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Contextualizing Asian masculinity in media post-race: a critical race theory inquiry on metadiscourses

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CONTEXTUALIZING ASIAN MASCULINITY IN MEDIA POST-RACE:
A CRITICAL RACE THEORY INQUIRY ON METADISCOURSES

by

Michael Kyung Park

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
(COMMUNICATION)

December 2014

Copyright 2014 Michael Kyung Park

2
DEDICATION
I dedicate this body of work to my parents for their constant support and the
professors, friends, and students who have inspired me throughout this intellectual
journey.

3
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I will be forever grateful to my advisor, Dr. G. Thomas Goodnight, and the other
members of my dissertation committee, Dr. Larry Gross and Dr. Lanita Jacobs. Also, I
want to thank my family and friends, without whom I could not have made it this far.
4
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dedication 2
Acknowledgments 3
Introduction 6

Chapter One: Sociohistorical Context and 15
“Post-Racial” Meta-Discourses

Theoretical Considerations on Masculinities 21

Critical and Cultural Perspectives on Asian Masculinities: 24
From Early Yellow Peril Constructions to a Globalized
Media Culture

An Intersectional Approach: Critical Race Theory, Critical 32
Discourse Analysis and the Post-Structural Narrative Turn

Chapter Two: Asian American Masculinity Eclipsed: A Legal and 45
Historical Perspective of Emasculation Through U.S. Immigration
Practice

Asians and United States Immigration Practices and Laws 48
Citizenship and Masculinity 56
Female Exclusion Laws and Anti-miscegenation 58
The “Feminized Professions” 63
Chapter Three: Race, Hegemonic Masculinity and the “Linpossible”: 67
An Analysis of Media Representations of Jeremy Lin

Asian-American Masculinity and Stereotypical Representations 71
Hegemonic Masculinity and American Sports Culture 74
Research Methodology 79
Media Analysis 83
Chapter Three Notes 95

5
Chapter Four: Psy-Zing Up the Mainstreaming of “Gangnam Style”: 96
Embracing Asian Masculinity As Neo-Minstrelsy

Race, masculinity and “pop” music: Crossing over, 98
but unable to “crossover”

Comedy, race and masculinity: Laughing at the Othered 103

Psy’s “Gangnam Style”: Embracing Asian masculinity 106
as neo-minstrelsy?

Televised public appearances: descriptions and analysis 109

Researching the audience 116

Conclusion 123

References 141

6
INTRODUCTION

On Friday evening, May 23, 2014, twenty-two year-old Elliot Rodger went on a
killing rampage in the Isla Vista neighborhood of Santa Barbara, California. Rodger shot
and killed three UCSB students, after stabbing to death his three UCSB housemates.
Several YouTube videos created by Rodger—including one uploaded just a few hours
before his rampage—were discovered, along with a 140-page manifesto that offered a
motive for his deadly rampage. His manifesto and YouTube videos painted a detailed
portrait of a narcissistic and mentally deranged loner whose pathology, according to
many observers, was shaped by a culture of racism and sexism. The mainstream press
described him as fitting the “typical” mass shooter mold; he was portrayed as a young
White loner with mental health issues that were inadequately addressed. However,
mainstream media largely overlooked the fact that Rodger was a biracial Asian American
male—not just a “White loner” as he was commonly described as in mainstream media.
In fact, Rodger was very much the “poster child” of a mythical “post-racial” era,
an era signified by the election of President Barack Obama. Like President Obama,
Rodger was bi-racial; his parents included an Asian mother and White father, and he
enjoyed a relatively privileged upbringing. Yet Rodger’s manifesto reveals that his
identity—shaped by race, class, and gender—greatly influenced his pathological rage and
hatred of women and himself. He described himself as “a beautiful Eurasian,” with
bloodlines that stemmed from British aristocracy, which he felt entitled him to higher
social status than “full-blooded Asians.” But his biracial identity also fostered feelings of
self-hatred and inadequacy; he was not quite “White enough,” “cool enough,” or
“masculine enough.” Rodger had succumbed to hegemonic ideals of masculinity that has
7
defined it, in part, through sexual conquest, which fueled his pursuit of a “beautiful
blonde girlfriend.” According to Connell and Messerschmidt (2005), hegemonic
masculinity embodies the most honored way of “being masculine” and refers to a
dominant masculinity that has been idealized in U.S. culture. Subordinate masculinities,
including effeminate heterosexual men, and homosexual men bolster hegemonic
masculinity as devalued categories that contrast hegemonic ideals (Connell, 1990). Asian
men uniquely subordinated within the hierarchy of hegemonic masculinity; as an out-
group, Asian men have historically been constructed as effeminate and asexual (Chen,
1999; Iwamoto, Liao & Liu, 2010). Rodger harbored the strong belief that his bi-racial
(Asian) identity prevented him from being accepted as the masculine ideal. He believed
that the dominant culture had emasculated him, even while his formative years were
spent with a bi-racial president that had been elected—twice—to the White House.
Rodger’s angst and self-hatred represents one of the debilitating ways that
hegemonic norms of masculinity continue to operate materially in our supposed “post-
racial,” “post-masculine” culture. Applying a “minority masculinity stress theory,” Lu
and Wong (2013) found that Asian men receive stereotypical reflected appraisals that
contradict hegemonic masculinity and potentially positive self-concepts, predisposing
them to stress. Zhang’s (2010) study applying cultivation theory to Asian stereotypes
found that people’s judgments about Asians largely aligned with the media
representations, and such stereotypes impact people’s intent to interact with Asians.
Rodger wanted to embody the hegemonic masculine ideal that he felt had eluded him; he
even bleached his hair blonde, because he thought it would make him “more cool,” “more
masculine,” and “less Asian.” The intersection of race and masculinity can be so
8
stigmatizing that Asian men may internalize the stereotypes that emasculate them. In his
manifesto, Rodger expressed his feelings of inadequacy: “I always felt as if white girls
thought less of me because I was half-Asian,” because dominant ideological notions of
masculinity hold that “Asian” means “less masculine.” Did his pathological self-loathing
project itself with the deliberate acts of stabbing to death his roommates—all Asian
American males—and shooting to death three other students? There is certainly enough
precedent that establishes how violence goes hand-in-hand with the oppressive nature of
identity politics.
Popular conception of the “post-racial” era as signified by the election and
presidency of Barack Obama holds that social injustices are not to be measured as large-
scale signifiers of difference or privilege, but as individual failures (Joseph, 2009; Squires
et al., 2010; Thornton, 2010). This utopian view—the perception of a post-race-gender-
sexuality culture—as if we now live in an era in which race, gender and sexuality is
inconsequential—is part of the impetus for this scholarly work. This idea that we are
beyond, past, or ‘post’ notions of race, gender and-sexuality based discrimination is
pervasive and related to post-modernist thought that identity politics does not matter.
Unfortunately, this post-race era is still situated in a social context replete with structural
and institutional inequalities and the reinforcement of hegemonic ideologies. Race,
masculinity and sexuality—identity politics—matter; they are livid and have material
consequences as Rodger’s horrific acts demonstrate.
As Celine Parrenas Shimizu observes, “well-known and highly regarded critical
studies of Asian American manhoods are few.” (2012). Rosalind Chou discovered that
scholarly social science articles about Asian American men numbered only 49, dating
9
back as far as 1977 (2012). Through this lack of discussion, omission, and distortion,
Asian men are further disempowered, while Asian masculinity is made more
inaccessible. This project in Asian and Asian American (racially Asian) masculinity
studies focuses on a sub-category of men’s studies scholarship that has received very
little critical attention, but is an important analytical site for examining and critiquing
cultural spaces and informs us of how racism and dominant ideologies operate.
However, I must first address some important points regarding the composition of
this body of work, as to both its context and focus. The substantive research material in
this work (chapters 2-4) originates from essays that have been published in both the law
and communication fields. Furthermore, due to the fact that this work stems from
published material, this body of work contains redundancies in each chapter with regard
to both the literature review and the theoretical grounds. I apologize in advance for the
redundancies. Moreover, a clear explication as to racial terminology is also in order.
Throughout this work I refer to “Asian” or “Asian American” (both racially Asian) and
use them interchangeably to refer to racially East Asian (e.g. Chinese, Japanese, Korean)
and not South Asian (e.g. Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan). Although south Asian and south
Asian Americans face similar forms of media marginalization (e.g. immigration and
employment-based stereotypes) (Purkayastha, 2005), identical racializing and
marginalizaing formations cannot be assumed for different sub-groups under a pan-Asian
ethnic category.
10
This research inquiry is informed by R.W. Connell’s concept of ‘Hegemonic
masculinity’
1
and how social ascendancy is embedded in legal/political doctrine and mass
media content. As MacKinnon contends, hegemonic masculinity pertains to a particular
variety of masculinity to which women and, among others, homosexual or effeminate
men, are subordinated (2002). This concept provides a definition of what it means to be a
man, and not coincidentally, appears to ensure the dominance of some men within the
sex/gender system. Hegemonic masculinity is viewed here as circulatory, with the
Foucauldian model of power and cultural representation as another key site in this critical
inquiry. Foucault (1978) provides an analytical framework for deciphering the
construction of gender and sexuality through discourse, whereby discourse defines the
boundaries of “normalcy.” Masculinity, like sexuality and gender, is also situated in
discourse that defines “what is masculine.” This research project operates with the
premise that dominant interpretations and definitions of being masculine to be embedded
in and sustained by discourse derived from (male-dominated) social institutions such as
law/state, corporations, and mass media.
Furthermore, this scholarly project is a thematic study on how Asian
masculinity—a product of culture and society—is contextualized, and how historical,
political, and cultural forces affect the construction of Asian masculinity and unveils the
new racism in a post-race cultural epoch. Asian men are faced with “model minority”
assumptions that lead to and perpetuate the notion that they are immune to race-related
problems. In modern professional settings, they are often perceived as not being

1
Connell’s work is influenced by Gramci and hegemony arguments, and explains its usage to signify “a
social ascendancy achieved in a play of social forces that extends beyond contests of brute power into the
organization of private life and cultural processes” (1987).
11
“masculine enough” to lead organizations (Oguntoyinbo, 2014). Recent statistics reveal
that while Asian men make up a large percentage of high-tech workers in Silicon Valley,
they only constitute 8.3% of corporate boards—a phenomenon that reflects a “bamboo
ceiling” (Gee, Peck & Mishra, 2013). Moreover, Asian Americans as of 2014, account
for only 1.5% of college presidents (Oguntoyinbo, 2014). Scholars also point out that
given stereotypical perceptions as weak, passive, and lacking hegemonic masculine
norms, Asian American men internalize notions of inferiority and receive minimal
positive body imagery (Chua & Fujino, 1999; Lu & Wong, 2013). The goals of this
project is to examine how emasculation discourse continues to marginalize the other and
also to debunk the post-racial narrative that Asians (as the “Model Minority”) no longer
face discrimination and marginalization, which in turn, justifies and naturalizes racism
and leads to materially detrimental consequences for Asian men.
It is without question that Asian Americans—Asian men in particular—are
infrequently portrayed in mainstream media, including television; fewer depictions leads
to less diversity of representation. These depictions then come to typify a group,
especially for media consumers with little “real-world” interaction with Asians or other
marginalized groups. However, my approach is not a comprehensive review of Asian
masculinity represented in various media including literary and cinematic text, as other
scholars have covered this area in great detail (Chan, 2001; Hamamoto, 1994; Marchetti,
1993; Ono & Pham, 2009). I have been selective in choosing contemporary cultural
artifacts that have been extensively contextualized in mainstream media in order to
provide a discursive foundation from which the articulation and re-articulation of Asian
masculinities in the mythical post-racial era can be critiqued. My intention is to employ a
12
critical approach that is interdisciplinary in order to uncover a partial cultural archeology
of Asian masculinity in contemporary popular culture that has seen the proliferation of
contemporary masculinity mediated through the Internet.
Due to my background in both legal and communication studies, I also employ an
interdisciplinary approach that examines how the law has played a central role in the
“racial morphology” of the country, and I start with the foundational legal discourse that
has helped shaped masculinity norms and the emasculation of the Asian male subject. I
begin this research inquiry by charting the historical/legal constructions of Otherness and
Asian American masculinity by analyzing the role of the state in defining and
reproducing the scripts of hegemonic and subordinated masculinities, and continues with
an exploration of its reinforcement by apparatuses in the cultural industries in the “post-
racial” era that have been largely ignored: the sports/media complex and the popular
(U.S.) music market. The cases addressing the construction and reproduction of
hegemonic and subordinated masculinities within the sports/media complex and popular
music market examine whether, and to what extent, there has been a reformulation in the
discourse of masculinity based on a heterosexual, white male standard.
The research here advances the case study approach on how each respective
cultural apparatus contextualizes race and masculinity in a “post-racial” environment.
David Zarefsky (2012) reminds us that the value of a case study goes beyond its
contribution to theory and extends to the value of studying the particular abductively;
what a text means or signifies, and why it matters, is not always self-evident. According
to Zarefsky, a “theory of the case” produces “a better understanding of a specific instance
of rhetorical practice achieved through close reading of the text and careful grounding of
13
the text in its historical context” (2012, 10). In other words, this critical approach
provides “a case study through abductive reasoning—inference from the facts of the case
in order put forward the best explanation for them” (Zarefsky, 2012).
The research here addresses how, and to what extent, race and masculinity
continue to be defined within a dominant ideological field and how notions of hegemonic
masculinity define the “other” in social spaces that have largely escaped scholarly
inquiry. Applying a case study approach, I address recent media manias—performances
and personalities that went “viral”—and investigate how such cultural phenomenon are
commented upon, adapted, and grated into emergent versions of representation which
facially appear fresh and counter-hegemonic. However, this investigation reveals that
such media manias are actually snared into a matrix of social representations that
continue to reify stereotypes of Asian masculinity. I critically examine contemporary
media sites of production and reproduction in a global digital context that add to, rather
than substitute for film, television and legal representations that have been the subject of
scholarly inquiry in Asian masculinity scholarship. How, and to what extent are Asian
male bodies currently contextualized as situations as well as situated by current social
and cultural media sites? How does emasculation discourse continue to naturalize social
hierarchies based on race, gender and sexual identity in a digital and global context?
How does the legacy of emasculation discourse find its way in popular culture post-race?
These are some of the larger (macro) questions that this project intends to address.
In the first chapter, I outline how racial categories and the meaning of race are
determined and reinforced by the specific social relations and historical conditions in
which such constructs are situated. This contextual understanding of racial discourse
14
provides the discursive backdrop for my legal case study on Asian immigration and
masculinity, which highlights the early shift in the discourse that has shaped Asian
masculinity with emasculation. I then critique contemporary meta-discourses that assert
a “post-race” narrative (as if we are beyond racism, sexism and other problematic “-
isms”) and offer important reasons for examining the residual effects of the legal-
historical constructions of Asian masculinity in popular culture. Moreover, I turn to
theoretical considerations on masculinities, including concerns regarding racialized or
marginalized masculinities that reinforce hegemonic ideals of masculinity. This is
followed by a review of the literature on Asian men in Western media and an explanation
of the intersectional approach to this research project. Finally, I outline how my project
extends critical inquiry on Asian masculinity post-race by investigating emasculation
discourse in media sites that recently have turned ripe for critical analysis: sports media
and the popular music market.

15
CHAPTER ONE: SOCIOHISTORICAL CONTEXT AND “POST-
RACIAL” META-DISCOURSES
The construction and maintenance of standard or hegemonic masculinity has
translated into the racialization, gendering, and disempowerment of marginalized groups
that include African-American, Asian-American, and gay males. As Ronald Jackson
explains, “In assuming that all masculinities are the same, one presupposes that all men
should completely share the burden of U.S. White male patriarchal allegations without
sharing the licenses to White male privilege, access, inclusion and power” (2006, p.129).
With this scholarly inquiry, I treat race, sexuality and masculinity as sociohistorical and
mediated constructions. As Omi and Winant aptly point out, “racial categories and the
meaning of race are given concrete expression by the specific social relations and
historical context in which they are embedded.
Racial meanings have varied tremendously over time and between societies”
(1994). Early Asian male immigrants, particularly Chinese immigrants, were framed and
described with language that was very similar to past and current constructions of African
American men. The Chinese were described as “heathen, morally inferior, savage,
childlike, the Chinese were also viewed as lustful and sensual” (Takaki, 1998). The
sexual stereotypes were uncannily the same, but this framing of the Asian male no longer
predominates the discourse (Chua & Fujino, 1999); today, Asian masculinity is bounded
by an emasculation discourse that constructs the Asian male as feminine and asexual.
Such changes in the discourse reveal the dysfunctinality of masculinity, and exposes it to
a critique of those constructing and reinforcing the dominant discourse on masculinity.
16
Post-colonial scholars such as Edward Said (1978) and Vijay Prashad (2003) have
argued that “Orientalism”—describing how Whites associate the East with being “static
and unfree” and Western civilization with being “dynamic and free”—is the root of Asian
emasculation. “Orientalism” is viewed as a method whereby Asians are negatively
stereotyped as exotic, barbaric and primitive, and an ideology established during
colonialism that the West is the protector of the East (Said, 1978). This ideology serves
to “exoticize” the East and seeks to demarcate difference between East and West with
power and dominance being associated with the West. However, Asian immigrant men
were initially feared like African American men, which complicates this theory. Early
Asian male immigrants were viewed as “untrustworthy” and were perceived as sexual
threats to White females; early framings of Asian men included them as hypersexual,
violent and dangerous (Chou, 2013).
As my legal case study on Asian immigration and masculinity highlights, the shift
in the discourse began with the institutional domains of politics and the law. As a
structural domain of power, the legal/political structure form symbiotic relationships with
hegemonic domains of power. Immigration policies and its implications on Asian
masculinity therefore present histories to be explored in order to determine how and to
what extent this structural legacy continue to operate in a post-race America. This case
study explores how laws and public policies have shaped racial and gendered experiences
for Asian American men, and how these imposed gendered meanings have operated to
support hegemonic masculine ideals while marginalizing Asian men with the
construction of an emasculation discourse. Although popular culture through visual
media such as television, film and literary work have perpetuated one-dimensional and
17
tired stereotypes of Asian males, U.S. immigration laws and practices have been a
significant factor in providing the cultural foundation that has shaped current
stereotypical images of the emasculated Asian male subject. I do not argue that U.S.
immigration laws represent the sole basis for the current image of the emasculated Asian
male. Rather, I offer an examination of the net effect of American immigration laws
have played an integral role in the emasculation discourse within which Asian
masculinity is situated.
With the election and presidency of Barack Obama, contemporary meta-
discourses concerning race, equality, and power have taken on a compelling narrative
turn. “Post-racial” or “post-racism” is the fanciful notion that our civil society views the
immutable characteristic of race as inconsequential, and thus racism is a “thing of the
past.” As Ralina Joseph explains, “Despite the racialized and gendered nature of all
aspects of American life, including media coverage, twenty-first century U.S. culture is
replete with the idea that we are beyond, past, or ‘post-’notions of race-, gender-and
sexuality-based discrimination” (2009, p. 238). This perception of being post-race-
gender-sexuality is pervasive. But as Joseph aptly notes, the post-racial narrative neither
acknowledges nor solves structural inequalities, helping instead to shore up hegemonic
ideologies (2009). The scholarship herein demonstrates the residual effects of historical
constructions of race and masculinity via ideological choices made in political and
cultural institutions. My intent is to draw attention to how masculinity in the “post-race”
era is not without identities that are centered and those who must reside in the margins;
socially constructed identities and masculinities have real, material consequences for
people.
18
As the battleground for fantasies of desire and identification, as well as anxieties
about alienation an incursion, the question of what to make of popular culture’s
economies of signs and capital has inspired much debate. Communication scholars have
turned their attention to American popular culture in order to examine its mobilization
and amplification of marginalization at particular historical moments of war, crisis and
moral panic. Representations of masculinity and race “have the power and scope to
foreground culturally accepted social relations, define sexual norms and provide
‘common-sense’ understandings about male identity for the contemporary audience”
(Feasey, 2008, p. 4). In examining recent and contemporary Asian masculinity in sport
(N.B.A.) media and popular music (rap music), I attempt to highlight the centrality of
popular culture to the construction, (re)construction of historical discourses and practices
(see first case study) that produce certain populations and its privileges and deprivations.
I have focused specifically on recent cultural artifacts on Asian masculinity that are
situated in the social spaces of sports (i.e. N.B.A.) and popular music (i.e. rap music) and
analyze them as critical case studies for several reasons.
First, while the cultural apparatuses of film, television, and literary text have been
explored in generating and circulating ideologies of Asian masculinity, cultural spaces
such as sports media and the pop music cultural industry have been largely unexplored.
Along with film and television, sport and the popular music market are central sites for
production and reproduction of ideologies. In particular, I explore the social spaces of
professional basketball and rap music, which also inhabit the dominant means of
ideological production; what they produce, as Stuart Hall (2003) points out, are
19
“representations of the social world, images, descriptions, explanations and frames” for
understanding how the world works, and “what meaning the imagery of race carries.”
Moreover, previous research on Asian masculinity have centered on fictive
mediated representations and images in film, television and literary text that reproduce
images that lampoon or typecast Asian masculinity (Balaji, 2011; Marchetti, 2009).
These fictive representations have been constructed and reinforced by Western (i.e.
American) cultural apparatuses motivated by profits. However, the cases under scrutiny
in this scholarly inquiry are not fictive representations of “identity molds” that media
corporations have historically produced—images that typecast Asian masculinity while
upholding the white hegemonic masculine ideal (Balaji, 2011). Thus, the cases I examine
are “factual representations” or “factual mediated narratives” that organically developed
as new media memes in popular mainstream culture in both the social spaces of sports
(N.B.A.) and rap music. The focus of the case studies therefore shifts to how these
cultural artifacts were contextualized; this scholarly inquiry enlarge the scope of current
Asian masculinity studies and begs for a deeper understanding of race and masculine
identities.
Finally, I want to address an important reservation with regard to the foci of the
cultural sites of sports and music. This body of work on Asian masculinity does not
necessarily apply to sports and popular music generally as a class for Asians; instead, the
work here narrows its focus on a team sport and a sub-genre of popular music that have
exuded a normative hypermasculine sensibility (Balaji, 2009; Banet-Weiser, 1999;
Oware, 2011). Both professional sport (basketball) and rap music are both social spaces
that are dominated by strong configurations of traditional masculinities, but also
20
racialized masculinities. These spaces are policed with hegemonic masculine norms, and
as Marchetti points out, there is an ideological potency of putting nonwhites at the service
of policing the American multiethnic body politic (2009). My intent therefore is to
explore how Asian masculinity would be contextualized in social spaces that reflect a
hypermasculine and racialized aesthetic. This aesthetic also parallels hegemonic
masculinity where, in the case of rap, Black males attempt to dominate women aurally
and visually (Oware, 2010). Informed by Connell’s hegemonic masculinity, status is
accorded to conformity with a particular code of hegemonic masculinity in professional
basketball and rap music. If Black men’s visibility within basketball and rap has
provided a highly visible cultural arena for Black masculinity (Collins, 2005) then
conversely, the sudden mainstream visibility—via “cultural eruptions”—of Asian males
in such spaces where they have been relatively invisible, warrants further examination in
order to unpack the normative/Other masculine paradigm that positions white hegemonic
masculinity at the hallowed center.
In today’s global convergence culture, sports and popular music is not just about
men; it is about masculinity and the processes through which particular versions of
masculinity are re-created (Woodward, 2011). Sports and popular music are cultural sites
where identity iterations are passed along without critical interrogation, raising the
necessity for critique. However, such cultural sites can also lead to democratic iterations
(Benhabib, 2002), because in today’s convergence culture, those affected by normative
institutional arrangements can also be participants in the discourse that have the potential
for democratic norms to be created and adopted.

