• International Journal of Human Ecology
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.79-85
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• 2009

This survey examined sex role identities (androgyny, masculinity, femininity, and undifferentiated), gender, and academic achievement scores from an international sampling of college students. For a comparison, American students and Korean students responded to survey questions on the Bem Sex Role Inventory and the Korean Sex Role Inventory respectively, reported family socio-economic status and achievement scores on the American College Testing (ACT) or Korean Scholastic Ability Test (KSAT). Results in this study indicate that a higher percentage of American students report an androgynous or undifferentiated gender role identity than do Koreans, while Korean students are more likely to show a feminine gender role identity than Americans. Although American students reported higher levels of androgyny in their gender role identity, those who fit the feminine gender role identity group showed higher ACT scores than other gender role identity types. However, in the Korean sample, the masculine gender role identity produced a higher academic achievement for both males and females.

• American Studies
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• v.42 no.2
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• pp.1-29
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• 2019

The recent census project that non-Hispanic White will be minority in thirty years has been accepted by the conservative media and politicians as the factor that threatens the authentic American national identity. The concerns about the majority-minority population chance influenced the election of Donald Trump who explicitly claimed the restriction of immigration, promising strong controls over the entry of undocumented immigrants. In the process, 'white-nationalism' based on the connection of racial whites and authentic American identity has been central issues in American society. In this sense, this paper examines who has been included/excluded from 'racial Whites' throughout the American history relating to the American identity politics and how these processes have shown the covert strategies of the whites for maintaining their privileges.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.1311-1337
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• 2010

This paper deals with one of the hottest debates in the history of the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) since its inception in the late 1960s. In 1998 at Hawai'i, the AAAS awarded Lois-Ann Yamanaka its Fiction Award for her novel Blu's Hanging, only to have this award protested. The point at issue was the inappropriate representation of Filipino American characters called "Human Rats" in the novel. This event divided the association into two groups: one criticizing the novel for the problematic portrayal of Filipinos in colonial Hawai'i, and the other defending it from the criticism in the name of aesthetic freedom. Such a "crisis of representation" in Asian American identity reflects on the ways in which local Hawaiians are positioned in the complicate power dynamic between oppositional Hawaiian identity and cosmopolitan diasporic identity within the larger framework of Asian American pan-ethnic identity. The controversial event triggered the eruption of Asian Americans' anxiety over the identity-bounded nation of Asian America where intra-racial classism and conflict have been at play, which are primary themes of Blu's Hanging. This paper shows how Yamanaka's Blu's Hanging becomes so disturbing a work to prevent the hegemonic formality of Asian America identity from being fully dogmatic. Ultimately, it contradicts the political unconscious of the reading public and unmasked its false consciousness by engendering a "free subjective intervention" in the ideological reality of colonial Hawai'i.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.49-72
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• 2010

As the first of Philip Roth's recent series of novels that delve into American Cold War history deeply entwined with the post-war Jewish American experience, American Pastoral traces the tragic fall of a third-generation Jewish American named Seymour "Swede" Levov, whose dream of complete assimilation to the post-ethnic American paradise is irrecoverably disrupted when his young daughter blows up the local post office to protest against the Vietnam War. This essay proposes to examine Swede Levov's interrupted pursuit of the American dream by locating it within specific Cold War contexts and national imaginaries propagated particularly during the years from John F. Kennedy to Lyndon B. Johnson. In so doing, I will argue that Roth presents a paradoxical vision of Jewish American identity that could be acquired by performing perpetual self-effacement and submergence into the non-place of anonymity and doubleness, a mythic location of the post-ethnic Cold War American family. Levov's life becomes true part of the mythic narrative of American history when he realizes that his life, just like the nation's history, is a series of temporalities radically discontinued without any manageable detour ot divine bypass to cross over. Rather than indicating Roth's retraction from the postmodern understanding of subjectivity, the novel's historical realism, I will argue, serves to illuminate the postmodern conditions of American Cold War history and ethnic identity.

• International Journal of Contents
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.51-64
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• 2020

Interviews with 17 Korean American professionals living in Korea revealed the relationship between their status, cultural identities, social capital, and conflicts that arise between their understanding of American and Korean social norms. The findings indicate that social capital for Korean Americans in Korea largely comprises of their English community in Korea and the Seoul Global Center; and that their access to social capital in the Korean society, in general, is limited. As result of limited availability and accessibility of social capital, with a sense of superiority, they maintained their American identity. In terms of social control, their lack of motivation to adopt and follow Korean social norms, as well as them being from the U.S., limited changes occurred in their cultural identity. Extending previous research on the Theory of Intercultural Public Relations, the public's power allows them to maintain their cultural identity, which in turn, effect their communication process. Implications of these findings, as well as suggestions for future study, are discussed.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.1-21
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• 2018

In Woman Watches over the World, Linda Hogan explores the broken identity of herself and her family, the issue of the poverty and the identity crisis, the alcoholism, prevalent in the Native American community and their silenced history. Previous studies have claimed that her memoir contributes to the restoration of Native American identity and history by accusing the violence of white culture, and seeks to recognize a dialogue between native culture and white mainstream culture as well. However they seem to overlook the complicated relations among story, identity, body and nature, to which Hogan as a multi-binded storyteller resorts as a way to break the silence of herself and her tribe for healing. Her own story, as a way to break the silence, becomes the formative drive to reveal the silenced history of her own tribe to lead the young generation to the future. She also understands the formative function of the story, which becomes the vehicle for embodying and connecting themselves to nature. To her, healing lies in the restoration of sympathetic relationship with nature. History, as a type of story, can be made up or mistold just like a story. There may be a blind spot where one can not assess what is true. In spite of the vision of the parallel worlds of the two cultures she presents, there seems to be no immediate solution to the discrimination against the Native American, poverty, identity crisis, and environmental problems which the Native American community faces. However, it can be said that her memoir serves as a rudder by presenting a direction to not only the Native American but also to readers in other cultures in its quest for practical possibilities for the future.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.23-48
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• 2014

