• 영미문화
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• 제18권1호
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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.

• International Journal of Human Ecology
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• 제11권1호
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• pp.1-10
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• 2010

Two elements of paisley textile design (color and size of motif) were manipulated to investigate their effects on people's perception. Korean and Caucasian American women were selected to represent Asian and Western countries to compare the differences in image perceptions of paisley patterns between two cultures. The participants were 168 female university students composed of 84 Caucasian Americans and 84 Koreans. The experimental design was a $2{\times}2{\times}7$ factorial design: two levels of perceiver's culture, two levels of motif size, and seven levels of the motif color. The four factors used to account for image perception were an elegance factor, individuality factor, maturity factor, and femininity factor. The results of the present study confirm that image perception can be different according to the color and size of a motif and the perceiver's culture. In the results, Americans perceived the paisley pattern as more preferable than Koreans did. Red background + Orange motif was perceived as the most feminine and Dark blue background + Sky blue motif and Dark gray background + Gray motif was perceived as the most masculine in both cultures. Compared to the big motif, the small motif was perceived as more elegant in both cultures.

• 분석과 대안
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• 제4권2호
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• pp.163-202
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• 2020

This paper examines how Japanese society produced and reproduced a distinctively gendered history and memories of the experience of WWII and colonialism in the postwar era. We argue that these gendered narratives, which were embedded in postwar debates about the Peace Constitution and comfort women, have engendered contradictions and made the historical conflicts with neighboring countries challenging to resolve. On the one hand, this deepens conflict, but on the other, it also generates stability in East Asia. After Japan's defeat in WWII, the American Occupation government created the Peace Constitution, which permanently "renounces war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes." The removal of the state's monopoly on violence - the symbol of masculinity - resulted in Japan's feminization. This feminization led to collective forgetting of prewar imperialism and militarism in postwar Japan. While collectively forgetting the wartime history of comfort women within these feminized narratives, the conservative movement to revise the Peace Constitution attempted to recover Japan's masculinity for a new, autonomous role in international politics, as uncertainty in East Asia increased. Ironically, however, this effort strengthened Japan's femininity because it involved forgetting Japan's masculine role in the past. This forgetting has undermined efforts to achieve masculine independence, thus reinforcing dependence on the United States. Recurrent debates about the Peace Constitution and comfort women have influenced how Japanese political elites and intellectual society have constructed distinctive social institutions, imagined foreign relations, and framed contemporary problems, as indicated in their gendered restructuring of history.