21
Theoretical Considerations on Masculinities
Masculinity, and in particular, marginalized masculinities, has largely escaped
scholarly inquiry prior to the 1980s. But recent academic interest in the discourse of
masculinity, and its representations, has been inspired by a fresh awareness that its
makeup shifts in accordance with change (and often very little or slow change) to social,
legal and political institutions, making it an intellectually challenging space that calls for
and requires rigorous scholarly analysis. Academic inquiry on the normative
constructions of masculinity in popular culture and media has grown in popularity in
communications studies scholarship (see Atkinson & Calafell, 2009; Hanke, 1998,
Palmer-Mehta, 2006). As opposed to a realized actuality, masculinity is an ideal that
members of a society strive for; masculinity becomes ideological—a goal to strive
towards—but ultimately unattainable (MacKinnon, 2003).
Michel Foucault (1979, 1984) provides an analytical framework for
deconstructing “gender” and “sexuality” through discourse, whereby social norms are
constructed by the way that they can be spoken of or conceptualized in language.
Discourse defines the boundaries of normalcy, and therefore masculinity, like gender and
sexuality, is also confined in discourse that defines “what it is to be a man.” The
“margins” of masculinity are groups that are marginalized by dominant society; they
occupy the peripheral and therefore are perceived “less important.” Marginalized or
subordinated masculinities are rarely centered or celebrated unless they conform to
categories marked and defined by hegemonic forces of masculinity. Marginalization
requires that social boundaries be demarcated to differentiate the minority or
marginalized from what is “normal” and “desirable.” As Kenneth Burke (1966) points
22
out, we are defined by the negative and by that which we are not. Although men are
ordinarily the beneficiaries of (a gender) privilege, being a man of color, and/or gay,
ruptures such a notion of privilege; men can and are marginalized when entangled with
issues of race and sexuality. This is because the identities of the marginalized are always
and inherently intersectional (Crenshaw, 1989). There is a liminality that follows
maleness and masculinity; the construction of masculinity is always fluid, yet
institutional structures, including the legal/political and mass media, tend to focus on the
center, at the expense of the margins.
The concept of “hegemonic masculinity” has often been used to decipher the
ways in which norms of masculinity have become naturalized in our society. Connell
and Messerschmidt (2005) argue that hegemonic masculinity is a concept that refers to a
dominant masculinity that has been idealized in U.S. culture. MacKinnon notes “certain
assumptions become popularized as common sense” (2003, p. 9). This involves
persuasion through cultural processes that include legal discourse, religious doctrine, and
by the consumption of mass media. These social institutions mold hegemonies of various
forms. However, “common sense” within a culture is formed, above all, by media,
including television, film, advertising, and sport, as relayed to and received by audiences
(MacKinnon, 2003).
Furthermore, it is important to note that hegemonic masculinity is also a
racialized masculinity. Connell (2001) contends that in order for hegemonic masculinity
to maintain its cultural dominance, it must incorporate boundaries that contrast out-
groups or subordinate masculinities. Subordinate masculinities, including effeminate
heterosexual men, men of color, and homosexual men bolster hegemonic masculinity as
23
devalued categories that contrast hegemonic ideals (Connell, 1990). Mercer and Julie
(1988) point out that ethnicity is an integral factor in the social construction of manhood:
the racial dialectic of the projection and internalization through which White and
Black men have shaped their masks of masculinity is one of the key points at
which race, gender, and the politics of sexuality intersect (p. 99).

Yet men of color who do embody hegemonic ideals are still culturally out-groups from
the dominant group; they are still marginalized from an institutional and individual
standpoint. As Chan notes, the successes of a few men of color, do not have a “trickle-
down” effect to other marginalized men (2001). For instance, boxing has provided a
significant social space for the assertion of a heroic black masculinity embodied by
figures such as Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali. At certain times, these figures are
included in a heroic masculinity narrative, but are also subject to exclusion,
discrimination and othering—the very forces they symbolically fought against.
Although scholarly inquiry discussing contemporary American men and
masculinity as it relates to the mediated version of manhood have been few, the ordering
aspects of hegemonic and marginalized masculinity warrant scholarly attention,
especially in cultural and social spaces such as sports, and music—spaces where both the
idealized and marginalized models of masculinity are inscribed and reinforced.
Compared to the White hegemonic masculine norm, Asian American men are uniquely
subordinated within the hierarchy of hegemonic masculinity (Chen, 1999). As an out-
group stripped of hegemonic notions of masculinity, Asian American men are therefore
branded with the inability to exude hegemonic ideals of masculinity. I now turn to
critical race perspectives on Asian masculinities.

24
Critical and Cultural Perspectives on Asian Masculinities: From Early Yellow Peril

Constructions to a Globalized Media Culture

Asian masculinity continues to be socially constructed and sustained through an
emasculation discourse that has been promulgated by historical, political, and cultural
forces. It is a marginalized masculinity that has mostly been externally defined (Chan,
2001; Espiritu, 1997). The relationship between race and masculinity is one intertwined
with popularized stereotypes that categorize groups who are deemed “masculine” (e.g.,
White, heterosexual) versus “feminine” or the emasculated (e.g., Asian, homosexual). I
begin with a short summary of studies that examine the adverse material affects these
stereotypical constructions have on Asian men. This short review will be followed by a
literature review of studies on Asian and Asian American men in Western media.
Zhang (2010) concludes that the “nerd” and “forever foreigner” constructions are
two of the most prominent stereotypes of Asian Americans. Moreover, the “nerd”
stereotype holds Asians as intelligent and technologically talented, but clumsy and
lacking social and communications skills (Zhang, 2010). The stereotype that Asian
Americans possess great mathematical aptitude is so prevalent in society that it is used as
a manipulation device in research studies of stereotypes (Smith & White, 2002). One
study on perceived attributions of “good managers” indicated that assessors attached the
term “nerd” to Asian American men (Cheng, 1996). Coupled with other stereotypical
traits such as “passive” and “shy,” “nerd” signifies a weak and emasculated embodiment
(Cheng, 1996).
Given such stereotypical imagery, Asian men’s experiences of a racialized self
differ from other subordinated and marginalized men. Studies confirm that Asian men
25
who attempt to conform to hegemonic masculine norms while overcoming racial
stereotypes depresses their self-identity and mental health (Iwamoto, Lau, and Liu 2010).
Lu and Wong developed the “minority masculinity stress theory” and applied it to Asian
American men to examine how they experience masculinity and how their experiences
are uniquely stressful (2013). They argue that stereotypes inform the prejudice and
discrimination reinforcing minority men’s position through symbolization within
hegemonic masculinity and observed that Asian men’s marginality adversely affect self
and mental health. Lu and Wong assert that prejudice and discrimination might
encourage Asian men to reinvest in identities less vulnerable to stereotypes, such as in
work-related domains where Asian men can embody a “provider” and “achiever”
identities (2013). These studies address the livid and material consequences of
pernicious stereotypes on the mental health of Asian men, but the direction of such
scholarly inquiry is not the focus of this project. This project is centered on Asian
masculinities as constructed and re-inscribed by cultural institutions. I now turn to focus
scholarly attention on the relevant literature on Asian masculinities in media.
Although scholarly work on Asian Americans and the media are fairly limited,
portrayals of Asian and Asian American men in mainstream American media have
historically been restricted to motion pictures (Brooks and Hebert, 2006). One exception
is Robert Lee’s early work on Asian Americans in popular culture. Lee examines a broad
range of cultural artifacts from early-19
th
century, including silent films, popular
magazines, and pulp fiction in order to decipher how definitions of Asians were
historically constructed (1999). Lee introduces six images, including: the pollutant, the
coolie worker, the deviant, the yellow peril, the model minority, and the gook, and notes
26
how such imagery emerged in American popular culture at a specific cultural moment.
For instance, Lee posits that the yellow peril discourse in popular culture signified a deep
fear of the imagined impact Asian migration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
could have on White American identity (1999). Doobo Shim (1998) applied a semiotic
analysis to Asian American portrayals in American film from mid-nineteenth century
through the Reagan-Bush era. Shim observed that Asian men were portrayed as asexual
in films, compared to Asian women who embodied hypersexuality in films like The
World of Suzie Wong (1960). The author notes that the stereotype of the asexual Asian
male works in contrast of the stereotype of Black men as “beast-rapists” but ultimately
serve the same goal: as abnormalities and minorities to be contained (1998). Shim cites
films like Sixteen Candles (1984) and Gung Ho (1986) as examples of Asian male
representation as comic relief. For instance, in Sixteen Candles, a Japanese exchange
student (played by Gedde Watanabe) talks with pidgin English, behaves in a strange
manner throughout the film, and his name bears a double-entendre that mocks Asian male
sexuality: Long Duk Dong.
Research on media’s role in the construction of race, men, and masculinity have
historically exemplified the Black-White racial discourse prevalent in contemporary race
discourse (Brooks and Hebert, 2006). Yet, stereotypical representations of Asian men in
American popular culture naturalize social hierarchies based on race, class, gender, and
sexual identity. In his seminal work, Monitored Peril, Darrell Hamamoto (1994)
explains, “images of control are used as an iconic shorthand to explain, justify, and
naturalize the subordination of Asian Americans within a society that espouses formal
equality for all” (p. 31). Hamamoto employed a historical materialist approach to an
27
examination of Asian American representations in popular television (1994).
Hamamoto’s research reveals how television images of Asians and Asian Americans
present them as foreign, but never without diverse histories and identities of their own.
Drawing upon a sexual racism reflected in mainstream films and popular novels,
television representations of Asians depict Asian men as emasculated while constructing
hypersexualized images of Asian and Asian American women. Hamamoto ultimately
tries to address why, in a society of racial plurality, do such “controlling images”
consistently appear on television? Employing a sociohistorical perspective, Hamamoto
argues that such tired and myopic representations are perpetuated to deflect or hide
discriminatory history in the West.
Gina Marchetti (1993) offers a critical film studies examination of the ideological
functioning of Hollywood film representations of Asians and Asian Americans as the
exotic Other. Incorporating a feminist and poststructuralist approach, Marchetti contends
that Hollywood Asia films (such as Broken Blossoms (1919), Year of the Dragon (1985))
should not viewed as simple misrepresentations of Asia and Asians, but rather as
cinematic reenactments “of a fundamental contradiction within the American psyche
between the liberal ideology of the ‘melting pot’ and the conservative insistence on a
homogenous, White, Anglo-Saxon, American identity” (p. 5). She explores the cinematic
representations of interracial love, and how these films invoke erotic but “forbidden”
pleasures policed by miscegenation. Ultimately, according to Marchetti, films that
present interracial sexuality reflect growing domestic anxieties over race, and that
Hollywood used Asians as signifiers of Otherness, “to avoid the far more immediate
28
racial tensions between blacks and whites or the ambivalent mixture of guilt and enduring
hatred toward Native Americans and Hispanics” (p. 6).
Recent scholarship on Asian Americans in media reflect a much needed inquiry
into the ideological and power relations embedded in the intersections of race, gender and
sexuality. While this area of research has produced far more studies on African
American intersectionality than those on Asian Americans, recent scholarship is slowly
expanding the Black-White binary. Thomas Nakayama’s (1994) analysis of Asian and
White masculinity in the film Showdown in Little Tokyo reflects this intersectional
approach. Nakayama argues that Asian American men are represented to re-center White
heterosexual masculinity. The Asian male lead (played by Brandon Lee) is depicted as
physically inferior and less virile to the White male lead (played by Dolph Lundgren),
and according to Nakayama, this racial tension “fuel the fire that breathes life into the
cultural fiction of White heterosexual masculinity” (p. 165). David Eng’s intersectional
inquiry provides an insightful analysis on the implications of psychoanalytic theory on
racial formation and Asian masculinity (2001). He critiques the assumptions about
naturalized racial difference, which therefore opens the door for psychoanalytic
narratives that “are integrated into out contemporary sense of self as modern liberal
(sexualized as well as racialized) subjects” (p. 14).
Jachinson Chan (2001) explores how Asian American men (Chinese men in
particular) are represented in film, literature, and comic books. Informed by Sau-Ling
Wong’s notion of textual coalition
2
, Chan offers close readings of Fu ManChu, Charlie
Chan, Bruce Lee and Shang-Chi collectively, as part of a coalition of cultural texts that

2
Wong, S-L. (1993). Reading Asian American literature: From necessity to extravagance. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
29
contribute to the discourse on masculinity. Chan examines how the images of Fu
Manchu and Charlie Chan represent sexual components of a xenophobic ideology in
American culture, and due to fears of miscegenation, such models must be desexualized.
For instance, Chan points out that the popularity of Fu Manchu in the 1920s is a
testament to a cultural need to create fictional enemies to appease racial and class
tensions:
Fu Manchu is represented as a desexualized breeder who rapes women in order to
procreate. The threat of an imperialist from China is layered with the threat of
miscegenation. The expansion of a Chinese empire would not only put the
political and social infrastructure of the West under Dr. Fu Manchu’s dictatorship,
innocent women from the West would be treated as breeders, serving the interests
of Dr. Fu Manchu (p. 30).

Charlie Chan, on the other hand, is one of the earliest representations of a model minority
in American popular fiction (Chan, 2001). Chan argues that while Charlie Chan offsets
the negative portrayal of Asian men such as Fu Manchu, Chan functions as a “controlling
image” that “does not threaten the hegemonic heteromasculine order as evidenced by
Charlie Chan’s lack of sexual attributes” (p. 53). The author contends that this
“controlling image” of Asian men as submissive, physically and sexually inferior have
been reified in American culture, and Chan functions as a symbolic icon whereby Asian
men constantly fall short of a hegemonic heteromasculinity.
In his examination of Bruce Lee films, Chan (2001) addresses how Bruce Lee, the
international star, embodies shifting ideological concerns according to specific historical
moments. However, Lee does not transcend all stereotypes, because as Chan notes, “he
perpetuates the asexual role that Western culture has constructed for Asian men and does
not spend the night with the Asian female character—something that would be
unthinkable in a James Bond film” (p. 89). Mimi Thi Nguyen (2007) provides a queer
30
iteration of what she calls “the phantom presence” of Bruce Lee in discourses on race and
masculinity. Nguyen examines how Lee’s presence can be inflected in radically different
ways, and can be read as symptomatic of how Asian masculinity is inscribed with
asexuality or quasi-Confucian asceticism. This asexuality is reproduced in Asian male
actors who found crossover success in Hollywood, “but are never figured as sexually
appealing or interested” (Nguyen, 2007, p. 273)
In Asian Americans and the Media, Kent Ono and Vincent Pham (2009) contend
that Asian men are mediated as part of an ambivalent dialectic, “two contrasting portraits
that appear to be opposite but in fact function together to represent [men] in problematic
ways” (p. 66). On one hand, Asian men are characterized as a yellow peril or martial
artist, but then are largely constructed with an emasculation discourse that operates to
neutralize any imagined threats over power relations. Ono and Pham further elucidate the
historical construction of Asians and Asian Americans, focusing primarily on dominant
imagery and representations in mainstream media sources (2009). Drawing upon the
work of Stuart Hall and Edward Said, they track the discourse of Asians and Asian
Americans as a yellow peril and focus on representations in early cinema, such as Fu
Manchu, and argue that current yellow peril imagery can be found by examining films
such as The Fast and the Furious (2001). Moreover, Ono and Pham highlight how
historically dominant mainstream media has imagined Asian men and women very
differently. The difference can be attributed to a history of colonialism. According to
Ono and Pham:
Colonial logics have been fundamental to the way people of color have been
represented in Western media. The juxtaposition of the sexually alluring and
available Asian and Asian American woman with the villainous and therefore
undesirable Asian and Asian American man suggests two things: First it implies
31
that the woman is free to enter into a romantic relationship with someone other
than the Asian and Asian American man (i.e. the White man). Second, it suggests
that the Asian and Asian American man, prominently featured as undesirable if
not loathsome, will be found to be an inferior romantic competitor, and therefore,
within the storyline, justifiably forgotten or eliminated. Thus, her desirability
combined with his undesirability ensures his eliminability (p. 64).

The authors remind us that media operate to construct men and women differently, and
argue that these representations are part of a colonial logic that constructs gendered
representations inter-relatedly (2009).
Recently, a few scholars have made research inquiries into the dynamics of Asian
masculinities in a globalized media environment (Balaji, 2011; Banerjee, 2006; Marchetti
2012). These scholars examine the effects globalization have on Asian masculinities in
media, but also extend scholarly inquiry to account for how these depictions are
industrialized. Balaji argues that in today’s globalized media culture, depictions of Asian
men, particularly their masculine identities, are products of both ideology and economics
(2011). If culture produces industry and industry produces culture, then according to
Balaji, “industry produces caricature” (p. 187). Caricatures of Asian men not only
benefit corporate profits, but also “serve to uphold a white patriarchal worldview, one
where Asian men are either marginalized, vilified, or made into comic objects that serve
as visual contrasts to hegemonic maleness” (p. 187). Balaji argues that media
corporations have little economic incentive to produce diverse images of Asian men;
what has been profitable is the reproduction of images that lampoon Asian masculinity
while upholding the White hegemonic masculine ideal (p. 189). He uses the Rush Hour
trilogy as a case study to critique how Asian masculinity is othered in order to favor
culture industry economics.
32
Marchetti’s (2012) analysis of the Rush Hour trilogy also confirms how these
Asian “identity molds” operate and notes that Chan’s masculinity is situated within a
Hollywood commercial context that frames him in a passive feminized space. According
to Marchetti however, Chan enters as a clown or minstrel, part of the carnivalesque
element of the series. She notes that Jackie Chan’s image and the on-screen
representations he embodies, “walks the line between being an envied flexible citizen of a
brave new globalized world and evaporating into nothing as alienated, deracinated,
expatriated, and emasculated” (p. 289). Banerjee (2006) explains that in order to find
mainstream success in film, Asian male characters must enter a “codified visual
hierarchy” and perform a new-age form of minstrelsy. The Rush Hour franchise reflect
this new-age form of minstrelsy—signified by caricatured representations of Asian men–
that continue to resonate among Western audiences.

An Intersectional Approach: Critical Race Theory, Critical Discourse Analysis and
the Post-Structural Narrative Turn
The key elements to my methodological approach for this research include:
Critical Race Theory (CRT), along with critical and textual analysis of cases studies
outlined below. CRT emerged in the 1970s as an intellectual response to Critical Legal
Studies, which, according to critical race theorists, failed to scrutinize the role race played
in the very construction of legal and other structural foundations upon which our society
rests (Crenshaw, 1988). CRT operates from the premise that race and racism are endemic
and permanent. Although race and racism are at the center of the critical race analysis, I
also view them at their intersection with gender—masculinity in particular. Although
33
CRT has occasionally probed beyond the Black-White binary of race, it has historically
privileged African American experiences (Brooks & Hebert, 2006). Moreover, as Brooks
and Hebert aptly observe, media scholars have shied away from CRT, and few critical
race theorists have devoted detailed attention to media institutions and their
representations (2009). However, the research here is informed by the critical
groundwork laid by Asian CRT scholars that include Robert Chang, Frank Wu and Mari
Matsuda, and extends the discourse beyond legal policy into the realm of media. I
employ CRT to devote detailed attention to institutions and social spaces that have been
largely unexplored but deserving of critique: popular music (hip-hop culture) and the
mediated representations of sport—both fruitful arenas for scholarly study of the
intersectionality of race and masculinity.
I also begin this project from a quasi-standpoint epistemological vantage point.
Several critical race and feminist scholars have employed a version of standpoint
epistemology, where a certain group is identified as a victim, and then “privileges that
status by claiming that it gives access to understanding about oppression that others
cannot have” (Bartlett, 1990). For instance, Rosalind Chou extends standpoint
epistemology (specific to feminist theory) to include racial marginalization in her
analysis of Asian American sexual politics (2012). However, many marginalized groups
can make this point, whether one is gay, colored, or female, and to assert that the
standpoint of the oppressed is more impartial is also problematic and exposes standpoint
epistemology to charges of essentialism. For instance, if a standpoint of women is
decided upon, this standpoint hinges on “the notion that a unitary, ‘essential’ women’s
experience can be isolated and described independently of race, class, sexual orientation,
34
and other realities of experience” (Harris, 1990, 585). However, the culture industries
have historically constructed and represented (east) Asian and (east) Asian American
men as a conflated identity that has been inscribed with several caricatures. Therefore,
my analysis also presumes Asian and Asian Americans (again, racially east Asian)
embody the same “identity molds” while also acknowledging the dynamic differences in
nationality, language, and livid experiences.
Moreover, I employ qualitative methods to critique and explain cultural
phenomenon, including the media contextualization of race and Asian masculinity—
categories that have been historically situated and socially constructed. Qualitative
methods enable researches to make meaning of cultural phenomenon at the micro level
and highlight the relationships of these interactions to the macro level (Buroway, 1991).
Instead of arguing for narratives in what Robert Chang (1993) describes as “the empirical
mode,” I begin my research by employing a post-structural narrative turn, which refers to
theories of interpretation that view meaning as culturally constructed and mediated by
structures of language and symbolic form (Rhode, 1990). The post-structural critique, as
Chang (1993) notes, “changes the present game, which involves the search for
legitimation, by eliminating the possibility of any appeal to an external standard of
legitimation” (p. 1286). Narratives, therefore, cannot be discounted because “in this
game of power there is no ‘objective’ standard for disqualification; one ‘wins’ by being
more persuasive” (Chang, 1993, p. 1286). This starting point will offer a narrative
account of marginalization and emasculation of Asian men from both a CRT and
communication perspective.
35
For this research, I also rely on textual and discourse analysis of case studies that
explore mediated coverage of race and masculinity. My intent is to evaluate the
possibilities of text and discourse under investigation. Dow’s (1996) notion of criticism
emphasize the “possibility of meaning rather than its certainty”:
This perspective does not see criticism as an attempt to provide the most accurate
retelling of how a text is received or as an attempt to account for the widest
variety of interpretations; rather, it views criticism as an argumentative activity in
which the goal is to persuade the audience that their knowledge of a text will be
enriched if they choose to see a text as the critic does (p. 4).

Furthermore, it is also important to examine mediated communication as a ritual, how
media content play out myths, and reinforce dominant ideology. Therefore, to
understand the narrative role of media, Elfriefe Fursich (2009) reminds us that it is
necessary to engage in independent textual analysis by drawing on anthropological
insights “which clearly lay beyond the producers’ or audiences’ intentions and the
economic-systemic context of media production” (p. 245). Critical discourse analysis
also provides another method to examine and interrogate the racial narratives conveyed
within media outlets by looking at themes from a variety of media texts in sports, popular
music, online videos, and television.
Moreover, this project also incorporates a critical qualitative study of audience
reception, in order for the research to explore how audiences make sense of mediated
conceptions of masculinity (Click, Holladay, Lee, & Kristiansen, 2014). It is important
to examine how audience members perceive or notice stereotypical representations, and
to determine if the content’s appeal is connected to racial caricature. Previous research
has established the efficacy of focus groups in identifying audiences’ response to media
representations of race, gender and masculinity that reveal ideological and critical
36
discourse limitations beyond superficial responses and interpretations (Bird, 2003; Jhally
& Lewis, 1992; Park, Gabbadon & Chernin, 2006).
As Balaji (2011) points out, when caricatures of Asian men have saturated the
market for decades, the culture industries have little economic incentive to produce
diverse images of Asian masculinity, especially when they have become more risk-averse
(p. 199). How does the discourse on Asian masculinity and its contextualization in a
post-race epoch mirror of challenge the caricatured imaginary of Asian men? My project
aims to extend this post-race inquiry by examining Asian masculinity discourse in the
cultural institutions of sports media and the popular music market, media sites that have
only recently been ripe for critical analysis on Asian masculinities. How are factual
representations of Asian masculinity in sport contextualized – is it informed by the
historical constructions of Asian emasculation? How does the celebration and reception
of audiovisual images of Asian men created abroad (i.e. Asia) confirm, reinforce or
challenge historical constructions of Asian masculinity? Sports and popular music are
important cultural spaces that enlarge the scope of current Asian masculinity and thus far,
communication scholarship on Asian masculinity in such mediated spaces have gone
unexplored. Therefore, to advance the discourse, an examination of how masculinity is
framed in these mediated spaces offer important insight into how entrenched the
emasculation discourse is situated in our global and post-racial society.

Case-Study: “Linsanity!” and Racialized Masculinities in Sport.

