2. Daily Agenda
Vocabulary Exam: re-take or make-up
Terms list 4: (The terms exam will be on the last
class day of the quarter. It will include a
comprehensive terms test, which will emphasize the
new terms.)
Discussion: Trickster Characters from our reading
In-class writing: Essay 4: outline and thesis
Author lecture: Sui Sin Far
3.
4. Terms for Exam 4: A Comprehensive Test
Gender Identity: The sense of “being” male or “being” female. For some
people, gender identity is in accord with physical anatomy. For
transgender people, gender identity may differ from physical anatomy or
expected social roles. It is important to note that gender identity,
biological sex, and sexual orientation are not necessarily linked.
Heterosexism: The concept that heterosexuality is natural, normal,
superior and required. A system of beliefs about the superiority of
heterosexuals or heterosexuality evidenced in the exclusion, by omission
or design, of gay, lesbian and bisexual persons in assumptions,
communication, policies, procedures, events, or activities.
Heterosexual: A person who is primarily and/or exclusively attracted to
members of a gender or sex that is seen to be “opposite” or other than
the one with which they identify or are identified.
5. • Homosexual: A person who is primarily and /or exclusively attracted to
members of what they identify as their own sex or gender. Because the
term possesses connotations of disease and abnormality, some people
do not like to identify as homosexual. Still others do not feel that it
accurately defines their chosen identity.
• Lesbian: One who identifies as a woman who is primarily or exclusively
attracted to others who identify as women.
• Sex Reassignment (SRS): A surgical procedure that modifies one’s
primary and/or secondary sex characteristics. This process was formerly
called a “sex change operation,” a phrase now considered offensive.
• Sexual Orientation: A person’s emotional, physical and sexual attraction
and the expression of that attraction with other individuals. Some of the
better-known labels or categories include “bisexual,” “multisexual,”
“pansexual,” “omnisexual,” “lesbian,” “gay” (“homosexual” is a more
clinical term), or “heterosexual.”
6. • Trans: Abbreviation for transgender, transsexual, or some other form of
trans identity. “Trans” can invoke notions of transcending beyond,
existing between, or crossing over borders.
• Transgender: An umbrella term used to describe people who do not fit
into traditional gender categories, including transsexuals, transvestites or
cross-dressers, intersexuals or hermaphrodites, and sometimes, even
people who identify as butch or femme. Can invoke notions of
transcending beyond, existing between or crossing over borders.
• Transition: The period when one is changing from living as one sex or
gender to a different conception of sex or gender. Transitioning is
complicated, multi-step process that may include surgically and/or
hormonally altering one’s body.
7.
8.
9. The Question
Does the trickster perform fundamental cultural work?
In understanding the trickster better, do we better
understand ourselves, and the perhaps subconscious
aspects of ourselves that respond to the trickster’s
unsettling and transformative behavior?
In understanding the trickster better, do we better
understand our limitations? Our culture? Our biases? Or
boundaries? Or something else?
10. Are there remnants of this early definition
of the trickster in our modern day
characters? Which?
“Everywhere one looks among premodern peoples, there
are tricky mythical beings alike enough to entice any
human mind to create a category for them once it had
met two or three. They are beings of the
beginning, working in some complex relationship with
the High God; transformers, helping to bring the present
human world into being; performers of heroic acts on
behalf of men, yet in their original form. or in some later
form, foolish, obscene, laughable, yet indomitable”
(Robert D. Pelton, The Trickster in West Africa 15).
11. Does this definition resonate with us
in terms of our modern trickster
characters? How?
According to [Paul] Radin, for
example, “Trickster is at one and the same
time creator and destroyer, giver and
negator, he who dupes others and who is
always duped himself. . . . He possesses no
values, moral or social, is at the mercy of his
passions and appetites, yet through his
actions all values come into being” (xxiii).
12. Do we see our trickster characters
in this more contemporary
definition? Who?
[The trickster] actually is immoral (or at least amoral) and
blasphemous and rebellious, and his interest in entering the
societal game is not to provide the safety-valve that makes it
tolerable, but to question, manipulate, and disrupt its rules.
He is the consummate mover of goalposts, constantly
redrawing the boundaries of the possible. In fact, the
trickster suggests, says Hyde, “a method by which a stranger
or underling can enter the game, change its rules, and win a
piece of the action” (204).
13. Can we revise this idea to
apply it to our texts or
characters?
Not just any rogue or anti-hero can properly be
termed a trickster. The true trickster’s trickery calls
into question fundamental assumptions about the
way the world is organized, and reveals the possibility
of transforming them (even if often for ignoble ends).
