Asian American Queer Performance

Author(s):  
Vivian L. Huang

Asian American queer performance indexes racialized, gendered, and sexualized forms and modes of performance created by, for, and about Asians in an American context. Since the 1980s, queer and ethnic studies have conceptualized performance not only as object of study (e.g., staged performance, visual art, film) but also as a method of critique and hermeneutic for troubling knowledges of Asian American encounter and subject formation. Performance in this sense can be understood as Asian American and queer in its engagement with and critical rescripting of histories and ideologies of empire, nationalism, war, globalization, migration, missionizing, white supremacy, and cis-normative heteropatriarchy that constitutes themes of Asian American studies. The interdisciplinary field of performance studies offers quotidian performance, racial performativity, and gender performativity as discursive tools with which to consider social conventions and scripts that render Asian American queer formation legible and dynamic toward future rewritings.

Author(s):  
Amy Sueyoshi

The introduction presents the book’s main argument that San Francisco writers, illustrators, public officials, and community leaders at the turn of the century avidly discussing new freedoms in middle-class gender and sexuality framed white women as provocateurs while fueling racialized characterizations of Chinese and Japanese. A mountain of sex acts that often traversed boundaries of race and gender thus testified to more than just the power of individual will in a magnanimous city. They cohered to tell a provocative tale of misogyny and white supremacy. This chapter additionally contextualizes the book within San Francisco history; traces its intervention in the history of leisure, sexuality studies, whiteness studies, and Asian American studies; discusses its methods; and offers a chapter outline.


2021 ◽  
pp. 233264922110184
Author(s):  
Pawan Dhingra

Discussions of white supremacy focus on patterns of whites’ stature over people of color across institutions. When a minority group achieves more than whites, it is not studied through the lens of white supremacy. For example, arguments of white supremacy in K-12 schools focus on the disfranchisement of African Americans and Latinxs. Discussions of high-achieving Asian American students have not been framed as such and, in fact, can be used to argue against the existence of white privilege. This article explains why this conception is false. White supremacy can be active even when people of color achieve more than whites. Drawing from interviews and observations of mostly white educators in Boston suburbs that have a significant presence of Asian American students, I demonstrate that even when Asian Americans outcompete whites in schools, white supremacy is active through two means. First, Asian Americans are applauded in ways that fit a model minority stereotype and frame other groups as not working hard enough. Second and more significantly, Asian Americans encounter anti-Asian stereotypes and are told to assimilate into the model of white educators. This treatment is institutionalized within the school system through educators’ practices and attitudes. These findings somewhat support but mostly contrast the notion of “honorary whiteness,” for they show that high-achieving minorities are not just tools of white supremacy toward other people of color but also targets of it themselves. Understanding how high-achieving minorities experience institutionalized racism demonstrates the far reach of white supremacy.


Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 30
Author(s):  
Phillip Goodwin

The 14th century mystic Julian of Norwich’s theology, dissolving gender binaries and incorporating medieval constructs of the female into the Trinity, captivates scholars across rhetorical, literary, and religious studies. A “pioneering feminist”, as Cheryll Glenn dubs her, scholarship attempts to account for the ways in which Julian’s theology circumvented the religious authority of male clerics. Some speculate that Julian’s authority arises from a sophisticated construction of audience (Wright). Others situate Julian in established traditions and structures of the Church, suggesting that she revised a mode of Augustinian mysticism (Chandler), or positing that her intelligence and Biblical knowledge indicate that she received religious training (Colledge and Walsh). Drawing from theories on space and gender performativity, this essay argues that Julian’s gendered body is the generative site of her authority. Bodies are articulated by spatial logics of power (Shome). Material environments discipline bodies and, in a kind of feedback loop, gendered performance (re)produces power in time and space. Spaces, though, are always becoming and never fixed (Chavez). An examination of how Julian reorients hierarchies and relations among power, space, and her body provides a hermeneutic for recognizing how gender is structured by our own material cultures and provides possibilities for developing practices that revise relations and create new agencies.


2009 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wan-Yi Chen

This study compares African American and Asian American adolescents in their rates of extreme community violence exposure and consequent internalizing behaviors. Using information from a national longitudinal survey this study found substantial violence exposure rates for both groups. Also, gender differences in exposure rates and adolescent reports of internalizing behaviors after violence exposure were detected. Male African American adolescents had the highest exposure rate, while female Asian American adolescents reported the highest level of internalizing behaviors. These findings suggest further research is needed to better understand the effect of violence exposure on various ethnic minority adolescents. Moreover, social workers and other professionals involved in adolescent services could use these results to improve outreach methods to vulnerable adolescents.


2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 25
Author(s):  
Imam Amrusi Jailani

Observing the relationship between men and women, actually recognized the existence of two relationships that are connotative be distinguished, that, sexual relations and gender relations. Sexual relationship is the relationship between men and women based on the demands and biological categories. Whereas gender relations is a concept and a different social reality, in which the sexual division of labor between men and women is not based on an understanding of normative and biological categories, but on the quality, skills, and roles based on social conventions. Thus, the concepts and manifestations of gender relations more dynamic and has the flexibility to consider psycho-social variables were developed. Based on this understanding, it could be someone who is biologically classified as a woman, but from the point of gender may play a role as a man or vice versa. Therefore, we need to reorient the roles of women, especially their involvement in the organization of the Islamic community, which often marginalized.


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