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Female Spaces of Hybridity as Resistance in Velina Hasu Houston's Plays

Jung,Byung-Eon 1

1부산대학교

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ABSTRACT

This essay examines the ways in which Japanese immigrant women are socially produced for “geographical” exclusion in racial, cultural, gender disparity and try to appropriate their hybridity as a strategy for a potential of freedom in Velina Hasu Houston’s plays, Asa Ga Gimashita (Morning Has Broken), Tea, and Kokoro (True Heart). During post-World War II, they are situated within an in-between space of hybridity in which there is a conflict between Japan’s pre-war patriarchal culture and the post-war democratic culture or American and Japanese culture in general. Ruled out through the politics of the “social tattooing” system, they are unable to break free from control by the dominant culture. However, Houston’s plays also place special emphasis on challenging the dominant discourse, in which the women are excluded on the basis of the physical and imaginary division of space. This essay argues that Japanese immigrant women recreate their own histories within Japanese and American history in order to pave the way for their discourse of female space. In this respect, Houston’s plays serve to produce the resistant potential of hybridity on the stage as a strategy for a new community by transforming a space of exclusion into a space of freedom.

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* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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