fashion and the gender divide, part 1

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As I started my first full-time job in 2016 and observed the people around me in my corporate office, I took notice of the men, including myself, wearing essentially the same manner of clothing every day: a collared shirt with straight pants; and on a casual day, a T-shirt and jeans. This monotony was not something I had really paid much attention to in the past—but now that I was spending so much of my time in the workplace, I could not help but realize how narrow the Western professional dress code for men is. Meanwhile, the ladies are free to flaunt their straight or flared skirts, skinny or flowy pants, and every silhouette in between!

This isn't totally at the fault of male consumers: retailers also simply tend to not offer as wide of a range of options for menswear, especially for the workplace. But these businesses know that men overall do not care to stray from traditional styles, so why would they try to sell something more unique when likely no customer will buy it?

Funnily, before entering the workforce, I cared little about this topic: during college, my sense of fashion, essentially comprising of plain T-shirts and jeans carried over from high school, did not adopt much of any new sophistication that could have been expected with moving to New York City or attending an unconventional institution like The New School. In hindsight, however, I think that this apathy was reactionary: surrounded by many of my peers donning more quintessentially-New-York urban or avant-garde clothes, I may have instinctively wanted to maintain my reserved Midwestern style, if you will, as an instant and easy declaration of who I am and how I was raised.

But since graduating, that indifference has transformed into a boldness, this time respondent to my new atmosphere of a less eccentric, more homogeneous workplace. I found myself unsatisfied appearing like every other male-identifying employee around me—and, perhaps also missing a touch of that creative spirit I felt while attending university, I began to realize that clothing was a way to express the more imaginitive, quirky sides of my otherwise quiet personality. So I dove into the Internet and branched out: in August of 2016, I purchased a black-denim jumpsuit from Standard Issue and wore it to work. I felt an underlying sense of discomfort as I walked around in a one-piece, a usually unheard-of choice for men in public—but I also experienced a new sense of self-confidence, being pushed to embrace the rebelliousness and unconventionality that my garment intrinsically represented.

I acknowledge that I may be allowed some implicit freedoms given my position as a designer: professionals in executive or sales or marketing roles work differently and often need to consider how they appear to clients and the larger business world, so I can understand how men with these jobs should stay on the safer, innocuous side of fashion. But, as a young creative, I can afford to take some risks, and I relish the opportunity to do so, if to at least add some color to a world in which people tend to stick with their comforts.

part 2 >

families of color on television, part 2

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I have neglected to write a follow-up about the resolution of my Culture & Media thesis sooner, but even two years after the fact, I consider that final project—a 10,000-word essay entitled Familial Containment: The Domestication of Casts of Color on American Television—one of my proudest scholarly achievements, and it is still well worth the time to write this reflection to share the noteworthy research and conclusions I presented about depictions of people of color on television and general portrayals of race relations in the U.S.

My initial proposal in 2015 involved the question of why American scripted series with casts of color almost always revolve around family and the general implications of increased racial diversity on television. As the year went on, my focus narrowed to be less about the latter point, as I discovered that the former gave me plenty to write about. In my ultimate analysis, I mainly concluded that shows featuring casts of color use the premise of family as a way to pacify the severity of racial and other controversial topics and make for more comfortable consumption by viewers. At the time of writing, shows like Black-ish, Fresh Off the Boat, and The Carmichael Show were becoming known for their unabashed social topicality; much of what was said on these shows was racially charged and often extreme, but keeping this dialogue within the confines of the family tempered its perceived harshness.

Beyond the contemporary, I also examined how the trend of exploring minority families started and expanded with series like Good Times, The Cosby Show, Family Matters, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, All-American Girl, and George Lopez. Social and political attitudes towards race had a major effect on how television shows are written, and with racial tensions still present throughout the twentieth century and onward, non-white characters needed to be illustrated through a more relatable lens. These shows' portrayals of people of color are especially notable when compared with their many Caucasian-cast counterparts that use non-familial premises; these series are able to use the safe invisibility of whiteness—similar to the basic familiarity of family—to allow for more unique premises, such as work, friends, or fantasy.

Given that the majority of the examples mentioned were situation comedies, I also addressed the significance of adopting this genre versus drama or comedy-drama. The number of dramas about people of color is very small, and the examples that do exist, namely Soul Food and Empire, are heavily centered around family, and adapted telenovelas like Ugly Betty and Jane the Virgin balance outlandish melodrama with particularly grounded familial storylines.

I concluded with the acknowledgement that, of course, there are shows that put minorities in more divergent settings, even though they still depict social issues in some sort of contained, intimate environment. Well-known cases include A Different World, Martin, and Living Single, which all put their characters in pseudo-families, if you will, that can stand in as channels through which to tackle subjects like race.

