Contextualizing Asian masculinity in media post-race: a critical race theory inquiry on metadiscourses

2014-09-22This scholarly project is a thematic study on how Asian masculinity—a product of culture and society—is contextualized, and how historical, political, and cultural forces affect the construction of Asian masculinity and unveils the new racism in a post-race cultural epoch. This project employs an interdisciplinary approach that examines how the law has played a central role in the “racial morphology” of the country, and starts with the foundational legal discourse that has helped shaped masculinity norms and the emasculation of the Asian male subject. This research inquiry begins by charting the historical/legal constructions of Otherness and Asian American masculinity by analyzing the role of the state in defining and reproducing the scripts of hegemonic and subordinated masculinities, and continues with an exploration of its reinforcement by apparatuses in the cultural industries in the “post-racial” era that have been largely ignored: the sports/media complex and the popular (U.S.) music market. The research here addresses how, and to what extent, race and masculinity continue to be defined within a dominant ideological field and how notions of hegemonic masculinity define the “other” in social spaces that have largely escaped scholarly inquiry. Applying a case study approach, I address recent media manias—performances and personalities that went “viral”—and investigate how such cultural phenomenon are commented upon, adapted, and grated into emergent versions of representation which facially appear fresh and counter-hegemonic. However, this investigation reveals that such media manias are actually snared into a matrix of social representations that continue to reify stereotypes of Asian masculinity. I critically examine contemporary media sites of production and reproduction in a global digital context that add to, rather than substitute for film, television and legal representations that have been the subject of scholarly inquiry in Asian masculinity scholarship