Karen Kuo | Arizona State University (original) (raw)

Papers by Karen Kuo

Journal of Transnational American Studies, 2013

East Is West and West Is East envisioning feminism across the pacific / 143 Facing Two Ways Baron... more East Is West and West Is East envisioning feminism across the pacific / 143 Facing Two Ways Baroness Shidzué Ishimoto, who is more commonly known in Japan as Kato Shidzué, was a former member of the Japanese Diet and a leading figure in both the birth control and feminist movements in Japan. Although Ishimoto never settled in the United States, her alliances with American feminists before World War II made her fairly well known to American intellectuals and writers interested in Japan and Asia. After World War II, Ishimoto worked with the Allied occupation in Japan and as one of only a few Japanese citizens involved in the occupation was recruited by the US government to play an important role in the future democratization of her country. The US Office of Strategic Services listed Ishimoto and her future husband, Kato Kanju, under the file titled "Friendly Persons." Intelligence reports collected on Ishimoto from American missionaries who knew her before the war described her as "anti-militaristic, and pro-America." 1 Ruth Benedict's influential 1946 book about Japanese culture, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, drew from parts of Ishimoto's autobiography. After the war, Ishimoto worked to forge stronger relations between Japan and its former colonies (especially Korea) and became the first Japanese woman to run for the House of Representatives. Ishimoto wrote her autobiography in English for Americans at the urging of her friend and mentor, Mary Beard, who believed that Ishimoto's life would be of great interest to the American public. Facing Two Ways: The Story of My Life introduced Americans to a Japanese woman who was radically different from the literary and theatrical constructions of Japanese femininity popularized in the West at that time. Where popular orientalist representations of Japanese women in the West depicted Japanese femininity as passive and subordinate, especially to men, these representations also supported a Western aestheticization and depoliticization of Japanese women, who were seen as merely orientalist exotica for Western pleasure. In contrast, Ishimoto's autobiography would seem to refuse a reading of the exotic and

This essay presents a comparative racial and gender analysis of masculinity and power during the ... more This essay presents a comparative racial and gender analysis of masculinity and power during the post- Depression United States in a reading of Younghill Kang's novel, East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee. 1 I argue that Kang's novel, primarily read as an immigrant story yields insight into the multiple racial and class formations of Asian and black men in the U.S. within the context of sexuality, power, labor, and the economy. Kang's novel shows how the dominant racial paradigm of black versus white in the U.S. depends on an Asian male subject who negotiates his racialized identity within a tripartite racial system of black, white, and Asian. This racial negotiation of Asian masculinity revolves around the figure of the early Asian foreign student who receives privileges

Social Sciences, 2021

This paper assesses how ongoing historical racism and nativism as embedded within U.S. culture re... more This paper assesses how ongoing historical racism and nativism as embedded within U.S. culture requires new and important dialogues about the omnipresence of White supremacy and its interconnected mechanisms that divide communities along the lines of race and perceived in-group status. To assess the role of immigration as it is understood through paradigms of White supremacy and systemic racism, the current study examines individual-level predictors of indifference to the BLM movement based on nativity status among Asian Americans—a racialized pan-ethnic group that is comprised of predominantly foreign-born members. Using the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey, one of the few nationally representative surveys that include detailed information about the Black Lives Matter movement, our study includes 1371 Asian immigrants (i.e., foreign-born Asian Americans) and 1635 U.S.-born Asian Americans. Results demonstrate that reporting indifference to the BLM movement differ...

Journal of American History, 2020

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 2015

This essay combines a close historical reading of a relatively unknown play, The Shanghai Gesture... more This essay combines a close historical reading of a relatively unknown play, The Shanghai Gesture (1926), with an analysis of its transformation into a film by Josef von Sternberg in (1942). Key to my argument is how concepts of female and domestic identity interact with race precisely within the genre of the theatrical female melodrama and the cinematic form. By foregrounding genre and form as a key part of understanding this play, I show how race and gender could be ambiguous or undefined. This is illuminated when the medium and genre shift. In 1942, the play was remade into a film by Josef von Sternberg. The racial and gender ambiguity of the play becomes masculinized (and neutralized), particularly under cinema’s voyeuristic gaze and the pressures exerted upon the director and the studio by the motion picture production codes.

Journal of Asian American Studies, 2015

Journal of Asian American Studies, 2003

Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2012

Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies, 2015