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Kitty Tsui
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 Breathless
: Erotica by
Kitty Tsui
How to describe writing
about sex? "Pornography" seems old fashioned,
male-oriented; and "erotica," while kinder and gentler,
feels like a marketing term. Kitty Tsui's Breathless
carries the label "erotic" on its cover, but it's
explicit, no-holds-barred, depictions of lesbian sex--including
S-M, bondage, and rough play--feels closer to the hard edge of
porn, not the gracefulness of "erotica." Tsui has been
writing for more than a decade and is just now finding a wider
audience, and it is about time. Breathless is beautifully
written, and Tsui knows exactly what she is doing. The grace of
the prose is countered, line by line, with sexual and emotional
excitement that startles us, even as we are seduced by it. Breathless
is a nonstop roller coaster that leaves us feeling just that.
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by Karin Aguilar-San Juan
For fun the other day a lesbian colleague and I
tried to rattle off as many names of U.S. lesbian writers as we
could, limiting ourselves to the years between 1960 and 1980. In a
few minutes, we came up with fifteen names, but although we listed
white, Jewish, and African American women and Latinas, we could
not come up with even one Asian American.1
Asian American lesbians have had many reasons
for silence. We are relative latecomers to the lesbian/gay writing
scene, in part because it has taken us a long time to declare
ourselves as lesbians. In the early 1980s, Kitty Tsui emerged as
one of our few published writers and role models, and some of us
exalted her fire-breathing poems, as if they-actually having
appeared in print-were better proof of our existence than our own
flesh and blood could ever be. In The Words of a Woman Who
Breathes Fire (1983), a collection of poetry and prose, Tsui
offered us an image of a proud, defiant, "no bullshit' woman,
the dyke we all wanted to be:
i am not afraid of
talking back to those
who presume to know
who i am
and telling me that what
i do is not natural...
[From "A Celebration of Who I Am' (62)]
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Names Index:
A B
C D
E F
G H
I J
K L
M N
O P
Q R
S T
U V
W X
Y Z
| Authors
Index | Scholars
Index |
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