Abstract
This chapter reflects on the author’s identity formation growing up in the slums of Chicago in a patriarchal Chinese family, moving to a “white” neighborhood and encountering racism for the first time, and embarking on the fraught academic journey toward the complicated guild of biblical studies. It discusses the various influences in her development, first, as a feminist, and then as an Asian American feminist, circling back to her roots in poverty to devote her current energies to examine and critique the inequalities and injustice that are endemic to our global capitalist society. She will examine her debt to Asian American feminist scholarship on race that helps her recognize the particular forms of racism, under which Asian Americans suffer, and her bonding with different communities of Asian and Asian American women (and men), such as Pacific, Asian, North American Asian Women in Theology and Ministry and the Ethnic Chinese Biblical Colloquium.
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Notes
- 1.
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1976).
- 2.
Gale A. Yee, “‘By the Hand of a Woman’: The Biblical Metaphor of the Woman Warrior,” Semeia 61 (1993): 99–132.
- 3.
Gale A. Yee, “The Woman Warrior Revisited: Jael, Fa Mulan, and American Orientalism,” in Joshua and Judges, ed. Athalya Brenner and Gale A. Yee (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2013), 175–90.
- 4.
“Almighty Black P. Stone Nation,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almighty_Black_P._Stone_Nation.
- 5.
I was able to reflect upon this nickname in Gale A. Yee, “Coveting the Vineyard: An Asian American Reading of 1 Kings 21,” in Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, I, ed. Athalya Brenner and Archie C. C. Lee (London: Bloomsbury T. & T. Clark, 2016), 56.
- 6.
Also, the fact that my house only had one bathroom for all those people didn’t help.
- 7.
Published as Gale A. Yee, “Inculturation and Diversity in the Politics of National Identity,” Journal of Asian and Asian American Theology 2 (1997): 108–12.
- 8.
Gale A. Yee, “Yin/Yang is Not Me: An Exploration into an Asian American Biblical Hermeneutics,” in Ways of Being, Ways of Reading: Asian-American Biblical Interpretation, ed. Mary F. Foskett and Jeffrey K. Kuan (St. Louis, MO: Chalice, 2006), 152–63.
- 9.
Sylvia Yanagisako, “Transforming Orientalism: Gender, Nationality, and Class in Asian American Studies,” in Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis, ed. Sylvia Junko Yanagisako and Carol Lowery Delaney (New York, NY: Routledge, 1995), 287.
- 10.
Lisa Lowe, “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Asian American Differences,” in Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 60–83.
- 11.
Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans, updated and rev. ed. (New York, NY: Back Bay Books, 1998).
- 12.
Gale A. Yee, “‘She Stood in Tears Amid the Alien Corn’: Ruth the Perpetual Foreigner and Model Minority,” in Off the Menu: Asian and Asian North American Women’s Religion and Theology, ed. Rita Nakashima Brock et al. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 45–65.
- 13.
Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1999); Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
- 14.
From the introduction to Frank Chin, Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers (New York, NY: Mentor, 1974), xi–xii; See also Peter X. Feng, Screening Asian Americans (New Brunswick: Rutgers University, 2002); Jun Xing, Asian America Through the Lens: History, Representations, and Identity (Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press, 1998).
- 15.
- 16.
- 17.
- 18.
Jessica Hagedorn, “Asian Women in Film: No Joy, No Luck,” in Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images, ed. M. Evelina Galang (Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2003), 204–10; Aki Uchida, “The Orientalization of Asian Women in America,” Women’s Studies International Forum 21 (1998): 161–74; For a helpful 60 minute video of clips of Hollywood depictions of Asians, see Deborah Gee, Slaying the Dragon (San Francisco, CA: NAATA Distribution, 1995). See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GW14mzRS23M.
- 19.
See Jane Iwamura’s critique of Carradine’s Orientalist portrayal of Chinese monks in Jane Naomi Iwamura, Virtual Orientalism: Asian Religions and American Popular Culture (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011).
- 20.
- 21.
Kingston, The Woman Warrior, 6.
- 22.
Patricia P. Chu, Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).
- 23.
Asian American theory has broadened the term “American” to include American political and socio-economic inter-global matters in Asia, while also maintaining a focus of the “domestic” issues of Asian Americans. Sau-Ling C. Wong, “Denationalization Reconsidered: Asian American Cultural Criticism at a Theoretical Crossroads,” Amerasia Journal 21, no. 1–2 (January 1, 1995): 1–27.
- 24.
Yee, “Inculturation and Diversity in the Politics of National Identity,” 112. I became Episcopalian in 2001.
