Abstract

How does an individual Asian American woman make sense of herself when she is simultaneously faced with three struggles: to countermand/resist the dominant representations of Asian American women; to incorporate and reinterpret Asian American collective identity; and finally to integrate actually-lived experiences and relationships into the abstract category of "Asian American"? ;Within Asian American studies, the relationship between self and community has been largely discussed in the languages of cultural politics, history, literature, sociology or legal discourse. What has been missing here is an ethical dimension. The issue of self and community constitutes an important part of recent feminist ethics scholarship. Nevertheless, discussion of Asian American women's experiences and lives has been missing in the debate. In fact, there has been a lack of an interpretive framework that would allow Asian American women to recognize and articulate their dynamic and complex selves-in-progress. ;My task, then, is to fill this void by developing a theoretical framework for Asian American women's construction of self from the point of view of an Asian American feminist ethicist. The dialogical syntheses I adopt here as my method and the process of formulating my theory extend to three areas: Asian American women's experiences and narrative practice; feminist scholarship, including feminist ethical and psychological debate on self and studies of narrative; and Charles Taylor's theory of self. Through the theoretical dialogue among these thinkers, I configure a theory of self which explains Asian American women's own emplotment of selves in their narrative practices. From there I examine a concrete narrative practice of anthologizing, where the search for self as a moral ideal becomes a personal quest for an authentic life as well as a collective struggle to achieve a meaningful and fully realized existence. ;The thesis demonstrates that identity politics demand both recognition of group and individual differences and that the construction of a meaningful community cannot be accomplished without letting an individual member autonomously create linkages between her life and the multiple communities to which she belongs