In this gender reader: more on Abenomics, Disney dimorphism, video games before gendered marketing, and more.

HULK SMASH YOUR DELICATE LADY HAND. Image from Frozen via Family Inequality.
Posted in Consumer Culture, Gender, Media, Race, Visual Culture, tagged Abe, Abenomics, advice columns, animation, cultural appropriation, dimorphism, Disney, feminism, Gender, Katy Perry, sexism, video games on 2013/12/29| 1 Comment »
In this gender reader: more on Abenomics, Disney dimorphism, video games before gendered marketing, and more.
HULK SMASH YOUR DELICATE LADY HAND. Image from Frozen via Family Inequality.
Posted in Culture, Expat Living, tagged API, Asian American, awkward, cultural appropriation, culture, egg, Identity, japan, Laura Kin, mixed identity, mixed race, racism, Seattle, Under My Skin, white privilege, Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience on 2013/07/05| 16 Comments »
Laura Kina “Gosei” oil on canvas, 30×45 in., 2012 on view in Under My Skin. Via Laura Kina’s blog.
As a fellow Japanese-Studies scholar, I feel I ought to comment on Maggie Thorpe’s “You don’t have to be mixed-race to have a mixed identity” in The Seattle Globalist. Although the article begins as a review of the Under My Skin exhibition at the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience in Seattle, Thorpe, a white grad student at University of Washington, uses the themes of the exhibition to discuss her personal identification with Japanese culture:
I became infatuated with Japanese culture when I was 8. Growing up in the southwest, I was like many white American youth, feeling “vanilla” and “boring” because I did not have a culture that was easily definable. So I found something else that appealed to me. These days, my co-worker announces frequently that I am the most Japanese at the Japanese restaurant I work at. The restaurant owned by a Japanese man, and staffed by mostly Japanese-American workers. When a Japanese pop song comes on the radio that I admit I don’t recognize, or there’s a reference to an anime I don’t know, I’m teased for not living up to my Japanese-obsessed reputation.
The article is problematic, to say the least, (more…)