• International Journal of Contents
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.86-91
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• 2013

The Piano, directed by Jane Campion in 1993, became a sensational movie with a special theme focusing on gender and sexual identity, when it won Palme d'Or in the Cannes Film Festival at the same year. Most of the critics discuss the representation of Victorian sexual repression in the colonial setting. But the critical acclaim tends to view the existence of the Maori people and the colonial setting as the backdrop of the narrative, although this colonial background is constructed as a medium to accelerate the release of the repressed passion. Regarding the race issue as a compelling discourse that gets left out of "feminist" accounts, this paper analyzes The Piano, focusing on both how the story of colonialism is constituted in the film and how the film represents ambivalent images of the Maori people, the native of New Zealand.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.211-233
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• 2007

Caryl Churchill achieved spacial politics to resist dominant ideology in Cloud Nine. It is suggested that heterotopia is a counter-site to the places which are controlled by colonialism and sexuality. Churchill juxtaposes African colony of Victorian period in the first act and modern London in the second act. It implies that individuals are similarly oppressed by dominant ideology until now though several conditions for individuals are drastically improved. White heterosexual men in the play try to build their utopia to keep their privileges. If they find anything abnormal to their standard, they systematically classify people and organize them into the different ranks and levels to seclude them from their utopia. Actually, the ideal people in the ideal place are oppressed by patriarchal ideology, compulsory heterosexuality, and colonialism which are covertly associated with gender. Therefore, Churchill uses the cross-casting to challenge the artificiality of gender, sexuality, generation and race in the play. People realize that they need to find their own desires free from gender, compulsory heterosexuality, ethnic, and race and their subjectivity flowing in and out of space. It is the site that all the binary oppositions are deconstructed and creates new multiple nodes to expand the boundary of their communities to heterotopia in real places.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.29-48
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• 2010

This paper is a kind of interdisciplinary studies which connect a Western film criticism with a criticism of minority literature in America. My purpose in this paper is to put on the table such a sensitive issue as racial representation and representativeness in Clint Eastwood's revisionist Western, Unforgiven. We admit generally that Western films have contributed to the white American myth-making of how the West was won. Yet, since the mid-1960s, a growing number of revisionist Westerns were produced so as to raise a question about the conventional way of looking at what happened in the American West. In order to analyze the problem inherent in the way of seeing, I pay attention to how the director Eastwood (re)presents a character named W. W. Beauchamp in the film. Presumably, what the character Beauchamp misses in the West can be overlapped with what ordinary film viewers miss in the genre of Westerns. Given this, interrogating both what Beauchamp sees and what he misses within the movie, I attempt to disclose how much of the West has been unseen from his biased viewpoint. By doing so, I argue why it is important to focus on some passing scenes that touch on the irony of a Native American train passenger, the gaze of the mute Native American housewife, the abrupt disappearance of Asian American men, the lynching of African-American ex-cowboy, and the self-determination of the saloon prostitutes. Then I hope that, conservative and mainstream though the director is, his way of revising the Western is not quite far from my minority-conscious critical position.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.117-132
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• 2007

Playwright Eugene O'Neill's expressionistic text-based approach to The Emperor Jones, with an emphasis on fixity, was at odds with African American actor Charles Gilpin's improvisational performance technique, stressing rupture, spontaneity, and discontinuity. The contemporary avant-garde performance troupe The Wooster Group likewise produces subversive and interrogative forms of identity in performing the play, which challenge the normative approach to gender, race, and an imagined orientation. The historical foundation of subversion and destabilization laid by O'Neill and Gilpin were manifold in the Wooster Group's production of The Emperor Jones, and not only formed a backdrop to it but also played a central role in the group's representation of race and even gender on the stage. In this essay, I use O'Neill's play, The Emperor Jones, a crucial example of racialized fantasies of identification, to explore how the modernist stage through the performances of Gilpin and The Wooster Group constructed racialized subjects of both its performers and audiences. Gilpin and the Wooster Group's strategies each shared a similar complexity in the portrayal of black identity in performance. Offering an examination of how ideologies of race and gender overlap in The Emperor Jones, I hope to show how each performance signifies a range of subversions and differences simultaneously and sometimes oppositionally that needs to be explored both holistically and in detail to offer a fuller picture of these remarkable attempts. Through this approach, I examine Gilpin's creative adaptations of O'Neill's text and illuminate how it is that the Wooster Group's appropriative use of blackface in their performance has come to gain critical acceptance.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.53-92
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• 2018

