Asam 118, oral exam study terms

Popular Culture: How Stuart Hall and others define it (as a site of struggle, negotiation, and power).

• not just entertainment, pop culture is tangible and can therefore be used to determine who is valued and who belongs, and this has historically been weaponized; a battleground where identity, meaning, and power get fought over, not a neutral space where meaning just exists.

• simultaneously monopolized (profit driven) while also being a place where marginalized groups can push back

• Stuart Hall: pop culture is a "contested site for political constructions of the people" — not just consumed, but a place where power is negotiated, not a fixed thing to sort into "good/bad."

• Raymond Williams: culture = (a) intellectual development, (b) a way of life, (c) artistic works — and it structures who belongs.

• Antonio Gramsci's hegemony: power sustained through consent, but culture can also be a site of resistance.

• Jeff Yang: pop culture reflects and gradually shifts social norms; positive representation gives people "narrative power."

Reading tie-in: Rise (Jeff Yang, Phil Yu, Philip Wang) — Yang is literally the "Jeff Yang's definition" cited in lecture; the book itself is an artifact of pop culture as a site of collective Asian American meaning-making.

Representation: The production of meaning through language and imagery.

• Stuart Hall: representation isn't a mirror of reality — it's how meaning gets made.

• Encoding/decoding: creators encode meaning, audiences decode it however they want (message isn't controlled by the sender).

• Representation is active — it produces identity, not just reflects it. If your group isn't "on the map," you're misunderstood, not just invisible.

• Pop culture as "a theater of popular desires and fantasies," not a place we find objective truth.

Reading tie-in: Davé's "Media" chapter — she frames media as fundamentally about who controls the production and broadcasting of meaning about Asian Americans, echoing Hall's point that representation isn't neutral reflection.

Orientalism: Edward Said’s concept of the West constructing the East as inferior "Other"

• Edward Said (1978): the "Orient" is a Western construction, not a neutral place — built to define the West as civilized/rational against an inferior "Other."

• Following Foucault: Orientalism = a structure of knowledge production, not just bias.

• US Orientalism (per Sylvia Shin Huey Chong) centers East/Southeast Asia (Yellow Peril) and draws more from mass media than "high culture."

• Still live today: framing of Palestinian children, "Iranian sleeper cell" rhetoric, etc.

Reading tie-in: Chloe Gong's "Techno-Orientalism in Science Fiction" — extends Said's framework into a contemporary genre example (sci-fi's fear/fetishization of Asian-coded technology and futures), showing Orientalism as an ongoing, adaptable structure rather than a historical relic.

Whiteness & White Supremacy: Structural systems that position whiteness as the universal norm and pinnacle of power.

• US pop culture defaults white-centric ideals even while seemingly being more inclusive and offering more representation.

• Whiteness operates structurally meaning its so intrinsically imbeded within American institutions that there are never any real consequences even when an individual from that institution is criticized → no real change comes from this criticism (see Apu case: an individual apology doesn't redistribute industry power).

• Legally constructed and gatekept: 1790 Naturalization Act ("free white persons"), Ozawa v. U.S. (race = "blood," not skin tone).

Reading tie-in: Davé's "Media" chapter — she notes media historically "conflates Asian and Asian American into one group" measured against a normative white middle-class American identity.

Asian American as Racial & Political Identities: The difference between race as an imposed social construct versus a chosen political coalition

• "Asian American" spans a huge range of ethnicities; "'Asia' itself is a Western organizing category, not something these groups used for themselves historically. It's reinforced today by things like the US Census Bureau's own definitions, which decide who counts as Asian and who doesn't.

• Two senses: racial (imposed) vs. political (chosen, coalitional).

• political identities on the otherhand are something chosen and coalitional, built deliberately across different ethnic groups.

• Rooted in the Third World Liberation Front / Third World Strikes (1968) — deliberate self-naming, refusing "Oriental."

• Migration tied to war/empire: "we are here because you were there."

Reading tie-in: Rise — the book itself is structured around this coalitional aspect and includes essays spanning many different Asian ethnic groups, gathered under one shared cultural and political umbrella, rather than treating 'Asian American' as one monolithic identity."

Racial Formations: The historical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and remade

• Race is not biological — a socio-historical process, created/transformed/remade overtime through different drivers but is not fixed or naturally occurring

• ex. oriental → Asian american

• Grounded in racial capitalism: the state wants Asian labor without Asian belonging

• Legal timeline: 1790 Naturalization Act → Page Act (1875) → Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) → Wong Kim Ark(1898) → Ozawa (1922) → National Origins Act (1924) → incarceration (1942) → 1965 Immigration Act.

