Alesia Perrys Stigmata and Gayl Joness Corregidora, focuses
on the reclamation of foremothers history through its literal inscription on
the contemporary female body. The protagonists of each novel experience
physically and psychologically the events of their foremothers histories of
enslavement and oppression. Perrys Stigmata tells the story of Lizzie
DuBose, a young woman living in the 1990s, who begins experiencing her
great-great-grandmothers and grandmothers histories. We learn that her
foremothers painful experiences are being revisited upon their
granddaughters bodies so that their stories can be re-membered. In order
to heal, Lizzies primary goal is to reclaim Sarah, who is both her mother and
her daughter; this recognition, Lizzie believes, will help her heal and allow
the cycle to end. Similarly, Corregidoras protagonist, Ursa Corregidora, a
lounge singer in the 1940s through the 1960s, has been told the stories of her
enslaved and oppressed foremothers (great-grandmother and grandmother)
so thoroughly that she experiences their histories as her own. The kind of
memory Lizzie and Ursa experience is similar to the concept of rememory
that Toni Morrison introduces in Beloved (36), but Joness version appears
thus: It was as if their memory, the memory of all the Corregidora women,
was her memory too, as strong with her as her own private memory, or
almost as strong (129). But when Ursa falls down a flight of stairs in the
novels first pages, she loses her uterus and the familial mandate to make
generations who will carry on this story. This chapter shows how Ursa and
Lizzie must contend with their painful matrilineal histories, reconnect with
their mothers, and find new ways of survival in the twentieth century.
Chapter Four, Childhood Scars and Womens Love in Emma Prezs
Gulf Dreams and Paula Gunn Allens The Woman Who Owned the
Shadows, critiques the patriarchal, heteronormative societies that preclude
loving relationships in these two novels. Gulf Dreams follows the love
between an unnamed narrator and her unnamed lover, the young woman
from El Pueblo, while The Woman Who Owned the Shadows explores the
childhood connection between protagonist Ephanie, a Native American girl,
and Elena, a Chicana girl. Both novels are fragmented chronologically,

18

The Fragmented Female Body and Identity

involving a series of vignettes that jump from past to present and from
dreams to reality. Unlike Stigmata and Corregidora, these two novels do not
explore the recovery and perpetuation of matrilineal history. Instead, they
focus on romantic relationships with other girls/women, relationships which
are destroyed in a heteronormative world. Indeed, in both novels, normative
male-female relationships and the structures that come with them (familial,
religious, and social) compel the protagonists female lovers to abandon
them. Moreover, both novels portray fragmented bodiesparticularly in
Gulf Dreamss fight scene, the story of Ermilas rape, and The Woman Who
Owned the Shadowss life-changing fall from the apple treeas symbols of
the destructive confines of heteronormative society. The fragmented
memories, chronologies, and bodies within these two novels both represent
and critique the fragmentation caused by patriarchal and heteronormative
regimes. However, these novels also portray the resistance and completeness
that can potentially arise from strong relationships between women.
Finally, Chapter Five, The Case of the Missing Women: Chaos and the
Absence of Female Bonds in Kathy Ackers Works, examines two novels
by Acker, a feminist, postmodern, Jewish American (though she does not
claim this ethnic heritage) author who uses extreme narrative fragmentation
to expose the historical fragmentation of the female body and identity.
Ackers works are so fragmented and so incisively critical of patriarchy that
two of them are examined in this final chapter. In Blood and Guts, the
protagonist, ten-year-old Janey Smith, whose mother dies when Janey is a
year old, is raised by her abusive, incestuous father. This problematic
relationship leads to a series of painful relationships between Janey and
violent, patriarchal men. In Empire, the novel shifts in time and space and
between the perspectives of the black female cyborg, Abhor, and Thivai, a
young male character. Abhors mother also dies early, and Abhor is, like
Janey, raped by her father. Interestingly, both female protagonists are
entirely without female friends and community. This lack of female bonds
leads to chaos and shifting identities, and the bodies of Janey and Abhor are
severely fragmented in the processJaney, for example, is diseased and
maimed by her sexual relations with abusive men, and Abhor is violently
sliced by her male companions. This chapter does not intend to suggest that
a mothers presence is necessary in order for a stable identity to be
discovered. Rather, the chapter suggests that Ackers novels, in particular,
emphasize maternal bonds and other forms of female connection as a viable
means for contesting patriarchal power, which is dangerously rampant in
these two novels.

