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

Yet despite Bulosan's inability to perceive the intersectionality of gendered and racialized social formations, his portraits of the women he encounters in the hospital render some of the ways that, for female intellectuals, "the Depression decade opened up a range of possibilities that enabled their entry into what Leslie Rabine has called 'feminine historicity'" (Rabinowitz 39). While they were not exempt from the raging impoverishment of the general population, "[t]hirties women speak of History-with a capital 'H'-intervening into their lives and remaking them" (39). The political exigencies and heightened awareness of systemic crises provided some women with opportunities to insert themselves into, and to re-articulate the terms of, struggles of global significance. Dora Travers, a Soviet émigré, tells Allos that she is returning home to have her child of part-Filipino parentage "born in a land without racial oppression" (227). Although Allos indicts her for abandoning America (just as he faults expatriate writers such as Hemingway and Wright), he shows how Dora politicizes motherhood to protest America's illegitimization of interracial children. In Alice Odell, Allos finds inspiration for his own desire to become an organic intellectual. Initially intimidated by what he perceives to be her "social position" (228) as a noted proletarian writer, he realizes that "her life and mine were the same, terrified by the same forces" (230). Like him, she hails from a dispossessed farming family but manages to become "a writer of promise," one who "was writing a novel about her starved childhood" (228). This, of course, is what the autobiographical Allos aspires to do. And she is another woman who travels to the Soviet Union in the hope that her stance on racial and economic equality will be strengthened. When Alice departs, she asks Eileen to look after Allos in the hospital. Eileen proves to be her sister's intellectual peer: she furnishes the bulk of the books that comprise Allos's education and discusses the Spanish Civil War with him. Allos is almost as impressed by Laura Clarendon, "a young woman who had just written a proletarian novel about the Northwest. This book, the first of its genre to appear in the early thirties, had won a national contest" (238) and, most notably for Allos, features a Filipino protagonist who counters the typical "stockpile characters in entertaining stories" (239).21 Allos asserts that, although she does not continue to write, Laura "had helped to shape" (239) the proletarian fiction movement.

Bulosan undoubtedly idealizes these women such that they figure as surrogate mothers for Allos, but they are still unmistakably represented as political subjects who participate in the struggle over the meaning of the war between Labor and Capital.22 To characterize them as mouthpieces "speaking male privilege, advocating political agendas set by men" (Lee 33) is to imply that fascism, racism, and labor organizing are primarily male rather than female concerns. Even as Bulosan excludes women's issues from the fight for democracy, reiterates the phallocentric rhetoric of brotherhood, and naturalizes women as caregivers, he testifies to the ways that white female radical intellectuals refuted the very logic of brotherhood that he adopts-one that segregates women from the most salient political issues of the time.