This essay aims to examine chick lit written within the Asian American context. For the most part, the chick lit genre has been typically regarded as a site to study contemporary white women's experiences and to debate the genres' credentials as feminist literature. Though some may disagree, there is general consensus that chick lit has fallen out of vogue after reaching its peak in the first decade of the new millenium.; nevertheless, it is being revisited by readers and critics alike as it has recently re-emerged as a location upon which to examine how race and gender inform notions of national belonging and female subject formation in the twenty-first century. To this end, this essay reads Kim Wong Keltner's The Dim Sum of All Things (2004). Keltner's protagonist Lindsey Owyang is yet another twentysomething "chick" looking for love, self, independence, and success in the huge megalopolis of San Francisco. What sets Lindsey apart from the chick prototype is that she is a third-generation ABC (American-born Chinese) and issues relevant to Asian America frequently make their way into Lindsey's narrative. Though it is generally considered as standing a "few notches above the standard chick-lit fare" (Stover n. pag), I would argue that meaningful reflections on many of the major pillars of Asian American literature, history, and cultural politics are glossed over in favor of cursory musings about the daily vicissitudes of Lindsey's life. This essay thus takes to task Ferriss's claim that a "serious" consideration of chick lit "brings into focus many of the issues facing contemporary women and contemporary culture - issues of identity, of race and class, of femininity and feminism, of consumerism and self-image" (2). I contend that a close examination of Keltner's The Dim Sum of All Things discloses that the chick lit format undermines a "serious consideration" of Asian American issues by presenting in particular a highly problematic representation of race and of Asian American femininity.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.12-24
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• 2017

This paper analyzed the representation of migrants in television with the example of KBS's My Neighbor, Charles. This primetime TV show with consistent popularity has showcased different types of migrants from other Korean television shows in terms of gender and race, and, partly the difference brought popularity to it. This study finds the major reason of the difference from changed migration patterns in Korea. Until recently, the main population of immigrants in Korea was composed of female brides and workers, but it became diversified to include male and the West migrants. This triggered the changes in media representation, but not thoroughly. Though the faces of migrant protagonists have been diversified, the remaining ideology of nation-centric that has been the main frame to regard migrants as someone to be integrated through traditional values persists. This study finds a few conflicts between the traditional and the change. For example, represented realities of migrants are extends to include their activities in public domain, disputes of multicultural society such as social differentiation and bias, and the criticism of Korean traditional culture. In a gender perspective, while all the marriages represented showed different kinds of vulnerability, discourses of traditional familialism were also clearly presented through different tools of representation. This study aims at contributing existing studies of media representations of migrants with a more complicated pictures in the context of social changes and migration population changes.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.4
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• pp.693-718
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• 2009

Kate Burns, a disillusioned Irish woman in Quetzalcoatl, has alternating feelings of fear, repulsion, oppression, compassion, and fascination vis-à-vis Mexican people. Together, these feelings are constitutive of a psychic process in which an imaginary appropriation of the other takes place. In this process white subjectivity represents or reconstructs the dark race precisely as its other. At the same time, Kate's feelings register her anxious recognition of the resistant, unappropriated being of the dark people: their true 'otherness,' or what Žižek calls "the excess of existence over representation." The otherness, frequently racial and sexual, evokes mixed feelings in the white subject. Kate's at once amorous and aggressive response to Ramón's body provides a case in point. Kate's emotional undulation is considerably mitigated in The Plumed Serpent, the revised version of the novel in which the theme of 'blood-mixing' is pushed to the ultimate point. Yet the interracial marriage resolves neither the racial nor the ontologico-sexual issues raised in the first version. Kate is still attracted to Ramón in his sagacious sensuality but goes on to get married to Cipriano, a pure Indian, only to find his mechanical masculinity ever unpalatable. This shows, not just Lawrence's wilful commitment to the 'blood-mixing' theme, but perhaps his lingering taboo against miscegenation as well. Changes in the plot entail those in the narrative voice. In Quetzalcoatl, Owen, a spectatorial and gossipy character, frequently competes for narration with the fully participant third-person narrator. In The Plumed Serpent, the third-person narrator becomes predominant, now attempting with greater confidence to present the reality of the racial other immediately to European readership. While such immediacy is illusional, narrative insistence on it implies a struggle to displace racial stereotypes and offer an experiential understanding of the other.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.35
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• pp.97-122
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• 2014