The centrality of bodies and the measures of embodiment are part of the culture of
sport, which connects strong configurations of masculinities with bodies (Woodward,
37
2011). Bodies are central to a sport such as basketball, and professional basketball offers
an excellent site for analyzing masculine embodiment in a sport that was, up until the
modern era, marked by histories of racism and social exclusion. Citing Foucault,
Woodward points out that in the case of race, the categories that organize people in sport
are not just the result of the sort of body they have, but also of the social and historical
circumstances; bodies therefore are the effect and not the cause of the particular
categories that are used (2011). Competitive sports are not just about men competing
against one another; it is about masculinity and the processes through which particular
versions of masculinity are re-created. Bodies themselves are “situations as well as
situated” (Woodward, 2011, p. 208).
Professional sports, and its symbiotic relationship with the sports/media complex,
are important institutions that inscribe masculinity, and therefore make it a prime area of
scholarly investigation. Sport is a social world that remains dominated by strong
configurations of traditional (or hegemonic) masculinities (Messner, 2002). As
aforementioned, hegemonic masculinity refers to a dominant masculinity that has been
idealized and widely accepted in U.S. culture (Connell, 1990). As Michael Kimmel
(1994) notes, the intersection of hegemonic masculinity and the public sphere results in
the “marketplace masculinity” exemplified in platforms such as sports and the military.
Team sports that emphasize direct physical contact have embodied the most dominant
form of masculinity; sports such as football and basketball are therefore integral to
defining a hypermasculine discourse on “how to be a man” (Wachs & Dworkin, 1997).
However, sports are more than just a patriarchal institution affirming men’s power
over women. In fact, the rise of sports in the last 150 years has had as much to do with
38
the intersection of class and race as it does with gender. Subordinated masculinities have
been marked according to ethnicity, sexual orientation, class and age (MacKinnon, 2003).
Carrington notes the “racial signification of sport” whereby sporting events act as key
signifiers for questions about identity within racially demarcated societies where racial
narratives are read both into and from sporting contests (1998). The mediation of sports,
therefore, plays an integral role in promulgating and reinforcing both dominant masculine
forms and subordinated masculinities. Sport mediation offers more than just
entertainment spectacle; it has social and political relevance, and as MacKinnon (2003)
aptly points out, its “innocent absorption” of masculine values in the arena of spectator
sports makes it a worthwhile research field.
Previous scholarship on sports communication and masculinity reveals that sports
media have been complicit in preserving hegemonic masculinity while failing to
acknowledge their own roles in its preservation (Burstyn, 1999). Nick Trujillo explored
newspaper coverage of Nolan Ryan, which revealed how sports media valorizes athletes
who play within the boundaries of hegemonic masculinity (1991). Furthermore, past
research shows how sports columnists reinforce sexual norms and engage in “neo-
homophobia” while safekeeping hegemonic masculinity (Hardin, Kuehn, Jones, et. al,
2001). Scholars Wachs and Dworkin (1997) argue that sports media operate as a policing
mechanism with regard to social hierarchies and that dominant sports media frames are
one of the material effects of power.
Moreover, both the mediation and contextualization of sports can be racialized,
perpetuating stereotypical tropes in order to maintain hegemonic masculine norms.
Sports media coverage operate under ideological frameworks that bolster hegemonic
39
masculinity by linking hegemonic masculinity to positive cultural values and desirability,
while others—such as gay and Asian—are assigned subordinate value. For instance,
sports media outlets often use racially coded language to inscribe masculinity norms
while also policing subordinated masculinities. Abby Ferber (2007) points out the
naturalization of racial difference in sports discourse, where Black athletes are often
described as “freakish” or “naturally more athletic,” further bolstering the myth that
Blacks are more naturally athletic. Other areas of sport media research that have received
scholarly attention include how sport media contribute to the social construction of race,
ethnicity, and nationality (Kassing et. al., 2004) how athletes of various ethnic groups are
comparably portrayed in the media (McCarthy, Jones & Potrac, 2003; Trujillo, 1991),
and cultural meanings attached to sport in relation to Black masculinity and cultural
resistance (Carrington, 1998). However, less attention has been paid to the mediation of
sports and its role in promulgating idealized notions of masculinity and policing
subordinated (including Asian) msaculinities.
Scholarship on Asian and Asian Americans in sports media have been extremely
limited and have only recently emerged. Fabos (2001) analyzed the sporting narrative
characterizing Kristi Yamuguchi as “foreign” during the 1992 Winter Olympics; King
(2006) examined anti-Asian American sentiment in sport through performative and
dialogic techniques to uncover how jokes binds Asian Americans to sport in the popular
imaginary. Yao Ming, Jeremy Lin’s predecessor in Houston, has been the subject of
scholarly inquiries into his global marketability (Oates & Polumbaum, 2004; Wang,
2004) and how linguistic representations of Yao in game commentary reimagine Chinese
cultural identity (Lavelle, 2011). However, a critical discourse analysis on the
40
contextualization of race and Asian masculinity in sport has gone unexplored. In this
regard, the cultural phenomenon of “Linsanity” and Jeremy Lin’s meteoric rise in the
N.B.A. provides an important site for analysis. As the first American of Chinese descent
(and only Asian American) to play in the N.B.A., how would Lin’s rise in a hyper-
masculine sport be contextualized? A case study of the media representations of Jeremy
Lin addresses whether assumptions of (a subordinated) and hegemonic masculinity
grounded in the sports/media complex would surface. Would sports media employ an
emasculation discourse to legitimize and maintain the virility of hegemonic masculinity?
Would the sports/media complex (made up of sports columnists, journalists, editors,
broadcasters and writers) be a site of complicity and collusion for the construction of
hegemonic masculinity? This case study extends previous discussions of sports, race and
masculinity research, and represents a new scholarly arena for expanding the discourse
on Asian American masculinity and to reveal how the emasculation and “Otherness”
discourse currently operates.

Case-Study: PSY’s “Gangnam Style” and Asian Masculinities in Pop/Rap Music
Hip-hop has established an influential presence in the American mainstream
popular music culture, yet it also reflects a racialized aesthetic. As Matthew Oware
notes, Hip-hop reflects a stereotypical Black masculine aesthetic (2011). Many rap artists
construct a racialized (i.e. Black) male subjectivity that incorporates the notion that
masculinity means exhibiting extreme toughness, invulnerability, and domination
(Collins, 2005; Oware, 2011; Neal 2006). Like the cultural space of professional
basketball, a hegemonic form of masculinity develops in the medium wherein rappers
41
attempt to dominate women aurally and visually in the music videos (Sharpley-Whiting,
2007). Commercial Black male rappers often draw on the “badman” trope that is
characterized by the “rebel to society” image, with an emphasis on their sexual and
physical prowess to uphold this aspect of hypermasculinity (Ogbar, 2007, Oware, 2010).
Despite the growing influence of digital content, music videos remain a powerful source
in representing identities; it is a cultural sphere where performers have become
increasingly reliant upon the images molded in these audiovisual spaces (Balaji, 2009;
Vernallis, 2004). Beginning in the 1990s, rap and the music videos used to promote the
artists, have been used to brand performative identities that equate Black masculinity
with “hardness” and “street cred.” Since then, Rap music became increasingly defined
with a hypermasculine (and hegemonic) aesthetic, along with a racial authenticity tied to
the consumption of commodities (Balaji, 2009).
While African Americans have a long established presence in the popular music
scene and have long been stereotypically attributed a natural sense of rhythm and a
natural ability “to dance gracefully and often alluringly (men being hyper-masculine)”
(Jung, 2014, p. 58), Asian Americans are virtually non-existent in the popular music
imaginary. Yang points out that Asian artists are culturally constrained between the poles
of Whiteness and Blackness, between presence and lack, and subject and object (2013).
Communication scholarship on popular music (including the multiple spaces of
mediation that it occupies), and its relation to Asian masculinity, has largely been
unexplored due to the fact that Asian Americans have little visibility in the popular music
market. Unfortunately, the historic structure of the popular music industry has included
very few Asian American stars. Although Asian Americans have been creating popular
42
music since the early twentieth-century, they have yet to gain mainstream appeal and
acceptance. Oliver Wang (2001) tracks Asian American contribution to popular music
from the 1950s to the 2000s, and argues that music has been a site where Asians
communities “can be imagined symbolically, in resistance to the denial of that
collectivity in the American political, social, and material world” (p. 443). Mina Yang
(2013) reminds readers that Asian musicians must negotiate their self-representation in
different contexts, and this logic reveals the liminal boundaries around American popular
music that Asian artists delineate through their abject position.
Due to the entrenched race-based modus operandi of the mainstream music
industry, major music labels have been unwilling to produce and promote Asian
American musicians (Jung, 2014). The persistent marginalization of Asian American
men as “perpetual foreigners” and as emasculated subjects has prevented them from
achieving mainstream popular music acceptance. These stereotypical images clash with
the physicality, aggressiveness and “coolness” factor required for pop music stardom, and
as one writer observes, “Asian-Americans may be expected to play the violin or know
martial arts, but not necessarily to sound like Kanye West or Madonna, or sell like them”
(Navarro 2007). Mainstream audiences have not been inclined to consume pop music
performed by Asian Americans, because Asian Americans do not fit into any of the
racialized molds that define popular music genres. In reference to social media access
and the distribution of music, Eun-Young Jung (2014) notes:
This new access is especially significant for musicians outside the mainstream
media industries. Still, it is not a panacea for racial exclusion, as the primary
medium for distributing music is in the form of video materials, in which the
racial identity of the musicians is almost always clearly visible … In all these
media, race and essentialist assumptions of who is privileged to represent
particular musical genres often come into play, and it is the issue of race, the
43
realities of identity-based inclusion and exclusion …” (p. 57).

In examining the racial boundaries around American popular music, Mina Yang (2013)
explains that for Asian/Asian-American artists seeking mainstream success, they “must
contend with the formidable challenge of performing in front of audiences who come
with certain expectations that have been shaped by pernicious stereotypes of Asian
(non)manhood” (p. 28). While the reception of non-Western media in the West has not
received much scholarly inquiry, media contra-flows can provide valuable insights into
the dynamics of race and masculinity in a culture that celebrates such text.
Therefore, the enormous crossover popularity of Psy’s “Gangnam Style” makes it
an ideal case study through which to examine the apparent paradox between a potentially
racist reception and celebration of a viral music video meme and its sweeping popularity
in a supposed “post-racial” American cultural imaginary. On one hand, it is possible to
conclude that Psy’s crossover success represents greater social acceptance of Asian men
who have historically been marginalized in mainstream media. However, Psy’s
physicality in the video also evokes one of the Asian male stereotypes: the emasculated
and clownish Asian male. A case study of PSY, and the cultural phenomenon of his viral
video and song “Gangnam Style” warrant examination in their relation to hegemonic and
subordinated (Asian) masculinity. What can we infer from the song and the video’s
popularity, despite the fact that no Asian or Asian American pop singer has found cross-
over success in the U.S. music market? Does PSY and the video reinforce notions of a
subordinated masculinity, making it “acceptable” for U.S. audiences to “appreciate” and
laugh at as opposed to laugh with? Does PSY’s success highlight the emasculation
44
discourse that shadows Asian men, and further reinforce notions of hegemonic
masculinity while reifying Black hypermasculinity?

45
CHAPTER TWO: ASIAN AMERICAN MASCULINITY
ECLIPSED: A LEGAL AND HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE OF
EMASCULATION THROUGH U.S. IMMIGRATION PRACTICE
The law is the discourse that generally presides over citizenship and the result of
the law’s effect often shape who the citizens are. Laws affect the collective histories, and
narratives that include or exclude individuals in relation to the nation as a whole. For
many years, scholars and historians have focused great attention on Asian immigration to
the United States in order to help understand the racialization of the United States as a
nation (Chan, 1991a; Daniels, 1988; Hing, 1993; Okihiro, 2001; Takaki, 1989).
Moreover, there has been insightful research and critical analysis done on female
subjectivity, mother-daughter relations and interracial marriages (Kim, 1982; Koshy,
2004; Yamamoto, 1999). However, less analytical attention has been given to the impact
of United States immigration laws and policies in shaping Asian masculinity norms and
the emasculation of the Asian male subject.
The history of the legal definitions of citizenship, naturalization, exclusion,
national antimiscegenation laws, and the legislative bans on the entry of Asian wives
have collectively contributed to a female gendering, along with the racialization of the
Asian American male (Eng, 2001).
3
As such, the Asian American male’s identity
continues to be produced and sustained through the means of racialized gendering. Many
contemporary stereotypes of Asian American men embody an emasculated image, and
unlike the hyper-masculinized image and perceived menacing sexual threats associated
with the Black male body, Asian American males are viewed as effeminate, asexual and

3
Eng notes that the feminization of the Asian American male in the United States cultural
imaginary typically results in his figuration as feminized, emasculated, or homosexualized.
46
passive (Kang, 1997).
4
Popular cultural representations appear to only confirm this
perception. Take, for example, the character of Jin, the Asian male cast member of the
ABC television series Lost. Jin is portrayed early on as a controlling and quiet figure,
and as the series progresses, it is subsequently revealed (not coincidentally), that Jin is
impotent. More recently, the popular Hollywood comedy The Hangover Part II,
reinforces this emasculated image of the Asian male with the character of Mr. Chow,
who, as one critic notes, is the butt of the most cliché of penis jokes: “His naked man-
handle is mistaken for a Shiitake mushroom” (Yang, 2011, para. 6). Even New York
Knicks sensation Jeremy Lin, currently the only Asian American player in the NBA, was
the subject of racist media comments during his rise to NBA stardom this past February.
Fox sports columnist Jason Whitlock aimed directly at Lin’s “lack” of masculinity when
he made the following comment on Lin’s meteoric rise: “Some lucky lady in NYC is
gonna feel a couple inches of pain tonight” (“Jason Whitlock apologizes,” 2012).
Darren Lenard Hutchinson (1999) writes that the sexualized construction of Asian
American males is also heterosexually based—“it seeks to stigmatize Asian American
male hetero-sexuality by feminizing it, or even labeling it as ‘gay.’” The character of
“Lloyd” (played by Asian American actor Rex Lee), on the HBO series Entourage,
personifies a subservient and effeminate character (he is also gay), and provides a (not so
subtle) link between emasculation and the image of the Asian male. Authors Frank Chin
and Jeffery Chin (1972) note that mainstream stereotypes depict Asian American men as
“completely devoid of manhood,” and “our nobility is that of an efficient housewife.” As

4
Kang notes that “[e]arly White American rhetoric surrounding Black men focused on their
masculine appearances, but the rhetoric surrounding Asian men emphasized either their asexuality or their
perceived femininity” (p. 345).
47
Chan, Chin, Inada, and Wong (1991) point out in The Big Aiiieeeee!, “It is an article of
white liberal American faith today that Chinese men, at their best, are effeminate closet
queens like Charlie Chan and at their worst, are homosexual menaces like Fu Manchu.”
Jachinson Chan (2001) contends that Charlie Chan is associated with a non-sexualized
image, and his physicality is linked to asexuality and a stereotypical cultural stoicism that
promotes a submissive male identity.
As a product that is socially constructed, racialized masculinity is shaped by
historical, political and cultural forces. Informed by the concept of “racialized gender” or
“gendered race” (Borris, 1995) and how the term “gender” is constructed rather than
found, racialized masculinity is also constructed, rather than found. Immigration policies
and its implications on Asian masculinity present histories to be explored. This paper
presents a historical and legal analysis of some of the ways in which Asian American
men have been materially feminized and emasculated by the effects of various United
States immigration practices and laws. Although popular culture—through film,
television, and literary work—have perpetuated negative stereotypes of Asian American
males, United States immigration practices have been a significant factor in shaping the
current stereotypical image of the effeminate Asian American male subject.
However, the analysis here should not be construed as a universal prototype for
Asian American masculinity, and I do not argue that American immigration laws
represent the sole basis for the current image of the emasculated Asian male.
5
Although

5
“Asian American” is a political term that has been used since the 1960s as a way to unify intra-ethnic
Asian groups and create a pan-ethnic coalition. Homogenizing Asian Americans as a monolithic group can
be theoretically problematic and I am cognizant of how the historical specificity of each sub-group differs.
Although this article reflects a strong reliance on Chinese American experiences and laws that directly

48
the effect of immigration and exclusion laws were to impede Chinese, Japanese and other
immigrants from settling permanently in America, I offer an examination of how the net
effect of American immigration laws may have also played a key role in the emasculation
of the Asian American male.
Part II provides a historical introduction to immigration laws that have affected
Asian Americans, particularly, Chinese immigrants. Part III examines the way in which
American immigration practices and laws barred citizenship to Asian men, and in effect
designating them as “other” and emblematically “non-male.” Part IV discusses how
United States exclusion and miscegenation laws have emasculated Asian men by
restricting their access to heterosexual norms and ideals, including nuclear family
relations. Finally, Part V examines how economic hardships that have resulted from
disenfranchisement and legalized exclusion, feminized Asian American men by forcing
them into professions generally associated with women, particularly, in the laundry
industry.

Asians and United States Immigration Practices and Laws
For almost 350 years after Christopher Columbus landed in North America, very
few Asians immigrated to the United States. Asian immigration was virtually
nonexistent (Hing, 1993). In many Asian countries, there was little reason, need, or
desire to immigrate to the United States, even though the era before the mid-1800s was a
time of open immigration for Asian immigrants into America (Hing, 1993). Asian
immigration (particularly Chinese immigration), began during a period when the

affected Chinese Americans, I believe this historical context to be integral to the formation of a Pan-Asian
masculinity.
49
European powers and the United States were experiencing major social and economic
transformations (Kim, 1994). The rapid expansion of industrial capitalism in America
during the mid-1800s created a high demand for cheap labor (Kim, 1994).
Driven by a rice shortage, the damaging effects of the Taiping Rebellion and
China’s loss to Britain in the Opium Wars, Chinese laborers began to arrive in America
in the 1840s (Hing, 1993). Hing (1993) notes that the Chinese were officially welcomed
when they first arrived in America. The simultaneous opening of Asia and the American
West, along with the new gold rush, created a demand for “coolie,” or (unskilled and
cheap) Chinese labor (Hing, 1993). Even John McDougall, the governor of California in
1852, wanted to provide land grants as incentives for the Chinese to settle on America’s
new frontier (Coolidge, 1909). The governor called for “further immigration and
settlement of Chinese—one of our most worthy classes of newly adopted citizens—to
whom the climate and character of our lands are particularly suited” (Daniels, 1988, p.
35). By 1882, almost 300,000 Chinese laborers had entered and worked on the West
Coast (Coolidge, 1909).
“Coolie” labor was seen as a great value in developing the industries of America,
not only on the west coast, but also throughout America; some Southern plantation
owners even considered replacing African-American slaves with Chinese labor (Konvitz,
1946). The Chinese were regarded as more dependable and less demanding than white
workers, and the Central Pacific Railroad, at first doubtful about the Chinese’ ability,
hired them (Hing, 1993). The Central Pacific Railroad realized that the Chinese labor
force could be purchased for two-thirds the price of white workers, and as Coolidge
50
(1909) points out, without the Chinese, “it would have been impossible to complete the
western portion of the transcontinental railroad in the time required by Congress” (p. 52).
Although the Chinese were initially encouraged to enter the New World as
laborers, the “coolie” labor that arrived and worked hard to help establish the industries
of early America would soon face the cruelties of racial prejudice. This anti-Asian
sentiment, fueled by the white majority’s fear of losing jobs to aliens, prompted demands
for restrictive federal immigration laws and practices. These same laws and practices
would not only exclude Asians from the American polity, but would simultaneously help
create a racialization and female gendering of the Asian American male.

Chinese Exclusion: A Brief History
Chinese immigration to America can be divided into distinct periods that present a
“schizophrenia” in American immigration policy. The period of 1849 to 1882
represented years of free immigration; an age of exclusion from 1882 to 1943; an era of
limited immigration from 1943-1965; and a period of renewed immigration since 1965
(Chan, 1991b). The official Chinese welcome which began before the mid-1800s was
short-lived; the Chinese welcome would turn into oppression, fueled by white racism. In
1852, the California legislature passed a discriminatory license fee requirement that was
specifically targeted at Chinese gold miners (“Act of the Third,” 1852). Two years later,
in People v. Hall (1854), the California Supreme Court ruled that the Chinese had no
right to testify against whites. According to historian Ronald Takaki (1989), by the
1860s, Chinese immigrants were seen as a threat to the idea of a racially white
homogeneous society and as “heathenish souls” who “have no knowledge of or
51
appreciation of free institutions or constitutional liberty” (p. 100-101). These economic
and racial fears attributed to the Chinese would ultimately culminate into exclusionary
laws and discriminatory economic practices that would limit job opportunities, prevent
family formations, and effectively emasculate Asian men.
In 1862, California’s first Republican governor (who was also one of the founders
of Stanford University), Leland Stanford, used his inaugural address to decry “the
presence among us of a degraded and distinct people,” and to call for “any Constitutional
action, having for its object the regression of the immigration of Asiatic races” (Daniels,
1988, p. 36). The Chinese were also viewed as an economic threat to white labor, and
they were resented for their resourcefulness and for their reputed frugality (Hing, 1993).
As Tomás Almaguer (2008) explains:
[T]he racialized hostility toward Chinese immigrants arose from their location at
the point of conflict between American capitalists—eager to employ Chinese
labor—and white workers—who considered them a threat to the free laboring
class. (p. 6)

By the 1870s, Chinese employment by the Central Pacific Railroad was at its peak, and
anti-coolie clubs increased, resulting in frequent mob attacks against the Chinese
(Sandmeyer, 1991). Sandmeyer (1991) notes that the resentment of the Chinese would
further fuel the need to preserve “racial purity” and “Western civilization.”
The pressure by both fronts of the American capitalist institution (American
capitalists and white workers) would prove to be fatal to the Chinese’ inclusion in the
American citizenry. In 1870, Congress amended the Nationality Act of 1790, which
limited citizenship to “free white persons,” to include African Americans and Native
52
Americans but deliberately denied the Chinese the right to citizenship (“Naturalization
Act,” 1870).
6

The anti-Chinese movement that erupted in the 1870s led to legislative attacks
against Chinese businesses, particularly, Chinese laundries (Chan, 1991b). In what would
be known as the “laundry ordinances,” city boards enacted ordinances that gave local
supervisors unlimited discretionary power to issue licenses (Chan, 1991b). However,
most of these ordinances were created to target Chinese businesses and prevent the
Chinese from obtaining licenses required by the board (“Yick Wo,” 1886).
Chinese immigrants also lost political standing in court. In 1878, the court in In
re Ah Yup, ruled that Chinese immigrants were deemed ineligible for citizenship because
they were “not white.” Even Mark Twain (1996), who observed the ill treatment of the
Chinese and harbored his own prejudices against the Indians of the West, remarked on
the unjust treatment of the Chinese:
Any White man can swear a Chinaman’s life away in the courts, but no Chinaman
can testify against a white man. Ours is the ‘land of the free’—nobody denies
that—nobody challenges it. (Maybe it is because we won’t let other people
testify). As I write, news come that in broad daylight in San Francisco, some
boys have stoned an inoffensive Chinaman to death and although a large crowd
witnesses the shameful deed, no one interfered. (p.350)

It was only a matter of time before the United States Congress would pass the first
exclusion act against individuals based on their nationality.

6
The Naturalization Act of 1870 amended the naturalization law to conform with the intent of the
Reconstruction amendments and allowed “aliens of African nativity and descent” to become naturalized
citizens. The 1870 Act amended the Nationality Act of 1790, which had limited citizenship through
naturalization to “free white persons” (specifically excluding African Americans and Native Americans).
53
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
On May 6
th
, 1882, the 47
th
U.S. Congress enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act
(“Chinese Exclusion,” 1882). The exclusion act provides in pertinent part:
In the opinion of the Government of the United States the coming of Chinese
laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the
territory thereof[.] (“Chinese Exclusion,” 1882)

Chan (1991b) notes that the Act excluded Chinese laborers for ten years but it did not
apply to laborers who were already in America at the date of enactment. In order for
Chinese workers already in the United States to come and go freely, the United States
government set up an identification system (Chan, 1991b). Before resident Chinese
laborers could leave and reenter the United States, customs officials would issue “return
certificates” (Chan, 1991b); Chinese laborers without authorized return certificates were
denied entry, and every Chinese unlawfully in the country “would be caused to be
removed therefrom to the country from whence he came[.]” (Chan, 1991b).
The anti-Chinese movement however, pressed for even more exclusion.
Amendments were made to the original exclusion act in 1884, making return certificates
the only permissible evidence for a laborer to establish a right of reentry even if the
laborer was a resident in California before the 1882 act was enacted and went to China
before the passage of the act (Chan, 1991b).
7
Furthermore, the prohibition was expanded
in 1888 to include “all persons of the Chinese race” (Takaki, 1989, p. 111).
The Chinese Exclusion Act was renewed in 1892 when Congress passed the
Geary Act (“Geary Act,” 1892). With the Geary Act, Congress complied with the

7
Chan notes that a number of Chinese laborers, who were residents of California but who went to
China before the passage of the 1882 act, would be denied reentry to the United States because they lacked
a return certificate.
54
demand for the registration of all Chinese laborers and the act even denied bail for
Chinese habeas corpus proceedings (Hing, 1993). In 1902, ten years after the Geary Act,
Hing (1993) notes that the prohibition was extended indefinitely. Congress passed laws
that gave the majority what they wanted: the removal of the Chinese to help defuse any
fears by the white labor force, and to help alleviate class conflicts within the white
majority during an era of economic crisis resulting from unemployment (Takaki, 1989).
8

The wrath of anti-Chinese legislation led to a major decrease in the Chinese American
population—from 105,465 in 1880, to 89,863 in 1900, to 61,639 in 1920 (Takaki, 1989,
p. 111-112).

The Immigration Act of 1924
At the dawn of the 20
th
century, the severe anti-Asian immigration laws did little
to satisfy the xenophobic demands of the white majority. They insisted that Asians were
racially inferior, and the legislation that passed in this era reflected this sentiment.
America’s victory in the Spanish-American War, coupled with neo-colonialist military
expansion by other nations, helped fuel America’s reactionary and isolationist political
climate (Hall, 1991; Patterson, 1999).
This renewed xenophobia would lead to even more exclusionist demands as
Congress passed the landmark Immigration Act of 1924, section 13 of which reads in

8
Takaki notes that exclusion acts enacted by Congress also reflected a broader concern than the
Chinese presence. Congress was responding to the reality that the age of opportunity was coming to an
end; society experienced “the discovery of unemployment.” Exclusionists warned that the presence of an
“industrial army of Asiatic laborers” was aggravating the class conflict between white labor and white
capital. They claimed that white workers had been “forced to the wall” by the Chinese laborers. Labor
unions were striking and rioting across the country from Chicago’s Haymarket Riot of 1886 and the
Pullman strikes of the 1890s. Removing the Chinese was more symptomatic of the class conflict between
white labor and capital; excluding the Chinese was thus, a way for Congress to “remedy” the tension within
the white working class (p. 110-111).
55
pertinent part: “No alien ineligible to citizenship shall be admitted to the United States[.]”
(“Immigration Act,” 1924). The act provided that immigrants of any country be limited
to two percent of their nationality in 1890. Although legislative supporters of the act
were more concerned with limiting immigration from many European countries, the act
also eliminated a few remaining categories for Asians (Hing, 1993).
9

The act provided for the exclusion of any “alien ineligible to citizenship,” and
since many Asians were excluded from naturalization under the 1870 statute, the
possibility of entry for Asians was cut off indefinitely (Hing, 1993). As Hing (1993)
notes, the act even prohibited previously privileged merchants, teachers and students—
“Asians were not allowed even under the two percent quota rule” (p. 33).
It was not until the middle of World War II did most Chinese immigrants finally
see light at the end of a dark, exclusionary tunnel. As the United States joined forces
with the Chinese to fight against the Axis powers, Congress felt the need to address the
charges that America was discriminating against the citizens of an ally (Hutchinson,
1981). In 1943, Congress passed the Magnuson Act, otherwise known as the Chinese
Exclusion Repeal Act, and for the first time, Chinese immigrants were allowed to
naturalize and become American citizens; however, the Chinese were allotted a yearly
quota of only 105 immigrants under the law (Hing, 1993). In 1965, President Kennedy
helped abolish the old quota system and implemented amendments that would allow
twenty thousand immigrant visas for every country not in the Western Hemisphere
(“Immigration Act,” 1965).

