• Journal of the Korea Fashion and Costume Design Association
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.5-29
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• 2002

This study was to analyze the social identity described in the dress of the American novelist Pearl S. Buck's (1892-1973) major works. A novelist pursues varying and refined expressions in an effort to convey to readers the character' identities of his or her own creation. In particular, Pearl S, Buck was a great writer who was awarded the Novel Literature Prize, and since her work The Good Earth recorded a world-wide bestseller, she might well be called a popular novelist. She depicted well her characters' identities from divers viewpoints with her unique delicacy and realistic expressions. For this study, the following seven works which are considered to feature the dresses for character's identity well were selected out of her 85 works: The Good Earth (1931), Sons(1932), The Mother (1934), A Housed Divided (1935), The Hidden Flower (1952), Love and the Morning Calm (1953) and Letter from Peking (1957). For an analytical tool, the content analysis method was used. In order to systematically review the social identity described in the dress individuals' identity were classified into the following categories based on the identity theories: Social identity were divided into ① age identity ② sex, gender identity ③ economic identity ④ occupational identity ⑤ political identity ⑥ religious identity ⑦ kinship identity ⑧ regional identity. The characters' age identity, sex, gender identity, economic identity, occupational identity, political identity, religious identity, kinship identity, regional identity were depicted by their dresses and physical features. All in all, it is hoped that this study would provided important cues to the understanding of the other party's identity through his or her dresses in mutual relationship: It is believed that this study would be useful because they are arranged through the analysis of the dresses featured in the great writer's works using a consistent framework of analysis.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.32
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• pp.63-79
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• 2013

Tar Baby, Toni Morrison's fourth novel re examines the problem that black characters face in negotiatiating a place for themselves within a dominant culture, with respect to their own history and culture. The novel critiques the dominant socio economic and commodifying cultural space from which the black woman seems to have no escape. Jadine is a colonized subject, for as a fashion model she has surrendered to an aesthetics of commodification, and as a student of art history, she has internalized the capitalist ethic of the white culture industry. Though she has ensured her freedom, Morrison's critique of her separation from her family and culture is unmistakable. Interwoven with her narrative is Son's predicament, the stereotype of a black racist and her 'lover'. The novel ends with him at the crossroads of culture, yet signaling his passage to freedom through resistance. The paper arguments how Toni Morrison has envisioned the welfare of African American community by reconstructing the role of new black generation, as represented by Jadine and Son, whose new journey towards their self fulfillment just not only bring their personal freedom but also regenerates African American community by resisting dominant commodifying cultural.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
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• v.26 no.9
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• pp.1308-1319
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• 2002

The purpose of this is to analyze the aesthetics characteristics of our modern sports fashion, and thereby, discuss them in the light of the overall mentality or the 20th century, and thus, present the conditions or sports fashion design meeting modem people's divers aesthetics values and desired. Modern sports fashion sues can be categorized into futurist sports style, erotic sports style and American sheet sports style. And the 20th century mentality characterized by changes of lifestyle, identity and aspiration has influenced the aesthetic features of such sports fashion sues, which can be summed up as follows; first, the futurist sports style applies the functional items and details of active sportswear to design, while heralding a positive and hopeful message of technology and future by using the material of hi-tech functions and senses. This sports style was affected much by shift from social status, attraction and wealth to demonstration of state-of-the-art science, pursuit of functionality in terms of shapes and materials, convenience through See combinations of sportswear items or design elements. Second, the erotic sports style based on minimalism attempted to express the erotic body beauty indirectly by exposing some parts of body or using the material pressed against the body. This sports style was closely related with the changes of sexual identity such as neutral sexualism, bi-sexualism and homo-sexualism. Lastly, the American street sports style was born from black Americarns' sports and dances. This spors style pursues “youth” beyond TPO concept As mass media and commercial sports developed, the young generation copied sports stars' uniforms or fashions to share honor, wealth and youth with them. In sort, the American sheet sports style was affected much by the so-called “heroism”. Such a changed object of aspiration influenced the aesthetic characteristics of American shot sports style directly.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.65-92
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• 2018