Since the arrival of Chinese immigrants in the 1850s, many Euro-American writers tended to project their fears, contempt, desires and fantasy onto the Other race and perceived Chinese Americans in stereotypes-dangerous villains, unassimilated aliens, quiet and passive servants, sexually submissive women, or seductive prostitutes. However in the 1970s and the 1980s Euro-American novels expressed varying attitudes towards Chinese Americans. Many earlier EuroAmerican writers began portraying positive characterizations of Chinese Americans. The purpose of this study is to examine the ways one of the Euro-American writers, Howard Fast characterized Chinese Americans in The Immigrants. Part of the novel concerns a Chinese American family. Fast gave a favorable portrayal of Chinese Americans. Unlike many Euro-American novelists who dealt only with Chinese American villains and prostitutes and view Chinese Americans as the lowest class of American society, Fast, on the other hand, portrayed Chinese Americans as law-abiding and useful citizens. Thus, I will discuss how Howard Fast subverted the familiar negative characterization of Chinese Americans and placed Chinese American experiences in the context of American immigration history. Many white Americans tended to notice only the lurid and sensational aspects in the Chinese American community. They seldom regarded Chinese Americans as people with homes and families and seldom saw Chinese Americans as individuals, as human beings with feelings, pain, and joy. To counter this racist view, Fast described the family life of Chinese Americans and depicted Chinese Americans as individuals with a full range of human emotions and with strong family and cultural ties. Though Fast debunked some myths about Chinese Americans, he also reinforces other stereotypes or some stereotypical illusions about them. In conclusion, I'll demonstrate Fast's work remains an incomplete representation of Chinese Americans.

• The Research Journal of the Costume Culture
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• v.29 no.5
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• pp.651-664
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• 2021

The purpose of this study is to first examine the relationship between appearance-enhancing beauty practices and feminism, and secondly, to analyze public images of contemporary women using this paradigm. Through the lens of this relationship, we present a literature review and empirical research focusing on the evolution of public image trends among girl groups, with special attention to the Refund Sisters, a South Korean supergroup currently drawing mainstream attention as female icons. The scope of analysis includes girl groups dating from the 1990's to the year 2020 and photos of the Refund Sisters. Our results indicate that firstly, free sexual expression is evident based on active use of sexuality; images contain bold demonstrations of females desire, expressions previously considered taboo. Secondly, we note deviations from more standardized female images, unique adornment of outward appearance, and rejection of normative female images through freer forms of self-presentation. Lastly, there is greater cultural and racial diversity, rejection of modern race and gender binaries, and increased representation of queer identities. However, the relationship between appearance-enhancing beauty practices and feminism is sometimes considered paradoxical, with some arguing that beautifying one's outward appearance is a compulsory strategy and that it should be rejected in order to resist aesthetic pressure.

• The Research Journal of the Costume Culture
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• v.32 no.1
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• pp.17-37
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• 2024

This study examines the rise of the Body Positive Movement on TikTok and its role as a form of online content activism influencing the fashion design and industry. Through a combination of literature review and case study methodology, the study explores the expression techniques and thematic types of Body Positive Movement on TikTok. Reviews of literature, previous studies, online articles, fashion journals, and relevant search terms on TikTok informed a definition of Body Positive Movement and an analysis of its formation and rise. The research findings confirm the impact TikTok content on Body Positive Movement has on the fashion industry in addressing external factors (i.e., 'Appearance', 'Race', 'Aging', 'Physical Disability') and intrinsic factors (i.e., 'Acceptance of Diversity', 'Self-Esteem', 'Rejection of Stereotypes', 'Appropriate Representation', 'Information Provision'). The key external factor , 'Appearance', includes subcategories such as 'Body Shape', 'Body Hair', 'Skin', and 'Facial Features'. TikTok content creators on fashion creatively combine music, emojis, and visual storytelling to exhibit positive self-perception concerning these factors. A significant finding of the study is that short clips predominantly manifesting external factors differentiate into informative or enlightening videos associated with intrinsic factors. The study underscores Body Positive Movement's important influence on the fashion industry from design to presentation.