Social melancholy and decolonisation of psychic space in selected diasporic Chinese women’s novels in English

Diasporic women from ethnic minorities have often been disproportionally stereotyped, stigmatised, and labelled as depressed or psychopathological due to their constant abjection and oppression by white-supremacist and patriarchal ideologies. Such negative stereotypes of women from minorities are recurrent themes in diasporic Chinese women’s novels, thus substantiating prevailing discourses about the essentialist deficiency and passivity inherent in women. However, this study investigates how female psychopathy is not so much the representation of individual pathology as a social one. By examining the psycho-affective status of female characters in selected works by diasporic Chinese women writers in white-dominated countries like Canada, Australia and America, namely SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café (1990), Hsu-Ming Teo’s Love and Vertigo (2000), and Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You (2014), this study aims to demonstrate how institutional power hierarchies and oppression produce female psychopathy incarnated in melancholy, depression, and suicide, etc. This study moves away from the intrapsychic paradigm of Freudian psychoanalysis and adopts a psychoanalytic social approach. This study utilises Kelly Oliver’s Theory of Social Melancholy (2004) to examine the mechanism of multi-layered social oppression in disturbing women’s psychic space and rendering them passive and depressed. Oliver postulates social melancholy as the melancholy of oppression resulting from the loss of self as a loved or lovable agent due to colonisation of psychic space by dominant oppressive ideologies. The central argument of this study is that symptoms of psycho-affective disorders prevalent among selected female characters should not be interpreted as manifestations of individual pathology. Rather, they are consequences of social melancholy due to colonisation of psychic space by institutional ideologies like racism and sexism. The study finds that sexually or racially marginalised women characters suffer from social melancholy because of the unavailability of positive representation of womanhood or motherhood in the phallocentric and white-supremacist social contexts, thereby undermining their subjectivity as active agents and rendering them passive. Therefore, pathologising women as deficient or depressed covers up the institutional causes of the prevalent psychopathy among women. Moreover, as colonisation of psychic space operates by suppressing individual agency and precluding sublimation, this study also explores the possibility of decolonisation. Drawing from Oliver’s Theory of Witnessing Subjectivity (2001), the study testifies that the process of witnessing works as testimony to the unspeakable lived experience of the racialised and gendered female subjects. The witnessing narratives constitutive of address-ability and response-ability open up the therapeutic possibility to articulate, thereby decolonising female characters’ psychic space and reconstructing their subjectivity. This study expands the critical analysis of diasporic women’s works by presenting an alternative approach to understanding women’s psychopathy and subjectivity (de)formation, thus depathologising women characters’ psychopathy. The significance of this study is that it not only challenges the sociocultural stereotypes that stigmatise women’s images, but also explores an ethic of responsibility. It transcends the pathology of recognition between superior subjects and inferior objects that justifies domination and oppression.

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