However, in the past decade, there has been an increasing number of shows that I think are truly breaking the mold of how to illustrate diversity. In my piece, I mentioned East Los High, Devious Maids, and Telenovela, but beyond that time, more recent years have seen even more atypical depictions of minorities like Atlanta, Insecure, and Dear White People. These shows, alongside other contemporaries that feature leads of color like The Mindy Project, How to Get Away With Murder, and Master of None, are taking great strides towards portraying minorities in more complex, challenging, well-rounded ways. The question that remains is whether or not such innovative and important stories are here to stay.

< part 1

the non-technological posthuman

I recently read an excerpt from N. Katherine Hayles's seminal work How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, a crucial exploration of posthumanism and the increasing dominance of technological bodies and artificial intelligence. The posthuman condition is the state of existence beyond human, meaning beyond our mere bodies and minds. Posthumanism has been a prominent literary and scientific topic as of recent decades, ranging from Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto to illustrations of the technological singularity. Science-fiction media commonly illustrates the future as a digital posthuman world, where society is completely controlled by, dependent on, and incorporated with machines, or at least some element of mechanical processing.

Hayles, however, entertains the notion of the posthuman as already an inherent element of humanity currently and not so neatly associated with the expansion of technology. Typical depictions of posthuman futures have conventionally conveyed that humanity has become seduced by immortality and preserved intelligence by way of digital functions and networks. But Hayles believes that organic life can only remain finite and corporeal. Her vision of the posthuman instead lies only in the proposition that the human mind is to be perceived as a machine and can never explicitly be a machine. When thinking of the brain objectively as an amalgamation of many informational processes, we can perhaps better understand and improve our subjective mental capabilities.

It is hard for me to accept that humans and technology will explicitly be one and the same—how can people really be open to welcoming digital and electronic functions into their bodies? But there is evidence now that suggests such circumstances may materialize. Tattoos make up a large trend in body modification, and other ideas about inserting more artificial substances into the body could grow in the future. Medical tools like pacemakers are already in wide circulation, so more permanent devices could become more common. On the other hand, there is also evidence that supports people's rejection of more invasive technology. The advent of Google Glass was sufficiently unsuccessful, so perhaps humans are not inclined to have digital processes always present in their everyday thinking. I, therefore, align my perspective with Hayles's; the posthuman condition is already apparent in how we merely understand human intellect as a scientific function, but the more extreme version of the posthuman that involves total technological integration seems unlikely.

families of color on television, part 1

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Before I entered college, I did not watch much television. It was passively discouraged by my parents, so I never got adopted the hobby. But, since leaving home, I became somewhat obsessed with TV: I quickly got into favorites like 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, How I Met Your Mother, and Happy Endings and dove into long-gone shows like Friends and Lost, to name only a few from my list. Why did I suddenly love television so much? Was this new activity ruining my brain?

Luckily, thanks to my studies in Culture & Media, I realized that I love watching television not just for the entertainment but also because TV is one of the richest forms of media that communicates and makes very visible the ideologies of modern society on an everyday level. I wrote one of my very first essays in my major on Happy Endings, in which I discussed not just its unique portrayal of racial and sexual minorities but also its potential position of tokenism. This was the first time I really saw the power in writing about television—an activity conventionally associated with entertainment and lethargy—and parsing out the positive and negative issues being portrayed on a societally-widespread medium.

My critical eye and mind has never come more into play than this past year, in which we saw a certain revival of racial minorities on mainstream television. Recent prominent shows that focus on non-white characters include Black-ish, Fresh Off the Boat, Cristela, Jane the Virgin, and Empire. On a fundamental level, it is fantastic that minorities are getting more of the spotlight and TV is bringing more awareness about foreign cultures to Western audiences.

But when you think about these new shows as a whole, are they really advancing any impressions or judgments? Several questions have come up after watching some of these programs. For me personally, I had an interesting experience watching Fresh Off the Boat, the first Asian-American network sitcom since Margaret Cho's All-American Girl. As a Chinese born in the U.S., I have found a seamless balance between my immigrant family's culture and my American environment, and I most often never think of myself as from a minority. But seeing a family similar to mine on Fresh Off the Boat suddenly did remind me of my status as a person of color and the lack of portrayal of my race on TV. The thing is, this didn't happen when I saw other singular Asian characters on other shows, but only when seeing a group of them in a family setting. Is it a good or bad thing that I finally truly relate to someone on TV but am also reminded of my foreign, "non-normal" identity?

I discovered that virtually all of the other shows mentioned above also feature their main characters strictly in the domestic sphere of families. Why are there no shows with casts of one color in other contexts, like work or school or friendship? Furthermore, after watching some of these shows, it is clear that a heavy focus across the board is the characters' respective races. Is it possible that this emphasis is hurting general representations of minorities and further pushing stereotypes? Another question that comes up is the common placement of minorities in the genre of comedy: why is Empire the only drama on that list?

I am excited to be writing about these questions for my thesis in Culture & Media; I feel strongly about this topic not just because of the medium of television but also for the ideas of minority inclusion versus exclusion and the normalization of otherness in mainstream culture. Hopefully I'll have some answers to these questions by the end of the year!

part 2 >