Reading tie-in: Davé's "Media" chapter — explains why media stereotypes of Asian Americans shifted over time, from yellow peril before 1965 to the model minority narrative after it. Law doesn't just regulate immigration it directly produces which stereotypes show up on screen and when

Agency & Resistance: The capacity of marginalized individuals to act independently and fight oppressive structures

• how and to what yield marginialized people fight back against the structure that opresses them

• Hayakawa founded Haworth Pictures (1918) after growing frustrated with being typecast into villain roles which is an example of seeking creative autonomy once he realized the system itself wasn't going to change from the inside; creative autonomy outside an exclusionary system.

• Anna May Wong resisted differently, in smaller and more embedded ways. She designed her own clothing and ornamentation rather than simply wearing whatever costume the studio handed her and had scripted her own moments of talking back within her films

Reading tie-in: UCSB Magazine's "Love Me, Love Me Not" — Anna May Wong "cultivated" her signature nails and "risqué costumes," deploying her heritage and autonomy deliberately

Social Construction (Race/Gender/Sexuality): The reality that these categories are created by society and history, not biology

• This term is about showing that categories we treat as natural such as race, gender, sexuality are actually built through law, history, and representation, not biology.

• The Page Act (1875) framed Asian immigrant women as presumptively prostitutes before they'd even arrived. Immigration officials then used pseudo-scientific 'measurements' trying to sort 'prostitutes' from 'respectable' women, through actual legal practice.

Reading tie-in: Davé's "Media" chapter she frames Orientalism itself as a constructed racial category defined in opposition to whiteness, rather than biological

Intersectionality: How overlapping identities (race, gender, class) compound systems of discrimination or privilege

• intersectionality is the way compounded identities produce distinct forms of discrimination or privilege, rather than each category operating separately.

• Page Act (1875) is an example of this which targeted Asian women through suspicion of prostitution which demonstrates both racism and sexism working in conjunction

• Hypersexuality tropes hit Asian men (emasculation) and Asian women (hypersexualization) differently — same logic, different gendered outcome.

Reading tie-in: Miyao's Sessue Hayakawa — Edith's storyline is driven by anxieties about bourgeois white womanhood while Tori's storyline is driven by racialized masculinity; and the whole plot is staged around fear of japanese taste that resulting in emasculating him

Orientalist Tropes: Dragon Lady, Sexual Predator, Lotus Blossom

• recurring throughout history based on gender

• Male-coded: the yellow peril frames Asian migration and power as an existential civilizational danger to the West. The 'violator of maidenhood' trope is the Asian man whose desire for a white woman is coded as a danger to her, her family, and the nation

• Female-coded: split into two opposites: the Dragon Lady is a threat through manipulation and sexuality versus the Lotus Blossom, which is fragile, submissive, needing rescue by a white man. despite being opposites they both involve hypersexualization of asian women

Reading tie-in: Miyao's Sessue Hayakawa, Ch. 1 — Tori in The Cheat is a textbook "violator of maidenhood": a refined but ultimately threatening Orientalist figure whose desire for Edith is coded as danger to white womanhood and the nation.

Cinema Codes & Interracial Laws: Hollywood production codes that legally and structurally banned miscegenation (interracial romance) on screen

• Hollywood banned depicting interracial romance on screen — and that rule shaped what roles Asian American stars were allowed to play at all, and even before this rule this ban was still ocurring informally

• Hayakawa: never permitted to play heroes because a hero's romance plot would need on-screen resolution with a white lead.

• Anna May Wong: denied the lead in The Good Earth (1937) — Luise Rainer cast in yellowface instead; Wong refused the secondary "second wife" role.

• Loving v. Virginia (1967) — interracial marriage not legalized nationally until then.

Reading tie-in: UCSB Magazine's "Love Me, Love Me Not" — explicitly states the Hays Code and anti-miscegenation laws "stifled Wongs career (she couldn't play a romantic lead with a white counterpart) and love life (she could be arrested!)."

Minstrelcy, Yellowface, & Brownvoice: White actors using makeup, accents, or performance to caricature people of color, including Asian characters.

• Non-Asian actors performing "Asian-ness" through makeup, accents, or caricature — a practice that outlasted formal censorship by decades.

• Yellowface (Josephine Lee): non-Asian performers using makeup/prosthetics to appear "Oriental" — Mickey Rooney,

• Brownface/brown voice: same logic for South Asian characters — central case: Apu (voiced by Hank Azaria), examined in The Problem with Apu.

• Whitewashing vs. broader race-bending.

• Apu case: individual apology (2021) ≠ structural repair — whiteness "insulates itself" in institutions.

Reading tie-in: Davé's "Media" chapter — names the exact lineage: Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi, Jonathan Pryce in Miss Saigon, and Hank Azaria as Apu, tracing yellowface/brownface as a continuous post-WWII practice despite the "easing of race-based censorship."

