Shah, Sonia, ed. - Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire

[oyceter]

This is a collection of essays by Asian-American feminists about Asian-American feminists (with the "American" indicating the US, although there is one that focuses on Canadian healthcare). From my recollection, the range seems fairly large-there were quite a few essays on lower-class women and I think the essays spanned a good range of ages,

Comments

[coffeeandink]

I really liked the article on the Indian women's movement against domestic violence in rural villages that grew out of women applying to domestic violence that same strategies they'd applied to British colonization. Vandana Singh mentioned the same movement in her recent Aqueduct interview -- I am blanking on the name.

I also really liked the article on Filipina nurses in the US, UK, Canada, and Saudi Arabia. It really brought home the globalization of racism and the interdependent effects of race and class oppression.

I was a little surprised, I think, at the number of articles discussing Canada and the UK, especially Canada -- I think I have bought into Canada's view of itself as better on racial issues than the US, so I was surprised to see that many of the same policies and discriminations have been adopted. The bit about nurses and medicine was especially surprising to me because I'd thought that so many of the US issues came out of its fucked health care system, but it looks like socialized medicine is *also* built on race, class, and gender oppression. Same backbone, different face.

eta: Sorry, didn't address your post at all. So, obviously, I do not have the kind of personal connection to the book you did! But I found a lot of value in it, too. And I also liked the personal essays, which brought home a lot of the points in the more academic or theoretical essays.

[oyceter]

eta: Sorry, didn't address your post at all. So, obviously, I do not have the kind of personal connection to the book you did!

No, not a problem! I want to talk about the crunchy thinky stuff in the book as well, but thanks to a) time passing before I wrote it up and b) emotional reaction, I could not think of anything.

I either missed most of the essays addressing the UK and Canada, or I simply forgot which ones they were. Though I did get the sense that the book was more international than I had been expecting from -American stuff.

And I was very pleased to see how many South Asians were represented in the book (yay Sonia Shah editing!), and doubly pleased to see so many essays that went from the US to the country people's families were from and etc. Though I am not sure how many Southeast Asians were represented, huh....