According to Wenying Xu, Asian American literature abounds in culinary metaphors and references (8); subsequently, a growing number of critics have begun to recognize that food "feeds into the literary rendering of Asian American subjectivity [and] provides a language through which to imagine Asian alterity in the American imagination" (Mannur 13). Ann Mah's Kitchen Chinese: A Novel about Food, Family, and Finding Yourself (2010) is yet another text within which to investigate how food "operates as one of the key cultural signs that structure people's identities" (Xu 2). Even as Kitchen Chinese insists on underscoring that Chinese food, as much as the voyage to her "motherland" China, is critical to protagonist Isabelle's quest to gain a better understanding of herself, we are able to observe how Isabelle exploits Chinese culture and its foodways as "food pornography" in order to align herself with mainstream America. Needless to say, the novels' relegation of Chinese food as "food porn" is problematic in that it encourages readers to participate in the exoticization of Asia and its culture, and the reduction of its people as the other. Ultimately, this essay aims to consider how the consumption and rejection of food becomes a critical means by which the Asian American subject fashions her identity.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.2
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• pp.187-217
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• 2010

By reading the main character, Rene Gallimard, in M. Butterfly as a spatial metaphor of America, this article examines how homogeneous American national identity of heterosexuality and white masculinity has been reinforced since the cold war and has constituted a crisis of hegemony with the decline of imperialism and how its pathological symptom is shown through the melancholic suicide of Gallimard. This article also argues how the feminine attributes implied in race, gender and sexuality in M. Butterfly are designated and allegorized as an impure, contaminated and ahistorical marker of national integrity in pthe social and material status of the heterosexual American white male. To develop my argument, I read M. Butterfly from a psychoanalytic point of view. Therefore I depend on Freud, Lacan, and Bhabha's psychoanalysis as the theoretical basis. In this paper, I also argue that the homogenized and fixed national identity is splitted and collapsed from within as shown in the Gallimard's melancholy and in the process of splitting the "Third Space" of hybrid subjects for the marginal and the emergent like Song Liling, a homosexual Asian man, can be built "from a space in-between." Therefore Hwang calls into questions conventions of fixed, essentialist identities through the shifting gender identities between Song and Gallimard in M. Butterfly and how identities in the plural are constructed variously in throughly historicized, politicized situations, and these constructions can be complicated by relations of power.

• Journal of the Korea Furniture Society
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.91-101
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• 2001

This study explored the trend of postwar period American furniture design and analyzes the contexts of the trend. To be more specific, this study categorized the types of the styles or "looks" of furniture which were dominant in postwar period America: the machine look ; the handicraft look ; the biomorphic look. The background and the context for each look were traced back and analyzed both diachronically and synchronically. Based on the analysis, this study provided two conclusions. First, postwar period American furniture design is in many ways indebted to the World War II, because the war itself and postwar economic revival produced high demands for furniture, which consequently produced a variety of looks of furniture. Second, the furniture design in this period is attributed to commercialism and consumer-oriented design policy formulated in the mid 1920′s when American design established its own identity separating from European avant-gardism.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.239-264
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• 2015

This study aims to investigate the effect of message content and source user identity on information diffusion in Twitter networks. For the empirical study, we collected 11,346 tweets pertaining to the three major mobile telecom carriers in Korea for three months, from September to December 2011. These tweets generated 59,111 retweets (RTs) and were retweeted at least once. Our analysis indicates that information diffusion in Twitter in terms of RT volume is affected primarily by the type of message content, such as the inclusion of corporate social responsibility activities. However, the effect of message content on information diffusion is heterogeneous to the identity of the information source. We argue that user identity affects recipients' perception of the credibility of focal information. Our study offers insights into the information diffusion mechanism in online social networks and provides managerial implications on the strategic utilization of online social networks for marketing communications with customers.

