This project includes an outline of a prospective fantasy novel whose story is described through chapter summaries, a bit of sample writing, and an accompanying explanatory essay that acts as the novel's afterword. It follows the story of Hikari Hinata,…
This project includes an outline of a prospective fantasy novel whose story is described through chapter summaries, a bit of sample writing, and an accompanying explanatory essay that acts as the novel's afterword. It follows the story of Hikari Hinata, a princess of a fictional nation in which gods and fate rule the lives of mortals. Her tale is a representative one--it seeks to call to mind the experiences of second-generation Asian Americans through its characterization, plot, and background inspirations. Two key concepts it focuses on are intergenerational trauma and combining that with ancient world mythologies, in a way that breathes new life into past narratives and explores modern-age experiences.
Date Created
The date the item was original created (prior to any relationship with the ASU Digital Repositories.)
Latinas face among the highest documented rates of depressive symptoms among all adolescent groups. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 2018 Youth Risk and Behavior Survey, 46.8% of Latina adolescents reported feeling sad and hopeless on a…
Latinas face among the highest documented rates of depressive symptoms among all adolescent groups. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 2018 Youth Risk and Behavior Survey, 46.8% of Latina adolescents reported feeling sad and hopeless on a daily basis. As a Latina myself, I found myself wondering how we could direct power back to our Latina youth. I turned to the tradition of storytelling, an integral practice in Latino/a communities. Storytelling is a social and cultural tradition, which upholds intergenerational connection, understanding, and education. While many Latinas engage with storytelling in the family space, I wanted to foster a safe space outside of the household for Latinas to connect with one another. I was inspired by psychologist Dr. Lillian Comas-Diaz's concept "Spirita," a synthesizing spirituality among women of color which places emphasis on understanding the shared traumatic experiences and drawing joy from empathetic connections and commitment to creating community with one another. From here, I developed a website called "Sanando Juntos," or "Healing Together," teaching Latinas how to use storytelling as a tool to better understand themselves as well as create a space to foster connections with other Latinas. In order to develop a theoretical framework for the website, a literature review was conducted observing successful methods of digital storytelling in adolescent audiences. I then used this research to develop the main pillars for the website, a storytelling workshop, safe-space building, multimedia approaches, and peer-to-peer interaction. With many young Latina girls disproportionately suffering from suicidal ideation and depression, Sanando Juntos acts as a way to break down the stigma surrounding these difficult conversations while empowering and connecting like-minded Latinas. The final website can be viewed at https://sanandojuntos.com.
Date Created
The date the item was original created (prior to any relationship with the ASU Digital Repositories.)
The Hong Kong-born Canadian photographer and performance artist Tseng Kwong Chi mostly worked in the United States until the year he died in 1990. Upon arriving in New York in 1979, he started his career with a new name. By…
The Hong Kong-born Canadian photographer and performance artist Tseng Kwong Chi mostly worked in the United States until the year he died in 1990. Upon arriving in New York in 1979, he started his career with a new name. By dropping his anglicized name Joseph and replacing it with his Chinese given name Kwong Chi, Tseng made a clear statement: this is my staged persona who refuses to assimilate to Western culture. This thesis deconstructs Tseng’s key works, including his party-crashing Met series, the decade-long East Meets West series, and the extended Expeditionary series. With his persona disguised by wearing a Mao suit and a pair of sunglasses, I argue that Tseng was a pioneer in the genre of Asian American performance photography and that his work foreshadowed the cultural jamming movement in his innovative use of détournement while it also critically comments on orientalism, cultural fetish, and Asian identity politics. Additionally, Tseng’s work served as a bridge, connecting art history with issues of Asian American identity. As a gay artist who worked mostly in the United States, his work was an early example of what Jachinson Chan has suggested as an alternative model of masculinity for Asian American men: that Asian American men can be free, independent, expressive, and willing to embrace femininity with their masculinity. As David Eng has argued, Tseng also bridged the fields of Asian American queer studies and diaspora studies. Moreover, Tseng carried the legacy of the first-generation Chinese American artists in the medium of photography and inspired the next generation of diasporic artists to explore Asian identity, and to contest the image of Mao and the power dynamics between East and West.
Date Created
The date the item was original created (prior to any relationship with the ASU Digital Repositories.)
This paper argues that the representation of diversity in Asian American genders and sexualities in the media challenges US stereotypes of Asian American masculinity and femininity and offers alternatives for both Asian American and white US audiences to be exposed…
This paper argues that the representation of diversity in Asian American genders and sexualities in the media challenges US stereotypes of Asian American masculinity and femininity and offers alternatives for both Asian American and white US audiences to be exposed to and thereby potentially reconsider, non-normative gender and sexual identities of Asian Americans. For the purposes of this paper, four different anime will be analyzed for their insight on: (a) the formation of queer identity of Asian characters and (b) observations on how diverse and accurate representations of Asian gender and sexuality has the potential to influence the creation of broader representations of Asian and Asian American gender and sexuality in the future. The four anime analyzed for these purposes were Wandering Son (Hōrō Musuko), Sweet Blue Flowers (Aoi Hana), My Hero Academia (Boku No Hero Academia), and The Legend of Korra.
Date Created
The date the item was original created (prior to any relationship with the ASU Digital Repositories.)
