MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

My paper will focus on the critique of Cristina Garcia’s gendering of trans-border Travel and mobility in 19th and 20th century China with reference to her novel Monkey Hunting. Garcia works towards the careful portrayal of Chinese women.She neatly draws the boundaries to heighten the different treatment of genders through the idea of mobility and she clearly defines the male and female space with reference to their mobility across the borders. All the Chinese men in the novel are travelling across the borders, embracing to the new identities that they are open to grab as compared to the women who are confined to their domestic sphere and are taken as a commodity. This idea of authority has been shown especially in the character of Chen Fang who is the only female character that travels far in the novel but then she has been raised as a boy and her travel is also within China. However, she has won this status of travelling through her male persona that is given to her by her mother as she wants to have some money from her husband for the education of a boy. As Echano puts it, “Chen-Fang’s impersonation of a boy allows her to enter a hierarchical space composed by and for men.” (Echano 84). “Gender Identity formation within national discourse is clearly exemplified by Cristina Garcia’s Chinese female character Chen Fang.Chen-Fang grows up in a long-established Chinese society in which,at the time of the narration ,women’s sexuality was defined solely in terms of reproduction and restriction of women’s movement to domestic spaces.”( Martinez 19)Thus, I argue that the concept of travel in Garcia’s Monkey Hunting is gendered and is representative of the specific gender roles.