• Fashion & Textile Research Journal
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.565-573
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• 2013

This study focused on the cultural differences between South Korea and the U.S. in terms of male consumers' sex role attitude and its influence on grooming and apparel shopping behavior. Purposive samples of American and South Korean males aged between 20 and 40 years were surveyed. The sample sizes were 219 and 233 for American and South Korean consumers, respectively. The data were analyzed by structural equation modeling and ANOVA using SPSS 12.0 and AMOS 14.0. The results indicated that only grooming was influenced by the perceived femininity in the case of South Korean men; however, the model for American men indicated a significant positive influence of femininity on grooming and recreational apparel shopping behavior. In other words, American male consumers who perceive themselves feminine were more likely to be engaged in grooming and recreational apparel shopping behavior. On the other hand, for South Korean men, recreational apparel shopping behavior was not influenced by their sex role attitude, or whether they considered themselves feminine or masculine. This means that recreational apparel shopping behavior is a gender-specific behavior in the U.S., but not in South Korea. The findings of this study indicated that culture has influence on consumers' approach to shopping and appearance. South Korean male consumers were more likely to acknowledge themselves as being feminine, enjoy apparel shopping and grooming compared to American male consumers.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.21
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• pp.139-164
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• 2010

Sung Yung Shin was adopted as a Korean infant to an American family. She is now one of the most important writers in Asian American literary field. This paper analyzes the characteristics of her literature, focusing on Skirt full of Black (poetry)and Cooper's Lesson(children's book). Sun Yung Shin uses collage in Skirt full of Black as an effective rhetorical device because it can express her experience as an adopted other in the multicultural American society. She rewrites the fairy tale of Swan Prince in the viewpoint of silence. For a yellow Asian adopted woman, speaking is suppressed. In the end, the attempt to escape from silence is the writer's resisting activity, and the rewriting of the tale is her questioning in place of the princess. I analyses Cooper's Lesson in the viewpoint of transcultural assimilation. Cooper's lesson is accomplished not by his white father but by a Korean settler, Mr. Lee. Cooper's family is a hybrid composed of white American father, Korean mother, and their half son. So this family has many complicated difficulties, though it's small. Mr. Lee who accepted a new language to establish a new identity teaches Cooper the importance of cultural assimilation, which is not a one-sided integration to dominant culture but an intercultural communion while sustaining each culture's singularity. Cooper learns that he should live in an harmonious and balanced life in a multi-cultural society while keeping his own subjective point of view.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.97-125
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• 2014

This paper delves into the question of universality in Native American Literature focusing on Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, exploring some different definitions of universality and looking at the work in the light of these definitions. In this paper I proposed four possible definitions or faces of universality applicable to the narrative of the oppressed people. Firstly, the colonizers indoctrinate their colonized persons with the colonialists' beliefs through the process of assimilation purposefully imposed in the name of universality. In Ceremony Rocky and Emo are the victims of assimilation including militarization. Secondly, the colonized people hold on to their traditional values in face of colonizers' universalism. In Ceremony Tayo shows an attachment to tribal stories in opposition to whites' lies. Thirdly, the colonized can get together by sharing experiences of violence, occupation, and loss of their land and language, forming a bond of "commonality" among them. In Ceremony the story of a medicine man, Betonie, suggests oneness of victims against the evil power of destroyers represented by nuclear bombs. Fourthly and lastly, the universal consists in the subject's trial and practice attempting to achieve universalism against the existing order, not in the stipulation defining what is universal. In the story Tayo endeavors to retrieve his cattle by transgressing whites' property and makes a hole in the established dichotomy of whites and Indians. In sum, Ceremony as a minor literature shows the developmental aspects of universality, culminating in Tayo's refusal to assimilate himself to whites' lies.