- 25.
Kwok Pui-lan, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005); Laura E. Donaldson and Kwok Pui-lan, eds., Postcolonialism, Feminism, and Religious Discourse (New York, NY: Routledge, 2002).
- 26.
Gale A. Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve: Woman as Evil in the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2003).
- 27.
Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001).
- 28.
Cf. Gish Jen, Typical American (New York, NY: Plume and Penguin, 1992).
- 29.
Lai Ling Elizabeth Ngan, “Neither Here nor There: Boundary and Identity in the Hagar Story,” in Ways of Being, Ways of Reading, ed. Fostkett and Kuan, 70–83.
- 30.
Lai Ling Elizabeth Ngan, “Bitter Melon, Bitter Delight: Reading Jeremiah Reading Me,” in Off the Menu, ed. Brock et al., 163–81.
- 31.
Barbara M. Leung Lai, “Hearing God’s Bitter Cries (Hosea 11:1–9): Reading, Emotive-Experiencing, Appropriation,” Horizons in Biblical Theology 26, no. 1 (June 2004): 26–27.
- 32.
Barbara M. Leung Lai, “‘I’-Voice, Emotion, and Selfhood in Nehemiah,” Old Testament Essays 28, no. 1 (2015): 162.
- 33.
Bonnie Thornton Dill and Ruth Enid Zambrana, “Critical Thinking about Inequality: An Emerging Lens,” in Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, 4th ed., ed. Carol R McCann and Seung-Kyung Kim (New York, NY: Routledge, 2017), 183–93; Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall, “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis,” Signs 38, no. 4 (Summer 2013): 785–810; Patricia Hill Collins and Valerie Chepp, “Intersectionality,” in The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics, ed. Georgina Waylen et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 57–87; Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality (Oxford: Polity Press, 2016).
- 34.
Denise Kimber Buell et al., “Cultural Complexity and Intersectionality in the Study of the Jesus Movement,” Biblical Interpretation 18, no. 4–5 (October 2010): 309–12; Marianne Bjelland Kartzow, “‘Asking the Other Question’: An Intersectional Approach to Galatians 3:28 and the Colossian Household Codes,” Biblical Interpretation 18, no. 4–5 (October 2010): 364–89; Halvor Moxnes, “Identity in Jesus’ Galilee—From Ethnicity to Locative Intersectionality,” Biblical Interpretation 18, no. 4–5 (2010): 390–416; L. Juliana M. Claassens and Carolyn J. Sharp, eds., Feminist Frameworks: Celebrating Intersectionality, Interrogating Power, Embracing Ambiguity. Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies, vol. 621 (New York, NY: Bloomsbury T. & T. Clark, 2017); M. I. Rey, “Reexamination of the Foreign Female Captive: Deuteronomy 21:10–14 as a Case of Genocidal Rape,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 32, no. 1 (2016): 37–53; Helena M. Bolle and Stephen R. Llewelyn, “Intersectionality, Gender Liminality and Ben Sira’s Attitude to the Eunuch,” Vetus Testamentum 67, no. 4 (October 2017): 546–69.
- 35.
Besides the works already cited, see Gale A. Yee, “Racial Melancholia in the Book of Ruth,” in The Five Scrolls, ed. Athalya Brenner, Gale A. Yee, and Archie C. C. Lee (London: Bloomsbury T. & T. Clark, 2018), 61–70; Gale A. Yee, “Of Foreigners and Eunuchs: An Asian American Reading of Isa. 56.1-8,” in T. & T. Clark Handbook of Asian American Biblical Hermeneutics, ed. Uriah Y. Kim and Seung Ai Yang (London: Bloomsbury T. & T. Clark, 2019), 261–71; Gale A. Yee, “Where are You Really From? An Asian American Feminist Biblical Scholar Reflects on Her Guild,” in New Feminist Christianity: Many Voice, Many Views, ed. Mary E. Hunt and Diann L. Neu (Woodstock, VT: Skylight Paths Publishing, 2010), 79–85.
- 36.
Gale A. Yee, “How Capitalism Echoes the Bible,” Inheritance: Heritage, Culture, Faith 62 (2018): 6–11.
- 37.