9
The law struck harshly at Jews, Italians, Slavs, and Greeks, who had immigrated in great numbers
after 1890, and who would have been disfavored by such a quota.
56
Citizenship and Masculinity
Asian immigrants who entered the United States from the nineteenth century
onward were viewed as the “yellow peril” (Saito, 1997; Yen, 2000)
10
threatening to
“oust” white European immigrants (Lowe, 1991). These immigrants were industrious,
and soon began to surpass white workers. As the “yellow peril,” Asian Americans were
viewed as “[i]nscrutable, sneaky, competitive,” and are also depicted as “military,
cultural, or economic enemies and unfair competitors for education and jobs” (Yen, 2000,
p. 6). It is no coincidence that the racialization of Asians as physically inferior from
“whites” predominated when America was in desperate need of cheap labor and capital,
coupled with an anti-Asian backlash (Lowe, 1996).
Many white laborers felt threatened by the competition from Asian workers, even
though many employers continued to seek them as subservient domestics and cheap
labor. As Asian immigrants became the scapegoats for the economic downturn in the late
1800s, union leaders and writers sustained the backlash with the rhetoric of preserving
“racial purity” and “Western civilization” in hopes of sparking anti-Asian legislation
(Hing, 1993). Immigration and naturalization laws were therefore a means to regulate the
terms of who constitutes a citizen, and also as a means to define Asian immigrants as
racially “other” and emblematically “non-male.”
Until 1870, United States citizenship was granted only to white male persons
(“Nationality Act,” 1790). In 1870, African Americans could become naturalized
(“Naturalization Act,” 1870) yet Asians were deliberately barred from naturalization until

10
The definition of the “yellow peril” stereotype generally refers to Asian Americans as foreigners
who hold lower ethical standards and as one Yen writes, “constitute a threat to American stability” (2000,
p. 6).
57
the Magnuson Act repealed immigration exclusion in 1943 (“Act of December,” 1943).
After 1943 however, as the state extended citizenship to Asian men, it could be said that
the state had formally designated them as “male” (Lowe, 1996).
11
However, the
enfranchisement of Asian immigrants into citizenship was limited to an annual quota of
only 105 immigrants (“Act of December,” 1943). Although the 1946 modifications of
the Magnuson Act, referred to as the Chinese War Brides Act, exempted Chinese wives
of U.S. citizens, the Act was largely intended to benefit U.S. military servicemen (“Act of
August,” 1946). Facing a very low annual quota of 105, non-naturalized Chinese
immigrants were therefore severely limited in establishing family formations and taking
part in the naturalization process.
As several social theorists have noted, notions of citizenship are dependent on and
supported by the idea of the patriarchal household and a “rationalized masculinity”
(Connell, 1987; Mohanty, 1991).
12
Asian males, denied access to citizenship, are then
racialized and gendered by social and legal forces—including immigration and
citizenship policies that further truncated the development of family formations, or a
“patriarchal household.” If bodily autonomy or integrity is a key component of
citizenship rights, then Asian men lacked full rights.

11
Lowe notes that the 1946 modification of the Magnuson Act exempted Chinese wives of U.S.
citizens from the annual quota (of 105), but as the law changed to reclassify “Chinese immigrants” as
eligible for naturalization and citizenship, female immigrants were not included in this reclassification but
were in effect specified only in relation to the changed status of the “Chinese immigrant” who was legally
presumed to be male (p. 11).
12
Author Chandra argues that the intersection of patriarchy and a racialized capitalist state produces
a definition of citizenship that is always a gendered and racial formation. Mohanty further argues that the
contemporary Euro-American state operates through an establishment of a “gender regime:” A regime
whereby the state is the primary organizer of the power relations of gender. In other words, the state
delimits the boundaries of personal/domestic violence, protects property, criminalizes ‘deviant’ and
‘stigmatized’ sexuality, embodies masculinized hierarchies (e.g. the gendered bureaucracy of the state
personnel) (p. 21-22).
58
Asian men would have their manhood denied when defined as ‘other’ rather than
citizens, or persons eligible for naturalization. Furthermore, citizenship and immigration
laws have historically been connected to economic agendas; such practices are therefore
anchored in the institutions of slavery and capitalist neocolonialism, and racism is often
the by-product (Mohanty, 1991). In the case of Asian men, a racialized gender was the
by-product of exclusionary political and legal institutions. Thus, the state’s management
of citizenship through exclusionary laws from the mid-1800s until the repeal acts of the
mid-1900s aided in the racialization (Mohanty, 1991)
13
and gendering of the Asian
American male.

Female Exclusion Laws and Anti-miscegenation
From 1850 until the repeal acts of the 1940s, Asian immigrant masculinity was
institutionally marked different from that of European-American “white” citizens owing
in part to the communities that were available to Chinese men as a result of exclusion and
miscegenation laws (Lowe, 1996). Such exclusion laws helped to emasculate Chinese
men by restricting their access to heterosexual norms and ideals such as nuclear family
formations. Fearful that Asians would establish strong communities, voting rights and
gain political power, the Euro-American power structure deliberately denied Asians the
ability to establish nuclear family formations. However, the antimiscegenation and

13
Mohanty notes, “A comparison of the history of the immigration of white people and of the
corresponding history of slavery and the indentured labor of people of color in the United States indicates a
clear pattern of racialization tied to the ideological and economic exigencies of the state. White men were
considered ‘free labor’ and could take a variety of jobs” (p. 24-25). Asian immigrants however, were paid
much lower wages than whites to work in mines and railroads. Furthermore, the history of immigration
and naturalization laws have intersected with the process of racialization, e.g., the Chinese Exclusion Act of
1882 was the first law to exclude individuals based on nationality.
59
exclusion laws that resulted from such economic and social fears have helped contribute
to the construction of the emasculated Asian American male subject.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the number of Chinese women in America did
not exceed 7.2 percent of the total Chinese population, although the percentage grew
slowly during the twentieth century—mostly due to births on American soil (Chan,
1991b). On March 3, 1875, Congress passed the Page Law of 1875, banning the
importation of Asian laborers from “China, Japan, or any oriental country,” and the
importation of women “for the purpose of prostitution” (“An Act Supplementary,” 1873;
Peffer, 1986).
14
But the Page Law had very little impact in halting the immigration of
Asian laborers. Coolridge (1909) notes that the number of Asian immigrants arriving
from Asian countries exceeded the total number for any other seven-year period prior to
1882 (and the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act) However, the impact of the Page
law was much greater with regard to female immigration. From 1876 to 1882, the
percentage of Asian women entering the United States declined by 68 percent (Coolidge,
1909).
Although the act was specifically drafted to ban Asian prostitutes, the Page Law
was often enforced as a general restriction on Asian female immigration, and thereby
reducing the total number of Asian female immigrants (Peffer, 1986). The Page Act
granted immigration officers the right to arbitrarily determine if Asian women who chose
to emigrate were “persons of high moral character” (Peffer, 1986). However, Peffer
(1986) notes that since immigration officers often suspected all but the wives of

14
Peffer notes that the ban on the importation of Asian laborers carried with it a relatively light
punishment, and therefore, the Page Act failed miserably in its attempt to halt the immigration of Chinese
laborers.
60
merchants and diplomats of prostitution, immigration officials implemented a system of
examination that made the immigration of Asian women prohibitively difficult.
Furthermore, under the 1922 Cable Act, (“Act of September,” 1922) a female
citizen, whether white or nonwhite, who married an “alien ineligible to citizenship” lost
her own United State citizenship (Chan, 1991; Hing, 1993). This act also demonstrated
that the provisions had a racialized designation; the act contained provisions for
American born European and African women to reclaim their citizenship, however, there
were no such provisions for American born Asian women (Lowe, 1996).
Finally, wives of Chinese laborers were also banned, which helped to effectively
halt the immigration of Asian women. The Ah Quan (1884) and Ah Moy (1885)
decisions in the 1880s, made it clear that “no woman married to a Chinese laborer could
come into the United States, unless she herself could prove prior residence here[.]”
(Chan, 1991b).
Racialized designations in the statutes passed during this anti-Asian era were a
familiar theme; further laws would include antimiscegenation measures to help diffuse
any “threats to white racial purity” (Takaki, 1989, p. 101). As Gary Okihiro (2001)
concludes, “the ‘yellow peril’ was the despoiling threat posed by Asian men or an
aggressive heathenism and barbarism to European women or a pure Christianity and
virtuous civilization” (p. 105). As a result of Asia’s industrial progression of the late 19
th

and early 20
th
century, Asian men were viewed as a threat to “civilized” European nations
and were “reborn as predators of white women” (Okihiro, 2001, p. 104). It seems for a
short period, Asian men were remasculinized to a small degree as threats to white female
61
“purity” until the antimiscegenation and exclusion laws were enacted to suppress the
“yellow peril.”
While Asian men were seen as a threat to the wall of racial purity, enacting
antimiscegenation laws effectively barred the Chinese from “tainting” the racial “purity”
of white women while also differentiating Asians from whites to support white
supremacy and control over nonwhites (Okihiro, 2001). According to Historians
D’Emilio and Freedman (1988):
European migrants to America had merged racial and sexual ideology in order to
differentiate themselves from Indians and Blacks, [and] to strengthen the
mechanisms of social control. (p. 86)

Okihiro (2001) argues that as Asian countries became more industrialized in the
nineteenth century and conflicts arose between Chinese immigrants and white labor,
“[the] need to differentiate gained new urgency during the nineteenth century” (p. 110).
Although antimiscegenation laws were intended to bar Asian men from procreating with
white women by differentiating Asians as “inferior,” the net effect of such laws have also
helped contribute to the construction of the emasculated Asian male.
Maryland enacted the first antimiscegenation law in 1661 (Reuter, 1969)
prohibiting marriages between whites and blacks and by the nineteenth century, most
states enacted similar laws (Takaki, 1989; Volpp, 2000).
15
In 1880, the California
legislature enacted legislation prohibiting the issuance of any license which authorized
the “marriage of a white person with a negro, mulatto, or Mongolian” (Osumi, 1982).

15
Volpp notes that by the time the U.S. Supreme Court finally declared antimiscegenation laws
unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia, thirty-nine states had enacted antimiscegenation laws.
62
By 1866, a similar antimiscegenation law was in place in Oregon (“Oregon Law,”
1866)
16
where the law prohibited marriages between whites and “Chinese, Hawaiians and
Native Americans” (Mooney, 1984). These antimiscegenation laws, coupled with laws
such as the Cable Act of 1922 (where a female citizen who married an “alien ineligible to
citizenship” lost her own American citizenship) effectively limited opportunities for
Asian male immigrants from procreating and establishing nuclear family formations.
Thus, white women who wanted to marry Asian male immigrants were barred by
antimiscegenation laws. Non-white women who married Asian male immigrants would
lose their citizenship. In turn, the antimiscegenation and exclusion laws effectively
limited the opportunities for Asian men to procreate by legally penalizing white and non-
white women if they chose to marry an Asian immigrant.
The anti-Asian movement also proclaimed that Chinese labor would drive down
the working wage and force the wives of white working men into prostitution (Takaki,
1979). The Page Act of 1875 (“Act of March,” 1875) and the exclusion of Chinese
laborers’ spouses, effectively halted the entry of Chinese women which worked to
produce Chinese enclaves as exclusive “bachelor communities.” Frank Chin (1981)
acknowledges that these “bachelor” Chinatowns were products of racism and the notion
that the Chinese themselves clustered together to preserve their alien culture is a myth.
According to a San Franscisco newspaper, the Marin Journal of March 30, 1876, whites
believed that a Chinese man had “neither wife not child, nor expects any” (Sandmeyer,
1991, p. 25). Such isolated communities represented the “asexualization” of the Chinese

16
The law prohibited marriage between any white person and any person with one-quarter or more
negro, Chinese, or Kanuka blood or any person having more than one-quarter Indian blood.
63
male subject whereby Asian American men were barred from normative heterosexual
reproduction and entitlements to community in the United States.
The historical institutionalization of Chinese bachelor societies imposes an
extension to the theoretical study of race and gender for Asian male subjects, and
possibly to an extension into the realm of homosexuality (Ting, 1995). These bachelor
communities were physically and socially isolated, and can even be recognized as
“queer” enclaves prohibited from heterosexual reproduction and entitlements to
community. The Asian male, before the repeal acts of the 1940s, was denied the
opportunity to establish families in America and extend successive generations among
Asian immigrants—they were “stripped” of their manhood, both legally and socially.

The “Feminized Professions”
Although, prior to the early 1940s, Chinese immigrants were barred from
becoming citizens, and laborers’ wives were excluded from entering the United States,
“ethnic antagonism,” also contributed to the “feminization” of Asian American men by
forcing them into professions typically associated with women (Lowe, 1996; Mohanty,
1991)
17
: cook, waiter, tailor, and laundryman (Lowe, 1996). “Ethnic antagonism” in the
mines, factories, and fields came in the form of anti-Chinese riots where Chinese
immigrants were beaten and shot by white workers; Chinese labor camps and Chinatowns
were raided, looted, and many buildings were set on fire (McWilliams, 1939). The

17
Mohanty notes that contemporary liberal notions of citizenship are constitutively dependent on
and supported by the idea of the patriarchal household and formulated around the notion of a “rationalized”
hegemonic masculinity. This rationalized masculinity is evident in the bureaucratic sexual division of labor
of people employed by the state. The majority of the political elite, judiciary and military are male while
women are overwhelmingly employed in the human services and secretarial arms of the state (p. 22).
64
Chinese were virtually forced into self-employment, and many of the Chinese turned to
the laundry industry. Okihiro (2001) notes that although many Chinese men sought their
fortunes in the gold mines during the gold rush, Chinese men were subject to a special tax
that reduced their earnings and white miners expelled them from certain mining districts.
Due to the fact that there was a dearth of women in nineteenth-century California, “work
such as cooking, cleaning and washing were open to Chinese men, who according to a
prevalent idea, were lesser men belonging to a feminized race” (Okihiro, 2001, p. 76).
A writer for The Cosmopolitan (then, a “family magazine”) described laundry
work as a “woman’s occupation [and men did not] step into it for fear of losing their
social standing” (“The Chinese in New York,” 1888). In 1870, there were 2,899 Chinese
laundry workers in California, comprising seventy-two percent of the laundry labor force
in California; twenty years later, the ratio of laundry workers to all workers in the
Chinese immigrant population peaked to one out of every twelve (Ong, 1983).
One of the reasons for such a high influx of Chinese as laundrymen is the fact that
a laundry business could be opened with very little capital, and with very little command
of the English language (Takaki, 1989). But the Chinese were mostly constructively
“forced” into such occupations; laundry work was “open” to the Chinese. One
commentator noted:
[m]en of other nationalities who are jealous of the Chinese have raised such a
great outcry about Chinese cheap labor that they have shut him out of working
on farms or in factories or building railroads or making streets or digging sewers.
(Chew, 1906, p. 289-290)

One old Chinese man remembers: “You couldn’t work in the cigar factories or the jute or
woolen mills any more—all the Chinese had been driven out. About all they could be
was laundrymen or vegetable peddlers then” (Takaki, 1989, p. 93). Thus, the Chinese
65
laundry “phenomenon” represented a retreat into self-employment in a restricted labor
market, to perform a traditional role assigned to women (Takaki, 1989).
The high concentration of Asian American male immigrants in what are typically
viewed as “feminized” professions further demonstrates the intersectionality of race and
gender (Eng, 2001). Chinese male immigrants, before 1940, could be said to occupy a
“feminized” position in relation to European-American males (Lowe, 1996). From a
historical vantage point, these “feminized” professions have helped to create and stabilize
an identity and image of the Asian American male subject that continues to linger today
in various stereotypes.
Thus, Asian men’s domestic labor, their “feminization,” as Okihiro (2001) argues,
helped to preserve and advance white manliness and free white men from “womanly”
tasks.” The stereotypes that have continued to define and identify past and present Asian
American male laborers to such low-paid “feminized” positions, provides compelling
evidence of the means in which economically, and in turn, legislatively determined
methods of racialization and gendering cling to the Asian male body.

Conclusion
The legal and historical examples of the definitions of citizenship tied to
immigration policies, the institutionalized exclusion of social space, and the social
constructs of professions, have collectively coupled racial and gendered imperatives.
These racial and gendered imperatives encourage us to understand that discourses on
masculinity and race do not define Asian Americans of any particular group,
18
but

18
Such as interethnic Asian, gay and lesbian groups.
66
encompass the larger Asian American constituency “whose status has been disavowed as
full members of the U.S. nation” (Eng, 2001, p. 18).
Asian American males, before the Magnuson Act repealed immigration exclusion
in 1943 (“Act of December,” 1943), occupied an emasculated, or even “feminized”
position in relation to the “masculinized” white male citizen. America’s historical legal
record, with regard to Asian Americans has so far been uneven and inconsistent. While
Asian immigrants had no trouble entering America before the 1850s, the anti-Asian
movement spawned soon after; almost 80 years would pass before the United States
slowly cut away at the exclusion laws and finally repeal the exclusive immigration acts.
America’s complex legal history of social organization has placed emblematic
significance on categories of gender, race and sexuality. From this standpoint, Asian
American masculinity draws its definition from a multitude of strategies and a legal and
social history that has racialized and gendered the Asian American male. As David Eng
(2001) writes:
[U]neven national histories of anti-Asian discrimination might be described not
only as being turned into the subject but also as being repressed and erased
through the abstraction of that turn, the subjection of that subject. (p. 18)

In this historical context, race and masculinity should not be viewed as a fixed notion;
rather, they must be viewed as a configuration in which social and legal forces produce a
dominant view of the Asian American male subject.

67
CHAPTER THREE: RACE, HEGEMONIC
MASCULINITY AND THE “LINPOSSIBLE”: AN
ANALYSIS OF MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS OF JEREMY LIN
In early February 2012, the viral-cultural phenomenon that became known as
“Linsanity” was born when an undrafted, Harvard-educated bench player named Jeremy
Lin, who was previously cut twice by National Basketball Association (“NBA”) teams,
led a lowly-New York Knick team to seven straight victories. Lin scored 136 points
(including 38 against the Kobe Bryant-led Los Angeles Lakers) in his first five starts;
establishing an NBA scoring record (“Jeremy Lin’s Starting Points,” 2012). Worldwide
media attention ensued, along with the Lin-inspired puns that flooded popular culture for
the next several weeks. During the first week of “Linsanity” a Google search returned
more than 2.1 million search results in over 6,700 news sources (Lariviere, 2012). Citing
the social analytics site Topsy, a CBS journalist uncovered that “Jeremy Lin” had been
mentioned 146,000 times, “Lin” 530,000 times, and “Linsanity” 42,000 times in the first
two weeks of February (Ngak, 2012). For several weeks in February 2012, it appeared
that the entire country was swept-up in Lin’s game-winning heroics. Even President
Obama, a longtime basketball fan, publicly revealed that he was on the “Jeremy Lin
bandwagon” (Zakarin, 2012, para. 3).
As the first American of Taiwanese and Chinese descent to play in the N.B.A.,
Lin’s stardom was a watershed moment particularly for Asian Americans who have not
witnessed such an Asian American-inspired cultural frenzy since Bruce Lee stormed the
American cultural consciousness in the 1970s. Interestingly, Jeremy Lin’s meteoric rise
to stardom parallels Bruce Lee’s journey to international acclaim. Lee was initially
68
rejected for lead roles in American mainstream television and film before being
vigorously courted by Hollywood after “proving” his star power with box-office hits
produced abroad. As Jachinson Chan notes, “Bruce Lee’s rejection by cultural producers
in America marginalized not only Lee’s identity as a Chinese American but his
representation of masculinity as well” (2000). Similarly, Lin faced rejection on several
levels during his journey to NBA stardom. He was named California high school player
of the year but disregarded by major college programs, and after a stellar college career,
was passed over in the draft. A few days from being released by the New York Knicks,
Lin got his “shot” and captivated the world with his record-setting performances. After
the conclusion of the 2011-2012 NBA season, Lin went on to sign (what seemed
improbable just months earlier) a three-year contract with the Houston Rockets for $25.1
million (Roth & Martin, 2012).
Although Wat Misaka—an Asian American and the first non-Caucasian to play in
the NBA—briefly played for the Knicks in 1947
1
, the media’s coverage of Lin’s stardom
engendered a transcendent moment in American sports history. Never before did an
Asian American player captivate the American public with the fervor and magnitude that
“Linsanity” produced. Although there are no longer blatant discriminatory practices that
prevented Jackie Robinson and Kenny Washington from playing in MLB and the NFL
respectively, racial stereotypes still permeate society and Lin’s success has challenged the
narrative that Asian American men are unable to excel in a physical sport like basketball.
Unlike the tired media images of Asian American men as comical foreigners or un-
athletic and meek types that fill popular culture, audiences witnessed an Asian American
male aggressively slashing through lanes, dunking, and outplaying some of the league’s
69
elite athletes. Sports writers highlighted Lin’s improbable road to NBA stardom, but
several media outlets also contextualized his success within the parameters of a
hegemonic discourse.
While there have been Asian American sport stars in the past, such as tennis-
champ Michael Chang, and several high-profile figure skaters, team sports such as
basketball and football personify and reproduce hegemonic masculinity while individual
sports—tennis, figure skating—often reproduce a more subordinated masculinity (Griffin
1998). Although previous research has analyzed how American sports media have
valorized and reinforced heterosexism, hegemonic masculinity, and homophobia in team
sports, research on how sports media contextualize and reinforce stereotypes and a
subordinated and racialized masculinity with regard to Asian Americans has been
relatively absent. This chapter contributes to existing sports communication research by
analyzing media representations of Lin’s meteoric rise in the NBA in order to understand
how such representations reinforce or challenge the dominant narratives on Asian
American masculinity and race. Media coverage of Asian Americans in professional
sports is especially important because so few Asian Americans consistently receive
media attention as newsmakers.
Moreover, this chapter explores assumptions grounded in the media coverage of
Lin, including how race and masculinity is defined within a dominant ideological field
and how notions of a hegemonic masculinity define the “other.” Here, race and gender
are viewed as social mappings that affect the construction of a racialized masculinity and
demarcate differences between hegemonic and subordinated masculinity. I draw on
Connell’s notion of hegemonic masculinity, where one dominant form of masculinity
70
maintains its dominance over others masculinities deemed subordinate. While numerous
studies of media portrayals of Asian American masculinity have highlighted the
marginalization of Asian American men in film and television, I examine the extent to
which sports media writers use emasculation discourse to legitimize and maintain the
virility of hegemonic masculinity. As Stuart Hall (1996) points out, “identities are
constructed within, not outside discourse” and sports media inscribe both implicit and
explicit ideologies in its coverage of sports. In particular, I look to the sports media as a
site of complicity and collusion for the construction and maintenance of hegemonic
masculinity by examining media representations and sports media columnists’ coverage
of New York Knick Jeremy Lin’s meteoric rise in the NBA from February 5
th
to March
15
th
, 2012.
First, I begin with a short overview of the discourse of masculinity, particularly,
the relationship between race, masculinity and sports culture in constructing and
reinforcing notions of both hegemonic and subordinated masculinity. I then sketch an
overview of the mass media’s institutional role in maintaining and policing hegemonic
masculinity. Next, I provide an analysis of mass media’s framing of Lin’s stardom. Did
the media overtly racialize Lin’s athletic success? Which media outlets—such as
mainstream print newspapers or online network news pages—were more likely to
racialize` Lin’s athletic exploits? This analysis includes an examination of how several
sports media outlets racialized Lin’s success in its coverage, while also policing
hegemonic notions of masculinity via an emasculation discourse imposed on Lin’s
athletic success. Finally, this chapter examines how the intense media coverage referred
to as “Linsanity”—what I refer to as a “media mania”—operates to preserve the
71
dominant discourse of masculinity by confirming the “low expectations” inscribed in
Asian male bodies, therefore making Lin’s success “miraculous” and “warranting” such
media coverage.

