SOURCE: McCormick, Adrienne. “‘Being Without’: Marilyn Chin's Poems as Feminist Acts of Theorizing.” Hitting Critical Mass 6, no. 2 (spring 2000): 1-16.

In the following essay, McCormick places Chin's poems that examine the poet's identity in the company of feminist theory that seeks to claim both a history and a language for women of color.

Marilyn Chin's “I” poems do not merely reflect the rich and varied modes of Asian American feminist literary theory which predate her work, but are themselves acts of theorizing. By referring to Chin's poems as such, I intentionally riff on the work of Barbara Christian, Katie King, and Lisa Lowe. In the influential article “The Race for Theory,” Christian claims that “people of color have always theorized, but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract knowledge” (336). This statement is quoted in numerous texts, testifying to the importance of Christian's claim to the various...