RE-SIGNED SUBJECTS: WOMEN, WORK, AND WORLD IN THE FICTION OF CARLOS BULOSAN AND HISAYE YAMAMOTO

III. THE FEMALE SUBJECTS OF AMERICA

Like Meteria, the women whom Allos encounters when he emigrates to America can be read as a threat to homosocial struggles for an equality dependent upon female subordination. According to Lee's reading of America, prostitutes and dance-hall workers are sexually objectified under a male gaze while female intellectuals are extensions of the mother/martyr figure exemplified by Meteria-but both "types" of women embody that which must be excluded from male working-class collectives. However, Bulosan's representations of working women in the U.S. are at once simpler and more complex than this inclusion/exclusion model would suggest. Through several of his female characters, Bulosan imparts the historical conditions that differentially engender women's oppression as well as empowerment, eschewing both the arrogant assumptions of knowing the Other in "her" singularity and the equally debilitating refusal to think beyond one's viewpoint. As I have argued with respect to part one of America, an overemphasis on the text's symbolic structures of gender obscures these micro-level portraits of women's histories-histories that interrogate rather than reinforce the macro-level rhetoric of homosociality. Attending more closely to Bulosan's representations of prostitutes and white female intellectuals, we see that he (mis)recognizes rather than elides the female subjects of labor, such that sexual exploitation is subsumed under economic exploitation. Nonetheless, even as Bulosan perpetuates this patriarchal form of analysis, I would argue that his representations of radical women intellectuals do not reinforce but repudiate dominant conceptions of what are properly "men's" versus "women's" spheres of praxis.

Bulosan both recognizes and disavows the laboring subject of prostitution in the episode involving Allos's encounter with Marian, who cares for him after he is nearly lynched by vigilantes for organizing Mexican lettuce workers. Along with the Odell sisters and Mary, Marian certainly is "the caring maternal figure" that is "the singular desire thematized as 'America'" (San Juan 139). Rather than simply engaging in hypostatization, however, Bulosan double-voices this woman's history. He portrays Marian as dependent and submissive ("I'll help you. I'll work for you.... What I would like is to have someone to care for" [212], she tells Allos) but also strong (after finding out a lover is married, she says, "I tried to make a new life. Without illusions, I went on my way" [211]). Before sacrificing herself for Allos (by selling her body to acquire money for him, an act that ends in her death by syphilis), she tells him that she had worked as a dishwasher while attending college and had also picked hops with Mexicans and "gypsies." And it is as a working woman that Marian initially attracts Allos's attention: "Her hands were rough; the fingers were stubby and flattened at the top. My heart ached, for this woman was like my little sisters in Binalonan. I turned away from her, remembering how I had walked familiar roads with my mother" (211). If Bulosan elides Marian's work as a prostitute, which is only mentioned and not represented, he describes the economic hardships that lead her into prostitution. Nonetheless, Marian is external and even antithetical to Allos's labor organizing, despite the fact that her prostitution is what supports them during their brief time together.