Consuming sporting Orientals

Abstract

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSDuring my six years in Iowa, I have met great faculties, colleagues, and friends. Without their support and consistent encouragement, I could not have finished this research. First of all, I would like to thank my committee members, Susan Birrell, Thomas Oates, Catriona Parratt, Mary Trachsel, and Travis Vogan. They were very supportive of my research. My adviser Susan spent so much time discussing my research and guiding me with her wisdom and insight. I want to especially thank Mary. She was always willing to discuss my research with me and met with me weekly for almost four years, which has been invaluable. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their love and support. iii ABSTRACT This research assesses cultural meanings attributed to Asian American sport celebrities, focusing specifically on former professional tennis player Michael Chang and professional golfer Michelle Wie. This work will examine how they are represented in mainstream American media and how their images have been used in various advertising campaigns. A key assumption of this research is that cultural stakeholders are involved in their particular media representations. Given that Asian American athletes have occupied peripheral positions in American sport, media and their invisibility in advertising campaigns, the recent commodification of Asian American athletic bodies is worth examining in greater detail. Drawing on Susan Birrell and Mary McDonald's (1999, 2000) "reading sport" methodology, I critically read their representations in mainstream media and television commercials to explore the complexity and particularity of the articulation of power lines surrounding these Asian American sport celebrities. The "reading sport" methodology emphasizes the particularity of power relations and interdependence of lines of power. Accordingly, I situate his or her representations in the different contexts that each athlete had to encounter. Chang's representation is situated within the conservative climate of post-Reagan America, and Wie's representation is situated within the context neoliberal racism and postfeminism. This study provides a broad understanding of the media representations of Asian American athletes and their different ideological functions in different contexts. Given that there have been a serious lack of studies regarding Asian American athletes, this iv study seeks to extend the existing body of knowledge about Asian American athletes and their multiple representations. v PUBLIC ABSTRACTIt is hardly surprising to see Asian American athletes in American sports and watch them in mainstream media. Given that one of the stereotypes about Asian Americans is their athletic inferiority to other races, they have been grossly underrepresented in sport media. However, their presence in American sports and media seems to reflect the inclusiveness of American sports as well as tolerance for Asian Americans. More specifically, their representations appear to celebrate their racial differences and the cultural diversit...

Football legend, role model, cultural ambassador, and true Canadian? A critical reading of the mediated legacy of Norman Kwong, the ‘China Clipper’

“…Regarding athletes of Asian descent, previous research noted how Asian American athletes’ recent ascendance to sport celebrity status are often framed in ways reinforcing orientalist stereotypes of Asian cultures, bodies, and genders (Chin and Andrews, 2016; King, 2011; Mayeda, 1999; Park, 2015). As blatantly racist messages diminished in the media, the portrayal of high-achieving Asian American athletes (e.g., Michael Chang, Michelle Wie) as ‘model minorities’ has become, in recent decades, a powerful yet insidious way to render Asian Americans as the perpetual ‘other’ (Joo, 2015). Recently, U.S. media’s explosive reaction to Taiwanese-American Jeremy Lin’s meteoric rise to stardom in the National Basketball Association (NBA), an exception of Asian males excelling in a contact team sport that demands athleticism, has drawn close scholarly attention to its ramifications on gender, masculinity, and U.S. race relations (Leonard, 2014; Park, 2015).…”