The objectifying gaze: a lacanian reading of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees
With the recent prevalence of white supremacist discourses in the United States, Asian Americans have unavoidably been subjected to xenophobic gazes and tendencies. The white gaze has traditionally enjoyed the privilege to objectify and fix the diasporic subject both racially and ethnically, f...
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2021
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| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/16416/1/42393-149869-2-PB.pdf http://journalarticle.ukm.my/16416/ https://ejournal.ukm.my/gema/issue/view/1372 |
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| Summary: | With the recent prevalence of white supremacist discourses in the United States, Asian
Americans have unavoidably been subjected to xenophobic gazes and tendencies. The white
gaze has traditionally enjoyed the privilege to objectify and fix the diasporic subject both
racially and ethnically, foregrounding a relationality that naturalizes the immigrant as the
inferior subject. The Vietnamese American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen recounts similar
unsettling experiences and sufferings of the Vietnamese (refugees) in his debut short story
collection The Refugees (2017). This essay seeks to explore the narrativesto outline the patterns
of looking dynamics and stratified and interracial gaze operating among the characters. To this
end, Lacanian theories of the gaze, the jouissance drive and the mirror stage are employed to
examine the subtle nuances and complex mechanisms of looking relations that are instrumental
in the development of Vietnamese characters. It is easily noticeable that the growing
consciousness among the characters of their prescribed inferior position in the scopic order
engenders in them feelings of anxiety and/or conflicting sexual impulses, or the jouissance
drive. Nonetheless, the hierarchal gaze is not depicted throughout the collection as an
essentialized and fixed phenomenon. Rather, some of the Vietnamese characters succeed to
control, recodify and reassert the prevailing structural domination of the looking relations, and
hence reclaim their agency and subjectivity in relation to the Other. It is concluded that Nguyen
successfully upends the dominant discourses of representations in which the Americans’
centrality is eternalized while the Vietnamese’ is prescribed and nihilated. |
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