While racial and ethnic socialization of transracial Korean international adoptees has been a growing topic in adoption literature, little research has looked at generational differences in parental racial and ethnic socialization of Korean adoptees. Using three semi-structured interviews with Korean…
While racial and ethnic socialization of transracial Korean international adoptees has been a growing topic in adoption literature, little research has looked at generational differences in parental racial and ethnic socialization of Korean adoptees. Using three semi-structured interviews with Korean international adoptees this paper analyzes how racial and ethnic socialization practices of white adoptive parents have changed over time. Through this analysis, we can better understand how Korean adoption policy should reflect the changing socialization practices as well as educational resources that different generations of adoptees want. Findings suggest that younger cohorts of adoptees are receiving more racial and ethnic socialization, however, interviewees still expressed the desire for greater educational resources on socialization practices for adoptive parents. Additionally, younger generations of adoptees may be less supportive of policy changes that end all Korean international adoption and have more positive feelings towards international adoption. Future research should consider the importance of tracing the historical connection between older Korean adoptees influence on policy changes like the Special Adoption Act. Overall, these interviews reveal a need for greater research on how Korean adoptees feelings towards adoption may shape policy within the adoption industry.
Date Created
The date the item was original created (prior to any relationship with the ASU Digital Repositories.)
This project analyzes contemporary U.S. mental health discourse as an assemblage that constantly renegotiates the normative subject through the production and regulation of intersectional mentally ill subjects. It uses feminist disability and biopolitical theoretical frameworks to explore how media discourses…
This project analyzes contemporary U.S. mental health discourse as an assemblage that constantly renegotiates the normative subject through the production and regulation of intersectional mentally ill subjects. It uses feminist disability and biopolitical theoretical frameworks to explore how media discourses of mental illness reveal the regulation of mentally ill subjects in relationship to intersections of gender, sexuality, and race. These discourses constitute a biopolitical technology that genders, racializes, and regulates mental illness. This regulation not only reveals the cultural boundaries around who is designated as “mentally ill” (and how they are designated as such), but it also demonstrates how mental illness is normalized when attached to certain bodies in specific contexts, yet perceived as a threat to the social body when attached to other bodies in other contexts.
In order to explore this assemblage, this project is organized around four foundational questions: How is mental illness produced, surveilled, and differentially regulated as a social formation within medicine and policy? How does media reproduce and renegotiate these medical and political mental health discourses? How do these mental health discourses intersect with gender, race, and sexuality? How does our assemblage of cultural, medical, and political discourse produce, observe, and regulate intersectional mentally ill subjects in relationship to shifting ideals of normative subjecthood?
This project answers these questions over the course of several case studies, each of which explores a set of thematically linked texts as a window into understanding how mental illness operates intersectionally and biopolitically in cultural discourses and social institutions. The first section establishes a broad theoretical framework for articulating how discourses of gender and sexuality are central to the production of mental illness in the United States today. The second section explores how this intersection of gender, sexuality, and mental illness is observed and regulated through social institutions like the workplace, the nation-state, and the carceral system. The final section explores emergent discourses of mental illness that move us away from centering individual mentally healthy subjects as idealized entities and toward understanding mental and emotional well-being as a collective social enterprise.
Date Created
The date the item was original created (prior to any relationship with the ASU Digital Repositories.)
The front cover of Uncle What-Is-It is Coming to Visit, a 1993 children’s book by Michael-Willhoite, features two white children frightened by the hairy arm and upturned wrist of an unseen adult. The arm is clad in a frilly pink…
The front cover of Uncle What-Is-It is Coming to Visit, a 1993 children’s book by Michael-Willhoite, features two white children frightened by the hairy arm and upturned wrist of an unseen adult. The arm is clad in a frilly pink and orange sleeve, and gaudy bracelets hang from the wrist. The plot hinges on the children’s uncertainty about an uncle they have yet to meet; they know he is gay but are unsure of what it means. Before their mother can explain, she is distracted by a kitchen mishap and the siblings turn to other neighborhood children for answers. They encounter a host of descriptions that terrify them: one neighbor describes gay people as “fags [and] queers [who] really want to be women.” He shows the children a newspaper clipping photo of “a large man dressed in a frilly dress [with] a turban piled high with fruit on his head,” an implicitly racialized caricature reminiscent of Latina style icon Carmen Miranda. Another neighbor describes gay people as “dressed up in black leather. Zippers and chains all over...Dark glasses [and] chaps” (Willhoite, 1993). After having nightmares of men with sinister expressions in tropical-themed drag and leather, the children are overjoyed to discover that their uncle seems “normal.” Relative to depictions of other gay people in the book, Uncle Brett is normal because he is nonthreatening—he is white with short, straight, brown hair; he wears a plain, blue, collared shirt and brown dress pants; he carries a brown briefcase; and he enjoys and excels at activities appropriate for his gender, like catch. Although the book seems to have an affirming message about accepting queer people, it sends a clear message about which queer people are to be feared by children and which are nonthreatening. Nonthreatening queers are those who seem most like people mainstream western society considers normal: people who conform to expected gender roles, who have a vested interest parenting, and who are white and middle-upper class. These nonthreatening queers are by far the most represented in queer-themed literature for children. Based on a survey of 68 children’s books with queer characters, this paper argues that the representation of queer identities in children’s literature upholds more than challenges heteronormativity. I will first address ways many of the books perpetuate gender normativity by problematizing young male characters’ gender-transgressing behavior, portraying queer adults with less threatening gender presentations, and upholding gender binarism; next, I will address how the majority of the books promote repro-narrativity by focusing on monogamous couples’ strong desires and concerted efforts to have/raise children; I will then address race and class and the way white and upper-middle class queer characters are overrepresented while non-white and lower-class queer characters are underrepresented or not represented at all.
Date Created
The date the item was original created (prior to any relationship with the ASU Digital Repositories.)