Accent-as-a-Caricature: The practice of white creators/actors adopting exaggerated Asian accents, tropes, or styles for comedic effect in media

• Shilpa Dave's Indian Accents: A fake, exaggerated accent marks someone as a permanent outsider — even if they look nothing like the stereotype visually

• Structural pattern: South Asian actors historically required to perform fake accents to get cast (Master of None, Riz Ahmed's Bond audition account).

Reading tie-in: Davé's "Media" chapter — lists "accent and language" alongside food, religion, and marriage practices as one of the dominant markers media uses to exaggerate Asian Americans' difference from a white norm.

Paranoid vs. Reparative Reading: Eve Sedgwick’s frameworks—paranoid focuses strictly on exposing systemic harm; reparative looks for joy, survival, and agency within a flawed text.

• Two ways to read a text: one exposes harm, the other digs for joy

• Paranoid: exposes harm, centers systemic critique (Slanted Screen, Slaying the Dragon).

• Reparative: scavenges a text for joy, pleasure, survival, agency — without erasing the harm.

• Neither is superior; both apply situationally.

• Critique of paranoid-only extreme: Hamamoto's Skin on Skin just flips emasculation into hyper-virility rather than escaping the binary.

Reading tie-in: Miyao's Sessue Hayakawa does both at once — it documents The Cheat's racism in exhaustive detail, while also crediting Hayakawa's performance for inspiring "photogénie," a real aesthetic movement among French critics.

Hypersexuality: Celine Parreñas Shimizu’s framework analyzing how Asian women navigate being hypersexualized while carving out agency

• Asian women's on-screen sexuality isn't random — it's history (immigration law) showing up on screen.

• Shimizu: "Our sexualities are embedded in history." Asian women's on-screen sexuality is a direct extension of immigration law.

• Page Act (1875): pseudo-scientific methods tried to distinguish "prostitutes" from "respectable" Chinese women.

• Key term: "productive perversity" — reclaiming hypersexuality rather than retreating into respectability politics.

• Holds pleasure and pain together, rather than treating all sexualized representation as pure harm.

Reading tie-in: UCSB Magazine's "Love Me, Love Me Not" — Shimizu, quoted directly, asks of Anna May Wong: "Your injury is aestheticized? Your harm is represented as a pleasure for viewers?" — a live example of her hypersexuality framework applied to a specific star.

Emasculation or Racial Castration: the systematic stripping away of an Asian man’s masculinity, power, and authority in American media. Instead of being portrayed as heroes, leaders, or romantic partners, Hollywood historically forces Asian men into two extremes: either dangerous, non-human "monsters" who threaten white society, or weak, passive, comic-relief characters who lack any romantic or social power..

• David Eng's "racial castration": Asian men denied a legitimate masculinity even while shown as sexually predatory.

• In The Cheat: Tori doesn't rape Edith — he brands her; the brand is a symbolic substitute for the sexual act.

• Root cause: immigration law created "bachelor communities," funneling Asian men into "feminized" labor (laundry, domestic work).

• Tori is stripped of his humanity and made out to be a dangerous, evil brute; exemplified through him branding her, simultanesouly also being emasculated in the way he automatically objectifies edith rather than having the actual masculine sexual agency that would allow him to pursue her normally; hes not framed as a being capable of being a legitimate romantic partner; Tori is basically silenced the entire courtscene while Edith gets an entire emotional confession

Reading tie-in: Miyao's Sessue Hayakawa, Ch. 3–4 — Yamaki (Wrath of the Gods) and Tokoramo (The Typhoon) are both explicitly described as "more feminized" than their white male counterparts, passive, and ultimately swallowed up by white patriarchal or nationalist structures — the emasculation pattern repeats across multiple Hayakawa roles, not just The Cheat.

Minor Feelings: Cathy Park Hong’s concept regarding the racialized range of emotions (shame, irritation, melancholy) built up from the dissonance of living in a society that gaslights your experienced reality of racism.

• Non-cathartic, often unacknowledged feelings (shame, irritation, dysphoria) built from daily racial friction — contrasted with "big" resolved emotions like rage/joy.

• Asian Americans pain isn't given the same narrative legitimacy.

• "Next in line to be white" reframed as risk of disappearing — absorbed as instruments of white power rather than sharing it.

• Lecture example: Hayakawa's character helping a white woman, then being casually pushed aside — a quiet, cumulative slight.

Reading tie-in: None of your current uploads address Hong directly — this term is lecture-only right now. If you want a textual anchor, the quiet dismissal of Hayakawa in Miyao's account (studio trade journals crediting Fannie Ward as "the star" while barely mentioning Hayakawa despite reviewers praising him more) is a good real-world parallel to cite from memory.