Asian-American Masculinity and Stereotypical Representations
Masculinity is an ideal that members of a society strive for, as opposed to a
realized actuality. As MacKinnon notes, “men’s experience must always fall short.
Masculinity is just out of reach. It becomes ideological, a goal to strive towards, but not
ultimately attainable” (2003, p. 7). French philosopher Michel Foucault provides an
analytical framework in unpacking the construction of gender and sexuality through
discourse, whereby social norms are constructed by the way that they can be spoken of or
conceptualized in language; discourse defines the boundaries of ‘normalcy’ (1978).
Masculinity, like gender and sexuality, is also configured in discourse that defines “what
it is to be a man.”
The relationship between race and masculinity has always been one vested with
popularized stereotypes that categorize those who constitute “masculine” (e.g. White,
heterosexual) versus “feminine” or the emasculated (e.g. Asian, gay). Stereotypes
involve representational practices that classify and categorize members of another group,
reducing those members to simplified and exaggerated characteristics, which are then
communicated as fixed by nature (Dates & Barlow, 1990; Hall, 1997). For example,
Zhang (2010) contends that the “nerd” and the “forever foreigner” are two of the most
prominent stereotypes of Asian-Americans. The “forever foreigner” stereotype holds
Asian-Americans to be foreign regardless of their fluency with the English language or
72
their self-identification as Americans (Kurylo, 2012). Moreover, the “nerd” stereotype
holds Asian-Americans as intelligent and technologically talented, but clumsy and
lacking social and communication skills (Zhang, 2010). The stereotype that Asian
Americans possess great mathematical aptitude is so prevalent in society that it is used as
a manipulation device in research studies of stereotypes (Smith & White, 2002).
The current state of Asian-American masculinity has been largely shaped by
racialized immigration and labor policies (Park, 2013), and media images (Hamamoto,
1994; Lee, 1999; Ono & Pham, 2009). Early anti-Asian sentiments ultimately led to
race-based exclusionary laws and gendered immigration practices that allowed entry for a
sizable numbers of Asian male laborers but restricted entrance of Asian females, resulting
in disproportionate sex ratios. Further policing Asian masculinity was the enforcement of
anti-miscegenation laws that prevented Asian laborers from marrying White women.
Moreover, many Asian-American men performed work in “gendered positions” that
included work as domestic servants and launderers (Park, 2013).
Another popular stereotype of Asian-American men involves the model minority
myth, defined as “the belief that Asian-Americans, through their hard work, intelligence,
and emphasis on education and achievement, have been successful in American society”
(McGowan & Lindgren, 2006). The model minority myth is founded on sexist and
heterosexist notions that Asian-American families instill “proper” values with an
economically responsible father as head of the household (Chua & Fujino, 1999). This
myth perpetuates stereotypes that Asian Americans love technology (Paek & Shah,
2003), and have narrow interests limited to academics (Ono & Pham, 2009). One study
on perceived attributions of “good managers” indicated that assessors attached the term
73
“nerd” to Asian-American men (Cheng, 1996). Coupled with other model minority traits
such as “shy” and “passive,” “nerd” signifies a weak and feminine masculinity (Cheng,
1996).
Like homosexuality, the Asian American male body has come to represent the
abandonment of “authentic masculinity.” While Asian-American men are attributed with
the inability to exude masculinity and are categorized as socially “undesirable,” Asian
American female bodies on the other hand, have been socially constructed as exotic,
ultra-feminine and sexually available (Fong-Torres, 1995). Not coincidentally, there has
been a rise in Asian American female roles in film and television (not to mention the
conspicuous proliferation of Asian American female broadcasters), yet Asian American
men are conspicuously absent or typecast or relegated to stereotypical roles.
Popular cultural representations in film and television only confirm the
emasculated construction of the Asian American male. Take, for example, the character
of Han Lee, the Asian American male cast member of the CBS television series 2 Broke
Girls. Han Lee is the Korean American manager of the dive diner where the two main
female characters work. Han’s broken English is often mocked on the show, and his
character personifies the most regressive of Asian stereotypes: “short, geeky, and non-
sexual” (Goodman, 2011, para. 7). Moreover, the second installment of the popular
Hollywood comedy franchise, The Hangover, reinforces the emasculated image of the
Asian American male with the character of Mr. Chow, who, as one critic notes, is the butt
of the most cliché of penis jokes: “His naked man-handle is mistaken for a Shiitake
mushroom” (Yang, 2011, para. 5). Author Frank Chin notes that mainstream stereotypes
74
depict Asian-American men as “completely devoid of manhood,” and “our nobility is that
of an efficient housewife” (1972, p. 68).
Regrettably, these media representations of the asexual and geeky nerd continue
to appear in contemporary media representations. The cultural emasculation of the Asian
American male also engenders internalized notions of inferiority and distress. Research
shows that Whites viewed themselves as more attractive than U.S.-born Asian American
men, followed by immigrant Asian men (Chua & Fujino, 1999). As Lu and Wong point
out, given stereotyped media portrayals as passive, weak, and lacking hegemonic
masculine norms, Asian American men receive minimal positive body imagery (2013).
Unfortunately, this historical and cultural context has situated Asian-American men
against lingering racial stereotypes and elusive hegemonic norms.

Hegemonic Masculinity and American Sports Culture
Connell & Messerschmidt contend that hegemonic masculinity is a concept that
refers to a dominant masculinity that has been idealized in U.S. culture (2005). With
regard to masculinity, MacKinnon points out that “certain assumptions become
popularized as common sense” (2003, p. 9). This often involves persuasion through
cultural processes such as religious doctrine, legal discourse, and by the consumption of
mass media content. “Common sense” within a culture is formed, above all, by
“television, film, advertising, and sport as relayed to and received by huge audiences”
(MacKinnon, 2003, p. 9-10). The concept of hegemonic masculinity has aided
researchers in uncovering the diversity and selectiveness of media images, as well as
mapping representations of different masculinities (Hanke, 1992).
75
Hegemonic masculinity is also a racialized masculinity. It embodies the most
honored way of “being masculine” and it requires all other men to position themselves in
relation to it (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). Moreover, gender relations between men
reflect a hierarchy of intragender relations and masculinities (Connell, 2001). According
to Connell, in order for hegemonic masculinity to maintain its cultural dominance, it must
incorporate boundaries that contrast out-groups or subordinate masculinities (2001).
Subordinate masculinities, including effeminate heterosexual men, working-class men,
and homosexual men bolster hegemonic masculinity as devalued categories that contrast
hegemonic ideals (Connell, 1990). Compared to White or Black men, Asian American
men are uniquely subordinated within the hierarchy of hegemonic masculinity (Chen,
1999). As an out-group stripped of hegemonic ideals of masculinity, Asian American
men have historically been viewed as effeminate, asexual, and passive. Asian American
men are therefore branded with the inability to exude hegemonic masculinity. For this
chapter, I include Asian American males in the category of a subordinated masculinity
that is situated in contrast to hegemonic masculine norms.
Messner points out that organized sports are an important social institution that
inscribes masculinity (1992). Organized team sports emerged at the turn of the twentieth-
century as a means for symbolically reaffirming male physical superiority over women
and subordinate men (Crosset, 1990). Kimmel holds that the intersection of hegemonic
masculinity and the public sphere is the “marketplace masculinity” exemplified in
platforms such as sports and the military (1994). Particular types of sports can be labeled
“hyper-masculine” because they are integral to the construction and maintenance of
hegemonic masculinity. Team sports that involve direct physical contact (e.g. boxing,
76
football, basketball) have embodied the most dominant form of masculinity, while
individual sports that emphasize grace (e.g. figure skating, tennis, gymnastics) have been
associated with femininity (Kane 1988). High-contact and physically punishing sports
such as football and basketball are therefore integral to defining a hyper-masculine
discourse of “how to be a man” (Wachs & Dworkin, 1997). Moreover, high-profile
professional athletes may embody all that is valued in current cultural conceptions of
hegemonic masculinity—“physical strength, commercial success, supposed heterosexual
virility” (Messner, 1989, p. 85). Messner points out that analysis of sports should not be
limited merely to the notion that it is a patriarchal institution affirming men’s power over
women; the rise of sports in the last 150 years has had as much to do with the intersection
of class and race as it does with gender (1992). A variety of subordinated masculinities
have been created by social factors that include ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, age
(MacKinnon, 2003). Jack Johnson’s domination of professional pugilism (along with his
consorting of White women) in the early twentieth-century led sports writers to proclaim
that Johnson had “demonstrated that his race has acquired full stature as men” (Messner,
1992, p. 12). It is through sports mediation that such labels, and constructions of “what it
means to be a man” is promulgated and reinforced. One of the most powerful institutions
for maintaining hegemonic masculinity in the United States has been sports media, and
its representations of men and sport.
The popularity and importance of sport and its mediation is beyond reproach. As
Sabo and Jansen point out, more print is devoted to sports in the U.S. than to national and
international news (1992). According to the Wall Street Journal, America’s most
expensive cable-television channel is the Entertainment and Sports Programing Network
77
(“ESPN”) (Gara, 2012). ESPN is also the only cable channel ever to have more than 20
million households watching a regularly scheduled program—a feat it has accomplished
several times (Sherman, 2011). However, mediated sport offers more than just
entertainment spectacle; it has social and political relevance, and as MacKinnon (2003)
aptly point outs, its “‘innocent’ absorption of masculine values in the time-out area of
spectator sports has a peculiar significance, one that makes it a worthwhile research field”
(p. 103).
Sports media is an integral component of not only promulgating patriarchal (and
Protestant) values in its coverage, but it is also integral in its construction and
preservation of idealized notions of masculinity. Mass media offers a social and cultural
mapping of the world, to address “who we are” and “what we value.” Sports media play
an integral communicative role in legitimizing these values (MacKinnon, 2003).
Previous sports communication research shows that sports journalists are complicit in
preserving hegemonic masculinity while failing to acknowledge their own role in its
preservation (Burstyn, 1999). Embedded in sports media coverage are ideological
frameworks that bolster hegemonic masculinity, such as linking hegemonic masculinity
to positive cultural values and depicting hegemonic masculinity as desirable, while others
(e.g. gay, Asian) are assigned subordinate value. The institution of sports, and the media
covering sports, form an integral symbiotic relationship in reinforcing hegemonic
masculinity values.
Carrington aptly points out the “racial signification of sport” whereby sports
contests act as a key signifier for wider questions about identity within racially
demarcated societies where racial narratives are read both into and from sporting contests
78
that are injected with racial meanings (1998). Sports media outlets often use racially
coded language to inscribe masculine norms or police subordinated masculinities. Ferber
(2007) points out the naturalization of racial difference in sports discourse, where Black
athletes are often assumed to be “naturally more athletic.” Terms such as “freakish” or
“physically gifted” are often imputed on Black athletic success, further bolstering the
myth that Blacks are more naturally athletic. As Kobena Mercer notes, “The spectacle of
black bodies triumphant in rituals of masculine competition reinforces the fixed idea that
black men are ‘all brawn and no brains’” (1994, pp. 178). The existence of racialized
masculinities underscores how hegemonic masculinity is also a means for certain men to
dominate other men, and not simply men’s dominance over women. Additional areas of
sport research that have garnered scholarly attention include how sport media texts
contribute to the social construction of race, ethnicity, and nationality (Kassing et al.,
2004), how athletes of various ethnic groups are comparably portrayed in the media
(McCarthy, Jones, & Potrac, 2003; Trujillo, 1991), and meanings associated with sport in
relation to Black masculinity and cultural resistance (Carrington, 1998).
Scholarship on Asian Americans to sports communication has been limited and
has only recently emerged. LPGA golfer Michelle Wie’s ethnicity and gender have been
examined (Billings, Angelini, & Eastman, 2008), and the narrative characterizing figure
skater Kristi Yamaguchi as “foreign” during the 1992 Winter Olympics has also been
analyzed (Fabos, 2001). King (2006) examines anti-Asian American sentiment in sport
through performative and dialogic techniques to uncover how jokes and joking behaviors
binds Asian Americans to sport in the popular imaginary. Moreover, “Linsanity” evokes
the media spectacle surrounding Yao Ming’s entry into the NBA, but previous media
79
scholarship on Yao has mostly focused on his flexible marketability in the global
marketplace (Oates & Polumbaum, 2004; Wang, 2004). Lavelle (2011) analyzed
linguistic representations of Yao in game commentary to analyze the extent to which
such representations reproduce and reimagine Chinese cultural identity. These studies
focus on Yao’s global marketability and linguistic representations as a Chinese national
and global spokesperson for China. However, this chapter extends previous discussions
of sports communication research by analyzing media representations of Lin’s meteoric
rise in the NBA—as an Asian American—in order to understand if such representations
reinforce or challenge the dominant narratives on race and masculinity.

Research Methodology
The research here explores mediated coverage of Jeremy Lin’s meteoric rise in
the NBA, and how mass media, including sports columnists and journalists—opinion
leaders in sports media—contextualize issues of race, masculinity and sport. How would
Jeremy Lin’s meteoric rise be situated by mass media in relation to race and masculinity?
How would mainstream print media, as opposed to online sports network coverage,
situate issues of race and masculinity as it relates to the cultural phenomenon of
“Linsanity.” This research inquiry investigates the extent to which Jeremy Lin’s
meteoric rise in the NBA was situated by a cultural industry that operates within defined
hegemonic boundaries in connection with race and masculinity. In this chapter, race and
gender are viewed as social mappings that affect the construction of a racialized
masculinity and demarcate differences between hegemonic and subordinated masculinity.
80
To examine the extent to which sports media’s coverage of Lin’s meteoric rise
contextualizes race and masculinity this chapter employs a critical discourse analysis.
Operating from the premise that sports media texts offer a fertile space to examine
the way ideologies about sports, race and masculinity are being maintained or contested,
this case employs a textual analysis to the research as it aids in articulating “the
denotative meanings and make explicit the latent meanings” of racial representation in
sports media (Paek & Shah, 2003, p. 231). This method was used instead of quantitative
content analysis in order to understand how terms are used to create meaning (Hardin et
al., 2009). Rather than give special attention to only written terms or words over the
image, each of these dimensions in sports text was open to analysis. Using critical
discourse analysis, the aim of this research is to understand the way media messages were
constructed, considering word selection, use of puns, and narrative, in situating race and
masculinity.
Over 200 news articles, columns, and blogs covering Jeremy Lin’s rise from
February 5
th
, 2012 to March 15
th
2012, including both popular print and online sources
from national media outlets and national online sports blog sites were collected and
analyzed. February 5
th
marks the start of “Linsanity”—the day after Lin’s breakout
performance against the Utah Jazz—where he scored a then-career high 25 points and for
the first time in his career, played more than twenty minutes in a game. March 15
th
is
claimed by several sports writers as the end of “Linsanity” when then-New York Knick
coach Mike D’Antoni resigned.
2
This date also overlaps earlier dates (e.g. March 5
th
)
that are also claimed to be the “end of Linsanity.”
81
This project employed a LexisNexis database search for the terms “Jeremy Lin,”
published in U.S. newspapers from February 5
th
to March 15
th
, 2012. The LexisNexis
database indexes articles from over 50 major English-language newspapers from the U.S.
and around the world. The scope of the inquiry was narrowed to major U.S. newspapers,
which produced 607 articles in publications that include The New York Times, USA
Today, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. Articles with headlines that
referenced “Jeremy Lin,” “Lin,” or Lin-related puns (such as “Lin-sanity” “Lin-vincible”
“Lin-sane”) were then examined to determine whether Lin is just mentioned without
comment or a central focus of the article. After discarding articles that did not comment
substantively on Lin’s athletic exploits or cultural significance, 137 articles were
analyzed. The articles subjected to analysis included 31 articles from The New York
Times; 23 from USA Today; 30 from The New York Daily News; 14 from The New York
Post; 13 from The Los Angeles Times; 5 from The Wall Street Journal; 7 from
Washington Post; 5 from Washington Times; 4 from The Philadelphia Inquirer; 4 from
Christian Science Monitor and 1 from Tampa Tribune.
A limited number of media representations beyond print sources were also
evaluated to measure the depth and extent of Lin’s cultural significance with regard to
issues of race and masculinity. These media representations beyond print sources were
collected via Google Alert news feeds and Google searches. Google Alerts, starting from
February 10
th
, 2012, to March 15
th
, 2012, were used to track news stories or blog posts
that contained the query of “Jeremy Lin,” “Linsanity,” and “Asian American.” The
Google Alerts was set up to provide links to web pages, online articles, and blogs with
this query, and the volume was set at “only the best results” and alerts were sent once a
82
day from February 10
th
to March 15
th
. This news feed resulted in approximately 5.45
article links a day, for a total of 185 articles. However, most of these links mentioned Lin
without much comment (e.g. the content focused on the playoff race, or just mentioned
Lin’s name as a reference point without further comment). After discarding articles that
did not comment substantively on Lin or that overlapped with print articles collected
from the LexisNexis database, 42 articles from online news and web sources, including
sports new networks such as ESPN.com, SB Nation.com, Foxsports.com, and
CBSSports.com were reviewed for more in-depth analysis.
Furthermore, the Google search engine was used to conduct an Internet query
with the words “Jeremy Lin” and “Asian American.” This inquiry was conducted in June
2012 and the search was limited by duration dates of February 5
th
to March 15
th
and
produced 12,400 results. The results emerge in order of popularity. Google uses a
special (and secret) algorithm called PageRank to generate search results based on how
many other sites link to it.
3
Therefore, an examination of the first four pages of hits was
made, as these pages reflected the most popular links about the words in the search query.
These links provided additional grounds to collect artifactual data and explore popular
media representations of Lin that may have been overlooked or underreported by major
news outlets, or were not included in the LexisNexis database or Google Alerts feeds.
However, since only the first four pages of hits were reviewed, the Google search query
is admittedly limited in its scope.

83
Media Analysis
A majority of the articles and sports media blogs that covered “Linsanity” from
February 5
th
to March 15
th
, 2012 appeared to contextualize Lin’s rise as consistent with
the American myth narrative of “succeeding against all odds” or the Horatio Alger-esque
“rags-to-riches” story. Of the 137 print articles examined, 43 of the articles specifically
described Lin as an “Asian American,” “Chinese American,” or “Taiwanese American.”
However, Lin’s ethnicity is specifically mentioned in 37 of the 43 articles between
February 5
th
and 19
th
—at the start and height of “Linsanity.” This disproportinate result
is likely a reflection of the “newsworthiness” or novelty factor of having someone of
Lin’s ethnic background dominating the competition on the grand stage of the NBA.
After two weeks of the “Linsanity” media mania, the public was more familiar with the
fact that Lin is Asian American and therefore, media outlets were arguably less likely to
highlight his ethnic background.
Overall, this research found that a predominant number of articles and coverage in
mainstream or national newspapers did not overtly racialize Lin’s meteoric rise or
reinforce classical Asian American male stereotypes. This was an especially positive
finding considering the lack of balanced media representations for Asian Americans in
popular culture and the dearth of Asian American athletes in the NBA and other popular
professional sport leagues such as the NFL. The results here suggest that mainstream
sports media have become more sensitive to issues of race and portrayals of athletes than
in years past. However, this research also uncovered several media artifacts with subtle
(and not so subtle) underlying racist tropes in its coverage.

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Instances of Racialized Coverage
While the majority of the media coverage documenting Jeremy Lin’s rise to
stardom did not overtly racialize Lin’s success, several instances of racialized coverage
appeared from national media outlets. The New York Post’s February 15
th
front-page
headline declared Lin’s game-winning shot against the Toronto Raptors as “AMASIAN”
(“New York Post’s,” 2012). By combining the words “Amazing” and “Asian” for its
headline, the New York Post explicitly categorized Lin as the “other” and racialized his
success; it is unfathomable to think that such a racialized headline would be used to
describe the feats of Black or White players. Responding to the Post’s headline, Jon
Stewart of Comedy Central noted that “[i]t would be like when Sandy Koufax threw a
perfect game, you just wrote on there ‘JEWTIFUL’” (as cited in McCarthy, 2012a).
Moreover, after the first Knicks loss with Jeremy Lin in the starting lineup, an online
news page in ESPN.com ran a photo of Lin along with a headline that read, “Chink in the
Armor” (as cited in Fry, 2012). Although it is plausible that this insensitive selection of
words was just a “benign” editorial oversight, as one writer commenting on the headline
notes, “[a]s anyone who has worked in digital media knows, the headline is what draws
attention and hits … Unlike an on-air comment, most writers and editors obsess over the
headline even after they click the publish button” (McNeal, 2012, para. 4).
Further analysis of Lin’s media coverage uncovers how several opinion-makers
were unable to look beyond Lin’s ethnic background in defining and framing his sudden
success. Stereotypes of Asian Americans as the “perpetual foreigner” or aliens incapable
of assimilation have historically been pervasive in American society and resurfaced with
media coverage of Lin’s exploits. A February 21
st
, 2012 Wall Street Journal article
85
headline read “LINmigration Service,” and the article references Lin and the positive
impact of U.S. immigration policy when it “welcomes talented people” (“LINmigration
Service,” 2012). Writing for the February 2012 issue of The Atlantic, Robert Wright
posits that Jeremy Lin’s athletic success may have much to do with the “perceptual
tendencies” of his “East Asian” heritage; making Lin therefore, a better passer and
teammate (i.e. unselfish) due to his “East Asian” background. Wright quoted a
psychologist’s claim that Asians perceive reality more “holistically” than Westerners
(2012). In line with the model minority myth, the author’s comments also seem to evoke
the long-held perception that the “Confucian work ethic” of Asians is responsible for
their success. Even Lin’s own team media network couldn’t resist categorizing Lin as a
“foreigner” or ethnic “other.” During a game at Madison Square Garden (“MSG”), the
MSG television network aired a spectator-made poster depicting Lin’s face above a
fortune cookie with the slogan “The Knicks Good Fortune” (McCarthy, 2012b). Ice
cream-maker Ben & Jerry’s, eager to capitalize on the Lin media frenzy, began selling a
limited-edition flavor in honor of Jeremy Lin (Boren, 2012a). The ice cream named
“Taste the Lin-sanity” contained lychee honey and fortune cookies, in “honor” of Lin’s
Asian heritage.
Racially insensitive coverage of Lin even prompted the Asian American
Journalists Association (“AAJA”) to issue advisory guidelines for media outlets on
February 23
rd
, 2012, after several instances of “factual inaccuracies about Lin’s
background” and “an alarming number of references” that rely on stereotypes of Asians
surfaced (2012, para. 2). The racialized media coverage and the double-standard
practiced by the sports media with regards to race and representation was cleverly
86
underscored and satirized by the comedy-sketch show Saturday Night Live (“SNL”).
The SNL skit, in the form of a sports panel commentary by “New York Sports Now,”
addressed the overuse of Lin puns, and racially insensitive remarks by the sports media
(Tucker, 2012). After one of the White panelists makes a reference to Kobe Bryant and
“fried chicken,” the other panelists collectively chastise the White panelist for his
reference to the outdated African American stereotype. In a twist of irony, the skit even
runs footage of Jackie Robinson to honor “Black History Month,” while the narrator
concludes how Robinson’s legacy has made the sports world “more tolerant.” While the
panel tries to downplay the issue of race in connection with Lin’s success, the panelists
then continue to contextualize Lin’s success in a racialized manner. As the SNL skit
highlights, the mass media’s representations of Jeremy Lin and his success reveals a
continued framing of the Asian American athlete as “foreigner” and a racialized “other,”
while such coverage rarely surfaces for Black or White athletes.

Policing Masculinity
According to the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) at the
University of Central Florida, Black males made-up 76.3% of all NBA players, while
Asians accounted for 0.2% (“Report,” 2013). As a sport dominated by Black males,
basketball is a unique cultural arena (with the NFL a close second) in that it is one of the
few spaces in American society, where, as Todd Boyd notes, “blackness, and specifically
black masculinity, is always at the center of the conversation, even when it’s not …
Because black masculinity is the norm in the NBA, it goes without saying. Concurrently,
any conversation about race in the NBA is inevitably refers back to this norm” (as cited
87
by Leonard, 2012, para. 3). Several instances of mediated coverage of Lin revealed the
reinforcement of a subordinated masculinity manifested through an emasculation
discourse that situates Lin in contrast to hypermasculine norms. One sports writer for
The Washington Post surmised that very few professionals noticed Lin’s athletic ability
“because Lin does not seem like your regular NBA basketball player” (Bowen, 2012,
para. 5). The writer further concludes, “Lin is a good reminder to kids that just because
you don’t look like a player doesn’t mean you can’t play” (Bowen, 2012, para. 8). Here,
the writer alludes to the idea that a “regular” basketball player is one that is Black or
White, but certainly not someone who shares the physical attributes of an Asian
Ameircan male.
The emasculation discourse that followed Lin’s mediation further prompted the
AAJA to advise media outlets to “[u]se caution when discussing Lin’s physical
characteristics, particularly those that feminize/emasculate the Asian male” (“AAJA,”
2012, para. 6). However, the discourse of hegemonic masculinity was maintained and
reinforced through several instances of the sports media’s use of racially coded language
to contextualize Lin’s athletic success. Even before Lin became a national sensation with
New York, one sports writer summed up Lin’s talents by describing him as “deceptively
quick” (Megdal, 2011, para. 6). After “Linsanity” swept the nation by mid-February
2012, a sports writer for SB Nation similarly commented on Lin’s success and how he
“showed a deceptively quick first step, the basketball IQ to know what to do in the pick-
and-roll …” (Schroeder, 2012, para. 11). During an ESPN interview, Lin made specific
reference to how sports writers often describe his play: “Oh, he’s quicker than he looks.
And I’m like, ‘what does that mean? Do I look slow?’ Or people are always saying,
88
‘He’s deceptively quick, deceptively athletic.’ I don’t know if that’s just because I’m
Asian or what it is” (“Jeremy Lin convo,” 2012). Here, the narrative of Lin’s athletic
ability has been contextualized behind the backdrop of a hegemonic masculinity that is
associated with blackness and hypermasculinity. Lin has been contextualized as not
embodying the traits of hegemonic masculinity; the discourse of masculinity has been
both racialized and policied by the sports media with code words such as “deceptively
quick” or “deceptively athletic.” By incorporating layers of racial stereotypes, Lin’s
athletic ability and quickness is situated as “deceptive” because as an Asian American
male, he does not embody the stereotypical definition of what it means to be athletic,
masculine or to “look like a player.” Rather, racial stereotypes hold that Asian American
males are by nature slow, weak and un-athletic. By employing such code words to
describe Lin’s abilities, dominant notions of hegemonic and subordinated masculinities
are further reinforced.
Published comments by a Fox Sports’ columnist regarding Lin’s performance
during an upset win against the Los Angeles Lakers further bolstered the emasculation
discourse surrounding Lin’s mediation. After Lin’s 38-point performance against the
L.A. Lakers, Jason Whitlock posted a thinly-veiled reference to a racist stereotype about
Asian male genitalia when he tweeted, “Some lucky lady in NYC is gonna feel a couple
of inches of pain tonight” (“Jason Whitlock,” 2012, para. 2). In a league where Black
masculinity is the norm and has been mediated as hypermasculine, Whitlock’s
statements, while misogynistic, also reinforce the notion that Asian men are thus void of
authentic masculinity, and are situated within a subordinated category. Male athletes are
often valued for their multiple sexual “conquests” (of women) and this narrative is
89
consistent with the definition of being a heterosexual man (Wachs & Dworkin, 1997).
Whitlock’s comments, as part of an emasculation discourse, helps solidify the linkage
between that which is masculine (i.e. sexual “conquests” of women) and those who are
subordinated or void of it (i.e. Asian).
On one hand, Whitlock’s statements reinforce one of the core values in the
discourse of hegemonic masculinity: the ritual of celebrating a sport (or military) victory
with sexual conquests of women. Masculinity is also hegemonic when heterosexually
defined, and sexual relationships, or “conquests” of women embody “what it means to be
a man” (e.g. Wilt Chamberlain’s assertion that he had sexual relationships with 20,000
women has been well documented and celebrated in sports media). As Wachs and
Dworkin (1997) point out, “the media protect heterosexual male promiscuity from
censure” while other subordinated groups are often blamed and sanctioned. Whitlock’s
comments reinforce hegemonic masculine values with regard to heterosexual conquests
of women while reinforcing the notions of racialized masculine boundaries. If the
symbolism of male sexuality is centered on the penis as the ultimate symbol of male
potency, asserting that Lin is unable to embody such a cultural conception therefore
operates to police and further legitimate notions of hegemonic masculinity.