Some work I have already done in this area include: Gale A. Yee, “Recovering Marginalized Groups in Ancient Israel: Methodological Considerations,” in To Break Every Yoke: Essays in Honor of Marvin L. Chaney, ed. Robert B. Coote and Norman K. Gottwald (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2007), 10–27; Gale A. Yee, “‘Take This Child and Suckle It for Me’: Wet Nurses and Resistance in Ancient Israel,” Biblical Theology Bulletin 39, no. 4 (2009): 180–89; Gale A. Yee, “The Elijah and Elisha Narratives: An Economic Investigation,” in Honouring the Past, Looking to the Future: Essays from the 2014 International Congress of Ethnic Chinese Biblical Scholars, ed. Gale A. Yee and John Y. H. Yieh (Shatin, Hong Kong: Divinity School of Chung Chi College, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2016), 21–50; Gale A. Yee, “‘He will Take the Best of Your Fields’: Royal Feasts and Rural Extraction,” Journal of Biblical Literature 136, no. 4 (2017): 821–38.
Bibliography
Bolle, Helena M., and Stephen R. Llewelyn. “Intersectionality, Gender Liminality and Ben Sira’s Attitude to the Eunuch.” Vetus Testamentum 67, no. 4 (October 2017): 546–69.
Brock, Rita Nakashima, and Rebecca Ann Parker. Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001.
Buell, Denise Kimber, Jennifer A. Glancy, Marianne Bjelland Kartzow, and Halvor Moxnes. “Cultural Complexity and Intersectionality in the Study of the Jesus Movement.” Biblical Interpretation 18, no. 4–5 (October 2010): 309–12.
Chin, Frank. Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers. New York, NY: Mentor, 1974.
Cho, Sumi, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall. “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis.” Signs 38, no. 4 (Summer 2013): 785–810.
Chu, Patricia P. Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
Claassens, L., M. Juliana, and Carolyn Sharp, eds. Feminist Frameworks: Celebrating Intersectionality, Interrogating Power, Embracing Ambiguity. Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies, vol. 621. New York, NY: Bloomsbury T. & T. Clark, 2017.
Collins, Patricia Hill, and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality. Oxford: Polity Press, 2016.
Collins, Patricia Hill, and Valerie Chepp. “Intersectionality.” In The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics, edited by Georgina Waylen, Karen Celis, Johanna Kantola, and S. Laurel Weldon, 57–87. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Dill, Bonnie Thornton, and Ruth Enid Zambrana. “Critical Thinking about Inequality: An Emerging Lens.” In Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, 4th ed., edited by Carol R. McCann and Seung-Kyung Kim, 182–93. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017.
Donaldson, Laura E., and Kwok Pui-lan, eds. Postcolonialism, Feminism, and Religious Discourse. New York, NY: Routledge, 2002.
Feng, Peter X. Screening Asian Americans. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, 2002.
Gee, Deborah. Slaying the Dragon. San Francisco, CA: NAATA Distribution, 1995.
Hagedorn, Jessica. “Asian Women in Film: No Joy, No Luck.” In Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images, edited by M. Evelina Galang, 204–10. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2003.
Iwamura, Jane Naomi. Virtual Orientalism: Asian Religions and American Popular Culture. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Jen, Gish. Typical American. New York, NY: Plume and Penguin, 1992.
Kartzow, Marianne Bjelland. “‘Asking the Other Question’: An Intersectional Approach to Galatians 3:28 and the Colossian Household Codes.” Biblical Interpretation 18, no. 4–5 (October 2010): 364–89.
Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1976.
Kwok, Pui-lan. Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005.
Lai, Barbara M. Leung. “Hearing God’s Bitter Cries (Hosea 11:1–9): Reading, Emotive-Experiencing, Appropriation.” Horizons in Biblical Theology 26, no. 1 (June 2004): 24–49.
———. “‘I’-Voice, Emotion, and Selfhood in Nehemiah.” Old Testament Essays 28, no. 1 (2015): 154–66.
Lee, Robert G. Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1999.
Lowe, Lisa. “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Asian American Differences.” In Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, 60–83. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.
Moxnes, Halvor. “Identity in Jesus’ Galilee—From Ethnicity to Locative Intersectionality.” Biblical Interpretation 18, no. 4–5 (2010): 390–416.
Ngan, Lai Ling Elizabeth. “Bitter Melon, Bitter Delight: Reading Jeremiah Reading Me.” In Off the Menu: Asian and Asian North American Women’s Religion and Theology, edited by Rita Nakashima Brock, Jung Ha Kim, Kwok Pui-lan, and Seung Ai Yang, 163–81. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007.
———. “Neither Here nor There: Boundary and Identity in the Hagar Story.” In Ways of Being, Ways of Reading: Asian-American Biblical Interpretation, edited by Mary F. Foskett and Jeffrey K. Kuan, 70–83. St. Louis, MO: Chalice, 2006.
