Publications and Research
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2016
Abstract
Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s award-winning yet remarkably neglected Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre (1993) explores female adolescence and coming of age in a rich, polyphonic collection of verse novellas. “Loving the Unlovable Body” focuses on Yamanaka’s treatment of this transition as a fully embodied, fraught, and often painful experience by explicating the uses of several tropes used to express girls’ experiences of their bodies: eating, voice, eyes, fragmentation, and marking/naming. These metaphors contribute to the development of a complex range of possibilities from devastating to hopeful, presented in juxtaposition and interplay, for girls’ relationships to their culturally denigrated bodies and the consequences to their attempts at positive sense of self.
Included in
American Literature Commons, Asian American Studies Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons
Comments
This article was originally published in Asian American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies, available at https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/aaldp/vol7/iss1/5.