Media Mania and the “Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations”
The media fanaticism that followed Jeremy Lin’s incredible run with the Knicks
blazed like a comet for several weeks in February of 2012; almost overnight, Lin and the
cultural phenomenon of “Linsanity” gripped the nation. “Linsanity” immediately went
viral, and within a week from the start of “Linsanity” a Google search returned more than
90
2.1 million search results in over 6,700 news sources (Lariviere, 2012). According to the
social web index site Topsy, “Jeremy Lin” had been mentioned 146,000 times, “Lin”
530,000 times, and “Linsanity” 42,000 times in the first two weeks of February (Ngak,
2012). Moreover, Ngak points out that YouTube highlights of Lin’s 38-point game
against the Los Angeles Lakers had over 1.6 million views, and the Nielsen rating for the
network that aired Knicks games had a 130 percent growth in viewership (2012).
Deadpsin.com, which tracks how often an athlete or team is mentioned during ESPN’s
SportCenter’s broadcast, revealed that Jeremy Lin’s name was used 350 times during the
height of “Linsanity” (February 13-20); comparatively, Lebron James was mentioned
“only” 70 times (Burns, 2012).
However, I argue that the extraordinary media attention that followed Lin’s
performances were culturally invested with much more than the popular underdog
narrative. Although the majority of mainstream media outlets did not overtly racialize
Lin’s success, the intense media attention of Lin’s breakout performances in early
February 2012 gave rise to a media mania that operates to preserve the dominant
discourse of masculinity and reinforce how improbable, unique, and “miraculous” it is for
an Asian American male to be athletically talented at such an elite level. This media
mania had as much to do with Lin’s ethnic background as it did with the contagious
narrative of the underdog. Boxing champion Floyd Mayweather commented that the
sports/media frenzy following Lin was due to his ethnicity: “Jeremy Lin is a good player
but all the hype is because he's Asian. Black players do what he does every night and
don't get the same praise” (Boren, 2012b, para. 3). While Mayweather’s comments may
be perceived as racially insensitive, they are not completely unfounded within the context
91
of race and the discourse of masculinity. Although Lin’s story deeply resonated with
fans as it directly tapped into several powerful American myths regarding the “Protestant
work ethic,” social mobility, and his journey “against all odds,” the fact remains that Lin
is currently the only Asian American player in the NBA.
4
The exhausting media
coverage of Lin points to an episode of racial exceptionalism; the mass media’s
“celebration” of an Asian American male succeeding in a sport where they are not
expected to.
Lin’s race was undoubtedly a significant factor as to why he garnered very little
interest from collegiate basketball programs. Lin was Northern California player of the
year, first team all-state and captained his high school team to a state championship
victory over national powerhouse Mater Dei. No school, neither Stanford nor San Jose
State, recruited his services. After a stellar college career at Harvard, Lin also went
undrafted by the NBA. Like the college coaches who likely discounted Lin’s abilities,
many NBA scouts and managers likely dismissed Lin’s athletic talents because Lin did
not embody the hegemonic masculine ideals that NBA professionals harbored and
accepted as “prototypical.” As Sports Illustrated columnist Phil Taylor pointed out, “I
knew on some level that part of the reason Lin was so quickly dismissed was that NBA
people had a hard time believing that an Asian-American could play point guard in the
NBA, which is why I'm kicking myself -- I didn't question the conventional wisdom even
though it didn't go along with what I saw with my own eyes” (2012, para. 4). If the
“conventional wisdom” of hegemonic masculine norms situates Asian American men in a
subordinated masculinity and void of athleticism, then Lin’s race was most likely a
crucial factor in his potential being “discounted” by college and professional coaches.
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The media mania that ensued with Lin’s success operated to confirm and
reinforce ideal notions of masculinity; the intense coverage by the mass media displayed
what one former presidential speechwriter coined “the soft bigotry of low expectations”
(Wertheimer, 2006). His success perplexed many sports media writers, and the intense
coverage of Lin’s exploits by the sports media confirmed how deeply entrenched the
norms of masculinity is situated. In other words, Lin succeeded well beyond the low
expectations that his body is culturally inscribed with (i.e. passive, weak and unathletic).
Although the narratives of “hard work” and “perseverance in the face of adversity”
factored into his cultural appeal, Lin was the “underdog of underdogs” precisely because
of his ethnicity, and his ability to compete and succeed at the highest levels of athletic
competition conflicted with the subordinated masculine norms that Asian American men
are situated within. Lin’s performances therefore went beyond the “low expectations”
inscribed in Asian male bodies and morphed into a media mania; his performances
undermined the expectation that Asian men are not athletically fit to compete in a
hypermasculine space such as the NBA.
The cultural by-product of such suffocating media coverage is the reinforcement
of the dominant masculinity discourse that defines subordinated masculine groups such
as Asian American men. Lin’s presence and success is heralded as “miraculous” and the
intense coverage reminds the masses how “unique” or “special” Lin is in overcoming the
“limitations” of the Asian body to perform at an elite athletic level. It is a longstanding
stereotype that Asian men are not physically equipped, or somehow physically-
disadvantaged to succeed in hypermasculine sports like basketball or football; so when
someone like Lin scores 38-points against the Lakers and gets the win—the sports media
93
must highlight this “aberration” as “magical” but also “unimaginable” (or dare I say
“Linpossible”) within the discourse of masculinity.

Conclusion
As Messner points out, the rise of sports in the twentieth-century had much to
with issues of class and race, as it did with gender (1992). Sports provide a space where
individuals can assert masculinity, and engage in practices that shape as well as reinforce
masculine norms. Drawing from the work of Foucault, Woodward notes “the categories
that organize people in sport are not just the result of the sort of body they have, but also
of the social and historical circumstances, which means that bodies are the effect and not
the cause of the particular categories that are used” (2011). The emasculation discourse
that linked Lin and his athletic success is also grounded in historical and legal
constructions of Asian men as “other” (Park, 2013). Like the institutions of law and
politics, the mass media has been an integral cultural apparatus in shaping, and
reinforcing hegemonic masculine norms.
As an Asian American in a sport that features few such players, Lin’s success in
the NBA has on one hand, helped to upend racial preconceptions of Asian men as weak
and un-athletic. The media spectacle that followed Lin’s meteoric rise in one of the
world’s most popular sports also highlighted and expanded the discourse on sports, race,
and masculinity. Overall, this study showed that the majority of sports writers in
mainstream print news outlets avoided describing Jeremy Lin’s success in racialized or
stereotypical terms. This research did however, locate several instances of racialized
coverage in mainstream news articles, popular online sports network sites, blogs, and
94
popular cultural artifacts, and the analysis showed that such media representations still
operate within a dominant ideological field in the construction and maintenance of a
racialized and hegemonic masculinity. While Jeremy Lin’s presence and stardom in the
NBA has been linked to the dismantlement of several stereotypes of Asian American
men, the fanatical coverage of Lin’s meteoric rise, on the other hand, also underscored
the regulatory practices by which subordinated masculine bodies are configured and
policed.
This chapter explored the extent to which to mass media contextualized Jeremy
Lin’s rise to stardom, and analyzed assumptions that may have been grounded in the
media coverage, including how race and masculinity is defined within a dominant
ideological field. On one hand, the results of the research suggest that mainstream media
representations have become more sensitive to racialized portrayals of athletes, even for
an Asian American athlete in a league devoid of them. This is undoubtedly a positive
finding, and an important step in the mediated coverage of sports. However, this chapter
also documented how intense sports media coverage—the likes of which the world
witnessed with the media mania known as “Lin-sanity”—can also operate to reinforce
dominant and hegemonic masculine norms through the lens of racial exceptionalism.

95
Chapter Three Notes
1. Misaka played a total of three regular-season games for the New York Knicks in
1947, scoring a total of seven points (Vecsey, 2009).

2. Howard Beck (2012) and Marcel Mutoni (2012) of the New York Times and
SlamOnline respectively, claim that the resignation of then-New York Knick
coach Mike D’Antoni and the hiring of Mike Woodson as coach spelled the end
to a system that fit Lin’s strengths and style of play.

3. Google PageRank. https://support.google.com/toolbar/answer/79837?hl=en

4. There have been a small number of Chinese nationals who played in the NBA,
most notably Yao Ming and Yi Jianlian. Yao retired from the NBA in 2011. Yi
played for the Dallas Mavericks in 2012.

96
CHAPTER FOUR: PSY-ZING UP THE MAINSTREAMING OF
“GANGNAM STYLE”: EMBRACING ASIAN MASCULINITY AS
NEO-MINSTRELSY?
Korean pop (“K-pop”) musician Psy (aka Park Jae-Sang) became a pop-cultural
sensation with his viral Internet meme “Gangnam Style.” By the end of 2012, the
audiovisual meme became the first YouTube video to reach one billion views, and it
reached this milestone in just over five months (Netburn, 2012). As of March 2014, the
video has generated over 1.9 billion views, making it the most popular YouTube video
ever. Within a few months of the video’s release, Psy made his television debut on
shows such as The Today Show, Ellen, Chelsea Lately, and even an appearance on
Saturday Night Live. Never before had a K-pop artist reached such epic crossover
success, despite the fact that dozens of acts from Asia have sought (and failed) to find
crossover success in the U.S. market.
Although Psy’s crossover appeal is largely unprecedented, his overwhelming
popularity has many Koreans both gratified and puzzled. The K-pop music industry is
primarily made up of young and attractive singers who often flaunt their sexuality. Psy
however, is a comedic performer who is significantly older (mid-30s), portly, and stands
as an anti-Adonis figure. Without question the “Gangnam Style” video has a catchy
melody and is visually seductive with its scenes of colorful juxtaposition, wacky set-ups
and Psy’s signature horse dance. Unbeknownst to most viewers, the video and the song’s
lyrics offer a subversive message: Psy’s scathing critique of materialism and
superficiality run amok in Korea’s trendiest district—“Gangnam.” But as critical
scholars concede, it is often difficult to distinguish parody and social satire from the
97
ideological reproduction of stereotypes in comedic performances found in television,
film, or music videos. Scholars frequently debate the question as to whether viewers are
laughing at stereotyped minority figures or with them (Hall, 1990; Weaver, 2010). Are
we laughing at or with Psy in “Gangnam Style”?
On one hand, it is possible to conclude that Psy’s crossover success represents
greater social acceptance of Asian men who have historically been marginalized in
mainstream media. However, Psy’s physicality in the video also evokes one of the Asian
male stereotypes: the emasculated and clownish Asian male. It is a racial caricature that
is non-threatening to the hegemonic (white) masculinity that has been constructed as the
ideal (Connell, 2001). A critical investigation of this pop cultural viral craze reveals that
Psy’s popularity in the U.S. is due in large part because he conforms to the role of the
funny, sexless, Asian clown or jester—a figure one can laugh at! The enormous
popularity of Psy’s “Gangnam Style” makes it an ideal cultural artifact through which to
examine the apparent paradox between a potentially racist reception and celebration of a
comedic Internet visual meme and its sweeping popularity in a supposed “post-racial”
American cultural imaginary.
Through the viral media mania of “Gangnam Style,” this article examines the
ideological implications of this Internet meme’s audiovisual appeal and its celebrated
reception on national television programs. This investigation will highlight the
intersectionality of race, sexuality, and masculinity within the context of “Gangnam
Style”’s mass appeal and addresses whether the popular embrace of “Gangnam Style”
offer alternative discourses or reinforce ideological constructions of Asian masculinity.
A textual analysis of the audiovisual text and Psy’s television debut identifies the
98
ideological implications that reflect as well as reinforce the emasculation discourse that
situates Asian masculinity as neo-minstrelsy. Moreover, through an audience reception
analysis, this study examines how viewers make sense of the audiovisual content and its
appeal, in relation to the textual devices found in the video. Although this investigation
does not purport to reveal the only or the most pertinent element(s) that triggered the
popularity of the song and video (the author concedes there are several factors as to why
“Gangnam Style” achieved mainstream success), the analysis here provides valuable
insight to how the reception and celebratory embrace of audiovisual text—whether in
film, television or in this case, a music video—reflects the emasculation discourse that
defines Asian men.

Race, masculinity and “pop” music: Crossing over, but unable to “crossover”
Although the concept of pop music is understood as a secular and accessible body
of music enjoyed by a large percentage of a given society, music that is identified as “pop
music” is in constant flux. In the fall of 2012, as “Gangnam Style” was making its
meteoric rise in popular culture, Billboard magazine reformatted their music chart
methodology to define—in today’s social-media-wired world—what constitutes a “hit”
(McKinley, 2012). Billboard decided to count digital sales and online streaming data,
along with terrestrial radio airplay in its methodology, while also creating two new
charts—“Rap” and “R&B”—with the same criteria (McKinley, 2012). The resulting
changes reflect the way music is consumed, both over-the-air, and increasingly, with
online formats such as Vevo and YouTube. With the influx of video sharing websites,
sites like YouTube offer transnational flows of visual content with ease of distribution
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and consumption of audiovisual media. Ono and Kwon (2013) contend that the rising
popularity of YouTube significantly altered the status of K-pop in the world as a cultural
force. According to Ono and Kwon (2013), “The virality of K-pop videos on YouTube
played a crucial marketing, distributional, and advertising role in promoting K-pop as a
popular entertainment form worldwide” (p. 200). The popularity of online music video
consumption, coupled with Billboard’s new chart calibrations not only reflect changes in
how music is consumed, but also underscores the continued importance of the visual
image—via music videos, other online content—that accompany the audio in today’s
media ecosystem. How the visual, coupled with the audio is popularly received will now
undoubtedly impact what constitutes a “hit” and crossover success.
Interestingly, Psy’s “Gangnam Style” was near the top of the Singles Pop Chart
while securing the number one song on the new Rap Songs Chart, even though Psy does
not rap on the track and most hip-hop stations did not embrace him as a “rapper”
(McKinley, 2012). This raises an intriguing question: does Billboard’s new de jure
categorization of Psy’s hit song as “rap” make Psy a “crossover” artist and where exactly
is he “crossing-over” from? As Reebee Garofalo (1995) notes, “On those rare occasions
when a recording became popular in more than one market, it was said to ‘crossover.’
While the term can be used to indicate simply simultaneous appearance on more than one
chart, its most common usage in popular music history connotes movement from margin
to mainstream” (p. 277). According to Rodman (2006) questions of race are essential to
understanding every major form of U.S. popular music since the rise of minstrelsy.
Billboard continues to demarcate its charts along racial/ethnic lines, which include “Rap”
and “Latin,” while the “Hot 100” pop chart is reserved de facto for the (White)
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mainstream. The crossover label therefore presents the mainstream as a white genre; it is
popularly understood to be the province of what Black, Latin, or ethnic is not.
While Psy’s “Gangnam Style” has become both a genre crossover and
transnational hit, Asian musicians that have attempted to infiltrate the U.S. popular music
market have historically found very little success. Although they may have reached
superstardom in Asia, such success has rarely translated beyond anonymity in the U.S. In
1963, Kyu Sakamoto became the first and only Asian artist to reach the top of the
Billboard charts with his melancholy tune, “Sukiyaki” (St. Michel, 2012). Most Asian
artists however, have yet to approach the success Sakamoto found with his one-hit (in the
U.S.) wonder, making the popularity of Psy’s “Gangnam Style” a rarity in the U.S. pop
market. More recently, K-pop superstar Rain, who in 2006 was chosen as one of “Time
Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People” established unprecedented music success
throughout Asia. He was commonly referred to as the “Usher of Asia” with his highly
coordinated dance moves that accentuated his chiseled physique. However, Rain has yet
to find crossover success in the U.S. music market; his “popularity” in the U.S. has been
limited to a few concerts in New York and Los Angeles.
As Eun-Young Jung (2013) aptly points out, Asian artists have attempted to
penetrate a market with very little interest in Korean or Asian pop music, and “their
visible identities as Asian inevitably placed them within the entanglements of race and
sexuality in America’s popular imagination” (p. 107). Since the 1980s, there has been a
heavy reliance on the visual materials to promote and market popular music, and as Jung
(2013) explains, “the physical appearance of the musicians and the reactions to their
appearance by the audience of potential customers have been very important
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commercially and aesthetically” (p. 107). As several scholars note, the crossover success
of the Latino music “boom” (“Lat-pop”) of the late 1990s, which included musicians
such as Ricky Martin, Christina Aguilera, and Enrique Iglesias, was due in part to
phenotypical considerations; these artists are light-skinned, have a European look, and
therefore have an appearance of “whiteness” (Bender, 2000; Cepeda, 2000). Moreover,
these artists also recorded predominantly in English, which is, with few exceptions, the
language for commercial success in the U.S. pop music scene. The images of these
artists, and the appearance of assimilation, were therefore important elements that
enabled Lat-pop to find mainstream success in the U.S. music market.
Asian and Asian American artists also face challenges associated with their
image, including stereotypical images that continue to occupy popular culture. Given
these stereotypical media portrayals as asexual and lacking hegemonic masculine norms,
it comes as no surprise that Asian men receive minimal positive body imagery (Lu &
Wong, 2013). These stereotypical images clash with the physicality, aggressiveness and
“coolness” factor required for pop music stardom. As one writer observes, “Asian-
Americans may be expected to play the violin or know martial arts, but not necessarily to
sound like Kanye West or Madonna, or sell like them” (Navarro, 2007). During the sixth
season of “American Idol,” Korean-American contestant and finalist Paul Kim was
praised by the judges for his “range” and “tonal quality,” but after being voted off by
viewers, Kim explained that he was told over and over again by countless label execs that
“if it weren’t for me being Asian, I would’ve been signed yesterday” (Navarro, 2007). In
examining the (racial) boundaries around American popular music, Mina Yang (2013)
explains that Asian American artists such as the JabbaWockeeZ and Far East Movement
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“must contend with the formidable challenge of performing in front of audiences who
come with certain expectations that have been shaped by pernicious stereotypes of Asian
(non)manhood” (p. 28). In order to avoid these racial constraints, members of the
JabbaWockeeZ wear blank white masks and costumes that cover every inch of their
bodies. As one member candidly puts it “The idea of the mask is to remove all ethnic
and social barriers when we perform” (Mallare, 2008). Yang (2013) notes that Far East
Movement’s music and self-representation largely removes its “Asianness,” and band
members often “sport dark sunglasses in most of their appearances, obscuring their eyes,
the most ethnically marked features on an Asian face” (p. 30).
Contemporary K-pop acts however, are predominantly made up of young,
fashionable stars that are not afraid to hide their sexuality and chiseled bodies; they exude
a masculinity that runs counter to what Psy’s image evokes. Jung (2010) highlights how
Rain’s physicality and sexuality is explicitly displayed for viewers of his videos. She
contends that Rain has offered a “provocative and potentially irksome, if not offensive,
confrontation to American masculinity” (2010, p. 233). These counter-hegemonic
images by K-pop artists directly clash with the emasculated image of Asian men in
popular culture, and it comes as no surprise that the emasculated image of the Asian male
operates as a substantial factor as to why K-pop singers and boy bands have been unable
to garner popular appeal and crossover success in the pop music market. The relative
absence of Asian or Asian American commercial success in the pop music market
underscores how important image and race matter with regard to the acceptance and
consumption of music. In seeking to penetrate the mainstream, Asian and Asian
American musicians must contend with and negotiate hegemonic notions of masculinity
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and sexuality. Crossover appeal thus reflects the intersectional dynamics of race, gender,
and masculinity embedded in the boundaries of popular music.

Comedy, race and masculinity: Laughing at the Othered
There is a sociopolitical tension in comedy, wherein comedy can be employed to
challenge tired and one-dimensional stereotypes, but can also be employed to reinforce
prevailing notions of marginalized groups. As Geoff King (2002) notes, laughter at
others is one-way social groups define themselves, “a process consisting to a large extent
of distinctions between self and other” (p. 144). Critical scholars contend that in a
society deeply rooted in institutionalized racism, race-based jokes and stereotypes operate
to solidify hierarchically structured racial differences (Hall, 1990: Omi, 1989). The
conventions of comedy can be employed to affirm dominant ideological positions by
diffusing critical interpretations of racial or emasculation discourse. Comedy extends
the alleged harmlessness of interpersonal jokes, which allows controversial content in
mediated representations to be considered acceptable (King, 2002, p.149). As an
ideological terrain of struggle, Hall (1990) explains that media images provide the
frameworks through which we interpret, understand, and “make sense” of some aspect of
social existence. Hall (1990) explains that race-based comedy is a “licensed zone,
disconnected from the serious” and the conventions of comedy “ultimately protects and
defends viewers from acknowledging their incipient racism” (p.17). According to Hall
(1990) several historic base-images of the “grammar of race” have been historically
naturalized by mediated images in film and other media forms. One variant includes the
“clown” or “entertainer,” and according to Hall, “[i]t is never quite clear whether we are
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laughing with or at this figure: admiring the physical and rhythmic grace, the open
expressivity and emotionality of the ‘entertainer,’ or put off by the ‘clown’s’ stupidity”
(p.22).
Those constructed as racially inferior have historically been constructed as figures
of fun and comic derision (Lokyer & Pickering, 813). In contemporary popular culture,
comedy is often utilized as a vehicle to reinforce dominant notions of Asian masculinity
by ridiculing and laughing at Asian men. In the same way that blackface minstrel shows
ridiculed African Americans, emasculated Asian jesters or clown figures are accepted and
allowed to generate laughs, at the expense of lampooning them. As Hall notes, the traces
of the clown or jester image are still to be observed today, but have been reworked with
modern and up-dated images (Hall, 2011). One of these contemporary traces of the
clown or jester image can be easily identified with the celebration and appeal of the
former American Idol contestant, William Hung. For many Americans, Hung was the
most recognizable “Asian singer” before Psy’s meteoric rise. Hung gave a self-
humiliating performance as he sang an off-key rendition of Ricky Martin’s “She Bangs”
for the judges of American Idol. He personified the emasculated Asian nerd trope; he
had a strong accent, buckteeth, and the media never failed to mention that he was
studying engineering. His audition immediately went viral, and one thing was clear:
audiences were laughing at him. Hung’s buffoonery was commercially exploited and
was highly profitable; his first album, Inspiration, sold 200,000 copies and he
subsequently starred in several music videos (Navarro, 2007). The media mania
surrounding this uncoordinated and tuneless overnight sensation baffled Idol host Ryan
Seacrest: “For whatever reason, people just like to watch William Hung” (Moss, 2004).
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Although some were surprised by Hung’s popular “appeal,” his sudden celebrated status
aligns with the dominant construction that ties Asian masculinity (or lack thereof) as the
subject of ridicule and humiliation. His popularity is indicative of popular culture’s
appetite for the tired image of the emasculated Asian male: short, geeky and
unfashionable. As Iwamoto and Liu (2009) explain, “William Hung had become the
contemporary Asian American equivalent of an African American minstrel singer” (p.
214).
Moreover, Hollywood’s recent employment of the clown variant can be found
with the Asian characters in the commercially successful Rush Hour and Hangover
trilogies. According to Balaji (2011), media corporations have little incentive to change
what has been profitable: the (re)production of images that lampoon or typecast Asian
masculinity while upholding the white hegemonic masculine ideal. Balaji (2011)
contends that the Rush Hour trilogy exploit Asian masculinity as neo-minstrelsy, where
Asian male characters must embody caricatured representations and be subjected to jokes
about their lack of sexuality, in order to have on-screen legitimacy (2011). For instance,
Carter (played by Chris Tucker), often makes fun of Lee (played by Jackie Chan), by
subjecting Lee to numerous jokes about his sexual prowess, creating the impression that
Asian males “are unable to achieve hegemonic male status of (hetero) hypersexuality”
(Balaji, 2011, p. 193). Another contemporary version of Asian masculinity as neo-
minstrelsy can be found in the Hangover trilogy. The character of “Chow”
(inconspicuously named “Leslie Chow” and played by Ken Jeong) embodies a feminized
Asian male who speaks with an awkward “Asian-ized accent,” and whose physicality
throughout the trilogy reifies the emasculated image of the Asian male. In the first
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Hangover film, Chow’s shoes are mistaken for “women’s shoes,” and later described as a
“men’s size 6.” Chow makes his screen debut when he jumps out of a car trunk naked
and thrusts his genitals into the neck of Phil (played by Bradley Cooper) and yells, “you
gonna fuck on me?” In the sequel, Chow, as one critic notes, is the butt of the most
cliché of penis jokes: “His naked man-handle is mistaken for a Shiitake mushroom”
(Yang, 2011, para. 5). Throughout the trilogy, Chow’s physicality is the center of humor;
jokes that exploit Asian masculinity as comic relief requires Chow to conform to the role
of comedic jester. This formula has been highly profitable; the Hangover trilogy is
currently the highest-grossing R rated film ever.
Given this marginalized context, where Asian male bodies are exposed to the
specters of American Idol’s William Hung, The Hangover’s Leslie Chow, and Rush
Hour’s caricature of Asian males, the sudden popularity of Psy’s “Gangnam Style” is
deserving of in-depth analysis that deconstructs the ideological implications concerning
the video’s appeal. Psy’s celebratory reception is situated at the intersection of race,
masculinity, comedy and the outer limits of popular music. The purpose of the present
study is to examine the ideological implications of Psy’s celebratory reception on
mainstream American television shows and investigate whether these mediated
appearances and the video’s popular reception naturalize and reinforce Asian masculinity
as subordinated and Othered.

