Border Crossing: Feminist Sinologies through a Southeast Asian Lens.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]