Introduction: Multiethnic Fragmentation and Womens Community

19

By pairing these works in individual chapters and placing them as a

whole into conversation with one another, I realize the danger in my claims.
I hope not to affirm any type of traditional, mother-father relationship, nor
the idea of conventional motherhood, nor the notion of maternalism, nor
even the necessity of a mother in the biological or adoptive sense of the
word. Nor, of course, do I oppose these relationships. I am also not arguing
that these novels are meant to fit into what Madhu Dubey calls the
matrilineage paradigm, which involves an idealized and uncritical
preoccupation with the mothers past (253). Dubey points out that Joness
Corregidora, for example, does not fit this paradigm, and I argue, in fact,
that none of the novels in this study fits, because each novel, as Dubey insists
Corregidora does, pluralizes the past (253). These novels all envision a
solidarity between women, but they are also fraught with complexity, pain,
and ambivalence, and they show the difficulty of each womans unique
history. I also do not wish to suggest that women should devalue meaningful
relationships with men. The claim I am making here is not meant to suggest
that fathers, grandfathers, and male partners are insignificant to these women
or to the novels, and in fact, many of these women have strong and
meaningful connections with men. Rather, I am suggesting that these novels
use specifically female bonds to contest not individual men or even men in
general, but patriarchy as a larger construct.
A few more caveats are necessary here. Importantly, I do not assume a
heterosexual, nuclear family structure, nor do I privilege any one type of
familial structure over another. To insist on any type of relationship would
be to claim that one model fits the lives of every woman in every time and
place. In fact, I am not passing any sort of judgment whatsoever on any
particular form of relationshipmany of which (including multitudes of
other relational styles not mentioned here) can provide meaningful and
loving spaces for growth, expression, and compassion. Therefore, I hope this
study is not interpreted to favor one form of relationship over anothera
judgment which would in fact contradict this studys intention. Rather, I
hope to indicate that womens bondsconventional or unconventional,
physical, spiritual, emotional, intellectual, or otherwiseare shown, in these
American multiethnic womens novels, to be viable ways of healing and of
resisting patriarchal constraints. With this being said, I also do not suggest
that women are more connected to children, or that they are more easily
bonded to one another, or that they are somehow more capable of forming
attachments or feeling compassion in general, than are men. To do so would
suggest a biological essentialism that defines women as naturally more

20

The Fragmented Female Body and Identity

emotional, nurturing, compassionate, and even dependent than men. On the

contrary, this study examines womens bonds as the literary antidote to
social, historical, and political oppressions specific to women of multiethnic
groups. Importantly, I reject the idea of common oppression, an idea
which undermines the true nature of womens varied and complex social
reality (hooks, Feminist 44). The bonds I suggest arise out of wounds
shared between specific women, and those wounds are unique and complex.
Finally, I do not wish to create a monolithic view of what womens
fragmented novels mean, or what the female body, the wound, or the scar
might symbolize. I also do not argue that the characters in these novels are
resigned to an oppressed or fragmentary state. Instead, I argue that these
specific, resistant novels celebrate matrilineage and sisterhood through the
healing of shared cultural wounds and fragmented histories. As Grosz states,
Bodies have all the explanatory power of minds (vii). I want to suggest
that the bodies of the women presented in these novels are presented as
physical reminders of an individual and collective history of oppression that,
in particular, women of ethnic minority groups in the United States have
resisted.

(Re)Writing History
In Cristina Garcas Dreaming in Cuban, Pilar Puente quickly learns that
history is innately biased toward a male, militaristic point of view. She
recalls the stories her father told her, stories involving Christopher Columbus
and European conquests. Pilar notes that history books are always one
damn battle after another, and that schools teach Charlemagne and
Napoleon because they fought their way into posterity (28). The female
perspective is missing in many historical accounts, so Pilar wishes to
celebrate the female voice and experience. If it were up to me, Id record
other things, says Pilar; Like the time there was a freak hailstorm in the
Congo and the women took it as a sign that they should rule. Or the life
stories of prostitutes in Bombay. Why dont I know anything about them?
(28). She sees that female experiences are not as important to written history
as are conquests by men. The problem is summed up when Pilar asks, Who
chooses what we should know or whats important? (28). She sees that
choices are consciously made, and that specific histories are purposely
devalued. Postmodern scholars Masud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton
agree, noting that what is read and believed as history is a large system of

Introduction: Multiethnic Fragmentation and Womens Community

21

ideas produced and maintained by those in power, ideas which exclude

certain histories in order to perpetuate dominant ideologies (54). In this way,
history must be understood as a contestation of diverse textualizations and
not as a solid and fixed narrative (54). Zavarzadeh and Morton argue, It
is necessary [] to combat the dominant ideology because it foreshortens
the horizon of historical possibilities by constructing the world in terms that
legitimate the interests of one class by subjugating others (16). Indeed,
history has erased the stories of many, an exclusion which may explain why
Lizzie DuBose and Ursa Corregidora must physically relive their histories.
Because of this erasure, as Minh-ha argues, the re-writing of history is
therefore an endless task [.] The more they [feminist scholars] dig into the
maze of yellowed documents and look into the non-registered facts of their
communities, the more they rejoice upon discovering the buried treasures of
womens unknown heritage (84). In other words, it is extremely important
to find new ways of recording history and sharing stories. Certainly, the
writing styles of the authors in this study, as well as the experiences of the
protagonists, generate new ways of remembering history.
As I move into my analysis of the interconnections between fragmented
narrative, fragmented bodies, womens recognition of shared wounds, and
female community, I reflect on Victor Frankensteins aborted female
creature. If she had come into existence, I wonder, what would her life have
been like? Without the community and matrilineal heritage of Sethe,
Theresa, Lizzie, and Ursa, how would she understand her existence? Would
the possibility of love be foreclosed, as it is for the young woman from El
Pueblo, the nameless narrator, Ephanie, and Elena? Or would her sense of
self be entirely shattered, as is the case with Janey and Abhor? Without
others like her, surely the female creature would have no way of
understanding her very literally fragmented, pieced-together body. Likewise,
the authors in this study seem to suggest that women who share in each
others experiences can begin to resist and to heal.