Rey, M. I. “Reexamination of the Foreign Female Captive: Deuteronomy 21:10–14 as a Case of Genocidal Rape.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 32, no. 1 (2016): 37–53.
Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. Updated and Rev. ed. New York, NY: Back Bay Books, 1998.
Uchida, Aki. “The Orientalization of Asian Women in America.” Women’s Studies International Forum 21 (1998): 161–74.
Wong, Sau-Ling C. “Denationalization Reconsidered: Asian American Cultural Criticism at a Theoretical Crossroads.” Amerasia Journal 21, no. 1–2 (January 1, 1995): 1–27.
Xing, Jun. Asian America Through the Lens: History, Representations, and Identity. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press, 1998.
Yanagisako, Sylvia. “Transforming Orientalism: Gender, Nationality, and Class in Asian American Studies.” In Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis, edited by Sylvia Junko Yanagisako and Carol Lowery Delaney, 275–98. New York, NY: Routledge, 1995.
Yee, Gale A. “‘By the Hand of a Woman’: The Biblical Metaphor of the Woman Warrior.” Semeia 61 (1993): 99–132.
———. “Coveting the Vineyard: As Asian American Reading of 1 Kings 21.” In Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, I, edited by Athalya Brenner and Archie C. C. Lee, 46–64. London: Bloomsbury T. & T. Clark, 2016a.
———. “‘He Will Take the Best of Your Fields’: Royal Feasts and Rural Extraction.” Journal of Biblical Literature 136, no. 4 (2017): 821–38.
———. “How Capitalism Echoes the Bible.” Inheritance: Heritage, Culture, Faith 62 (2018a): 6–11.
———. “Inculturation and Diversity in the Politics of National Identity.” Journal of Asian and Asian American Theology 2 (1997): 108–12.
———. “Of Foreigners and Eunuchs: An Asian American Reading of Isa. 56.1-8.” In T. & T. Clark Handbook of Asian American Biblical Hermeneutics, edited by Uriah Y. Kim and Seung Ai Yang, 261–71. London: T. & T. Clark, 2019.
———. Poor Banished Children of Eve: Woman as Evil in the Hebrew Bible. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003.
———. “Racial Melancholia in the Book of Ruth.” In The Five Scrolls, edited by Athalya Brenner, Gale A. Yee, and Archie C. C. Lee, 61–70. London: Bloomsbury T. & T. Clark, 2018b.
———. “Recovering Marginalized Groups in Ancient Israel: Methodological Considerations.” In To Break Every Yoke: Essays in Honor of Marvin L. Chaney, edited by Robert B. Coote and Norman K. Gottwald, 10–27. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2007a.
———. “‘She Stood in Tears Amid the Alien Corn’: Ruth the Perpetual Foreigner and Model Minority.” In Off the Menu: Asian and Asian North American Women’s Religion and Theology, edited by Rita Nakashima Brock, Jung Ha Kim, Kwok Pui-lan, and Seung Ai Yang, 45–65. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007b.
———. “‘Take This Child and Suckle It for Me’: Wet Nurses and Resistance in Ancient Israel.” Biblical Theology Bulletin 39, no. 4 (2009): 180–89.
———. “The Elijah and Elisha Narratives: An Economic Investigation.” In Honouring the Past, Looking to the Future: Essays from the 2014 International Congress of Ethnic Chinese Biblical Scholars, edited by Gale A. Yee and John Y. H. Yieh, 21–50. Shatin, Hong Kong: Divinity School of Chung Chi College, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2016b.
———. “The Woman Warrior Revisited: Jael, Fa Mulan, and American Orientalism.” In Joshua and Judges, edited by Athalya Brenner and Gale A. Yee, 175–90. Texts@Contexts. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2013.
———. “Where are You Really From? An Asian American Feminist Biblical Scholar Reflects on Her Guild.” In New Feminist Christianity: Many Voice, Many Views, edited by Mary E. Hunt and Diann L. Neu, 79–85. Woodstock, VT: Skylight Paths Publishing, 2010.
———. “Yin/Yang is Not Me: An Exploration into an Asian American Biblical Hermeneutics.” In Ways of Being, Ways of Reading: Asian-American Biblical Interpretation, edited by Mary F. Foskett and Jeffrey K. Kuan, 152–63. St. Louis, MO: Chalice, 2006.
Yu, Henry. Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
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Yee, G.A. (2020). The Process of Becoming for a Woman Warrior from the Slums. In: Kwok, Pl. (eds) Asian and Asian American Women in Theology and Religion. Asian Christianity in the Diaspora. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36818-0_2
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