MR. YAMADA AND THE COST OF A NEW MASCULINITY IN JOHN OKADA’S NO-NO BOY
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12795/REN.2025.i29.1Keywords:
masculinity, racism, No-No Boy, John Okada, Asian American literatureAbstract
During the Second World War and its aftermath, the U.S. government implemented racist policies that forced one hundred thousand Japanese and Japanese Americans into detention camps. A decade later, John Okada wrote No-No Boy (1957), about the traumatic experience of the camps and the stress of adjusting to American society in the following years. This paper aims to examine Okada’s description of the internalization of racism and the effects of emasculation on male racialized migrants. The analysis explores the reinforcement and contesting of nationalistic attempts at remasculinization and the timid endeavor, in the figure of Mr. Yamada, to create a new masculinity away from the masculine and patriarchal dyad. In the context of the heteronormative conservative society of the 1950s, the Issei father finds a way out of emasculation through care and communication, which contrasts with a rejection of the maternal figure, that is sacrificed in this new masculinity.
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