SOURCE: “Theorizing Ethnicity and Subjectivity: Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey and Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club,” in Genders, No. 15, Winter, 1992, pp. 72–85.

In the following comparative essay on Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey and Tan's The Joy Luck Club, Schueller writes that Kingston uses a subversive male protagonist to illustrate how ethnicity is socially constructed, while Tan uses four separate mother-daughter relationships to simultaneously embrace and thwart conceptions of ethnicity and gender.

When women of color began to voice their estrangement from the theories and concerns of white feminists, they dramatized the fact that they had for too long been the objects of representation.¹ The task of these women was twofold: that of deconstructing the male/female binary opposition of white feminism by interjecting concerns of race, colonialism, and imperialism; and that of constructing theories of “identity” (and I use the term deliberately with caution) for women of...