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

It is not so much that Bulosan subscribes to an ideology of organizing a working class that excludes women as that he categorizes prostitutes with the lumpenproletariat: "The gamblers, prostitutes and Chinese opium smokers did not excite me, but they aroused in me a feeling of flight" (104). The lumpenproletariat are fundamentally anti-revolutionary just as Allos's brother Amado, a bootlegger and gambler, is incapable of fighting against fascism so long as he belongs to a class that "cheat [s] Filipino farm workers of their hard-earned money" (161). The dance-hall girls are also structurally positioned to take away Pinoy wages: "The girl was supposed to tear off one ticket every three minutes, but I noticed that she tore off a ticket for every minute" that a cannery worker danced with her, Allos says (105). Nonetheless, in an exchange with a Lompoc businessman, Bulosan clarifies both that Pinoys are not inherently dissolute and that the small gamblers and prostitutes are not the true exploiters:

I think it is inaccurate, then, to read Bulosan's representations of prostitutes as part of a patriarchal schema that excludes all women from the (inter)national body of workers, insofar as he asserts that those women and men involved with the informal economies of gambling, prostitution, and drugs contribute to the oppression of Filipino farmhands.

Bulosan's exclusion of female prostitutes from the body of the radicalized working class also speaks to his need to desexualize the Filipino working class in response to the hypersexualization of the Pinoys. The idea that "every Filipino is a pimp" (121) reinforces racial segregation and exploitation; as Bulosan documents, whites opposed the 1931 ruling in Roldan v. Los Angeles County that allowed Filipinos to marry white women, while anti-union vigilantism and fears of miscegenation ran together: the white men who attempt to lynch Allos and José for organizing the Mexican lettuce pickers make a point of mutilating their genitalia. To counter this sexualized construction of the Filipino body, Bulosan invests Allos with an asexual (or even anti-sexual) persona; an adolescent experience with a young dancing partner leaves him "trembling with cold and sudden fear" (78), and his single sexual encounter fills him with a "nameless shame" (160). Not surprisingly, his adult relations with women in the U.S. are platonic. Ultimately, though, this fear of sexuality buttresses Bulosan's inability to perceive the material realities of prostitution and sexual abuse.