Psy’s “Gangnam Style”: Embracing Asian masculinity as neo-minstrelsy?
To better understand how Psy’s image fits with the popular trope of Asian
masculinity, a descriptive synopsis of the “Gangnam Style” video will first be provided.
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The synopsis will highlight the visual imagery that evokes western (American)
constructions of Asian masculinity. Psy’s physicality and the visual set-ups are consistent
with popular images of the comedic Asian jester—who generates laughs—at the expense
of reinforcing racial categorization. The synopsis is then followed by a critical reading of
Psy’s mediated public appearances on mainstream television programs (e.g. daytime and
late-night programming) that decode ideological implications that naturalize the
emasculation discourse that Asian men are situated in. A few points of reference will
guide the critical analysis of the song and video’s celebratory reception, and Psy’s
mediated appearances. First, Barry Brummett (2006) explains that texts are sites of
struggle over meaning, and people struggle over how to interpret texts to make sense of
their world. In the process of struggle over meanings of race and representation, people
interpret it in ways that reinforce or align with their own social reality (Brummett, 2006).
For instance, Brummett (2006) points out that the meaning of popular music favored by
young people has always been struggled over; making a musical artist stand for one kind
of text versus another is therefore one goal of rhetorical struggle (2006). Second, critical
media scholars have provided a substantial body of work on Asian male marginalization
in the media (Hamamoto, 1994; Ono & Pham, 2008; Shimizu, 2012), but less critical
attention has been paid on Asian masculinity as neo-minstrelsy (Park, Gabbadon, &
Chernin, 2006; Balaji, 2011). The analysis here extends the ongoing interrogation of race
and (Asian) masculinity in the media, inspired by the critical discourse and analytical
model set forth by cultural studies, including the work of Fiske (1987, 1989), and Hall
(1996).
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Although Psy’s “Gangnam Style” song and video was never marketed specifically
to the American music market, with over 1.9 billion hits (and counting), Psy became the
first Asian singer in the modern era to achieve mainstream popularity. “Gangnam Style”
was the first single released from his sixth album, Psy 6, and the video was uploaded in
mid-July 2012. Soon after, social media and news sites such as Reddit featured the
video, and Twitter feeds from high-profile artists such as Robbie Williams and T-Pain
helped propel the video to become a viral cultural phenomenon (Billboard 2012). The
video begins with the portly face of Psy basking in the sun in what appears to be a “day at
the beach,” but as the camera pulls back, the image reveals that Psy is sitting in a
children’s sandlot. Psy then performs his signature horse dance in a horse stable, before
being accompanied by two “sexy ladies” along a trash and dust-filled parking structure.
Subsequent images show a semi-naked Psy in a men’s sauna, and later his portly body is
seen clumsily splashing in a hot tub. The video is largely filled with scenes of Psy
performing his horse dance next to Asian females who are dancing in choreographed set-
ups or are objects of the male (hetero) gaze. A comical scene in an elevator shows a male
dancer repeatedly thrusting his pelvis in the air, while Psy sings lying between the
dancer’s legs. Without the ability to understand the lyrics however, the visual
juxtaposition of these various sequences do not make the parodic elements underlying the
song’s social critique readily apparent. Thus, the subversive message in the song and
video—that parodies the wealthiest and most influential neighborhood in South Korea—
is left unnoticed or incomprehensible to the mass (American) audience.
In the absence of satirical decoding for most viewers, the qualities of the image
are intensified, where viewers are left focusing on the melody, the comical visuals, and
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Psy’s minstrelsy. The failure of most viewers to decode the text makes Psy no longer the
jokester; Psy becomes the joke. Psy’s performativity is rooted with a genre of
entertainers in Korea referred to as “gwang-dae,” who are more clown or jester-like;
these entertainers are seen as musical comedians rather than actual K-pop acts (Jones,
2012). However, the construction of Asian masculinity in U.S. popular culture often ties
up Asian male bodies as the subject of ridicule and humiliation. If buffoonery has been
one of the most common images of Asian men in the Western markets (Banerjee, 2006;
Balaji, 2011), then members of the dominant culture are likely to translate texts into their
own cultural schema that reinforce dominant ideologies.
Psy’s image and performativity do not disrupt hegemonic ideals of masculinity;
he embodies the emasculated Asian male clown variant that mainstream can easily
consume. For most U.S. (and Western) consumers, the social critique of Gangnam’s
superficiality has no bearing on the video’s appeal. Like Leslie Chow of the Hangover
trilogy or American Idol’s William Hung, Psy exemplifies the Asian male trope of the
emasculated, and non-threatening buffoon. Given the historical and cultural context that
equates Asian masculinity with comic fodder, Psy owes a large part of his mainstream
popularity and music legitimacy to popular culture’s longstanding appetite for caricatured
images of Asian males.

Televised public appearances: descriptions and analysis
To determine the extent to which the celebratory reception of Psy reconfirms
Asian masculinity as neo-minstrelsy and Asian male Otherness, nationally televised
public appearances of Psy during September of 2012 were analyzed. The mediated texts
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subject to critical inquiry include Psy’s televised appearances on daytime talk shows, and
late-night variety and comedy programs. By mid-September, the video had attracted over
150 million hits, and established a Guinness world record as the “most liked” video in
YouTube history (Barrett, 2012). Psy made his first (and the majority) of Psy’s
nationally-televised public appearances in U.S. media during this month. Television
programs including The Ellen DeGeneres Show, NBC’s Today Show, Saturday Night
Live, and Chelsea Lately were reviewed, and the analysis of these televised segments is
aided by Condit’s model of making informed interpretation of texts; a model that
incorporates references to the cultural-historical context of the images, and comparing /
contrasting them with other media images (1989).

Textual descriptions
The Ellen DeGeneres Show is a talk-variety show hosted by comedian and actress
Ellen DeGeneres. Debuting in 2003, the daytime talk-and-variety show is described as
an Emmy-winning, “upbeat” talk show that features celebrity interviews, music
appearances and viewer participation (TV Guide). The Today Show on NBC is an
American morning television show that is currently the only four-hour American
morning television broadcast (Today). Originally launched by NBC news in 1952, this
morning news program is self-described as “a live broadcast that provides the latest in
domestic and international news, weather reports, and interviews with newsmakers from
the worlds of politics, business, media, entertainment and sports” (Today). From 1995 to
2012, The Today Show was the highest-rated morning news program, and it generally
regarded as the most reputable morning talk show with wide audience appeal.
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Premiering in 1975, Saturday Night Live (SNL) is an American late-night sketch
comedy and variety show that combines comedy skits with parodies of current political
events. The structure of SNL has remained largely consistent since its premiere, which
includes a celebrity host and regular in-house comedic actors who perform comedy
sketches live; these sketches are interspersed with occasional prerecorded short films and
performances from at least one musical guest (Whalley, 2010). Chelsea Lately is a late-
night comedy talk show that debuted in 2007, and is hosted by comedian and author,
Chelsea Handler. The program is one of the few late-night talk shows hosted by a
woman, and the talk show averaged 613,000 viewers in 2012 (Poggie, 2014). The
show’s premise is described as an “irreverent look at news stories, celebrity gossip, and
various other hot topics” (TV Guide).

Textual analysis
A critical analysis of Psy’s televised appearances indicates that his presence and
appeal as a guest is largely limited to the visual performance of his trademark horse
dance. In fact, audience members and viewers learn very little about whom Psy—the
artist and performer—is; he is rarely interviewed, let alone allowed to speak about
himself or his music. Psy’s appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show
1
(Ellen) marks one
of the first nationally televised public appearances for Psy and provides a script of
representation that other shows appear to follow. Before Psy’s live apperance, Ellen
addresses the audience about this new online video that is “blowing up all over the place”
(DeGeneres, 2012). A clip of the “Gangnam Style” video is shown, and guest Simon
Cowell (of American Idol fame) can be heard stating, “It’s brilliant. Amazing.” Fellow
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Ellen guest Britney Spears acknowledges that she tweeted about the music video, and
Ellen reveals that she got someone (i.e Psy) to teach Britney the horse dance. Psy then
appears on stage, but is never formally introduced. Instead, Ellen directs Britney to learn
the dance, but is concerned that Britney may not be wearing the right shoes. Psy
interjects and explains “it’s fine, because the mindset of the dance is to dress classy and
dance cheesy.” This is followed up by an awkward interruption when Psy asks Ellen, “by
the way, can I introduce myself, not just dance?” Ellen fails to properly introduce Psy,
and the audience and viewers learn nothing about him, nor is the song’s lyrics or
subversive message inquired about. Psy teaches Britney and Ellen his horse dance before
performing the song for the audience. It becomes clear that Psy’s value as a guest is
centered on his comical dance; he is relegated to an object of humor who elicits laughs
with his minstrel performance.
Psy’s comical horse dance and minstrelsy is further exploited in the season
premiere of SNL’s thirty-eighth season
1
in a skit featuring Seth Macfarlane. The comedy
sketch take place at a Lids sports store and involves employees Deakin, Rodney and
Topher. Rodney is disgruntled after he did not receive a promotion that went to co-
worker Topher. Deakin however, knows how to cheer Rodney up; he pushes a red
magical button that activates a Psy impersonator who dances to “Gangnam Style.” After
pushing the button again, the impersonator appears but is accompanied by a yellow-
suited dancer, similar to the character found in the “Gangnam Style” video. Rodney asks
who the dancer in the yellow suit is, and Deakin responds “who cares, just be happy he’s
here!” After Topher reveals that he was fired, Deakin realizes he must “put it into turbo”
in order to cheer up his co-worker. The red button is pushed again, and then the real Psy
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appears and performs the horse dance. Psy mimics a scream at a female dancer’s
buttocks. Rodney asks Deakin, “Did he just scream at her butt?” Deakin responds, “You
damn right he did, and we are gonna live forever!” The point is clear: the comical dance
moves and wacky visuals are consumed as silly entertainment and comic relief. Psy
never speaks a word except for “Oppa Gangnam Style.” Like his debut on Ellen, Psy
stands as a recognizable prop, eager to entertain with his comical physicality.
Psy’s appearance on The Today Show
1
did provide Psy with one of the few
nationally televised occasions to be interviewed. Psy answered questions concerning his
musical training in Boston, the length of the music video’s shoot, and the fact that he has
been a K-pop artist for over ten years. Consistent with his appearance on Ellen and other
programs, Psy proceeds to teach his signature horse dance to the hosts, before performing
“Gangnam Style” on the live broadcast. After a commercial break, a Today host
announces that “they had so much fun with Psy a couple of moments go, you know what?
Let’s do it again!” Inexplicably, Psy dances and performs “Gangnam Style” for a second
time, just moments after performing it live. After his repeat performance, Psy is
interviewed in a formal studio setting. Psy jokingly asks why he had to sing the song
twice? After a few questions regarding Psy’s reaction to the video’s popularity, a Today
host interjects and tells Psy, “We got a guy who could do background drums for you” and
the broadcast immediately cuts to a video of an Asian jazz band performing a song. The
video then focuses on a white-haired drummer who is engaged in a highly animated drum
performance, full of passionate stick and limb flicking. In manic fashion, the drummer
jumps to his feet as he wildly bangs on the cymbals, while displaying exaggerated
expressions of emotion. It is a scene of mockery, and to juxtapose this comical image in
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connection with Psy’s appearance establishes an implicit (if not explicit) imposition that
the drummer’s physicality, like Psy’s, invites derision and mockery. Psy, like the
drummer, is a punch line, an object to be laughed at and ridiculed.
On Chelsea Lately
1
, Psy makes an appearance in a skit that has Psy galloping his
signature horse dance while performing menial office tasks such as stomping on
cardboard boxes, dusting office portraits, and stapling papers. Following his script of
minstrelsy, Psy provides comic fodder as viewers watch Psy dance up and down the
office while performing mundane office tasks. Throughout the skit, he never speaks; he
never even blurts out “Gangnam Style” while performing his dance. Interestingly,
compared to his other televised appearances, Psy displays a stoic and indifferent—
possibly even reluctant—facial expression throughout the skit. His appearance on
Chelsea comes after several television appearances where he dances the horse trot – is his
facial expression a result of physical fatigue or self-realization of his minstrelsy? The
skit ends with Psy shaking a martini shaker while performing his horse gallop as Chelsea
Handler watches in amusement. As he pours Chelsea a martini drink, Chelsea concludes,
“Now that is an Asian I could date.” The imposition in no uncertain terms is clear: Asian
males are undesirable but can find on-screen legitimacy as comic relief.
Banerjee (2006) explains that in order to find mainstream success in film, Asian
male characters must enter a “codified visual hierarchy” and perform a new-age form of
minstrelsy. The celebratory reception of Psy’s “Gangnam Style” indicates that in order
for Asian males to find popular appeal in the audiovisual realm, they too must negotiate
with a “codified visual hierarchy” where consumers will only accept caricatured images
of Asian men. It is no wonder that Psy is pressed to perform his horse dance twice in one
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live broadcast (The Today Show), and is rarely asked questions about his music or
background; he is relegated to comic chattel, and the mass audience can easily consume
the entertainment value he provides, a value premised on how his video and image
conform to racial conventions. Psy’s “crossover success” into America’s mainstream
cultural imaginary, coupled with the absence of prototypical male K-pop artists (e.g.
Rain, Se7en, or Big Bang), who flaunt an aggressive sexuality, bolsters the assertion that
a codified visual hierarchy operates in the audiovisual space and the outer limits of
popular music. While Psy’s popular appeal and celebrated reception in the American
cultural imaginary is unprecedented, his image and physicality is tightly aligned with
popular constructions of Asian men that define Asian masculinity as synonymous with
emasculation and comic relief.
However, a discussion of ideological limitations of racialized masculinity and
stereotypes cannot be complete without investigating audiences’ interpretation of the
audiovisual text. A scholar’s analysis of text may not mirror the analysis made by
viewers, and therefore to understand how hegemonic and subordinated masculinities
continue to be reinforced in popular culture, an examination of audience response to
audiovisual text is warranted. The research turns to an examination of how viewers make
sense of the audiovisual content and its appeal, in relation to the comedic elements and
textual devices found in the video. How do audiences characterize the appeal of the
audiovisual text? How do viewers make sense of the comedic elements that are tied to
the representations of gender, race and sexuality? What elements did they find
entertaining, funny and why?

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Researching the audience
Method
Focus group interviews were conducted with predominantly White participants,
and a few minority participants. All participants were placed in separate focus groups
with one moderator to facilitate the study. There were four focus groups with seven to
ten individuals per group, for a total of 34 participants. Of the 34 focus group
participants, race and gender were as follows: 31 were White (12 males, 19 females), 1
Asian American (female), 1 Native American (male), and 1 Latino (male). The age
ranges were as follows: White, 19-40 years (median 21 years); Asian, 21 years; Latino,
23 years; and Native American, 22 years.
The participants were recruited from the undergraduate population of a mid-size
northwest research university through classroom announcements, e-mail, and by word-of-
mouth. All participants were undergraduate students. The participants were assigned to
a designated classroom where they would watch the “Gangnam Style” video as a group.
This viewing was followed by a discussion about the audience’s opinion on the text of
the video, including questions about why they found the video appealing, and whether
they identified any stereotypical representations that are evoked in the video. The
moderator posed subsequent questions regarding how participants would describe the
lead singer, and what words they would use to describe him. A scripted set of questions
was initially asked, and several follow-up questions were posed, the nature of which
depended on the answers to the scripted set of questions in order to get more detailed
comments. The discussions were set to a relaxed environment, in order for participants to
provide candid responses through an informal conversation about their views on the
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audiovisual content. The group discussions lasted about 30-45 minutes, were tape
recorded, and subsequently transcribed.
An analysis of the focus group data centered on the audiovisual appeal of the
video; what content in the audiovisual text made the video so appealing, or entertaining
and why? How would participants describe Psy and his physicality? Furthermore, the
data was examined to determine if the participants noticed or perceived any stereotypical
representations in the text, and whether the lead singer, Psy, evoked stereotypical
representations found in U.S. popular culture. The focus group participants were given
pseudonyms to protect their confidentiality.

Audiovisual Appeal
Based on the participants’ reactions to the “Gangnam Style” music video, the
majority of the focus group participants found the video entertaining. The majority of the
participants laughed throughout the viewing, and described the audiovisual content with
the following adjectives: “funny,” “ridiculous,” “silly,” “comical,” and “random.”
Overwhelmingly, the focus group participants articulated that the video’s appeal
stemmed from the content being “over the top” and “ridiculous.” One common theme
that emerged from the participants’ description of the video included the “absurdity” of
the various scenes and sequences throughout the video. Michelle (twenty-one, White)
shared, “the video is weird, goofy and there is an absurdity to it. I felt more embarrassed
for them [the singers/actors] as they tried to project humor.” Many respondents, like
Evan (twenty, White) felt the video was funny because the singer and the video “didn’t
take itself too seriously; you get a sense that nobody is taking themselves seriously and
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that they are just trying to create a wild scene.” Caroline (twenty, White) offered another
explanation: “What made the video funny was over-sexualizing the dance moves … and
the moves all seemed ridiculous.” Others, like Jane (twenty-one, White) described the
video as “over the top. It’s full of silly and ridiculous images, and it is different from
other music videos that are produced today.”
Another common theme that arose to describe the video’s appeal involved what
Tammy (twenty, white) described as its “catchy appeal.” According to Tammy, “the
music video is catchy, upbeat, and you want to dance along.” Not surprisingly, viewers
not conversant in the Korean language were left focusing on the visual imagery and the
music’s rhythm and melody. Moreover, only two participants mentioned the satirical
nature of the song and video. The fact that the overwhelming majority of participants
were not able to understand the lyrics, nor were they cognizant of the satirical theme,
may explain why most participants articulated an element of “randomness” to the visual
imagery; in the absence of lyrical decoding, the video’s dance set-ups juxtaposed with
contrasting set locations added to the video’s “odd” and “ridiculous” character. The
majority of the participants’ response to the audiovisual text appears to coincide with
popular culture’s celebratory reception of the comedic and “wacky” nature of the
audiovisual meme. The participants overwhelmingly found the audiovisual text comedic
and enjoyed laughing at Psy, with very few laughing with him.

Psy as caricature
When asked to describe the lead singer/rapper (Psy), several participants made
reference to Psy’s physicality, referring to him as “short” and describing him and his
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“horse dance” as “goofy,” “funny” and “silly.” The notion that the singer “didn’t take
himself seriously” was a common description of Psy. According to Amy (nineteen,
White), “the leader singer was very animated and is someone who doesn’t take himself
too seriously. Janice (forty, White) echoed this sentiment as she shared that Psy
“enthusiastically makes fun of himself and others.” For many of the participants, Psy’s
appearance and physicality was read along the lines of common Asian male tropes and
notions of masculinity. The author suggests that such a reading is likely due to the fact
that the overwhelming majority of the participants were comfortably aligned with the
dominant racial hierarchy that promotes White invisibility and marginalization of others
(Dyer, 1997). While most of the participants found Psy “hilarious,” “comical,” and “over
the top,” several others described him as lacking the masculine image of rappers that
popular culture has embraced with Black and White bodies. Kelly (twenty, White)
asserted that Psy “is goofy and not what people normally expect to see with rappers.
He’s more feminine or metrosexual than other rappers.” Cole (twenty, White)
maintained that the lead singer “is not really masculine, but more robotic and funny.”
Such descriptions of Psy are in line with previous scholarship (Park, 2014; Shek, 2006)
which assert that forms of masculinity among men of color, including Asian males, gay
and bisexual men are subordinated and represent the abandonment of the hegemonic
masculine ideal.
Several participants also commented that Psy’s sexuality was ambiguous. Bryan
(twenty-two, White) explained, “the lead singer is portrayed as chauvinistic, lonely, and
bisexual but comfortable in his own skin.” Referencing North Korea’s current dictator,
Louis (twenty-three, White) described Psy as “Kim Jong Un-like, chubby, but
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comfortable with his own sexuality.” The fact that several participants asserted that they
were unsure of Psy’s sexuality also points to dominant notions of Asian masculinity that
is vested in emasculation discourse. In contrast, many of the participants pointed out how
women in the video were “over-sexualized” and were clearly “objectified” with video
close-ups of female buttocks. Jane (twenty-one, Asian/white) asserted that the “women
were all dressed proactively, and the video objectified women with close-ups of their
behind.” However, unlike the perceived sexuality of Psy, the sexuality of the women
were never questioned or described by participants as ambiguous. Although most of the
participants identified the various scenes and the physicality in the video as “funny” and
“wacky,” several participants pointed out how Psy’s image fails to evoke normative
constructions of masculinity that are often tied to rap artists who have historically found
commercial success in the U.S. music market.

Conclusion
For many consumers of the viral “Gangnam Style” meme, it is never quite clear
whether they are admiring, as Hall (2004) notes, the “rhythmic grace” of the
“entertainer,” or are they “put off by the ‘clown’s’ stupidity”? The meme provides a
catchy melody, a dance that is easy to replicate, and a visually seductive aesthetic
coupled with slapstick physicality. While the meme’s viral popularity seems innocuous
and presents an opportunity for engagement with an Asian cultural text, Psy’s popularity
and celebrated reception on U.S. national television shows appears symptomatic of
Western audiences’ appetite for reductive images that equate Asian masculinity with
buffoonery and emasculation. Rarely do viewers learn about Psy the artist, the person, or
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the social satire that undergirds the video and song. He provides entertainment—comic
relief—based on the Asian minstrel role that popular culture has recycled and naturalized
with images like the “Long Duk Dong” character in the John Hughes film Sixteen
Candles, to the contemporary mediated images found in many of Jackie Chan’s
Hollywood films and franchises like The Hangover. Although the present study is
limited by the homogeneity of the focus group participants, an analysis of the audience’s
perceptions of the audiovisual text and its appeal reveals that viewers were drawn to the
“absurdity” and comedic qualities of the meme, even though most viewers were unaware
of the meme’s satirical nature. Aligned with hegemonic notions of masculinity, many
viewers were unable to accept Psy as a rapper/singer who could project masculine
qualities that are required for rap or pop stardom. Moreover, the cultural context of Psy’s
meteoric rise coincides with the rise of Asian and Asian American women in television
and film, yet is matched by the conspicuous absence or marginalization of Asian and
American men (Balaji, 2011; Park, et al. 2006).
Psy’s popular appeal is bolstered by the fact that his image and physicality do not
challenge or problematize the hegemonic (White) masculine ideal. Western audiences
can embrace Psy and his physicality because it mirrors popular constructions of Asian
masculinity that audiences are willing to consume. His neo-minstrel performance and
clown image align with popular Western (U.S.) mediated caricatures of Asian men that
have historically been commercially successful. According to Balaji (2011), media
corporations have little incentive to change what has been profitable: the (re)production
of images that lampoon or typecast Asian masculinity while upholding the white
hegemonic masculine ideal. Such caricatured images constructed by Western media have
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saturated the popular culture for many years, which has resulted in hackneyed
representations that audiences are familiar with and eager to consume. Thus, the
variegated ways that this Asian meme is presented and consumed by the Western (U.S.)
culture highlights how deeply entrenched caricature representations are in the larger body
politic. In the supposed “post-racial” era, Psy’s celebrated embrace by mainstream
Western audiences reflect a society that still operates with a myopic cultural logic that
situates Asian masculinity within narrow constructions aligned with buffoonery, a lack of
sexuality and Otherness.

