bound·a·ry

[boun-duh-ree, -dree] noun, plural bound·a·ries. 1. something that indicates boundaries or limits; a limiting or bounding line.

In class today we related Slanted Screen, Orientals, and Saving Face together by relating them to the term “boundary.” Above I gave Dictionary.com‘s definition of boundary  and in class, we defined boundaries as a division, borders, or lines. All three relate to boundaries of sexuality, opportunity, traditions, interracial boundaries and more.

We eventually moved onto East Main Street and the different chapters. Each chapter has a different topic, but they all have the same theme of having these boundaries given to them.

The first chapter we covered was chapter 6, “Within Each Crack/A Story.” This chapter covers the “political economy of queering Filipino American pasts” (117). The title can mean various things, like the cracks in our hans, or cracks in a story, or even a butt crack.

Queer has many different meanins; however, in today’s society, most people only understand “queer” as the derogatory term. In this chapter, though, queer is actually used in both the strange or odd conventional viewpoint and the homosexual meaning. On page 125 it states, “‘They like you because you eat dog,’” obviously this is a queer view of it being something that would seem mentally unbalanced in the American culture;  furthermore, this essay tries to use “‘queer domesticity’ to characterize pre- 1965 communitities of Filipino laborers”(119). In a sense, some habits of Filipino culture can be seen queer to the American eyes, yet what Filipino had to go through is quite queer itself insofaras to America sees the Philippines as “little brown children” (124). As the Filipino community tries to assimilate to America, America has set this boundary in which they cannot cross.

The second chapter we covered was chapter 10 “Miss Cherry Blossom Meets Mainstream America.” This chapter covered Japanes American second generation (Nisei) beauty pageants and how they tried to assimilate to American cultures. There was a boundary already set up against the Japanese-Amreican culture to prevent them from being part of the American culture so creating pageants that “mimiced” mainstream America (208). Their way of mimicing the American culture was their way to prove to the whites that they were trying to assimilate, “by dressing the queen in western garb and promoting her keen and usually native-born ability to speak English, the community highlighted the “Americanness” of Japanese Americans…They too could claim to be ‘All American Girls’ by mimicking and adopting hegemonic American cultural values such as innocence, sexual purtity, honesty, and caring” (207). Instead of being able to cross this boundary of beauty pageants, Nisei pageants ended up making a new boundary to acceptance of a new kind of beauty pageant of Japanese American culture.

The last chapter we covered for the day was chapter 14, “How to Rehabilitate a Mulatto.”