Encyclopedia of Asian-American Literature

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Woo, Merle (1941– )
As a leading member of the Radical Women
and the Freedom Socialist Party, Merle Woo has
dedicated her life to fighting for social justice.
Committed to the group’s ideals of genuine de-
mocracy and full equality for all, the Korean-Chi-
nese-American activist has worked to preserve
women’s reproductive freedom, immigrant rights,
and freedom of speech. In 1982, as part of a wide-
scale attack on radicalism, affirmative action, and
intellectual freedom during the Reagan years,
Woo was dismissed from her position as lecturer
of Asian American Studies at the University of
California, Berkeley. While the university cited a
new stipulation confining lecturers’ appointments
to four years, which Woo had exceeded, many of
Woo’s supporters saw the firing as directly related
to Woo’s radicalism, open lesbianism, feminism,
and socialism. In a series of acclaimed court cases,
Woo, with the support of the American Federation
of Teachers, the National Lawyers Guild, the Merle
Woo Defense Committee, and others, fought the
university on the grounds of unfair labor practices
and won. The four-year limit on lecturer appoint-
ments was struck down by the court, and Woo
was granted a two-year visiting lecturer position
and financial remuneration. She chose to forgo
additional legal battles that might have secured
the tenure-track appointment she had originally
been promised; instead, she turned her attention
to healing from the breast cancer with which she
had just been diagnosed.
Woo’s activism includes producing work in a
variety of genres: nonfiction essays, performance
art, and poetry. She has contributed to a number
of Radical Women publications such as Permanent
Revolution in the U.S. Today, which includes her
essay “Lesbian and Gay Liberation: A Trotskyist
Analysis,” and Three Asian American Writers Speak
Out on Feminism, which features several of Woo’s
dramatic monologues and poems that give voice
to her ancestors. In the late seventies and early
eighties, Woo, along with fellow radicals NELLIE
WONG and Kitty Tsui, participated in an Asian-
American feminist performance art group called
“Unbound Feet Three.” While much of the work
that Woo completed with this group has remained


unpublished to date, Woo’s poetry has circulated
widely in journals such as Plexus, Haight-Ashbury
Journal, and in collections like Breaking Silence,
The Forbidden Stitch, Making Waves and My Lover
Is a Woman.
Among Woo’s best-known works are her per-
sonal essay, “Letter to Ma,” which appears in This
Bridge Called My Back, and her collection of
poems Yellow Woman Speaks. While Woo’s letter
is addressed to her mother, its audience is much
broader, as Woo points to the similarities among
Asian women’s experiences of racism, sexism, and
economic disadvantage and requests that yellow
women and their allies unite to eliminate such in-
justices. Yellow Woman Speaks, originally released
in 1986 and reprinted in 2003 with a handful of re-
cent poems discussing trans-genderism and queer
sexuality, approaches themes similar to those in
“Letter to Ma”: lesbian identity and sexuality, hon-
oring ancestors, racial oppression, and feminism.
While several poems from this book have been
widely anthologized, they received little critical at-
tention, a fact that Sunn Shelley Wong attributes to
an academic dismissal of poetry that uses informal
diction, democratic instead of difficult themes, and
overtly oppositional politics. Slowly though, critics
are turning an eye toward Woo’s work, whose co-
authored Three Asian American Writers Speak Out
on Feminism was positively reviewed in Iris maga-
zine upon the book’s rerelease in 2003. Moreover,
Professor Suzanne Juhasz has cited Woo’s poem on
lesbian sexuality, “Under a Full Moon” (previously
published as “Untitled”), as exemplary of what she
calls the “complimentary identification” of lesbian
desire (156–158), that is, an identity that is based
both on difference and sameness.

Bibliography
Huang, Su-ching. “Merle Woo.” In Asian-American
Poets: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook,
edited by Guiyou Huang and Emmanuel S. Nel-
son, 323–330. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press,
2002.
Juhasz, Suzanne. A Desire for Women: Relational Psy-
choanalysis, Writing, and Relationships between
Women, 143–166. New Brunswick, N.J., and Lon-
don: Rutgers University Press, 2003.

Woo, Merle 323
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