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CONCLUSION
From 1966 to 1969, George Takei played Lt. Hikaru Sulu on the iconic television
series Star Trek. As one of the few Asian American men on national television, Takei
was able to exude charm, confidence, and masculine identities rarely seen on prime-time
television then and even now. Despite low Nielsen television ratings, the series would
eventually secure a veritable mark on America’s popular culture imaginary. But it took
the courage and risk by creator Gene Roddenberry to push for a cast of racially diverse
individuals to make up the starring cast. In today’s mainstream media landscape—almost
fifty years after the original series aired—there is still a dearth of Asian male imagery
that matches the masculine identities that Takei embodied. Although Takei would never
eclipse the on-screen popularity, nor the diverse masculine identities that came with the
role of “Sulu,” Takei has harnessed digital media to spearhead his political activism, to
reinvent his public image, and reinvent his own masculine identity; he has accomplished
this by immersing himself in today’s evolving convergence culture (Jenkins, 1996). He
has used social media (over seven-million “likes” on his Facebook page) to advocate in
local and national politics regarding issues of race, Japanese American internment, and
LGBT issues.
Takei’s own reinvention as media and political activist provides an inspiring
example of the potential for democratic iteration in our convergence culture. But we are
also reminded of the fact that without political (or economic) power, substantive societal
change progresses slowly, if at all. Instead of waiting (or hoping) for media producers or
opinion leaders to graft alternative or balanced media imagery, perhaps marginalized
groups, including Asian Americans and the LGBT-oriented, as Darrell Hamamoto
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proposes, need to “strong-arm our way to equity and diversity”? (2001). Could this be
what the future holds for Asian American masculinity and media diversity – in order to
boldly go where no (Asian) man has gone before?
However, before we engage in theorization and articulation of practices that could
potentially reconfigure Asian and other marginalized identities, we must understand and
recognize the explicit and implicit signifiers that cultivate and reinforce notions of
Otherness in our media-dominated society. Hopefully, the contributions made in this
project inform readers on how important it is to remain vigilant of marginalized
masculinities that duplicate or reify ‘emasculating’ ‘dysfunctional’ or ‘pathological’
constructions. Through the lens of critical race theory, I have sought out new measures
to uncover how racialized impressions are made, and how such frames are projected. I
have elected to do so because I believe it is imperative that an examination of
masculinities and the racial tropes that sustain a discourse of marginalization requires
critical interrogations of the standards and measures that scholars have relied upon. In
today’s convergence culture, using different theoretical and methodological approaches
can help to interrogate and decipher representations and conceptualizations of race and
masculinity in its seemingly amorphous variations across media.
Overall, the aims of this research project have to been to draw upon a variety of
critical strategies, including legal, textual, and rhetorical analyses, in order to reveal and
understand how individuals—in this case Asian men—are and continue to be “race-d”
and entrapped in an emasculation discourse, despite the cultural conditions of
globalization and “post-racism.” This work incorporates varied analysis in order
recognize and be sensitive to its intersectional standpoint; issues of race, gender, and
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orientation have unique cultural formations, legal histories, and policy considerations,
and critical inquiry must reflect such diverse and unique social flora. This project has
also instituted a unique mixed-method inquiry to critical race theory fusing legal, textual,
performance, and audience studies in order to get a robust and holistic analysis of the
social processes of power that are engineered through interdependent social structures,
including legal and cultural institutions. Through a critical legal studies approach, this
work examined how legal discourse and state policies culturally designated Asian men as
“other” and “non-male.” Incorporating a critical discourse analysis, this project
uncovered how mass media contextualizes Asian masculinity in the mediated space of
professional sports. Furthermore, through a textual and audience analysis of one of the
world’s most popular digital memes, this work unveiled how the reception and
celebration of a cultural text can be operationalized to reify ideological constructions of
race and masculinity, and how residual effects of an emasculation discourse resurface
beyond mediated representations.
Moreover, this body of work problematizes post-racial discourse by exploring
how the legacy of political, legal, and cultural institutional forces continues to define
Asian men as Othered through sophisticated, nuanced and implicit racial logics. It is
important to reiterate that the central premise of critical race theory (and this project) is
that racism is engrained in the fabric and structural systems of American society. In other
words, a basic tenet of this theoretical perspective is that institutional marginalization is
pervasive in dominant culture, and this project operates from this premise. Since the rise
of Asian “coolie” labor in the mid-1800s, Asian men have continuously been
marginalized and Othered in order to compare/contrast them to a coveted hegemonic
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masculine identity. My intent with this project is to extend the field of critical race
theory to media systems; a nation’s media system reflects the historical, cultural, and
economic orientations of that society, and conversely, examining these aspects of a nation
can provide insight into its media system (Silverblatt, 2001). Through existing power
structures of legal and media institutions, this nation has defined “masculine” by
categorizing what is “not masculine.” Thus, as my case demonstrates, the Asian male
body has historically functioned as a racial reference point in the discourse of hegemonic
masculinity.
This critical project has been historical, legal, but also rhetorical. One of the
focuses of this rhetorical project has been on critiquing discourse in order to make what
facially appears invisible visible, and addressing the legacy of a racist discourse that has
continued to be rehashed and snared in the larger body politic. This analytical focus is of
particular importance and relevance in today’s supposed “color-blind” climate where the
rhetorical discourse often masks or downplays structural and institutional inequalities.
Commenting on the historical context of identities, Stuart Hall (1996) observed, “Though
they seem to invoke an origin in a historical path with which they continue to correspond,
identities are in actuality about questions of using the resources of history, language, and
culture in the process of becoming rather than being (p. 4). What are Asian men
“becoming” when externally imposed meanings inscribed upon Asian bodies unveil a
“legacy of caricature” in a supposed “post-racial” United States? What are Asian men
“becoming” when the most popular digital meme of the 21
st
century features a portly,
clownish Asian male who animates a “horsey dance”? What are Asian men “becoming”
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when the success of the first Asian American N.B.A. basketball player is contextualized
within an emasculation and Othered discourse?
Part of my goal here has been to demonstrate how law and popular culture have
worked symbiotically, mutually reinforcing a racialized, emasculation discourse for over
a century. Although we are living in an “information society” with evolving
communication technologies and global economic conditions, the discourse of Asian
masculinity continues to be constructed by the residual effects of early ideologies that
have become institutionalized. To better understand the structural pervasiveness of this
racialized discourse of Othering, this body of work has highlighted the interdependence
of law and popular media culture; both systems mutually feed, build upon and reinforce
discursive constructions on race and masculinity.
The legal critique found herein touches on how early media depictions of Asians
as the “Yellow Peril” fueled and justified discriminatory legal policies that also racialized
Asian men. In other words, you don’t get discriminatory structures such as the law
without popular sentiment promulgated by media in popular culture and vice versa. As
my case illustrates, these early constructions from the legal and political institutions then
get publicly traded through mediated images, representations, and performances in the
cultural industries. Thus, one aim of this project is to uncover and understand how
structurally embedded discriminatory discourse remains in operation; by employing both
legal and popular convergent culture analysis to this end, this work reveals that an era of
true “post-racism” is a long road ahead and goes well-beyond the election of an African-
American as President of the United States.

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Critical Reflections: “Post-Race” Politics of Identity and New Theoretical
Perspectives
The genesis of applying multiple methods and varied inquiry to critical race
theory stems in part from the project’s motivation to address (debunk!) “post-racial”
notions that have saturated the public discourse in our contemporary cultural imaginary.
Meta-discourses about power and equality that privilege a post-racial narrative are
rhetorically more positive than the discourses themselves, and it is from this
contradictory place that this project springs forth. Through a case studies analysis, this
project underscores this fictive and fanciful notion of a culture “post-(race, gender, sexual
orientation).” This illusory era of colorblind ideology promotes the idea that race does
not ultimately matter; race may be “present” in public discourse, but contained in
contexts that reinforce the sense that race has no political or historical weight (Gray,
2005, p.1). But in the words of Kent Ono (2010), “post-race” is a “discourse of
distraction.”
This post-racial narrative coincides with and further builds upon a global digital
media culture, where cultural texts are exchanged at increasingly rapid rates. In a global
convergence culture, text, images, and audiovisual content are quickly commented on and
exchanged, promoting the reification of racialized tropes and narratives with little
reflection and discussion on the cultural conditions of such text. This work positions
itself within today’s convergence culture to establish a critical lens—a mixed-method
theoretical framework—in order to “de-bunk” or at least problematize marginalizing and
racialized discourse that gets instantaneously consumed, framed, and contextualized by
consumers and media producers alike. As this body of work has demonstrated, the
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practice of critiquing the reception, popularity and celebration of cultural phenomena can
uncover the hidden, and nuanced marginalizing iterations in today’s media ecosystem.
Early global media scholars argued that globalization would have a democratic
impact on media representations. Fiske contends that “global capitalism has no choice
but to recognize that it has to deal with multiple markets,” and as a result, the cultural
industries “will have to stop claiming the national as their local and will have to be
explicitly localized or denationalized” (1997, p. 58, 64). However, Asian masculinity has
remained snarled in a web of caricatured identities and emasculation discourse, even
while alternative configurations of Asian women (beyond stereotypical constructs) in
popular culture have been generated. Perhaps our “multi-cultural” society has not
reached the tipping points for substantive change or progress with regard to equity and
diversity in mediated representations, or perhaps scholarly prognostications were overly
optimistic and critically myopic.
In his work on media equity and diversity, Larry Gross notes that network
television is driven by what advertisers are willing to pay for, and that network
programming is aimed at a predominantly white audience, and “will ultimately always be
of, by, and for the white [middle class, heterosexual] majority” (2001, p. 115). Similarly,
Herman Gray points out that the white audience is “the ideal subjects of consumerism
and representation while people of color are simply political subjects” (2001, p. 105).
Both Gross and Gray underscore the financial considerations by the cultural industries,
which predominantly dictates the politics of representation as to which identity molds get
visibility, who gets priority, and who is the focal point within a cultural text. Despite the
globalization of media and the rhetorical circulation of a post-race narrative in the age of
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multiculturalism, financial interests of the media institutions charged with producing and
disseminating cultural texts remain paramount. A review of the latest SAG-AFTRA
casting data reports reveal that Asian Americans occupy only 3.4% of all leading
television/theatrical roles (2008). Gross (2001) has pointed out that while minority
characters may be visible in mainstream media, they occupy small, albeit “high-status”
roles, but rarely occupy leading roles. In a 2013 interview, Golden Globe-nominated
Asian American actor Masi Oka discussed the dearth of Asian faces on U.S. screens:
“You can’t get Asians cast in leads yet. Maybe as a second lead, but the lead is still
going to be Caucasian or African-American” (Blair, 2013, para. 2)
Today’s “post-racial” cultural condition also operates against the backdrop of
increasing global media conglomeration and less diversity of media ownership. As
scholars point out, cultural production is both an economic and ideological process that is
grounded in Western control of the cultural industries (Hesmondhalgh, 2007;
McChesney, 2004). Thus, as Gross and Gray reminds us, it is important to remember the
media industries’ bottom-line imperative in the cultural production process. Just as it
financially benefits the television networks to cast predominantly White (heterosexual)
men, it can be argued that presenting alternative and diverse images of Asian men run
contrary to the financial interests of the media institutions that construct and circulate
such imagery in an era of market consolidation. As Balaji (2001) reminds us, the media
industries produce caricature, and these caricatures not only benefit the corporations that
produce them, “but they serve to uphold a white patriarchal worldview, one where Asian
men are either marginalized, vilified, or made into comic objects that serve as visual
contrasts to hegemonic maleness” (p. 187). For instance, global media texts such as the
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Rush Hour trilogy exploit Asian masculinity as neo-minstrelsy, where Asian male
characters must embody caricatured representations in order to have on-screen legitimacy
(Balaji, 2011). The Hangover, the highest grossing R-rated comedy to date, features a
prominent Asian male character that is the center of racial jokes that exploit Asian
masculinity as comic relief. Even in the era of globalization and a supposed post-racial
cultural condition, there is little incentive on the part of the media industries to provide
alternative images of Asian masculinity when stereotypical identity molds have proven to
be profitable.
Without any incentive to change a political-economic identity formula that has
been profitable domestically and internationally, the cultural industries will likely
continue to exclude Asian men from representation in a leading capacity unless it fits a
caricatured mold. If being left off of the media’s center stage is a form of “symbolic
annihilation” (Gerbner & Gross, 1976), then the rare instances of Asian male visibility on
the popular cultural center stage as racial caricature may be just as devastating in their
ideological impact, especially when such depictions naturalize difference. Perhaps it’s
better to be “invisible” than to be visible as a cultural caricature? The recent Comcast-
NBCU merger, wedding the largest cable/Internet provider with one of the largest content
producers, is the latest incarnation of convergence culture on a macro market-level scale
that is likely to lead to cultural texts that recirculate troublesome caricatures for the sake
of satisfying shareholders’ bottom-line concerns. Compounding the problem of
stereotypical constructions is the reality that regulatory institutions like the Federal
Communications Commission, have demonstrated a lack of eagerness (at least in the
modern era) to regulate diversity of representation and ownership. As media scholars
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such as Balaji (2011) and Hesmondhalgh (2007) note, greater consolidation translates to
increased control, but also less risk-taking as to the types of content that is created,
recycled, and reproduced by the (Western) cultural industries. Instead of diversifying
depictions and constructions of Asian men, globalization and market concentration has
thus far led to repackaged identity “molds” in popular culture that continue to play upon
stereotypes.
Moreover, today’s convergence media also marks a shift toward the dynamic
ways that media symbols, images, and even caricatures can flow across multiple media
channels, toward the increased interdependence of media systems, and toward multiple
ways of accessing media content (Jenkins, 2006). But as Jenkins (2006) notes, this shift
is also a result of economic considerations, and media industries are embracing
convergence in order to exploit the advantages of media conglomeration and the multiple
ways of selling content to consumers. While profits are the primary consideration for the
media industries, popular culture trades on stereotypes, and as this project points out, has
done so with Asian masculinity since the early days of Asian immigration. This project
reveals how the proliferation of media sources, channels and voices in today’s
convergence media gives rise to more nuanced forms of stereotyping, emasculation, and
the marginalization of Asian men as Othered. One of the goals of this project has been to
illuminate these nuanced forms of mediated identities that weave across user-generated
content, social media, traditional news media outlets, television shows, and how
consumers and opinion leaders talk about and contextualize such identities. The cases
herein underscore potential problems with such nuanced orientations: the unknowable
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influence of convergence media and participatory media upon consumers, and the social
implications for stereotypical and caricatured frames to be taken as truth.
So what does a mixed-method of inquiry add to critical race theory, or what does
critical race theory add to a mixed-method inquiry? In his work on race and
representation, Stuart Hall (1997) articulates a particular cultural and ideological lens—
what he refers to as “frames of intelligibility”—through which discourses are seen,
understood, and acted upon. Consumers, critical scholars and activists harness these
frames of intelligibility to decode and comprehend cultural discourses in public sites. I
have incorporated a mixed-methodology to critical race theory, in order to illustrate
particular frames of intelligibility applied to the nuanced, subtle and implicit discursive
practices in digital and transnational flows of identity formation in today’s convergence
culture. Racist discourse in today’s media-saturated convergence culture is not always
overtly observable to the naked eye or attentive ear; the case studies herein illuminate
how racist discourse is also inferential, implicit and resurface with emergent and
multiplicitous media forms. Without question the politics of production and
representation are important to our understanding of racial dynamics, but so too is the
reception and consumption of racial content in new, emerging media forms. This is of
particular relevance in today’s convergence culture, where convergence is more than just
a technological shift, but also a process: a change in the way media is produced,
consumed and our how it alters relationships between existing media (Jenkins, 2006).
Thus, a mixed-method perspective effectively weaves through varied inquiry to detect
more sophisticated orientations of racism and marginalization in today’s media
landscape.
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Applying this methodological perspective to critical race theory, I have traced
how marginalizing discourse—including racist narratives and emasculating stereotypes—
“float” and are circulated by opinion leaders such as journalists who cover and
contextualize sport and body—as with Jeremy Lin—through legacy news publications,
online forums, and social media. This project has also tracked how racist discourse is
transmitted in public sites such as talk shows or sketch comedies that are cloaked in
humor, but ultimately naturalize and reinforce racial difference. Using the celebrated
(and mediated) reception of Psy’s “Gangnam Style,” I have traced how caricatured
orientations are re-circulated by audiences and consumers who do not fully participate in
the (cross)-cultural experience of a transnational cultural product. The interrogation of the
case studies herein demonstrate how this interplay of media convergence reinforces
normative cultural alignments which provide the conditions that construct, recycle, and
preserve discriminatory practices and stereotypical identity molds. In essence, the
emasculated, feminized, clownish, neo-minstrel social constructions of Asian masculinity
remain consistent and embedded in today’s media matrix—they are not going anywhere!
How then, can we apply the work advanced in this project to progress Asian men and
masculinity beyond constructions of caricature and marginalization?

Moving Forward: Critical Interventions for Equity and Diversity in Media
This body of work seeks to make a critical intervention in media equity and
diversity in several ways. The first contribution is an educational one. This work reflects
the sober reality that Asian masculinity is encapsulated in a political-economic identity
media structure, a market-driven social algorithm that continues to marginalize,
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categorize, and devalue ethnic difference. While critical inquiry into Asian masculinity is
still under-researched and under-theorized, this project provides an intersectional critique
and advances a unique methodological intervention that illuminates pathways into how
historical constructions of race and masculinity resurface and remain embedded in
today’s digital and global media ecosystem that extend beyond traditional mediated
representations. It is my hope that this work will prepare students, scholars and activists
with a theoretical framework to decipher, untangle, and interrogate future moments of
racial marginalization and caricature across different socio-cultural pools of
representation. As Kent Ono (2009) reminds us, without critical media studies, we are
disarmed with the ability to understand such events in their historical, political and
cultural context. Critical reflection on historical media representations and
contextualization is needed to understand how such discourse is institutionally and
culturally embedded within media discourses. Arming students and scholars with an
effective theoretical lens, along with the an understanding of the historical and cultural
contexts to identify and critique racist ideology, is the first step in articulating practices
that have the potential to reconfigure social and cultural identities in today’s “brave new
(digital) world.”
Similarly, this scholarly inquiry also rebukes the post-race ideology that identities
and identity politics do not matter. As Hall (2005) reminds us, identity is a “production”
and a constant process. The scholarship assembled here demonstrates that identities are
not just fluid and in flux; identity politics matter, they are livid, and they have material
consequences. As Iwamoto, Liao, and Liu (2010) point out, overcoming emasculating
configurations while attempting to conform to hegemonic masculine norms continue to
136
produce material and livid consequences to Asian men’s health and self-concepts. To
further rebut conceptions of a “post-race” climate of “multiculturalism,” this project has
reiterated to readers that racist and emasculating discourse often appear cloaked in
humor, or cloaked in celebratory reception, which operate to both defuse racial anxiety
and minimize the reality of racism. This work seeks to educate and build upon the post-
racial critique laid out by media scholars, by providing further evidence of oppressive
practices that bear the mark of institutional racism and othering that “continue to crawl
out of their crypts and exert themselves in a surging, lurching, endless night of the living
dead” (Vavrus, 2010, p. 223).
Moreover, this project offers a methodological contribution. Through the cases
studies herein, I provide several examples to analyze racist and othering discourse across
multiple media contexts by fusing multiple methods of inquiry to critical race theory in
order to weave understanding of the intersectionality of such varied inquiry. Marshall
McLuhan (1967) imagined that the future of media would enable social conditions that
would lead to a “global village,” bridging geographic and cultural divides. But as this
work highlights, instead of crossing cultural barriers, globalization and convergence
media have, in many ways, promoted the reification, reproduction and celebration of
them, but through emergent and sophisticated ways. Today’s convergence media is rife
with nuanced cultural constructions of race and difference across dynamic identity spaces
where each informs the other, whether it be in dominant media representations, news
articles, blogs, online forums, broadcast and cable television and other spaces that make
up our media convergence vernacular. The sampling of a mixed method inquiry
137
articulated through this body of work will help to guide future critical inquiries on
nuanced instances where Asian masculinity conform to or cultivate notions of Otherness.
This project also springs forth a political contribution. By analyzing and
critiquing explicit and implicit forms of racial othering in emergent and nuanced
orientations in media, I seek to change the popular discourse on Asian masculinity and
the constructed caricatures that continue to render it marginalized, emasculated, and the
subject of comic fodder. While the cultural industries have provided few constructions of
Asian manhood beyond the caricatured molds—such as the character of ‘Sulu’ in Star
Trek, or the recent Fast & Furious franchise (directed by Justin Lin, an Asian American)
that features a multi-dimensional Asian male figure—critics and scholars could argue that
a global-capitalist media market will presumably foster mediated representations that are
progressive and more accurate. The idea goes, in the era of globalization, if we just “wait
it out” we are likely to see more robust and diverse depictions and representations. But
as Jackson and Moshin (2013) aptly point out, social quiescence to a politics of negative,
racial, gendered, ethnic, and sexual difference can only lead to epistemic violence and a
constant recycling of power to the hegemonic masculine standard that is heterosexual,
white and male. As this body of work has revealed, pro-capitalist logics prevent cultural
constructions that go beyond the caricatured identity molds that (at least what media
producers think) media consumers will accept and can profit from. Moreover, greater
media market concentration translates to cultural products that are financially “less
risky”; risk-averse content producers are then likely to recycle and rehash proven
formulas and produce text that can defer to successful precedent (i.e. caricatured identity
molds).
138
Therefore, this work also represents a call to action—a call to activism—for
readers and students alike, to encourage them to be more critical of how racialized
discourse operates and spreads across varied media. Informed with a sophisticated
analytical framework that this research project has drawn up, I encourage readers to share
critiques with others in the digital public sphere; this can be accomplished through social
media sites, including Facebook and Twitter-led campaigns, blogs, or through user-
generated media-sharing websites like YouTube. While this critical inquiry has
demonstrated that racialized constructions can easily pass, transfer and build upon a
variety of media indices, there is also the potential for democratic iteration with
convergence media and its participatory measures. The website and popular development
of AngryAsianMan.com is an inspiring exemplar of media activism that has exploited the
convergence of information, communication technology and media content. Phil Yu, the
website’s creator, initially started the personal Internet blog to comment on pop culture
and discrimination in the Asian American community; today, the site draws tens of
thousands of readers on its site each day, and is one of the most widely-tracked Asian-
American blogs (Yang, 2010). Yu acknowledges that the media courses he took at
Northwestern University challenged and politicized him, and ultimately motivated him to
start the blog, and to comment on and critique representations of Asian Americans (Yang,
2010). Pursuant to Hamamoto’s (2001) strategy for “strong-arming” our way to equity
and diversity in media, Americans of marginalized status are taking initial steps to shape
their own collective identity and destiny by harnessing the power of the same new media
logics that continue to marginalize them in popular culture.
139
Wong Fu Productions, an Asian American filmmaking group, is a groundbreaking
example of the positive potential for self-representation with convergence media.
Established by three college students in 2003, the group exploited user-generated digital
media to produce short films that addressed Asian American politics, media
marginalization and featured a primarily Asian American cast. Currently, the group’s
YouTube channel boasts over two million subscribers (with a large Asian American
viewership eager to see themselves represented—beyond caricature) and as of August,
2014, is producing its first feature-length film (Tsai, 2014, para. 5). Just as stereotypical
identity molds ripple through varied media platforms and public media sites in today’s
convergence culture, Wong Fu’s content—short films, music videos—passed around
through download links, fans’ instant messenger profiles and other digital channels (Tsai,
2014, para. 7). Like AngryAsianMan.com, Wong Fu Productions was able to take full
advantage of the viral (and democratic) potential afforded them by the same convergence
culture that ensnarls, and recirculates tired racial tropes of Asian masculinity.
Finally, it is important to acknowledge that this project on race and masculinity is
analogous to a “drop of a pebble in a large pond”; hopefully, the ripple effect of this body
of work will help guide future race and masculinities studies in analyzing, critiquing and
reframing masculinities and normative definitions of masculinity across varied media and
cultural contexts. More scholarly work is needed on the global conceptions of diverse
masculinities and how such constructions are communicated across cultures, especially in
the age of convergence media. What institutional and structural forces have the greatest
impact on the “push-pull”(i.e. caricature looping versus emancipatory potential) of
convergence media? How should we define masculinity in the global sphere of the
140
future? Future critical inquiries also need to examine and interrogate the cultural practice
of masculinity as both a local and global phenomenon.
It is with modest hope that this project encourages students, scholars, media
professionals, and activists to use this work and its theoretical lens of analysis to critique
future incarnations of caricatured molds and stereotypes, and to promote greater self-
representation and media empowerment by using the same convergence culture logics
that foster both the looping of caricature and stereotype, and enable participatory
enfranchisement through self-representation across borderless communication platforms.
I also hope this body of work encourages readers to question their own disciplining
practices, naming acts, and discursive ways of consuming, contextualizing, and
celebrating in today’s digital convergence media. I leave this project with the hope for a
future where there is not only equity and diversity in media representation, but an
establishment of a convergence media culture that reflects and sustains a truly equitable
and democratic, global society.

141
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Creator Park, Michael Kyung (author)

Core Title Contextualizing Asian masculinity in media post-race: a critical race theory inquiry on metadiscourses

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 09/22/2014

Defense Date 09/08/2014

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Tag Asian,critical race theory,masculinity,OAI-PMH Harvest

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Advisor Goodnight, Gerald Thomas (committee chair), Gross, Larry P. (committee member), Jacobs, Lanita (committee member)

Creator Email mkpark85@gmail.com,parkmk@usc.edu

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