Sexual violence is usually adopted to be a literary trope to discuss how women mobilize shame, especially in extreme conditions of war. The feeling of shame brought by sexual violence is imposed on women due to patriarchy and ethnocentric nationalism. At the same time, women suffer from and have to process immense sexual trauma. Counter-intuitively and strategically, women mobilize shame to paradoxically break away from the mechanism of social shaming by appropriating its discourse. Shame, a once negative social typecasting imposed by patriarchy, is transformed into a rebelling and even liberating ammunition to protect women from further social shaming such as the stigma of losing chastity.
This is one of the major threads in the Chinese Canadian writer Zhang Ling’s A Single Swallow (2017), which elaborates a Chinese woman’s life experience through a transnational narrative and revisits war-related sexual violence from a diasporic perspective. The female protagonist, Ah Yan, was raped by Japanese troops during the Second Sino-Japanese War and constantly encountered sexual harassments by her Chinese compatriots. The female protagonist is daring enough to question the legitimacy of patriarchy and nationalism. She borrows the trope of national sentiments and debunks her male compatriots. By discussing how the female protagonist mobilizes shame, I demonstrate that a “raped object” transforms into a “queer subject,” following the conception in queer studies. This transformation signifies a reclaiming of sexual agency, allowing women to subvert entrenched patriarchal and nationalist narratives.
Linshan Jiang is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. She received her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she also obtained a Ph.D. emphasis in Translation Studies. Her research interests include modern and contemporary literature, film, and popular culture in mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan; trauma and memory studies; gender and sexuality studies; queer studies; as well as comparative literature and translation studies. Her primary research project focuses on female writers’ war experiences and memories of the Asia-Pacific War, entitled Women Writing War Memories. Her second research project explores how queerness is performed in Sinophone queer cultural productions. She has published articles about gender studies and queer studies in literature and culture as well as translations of scholarly and popular works in Chinese and English. She has been making a podcast named Gleaners with her friends for more than ten years and she is also a host of the East Asian Studies channel for the New Books Networks.