Affects: the feelings, mood, or sensations of a scene before it is even put into words. It is how popular culture (an image, sound, or actor’s physical presence) makes the audience feel something in their body (like tension, discomfort, or warmth) before they can even explain why

• What you feel/sense before you can name it — bodily, sensory (tension, warmth, discomfort).

• Shifts the analytical question from "what does this mean" to "what does this do to us."

• Sianne Ngai's "ugly feelings" (irritation, envy — non-cathartic).

• Raymond Williams's "structures of feeling" — lived experience still in process.

Reading tie-in: Miyao's Sessue Hayakawa, Ch. 1 — French critics Delluc and Colette's concept of photogénie is almost a period term for "affect": the "unique aesthetic qualities" of Hayakawa's screen presence that made audiences feel something ("Buddha's mask," eloquence in stillness) before it could be articulated in words.

Burden of Representation: When a single character is forced to stand in for an entire ethnic or racial group because of symbolic omission (the total absence of other characters like them in mainstream media

• When a group has almost no other media presence, a single character is forced to stand in for the entire community due to symbolic omission.

• No counterbalancing range of images to dilute a stereotype's cultural weight.

• Real-world consequence: Apu's catchphrase became a tool of childhood bullying.

Reading tie-in: Davé's "Media" chapter — notes the media "tends to conflate Asian and Asian American into one group," collapsing distinct ethnicities/histories into interchangeable stereotypes precisely because there's no depth of alternative representation to push back against it.

sessue hayakawa & the cheat

-Tori’s character and his desire for Edith is portrayed as threatening towards her and specifically the “domesticity” of her whiteness; made out to be the violator both sexually racially

-its implied that edith knowingly borrowed the money from Tori in exchange for sexual favors however once she falls back on their deal he’s the only one blamed

-racial castration: Tori is stripped of his humanity and made out to be a dangerous, evil brute; exemplified through him branding her

-hypersexualized: Tori is hypersexualized as a predator while simultanesouly also being emasculated in the way he automatically objectives edith rather than having the actual masculine sexual agency that would allow him to pursue her normally

how did Hayakawa navigate the "sexual predator" trope, early Hollywood stardom, starting his own company, formations of racialized masculinity, and the limitations of silent cinema codes?

-Hayakawa being barred from romantic and heroic roles following The Cheat pushed him to start his own film company as a means of agency and resistance to the growing misconceptions of Japanese people stemming from this film

-one of the major limitations of silent cinema is that everything must be conveyed physically, and according to Miyao’s book about hayakawa, Tori is said to possess the mic pose which is a frozen, wide-eyed stare in the film which is meant to denote violence

-also in the trial scene edith’s character gets a full emotional confession and experiences a redemption arc while Miyao talks about how Tori’s scenes were primarily cut out of the film and is effectively silenced. following this, he’s beaten and mobbed despite having no cross-examination in court; relates substantially to how POC men (specifically black men) have been treated historically when they have accusations of harming white women, regardless of if those accusations have any accuracy

What did you think of The Cheat? Of Sessue Hayakawa’s performance in the film? Analyze Sessue Hayakawa’s performance and subsequent career in relationship to the white gaze, Orientalist trope of sexual predator, and emasculation/ racial castration. 

-overall, i found the film kind of eerie and disturbing, i think the fact that its a silence film made it so much easier to dehumanize Tori’s character since it’s very clear the producers framed his character in a very calculated way even down to the composition of the film. One of the works stated that Hayakawa was a highly skilled actor even moreso than Fannie ward, however his talents were strategically used against him in this film

-white gaze wise, this whole film is very clearly built for a white audience; Miyao talks about how lighting was used very deliberately to convey Tori as exotic and mysterious to the audience which they don’t do for Edith’s white husband, and this is in order to make him something exotic and refined to look at, not necessarily a human with depth. The film cut pretty much all of Tori’s scenes where he portrays varying emotions giving audience full interpretive control over his character

-orientalist sexual predator: Gina Marchetti, this "Oriental rape" fantasy does double duty: it demonizes the Asian man and disciplines the white woman”; Tori is stereotypically portrayed as a barbaric, hypersexual predator while the white woman is in distress and need of Western protection; used to justify imperialism by painting the East as uncivilized and in need to Western intervention to subdue them

-emasculation/racial castration: Tori is stripped of his humanity and made out to be a dangerous, evil brute; exemplified through him branding her, simultanesouly also being emasculated in the way he automatically objectifies edith rather than having the actual masculine sexual agency that would allow him to pursue her normally; hes not framed as a being capable of being a legitimate romantic partner; Tori is basically silenced the entire courtscene while Edith gets an entire emotional confession