| Summary/Abstract |
Li Yongping’s writing displays an acute sensitivity to the changing cultural and historical positioning of the Sinophone Malaysian (Mahua) community and his own migratory experiences. This article focuses on Li’s incessant engagement with issues of gender and feminine sexuality in relation to the shifting biopolitical construction of a hybrid Sinophone Malaysian identity. Through an analysis of Li Yongping’s short story collection, The Snow Falls in Clouds (2002), I aim to examine how he deploys the trope of a prostitute figure to evoke the complexities of a Sinophone Malaysian identity and identification as a consistently reinvented affective product. Li’s keen awareness of the trafficking of desirable Chinese female bodies in Southeast Asia is inextricable from Sinophone Malaysia’s cultural history and community formation. Spectral feminine images reflect the increasingly porous and deterritorialized boundaries of citizenship, community, and nationalism complicating the concept of “Chineseness” and an affective Sinophone Malaysian subjectivity.
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