In this regard it is not surprising that innovative uses
have been made of the modern incarnation of the
trickster in American novels produced by writers of
dual ethnic or cultural backgrounds, in whose worlds
boundaries have continually to be mediated and
assumptions challenged.
14. Are our Characters
modern Tricksters? How
do we know?
The self-reflexivity associated with the [contemporary
trickster] is absent in the ancient “unconscious”
trickster, like Wakdjunkaga, whose hands fought each
other and who was unaware that his anus was part of
his own body. The contemporary trickster, by
contrast, is largely self-aware, unlike his/her archaic
counterpart. “[T]he pressures of experience produce
from that somewhat witless character a more
sophisticated trickster.”
15. A New Age of Tricksters?
Are they tricky? Or in
Earnest?
[A] new age brings a transmutation and a new
repertoire of tricks. In fact, we may now have
reached the stage of ultimate ambiguity, where the
trickster’s self-awareness and self-reflexivity call into
question even what is a trick and what is in
earnest, or on what side of the boundary truth lies, if
indeed there are any more “sides” or any
unequivocal truths (Lock).
18. Sui Sin Far, born Edith Maude Eaton, was the first
writer of Asian descent published in North
America
She was born in England, in 1865 to a Chinese mother and an English
(white) father. Eaton's mother was apparently schooled in England
although she returned to China after her education was completed.
Eaton's father was a merchant who did trading in China; it was on one of
his business trips that he met and fell in love with his future wife.
According to Eaton scholars, Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks,
"interracial marriage was taboo in both cultures[; thus,] theirs was an
unusual union." At age seven, Eaton and her family left England and
immigrated to Hudson City, New York, and in the early 1870s, settled in a
Montreal suburb.
19. Eaton started her career at Hugh Graham's Montreal
Daily Star newspaper as a typesetter at age eighteen.
Her first short stories were published in the Dominion Illustrated in
1888; she also maintained her administrative duties as well as
submitted newspaper articles. It was in her journalistic writing that
Eaton openly identified herself as a Chinese American and
explained her biracial heritage to her readers. She wrote under the
pseudonym Sui Sin Far, a childhood nickname that means "water
lily" in Chinese. Her sister, Winnifred Eaton, also a writer, used
Onoto Watanna as her penname.
20. Yi Bu Wang Hua
In the mid 1890s, Eaton moved briefly to Jamaica, where she contracted
malaria, from which she never quite recovered. During the next ten
years, until 1909, she lived in Seattle and San Francisco. She wrote more
articles and short stories and gained a literary reputation. Chinese American
women were at the center of much of Eaton's writing, and she worked to
break down cultural stereotypes. In 1909, Eaton moved to Boston where she
compiled a full-length selection of short stories, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, which
was published in Chicago in 1912. In 1913, Eaton, stricken by horrible
rheumatism and bad health, returned to Montreal. She died on April 7, 1914
and is buried in the Protestant Cemetery there. In gratitude for her work on
their behalf, the Chinese community erected a special headstone on her tomb
inscribed with the characters "Yi bu wang hua" ("The righteous one does not
forget China").
21. A Spiritual Foremother
Known as "spiritual foremother of contemporary Eurasian
authors," Eaton has been the subject of two dissertations, a
literary biography, and numerous articles. Notable Sui Sin Far
scholars include S. E. Solberg, Amy Ling, James Doyle, and
Annette White-Parks.
Amy Ling writes, "If we set Sui Sin Far into the context of her
time and place, in late nineteenth-century sinophobic and
imperialistic Euro-American nations, then we admit that for her,
a Eurasian woman who could pass as white, to choose to
champion the Chinese and working-class women and to identify
herself as such, publicly and in print, an act of great
determination and courage."
22. The Reception of Chinese by White Americans
To appreciate the work of Edith Eaton fully, we must discuss its historical and social
context, namely the reception of Chinese by white Americans before and during
her period. Though the Chinese were never enslaved in this country, as were
Africans, they were brought here in large numbers as indentured laborers. The
Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) was only repealed in 1943 and naturalized citizenship
for Asians was permitted in 1954, long after African-Americans and American
Indians were recognized as American citizens. Initially attracted to California by the
discovery of gold in the mid-nineteenth century, by the l860s thousands of Chinese
laborers were enticed here to construct the mountainous western section of the
transcontinental railroad. Almost from the beginning, prejudice against them was
strong. They were regarded as an alien race with peculiar customs and habits that
made them inassimilable in a nation that wanted to remain white; their hard-
working, frugal ways and their willingness to work for lower wages than whites
rendered them an economic threat and thus targets of racial violence.
23. Homework
Reading: Far “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio
of an Eurasian”
Post #27 Outline and thesis for Essay #4
Studying: terms
