Tamara Ho

UMI, ProQuest ® Dissertations & Theses. The world's most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses. Learn more... ProQuest, Through a Burmese looking-glass: Transgression, displacement, and transnational women's identities. ...

This essay examines the resettlement of Burmese refugees in the United States through the lens of food. Looking specifically at Christian community gardens, corporatized meat processing, a feature film, and nonfiction book, I analyze how Karen refugees have participated in U.S. food economies and investigate processes of selective and serial migration, religion, representation, and community-building.
“Critically juxtaposing” two different, although related, case studies enables a preliminary mapping of how refugees from Burma/Myanmar have resettled in the United States in the early twenty-first century, with a focus on legibility, racialization, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), and mutual aid.

Burmese spirit worship offers a particularly complex case of translating transgression and transgendered identities.1 The Burmese nat kadaw,2 or spirit medium is, on the one hand, provocatively represented and constructed in variegated globalized representations highlighting the exotically queer and, on the other hand, often miscategorized and unevenly transposed into Western frames of language and epistemology. The challenge of speaking across cultures and languages is demonstrated in Gary Morris’s review of the 2002 San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival:

Wendy Law-Yone’s 2010 novel The Road to Wanting offers a Southeast Asian lens through which one might examine China’s southwestern frontier and relationships forged within the Sino-Myanmar borderlands. The Road to Wanting maps an intersectional, interracial terrain where the past is selectively developed through transnational joint ventures and promises of an improved future with localized flair, a speculative modernity that is fabricated by bodies differentially marked by minoritization, mobility, and capital. Offering a view of “the Wild West of China,” the novel highlights the interactions among peripheral and marginalized populations that are often homogenized in ethnonationalist terms (e.g., as Chinese, Zhonghua minzu, or Burmese). My analysis highlights how Law-Yone’s polyphonic play within this multilingual contact zone generates alternative paradigms for transnational encounters and translocal affective affinities. The essay suggests that an expansive notion of Chinese women’s studies might adapt or borrow from recent transnational and methodological turns in ethnic minority studies and US critical race studies that analyze not only the hegemonies operating within one’s own “home” field (read: nation, race, ethnicity, or discipline) but also imperialistic relationships with a nation’s internal others and geopolitical margins. In this way, then, a transnationally inflected model of feminist sinologies can productively consider the politics of knowledge in the study of Chinese women and men while keeping in mind the effects of Chinese capital and geopolitical power in the nation, in the region, and in the heterogeneous formations of sinophone studies. My reading therefore endeavors to realign our view of what might constitute China studies, feminist sinologies, and Asian/American writing in an increasingly globalized and transnational world.

... 2005), a fictional feature film, made and released in Myanmar in 2004 by Yee Myint Productions ... Right: A female patron offers medium Ah Swan a drink of Mandalay Rum during a ... the second part of the intergenerational drama situates the patriarchal protagonist Tun Aung Zaw ...

When the world thinks of Burma, it is often in relation to Nobel laureate and icon Aung San Suu Kyi. But beyond her is another world, one that complicates the overdetermination of Burma as a pariah state and myths about the ohigh statuso of Southeast Asian women. Highlighting and critiquing this fraught terrain, Tamara C. HoAEs Romancing Human Rights maps oBurmese womeno as real and imagined figures across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. More than a recitation of oon the groundo facts, HoAEs groundbreaking scholarshiputhe first monograph to examine Anglophone literature and dynamics of gender and race in relation to Burmaubrings a critical lens to contemporary literature, fi lm, and politics through the use of an innovative feminist/queer methodology. She crosses intellectual boundaries to illustrate how literary and gender analysis can contribute to discourses surrounding and informing human rightsuand in the process off ers a new voice in the debates about representation, racialization, migration, and spirituality. Romancing Human Rights demonstrates how Burmese women break out of prisons, both real and discursive, by writing themselves into being. Ho assembles an eclectic archive that includes George Orwell, Aung San Suu Kyi, critically acclaimed authors Ma Ma Lay and Wendy Law-Yone, and activist Zoya Phan. Her close readings of literature and politicized performances by women in Burma, the Burmese diaspora, and the United States illuminate their contributions as authors, cultural mediators, and practitioner-citizens. Using flexible, polyglot rhetorical tactics and embodied performances, these authors creatively articulate alter/native epistemologiesuregionally situated knowledges and decolonizing viewpoints that interrogate and destabilize competing transnational hegemonies, such as U.S. moral imperialism and Asian militarized dictatorship. Weaving together the fi ctional and non-fi ctional, HoAEs gendered analysis makes Romancing Human Rights a unique cultural studies project that bridges postcolonial studies, area studies, and critical race/ethnic studiesua must-read for thosewith an interest in fi elds of literature, Asian and Asian American studies, history, politics, religion, and womenAEs and gender studies.

Romancing Human Rights maps “Burmese women” as real and imagined figures across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century and demonstrates how Burmese women break out of prisons, both real and discursive, by writing themselves into being. Ho's close readings of literature and politicized performances by women in Burma, the Burmese diaspora, and the United States illuminate their contributions as authors, cultural mediators, and practitioner-citizens. Weaving together the fictional and non-fictional, Ho’s gendered analysis makes Romancing Human Rights a unique cultural studies project that bridges postcolonial studies, area studies, and critical race/ethnic studies—a must-read for those with an interest in fields of literature, Asian and Asian American studies, history, politics, religion, and women’s and gender studies.

Wendy Law-Yone’s 2010 novel The Road to Wanting offers a Southeast Asian lens through which one might examine China’s southwestern frontier and relationships forged within the Sino-Myanmar borderlands. The Road to Wanting maps an intersectional, interracial terrain where the past is selectively developed through transnational joint ventures and promises of an improved future with localized flair, a speculative modernity that is fabricated by bodies differentially marked by minoritization, mobility, and capital. Offering a view of “the Wild West of China,” the novel highlights the interactions among peripheral and marginalized populations that are often homogenized in ethnonationalist terms (e.g., as Chinese, Zhonghua minzu, or Burmese). My analysis highlights how Law-Yone’s polyphonic play within this multilingual contact zone generates alternative paradigms for transnational encounters and translocal affective affinities.