Considered as the first generation of the Chinese American male writers, Shawn Wong has often been tagged with the male-centered or cultural nationalistic writer for his first short novel Homebase since the 1970s. He has, however, shifted his own gender and cultural attitudes toward his male character in his second novel American Knees, published in 1995. By focusing on his second novel, this paper examines how Wong critically reconsiders the male-centeredness and cultural nationalism in a way to invalidate them in relationships among male and female characters in the formation of the Chinese American male's identity. Attempting to establish his own national and cultural identity as an American citizenship and the self-awareness of masculinity as a man, Rainsford Chan in Homebase believed that he could achieve his identity and masculinity with the chronological experiences related to his ancestors in American society. He even strictly erased the presence of female in his own identity formation. In doing so, he seemed to anchor his authorship at the discourse of the male-centeredness and cultural nationalist like other contemporary writers such as Frank Chin and Jeffrey Paul Chan who always strongly marked cultural tradition. By creating a non-conventional male character Raymond Ding with compromising and open-eared attitudes toward female characters, however, Wong dramatically changes the idea of representing the relationships between male and female characters in American Knees. In this novel, he suggests that the male character' identity can be properly formed not in the extreme reinforcement of masculinity or the ethnic-based cultural awareness but with the mutual understanding between male and female individuals regardless of ethnic and nationalistic biases. Consequently, Wong attempts to bail out of the male-centered images of the first generation of the Chinese American male writers through Raymond Ding.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.367-379
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• 1993

The objectives of this study were to classify the contents of clothing image preferences of Korean and American students, and to examine how clothing image preferences vary according to sex role identity, sex, and culture. A woman's clothing image preference inventory and the Bem Sex Role Inventory were administered to 127 Korean students and 116 American students. Sex role idendity was classified into androgynous, masculine, feminine, and undifferentiated type. 1. Four segments of woman's clothing image preference derived by factor analysis : F. 1 'splendid-plain' ; F. 2 'feminine-masculine' ; F. 3 'casual-formal' ; F. 4 'classic-contemporary'. 2. Americans prefered splendid image more than did Koreans. Androgynous-typed males liked splendid image most among American male subjects. 3. There was interaction effect between sex and culture on feminine-masculine image preference. In Korean students, males liked feminine image much more than did females. Masculine-typed females liked masculine image most among American female subjects. 4. Koreans prefered casual image more than did Americans. 5. There was interaction effect between sex role identity, sex, and culture($4{\times}2{\times}2$) on classic-contemporary image preference. Feminine-typed females liked classic image most among Korean female subjects. 6. Korean males especially prefered luxurious image least. Korean females contemporary most, American males sexy most, American females fashionable most among four subject groups. That is, differences on clothing image preferences were found according to sex role identity, sex, and culture.

• Korean Institute of Interior Design Journal
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.11-19
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• 2005

As the world becomes more globalized thanks to the fast development of the Internet, a national identity becomes more important than ever before. Based on this, the study searches for the identity of modern American architecture through exploring the influence of modem American fine arts on the contemporary architecture. It was found that the concepts and the attributes of modern American fine arts obviously transferred into the contemporary architecture. The main concept was elimination of any kind of illusion for maximization of reality, and it was rooted Into American culture, the way of life and thinking. With the concept, the attributes were divided into two extreme poles: materiality and morphology: the former was evolved from Abstract Expressionism and Post-Minimalism and transferred into Los Angeles Avant-Garde architecture; the latter was from Pop Art and transferred into Postmodern architecture and Pop Architecture.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.219-239
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• 2014

Arjun Appadurai contends that "the new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models" (32); though discerning and perhaps becoming more and more apt, Appadurai's observation of the breakdown of the "center-periphery" binary appears as mere "academic jargon" in the lives of new immigrants, tackling the murky waters of identity politics in the transcultural technoscape of modern America in Kunzru's Transmission. Kunzru's antihero is Arjun Mehta, a software technician, who comes to America with high hopes of realizing the "American Dream." To a certain extent, Arjun himself is culpable of resurrecting the "center" as he prioritizes America and its values over all else. Despite his best efforts, Arjun cannot prevail in the perilous politics of exclusion/inclusion, and is relegated into a "high-tech coolie," exploited for his technological savvy. Even as the "center-periphery" binary stays intact in the production of an (Asian) American identity, it becomes undone in the hands of this "would-be" American; ultimately denied inclusion into America, Arjun unleashes a destructive virus that has major global consequences. In a sense, the boundary that separates the center and the periphery comes down as both collectively become victims to Arjun's retributive malfeasance. Arjun seems to rely on the "American" promise that old allegiances (to a national identity) are now defunct and new ones can be easily forged; as Kunzru's Transmission demonstrates with the tragic story of Arjun, the complex politics of identity production in America does not necessarily deliver on this promise. This essay hence aims to examine the politics of (national) belonging in the age of transnationalism.