Chinese Railroad Workers and the American West
Tufts Resources
Contemporary Hollywood Masculinities by
Kord and Krimmer investigate the most common male types - cops, killers, fathers, cowboys, superheroes, spies, soldiers, rogues, lovers, and losers - by tracing changing concepts of masculinity in popular Hollywood blockbusters from 1992 to 2008 - the Clinton and Bush eras - against a backdrop of contemporary political events, social developments, and popular American myths. Their in-depth analysis of over sixty films, from The Matrix and Iron Man to Pirates of the Caribbean and The Lord of the Rings, shows that movies, far from being mere entertainment, respond directly to today's social and political realities, from consumerism to "family values" to the War on Terror.
Recommended Chapter "Cowboys, myths and audiences " for TUAG exhibition Kenneth Tam: Standing in soft Formation
Call Number: Tisch: PN1995.9.M34 K68 2011
Cowboy by
The Cowboy, Reconsidered: the enduring myth of the cowboy is a richer, more diverse story than most understand. In this survey, some of the most important artists working today take up the cowboy through the lens of queer, Black, Asian, and Latinx perspectives. Perhaps no other figure in the American popular imagination conjures the respect, mystery, and adoration than that of the cowboy. And it's long been a favorite subject of artists from the early twentieth century to today. In this unique exhibition and accompanying catalogue, the cowboy is explored in depth from diverse perspectives and lived experience, ushering in a new vision for this long-standing pop icon. Director Nora Burnett Abrams considers the cowboy through historical perspectives, breaking down the myth and mystique. In an extended interview, curator Miranda Lash talks with queer Latinx artist rafa esparza who considers the vaquero (the Spanish term for cowboy) in his work. And Jongwoo Jeremy Kim explores issues around masculinity in Asian American cowboy communities. Artist List: Amy Sherald, Deana Lawson, Wendy Red Star, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Cruz Ortiz, John Baldessari, Mel Chin, Alex Da Corte, Angela Ellsworth, rafa esparza, Karl Haendel, Luis Jiménez, Kahlil Joseph, Grace Kennison, Yowshien Kuo, Laurel Nakadate, Richard Prince, Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, Ana Segovia, Stephanie Syjuco, Kenneth Tam, Ken Taylor, Salla Tykkä, Andy Warhol, and Nathan Young
Recommended chapter: chapter on Silent Spikes by Jongwoo Jeremy Kim for TUAG exhibition Kenneth Tam: Standing in soft Formation
Call Number: SMFA: N8217.C75 A37 2023
Ghosts of Gold Mountain by
"Gripping... Chang has accomplished the seemingly impossible... he has written a remarkably rich, human and compelling story of the railroad Chinese."--Peter Cozzens, Wall Street Journal WINNER OF THE ASIAN/PACIFIC AMERICAN LIBRARIANS AWARD FOR LITERATURE WINNER OF THE CHINESE AMERICAN LIBRARIANS ASSOCIATION BEST BOOK AWARD A groundbreaking, breathtaking history of the Chinese workers who built the Transcontinental Railroad, helping to forge modern America only to disappear into the shadows of history until now. From across the sea, they came by the thousands, escaping war and poverty in southern China to seek their fortunes in America. Converging on the enormous western worksite of the Transcontinental Railroad, the migrants spent years dynamiting tunnels through the snow-packed cliffs of the Sierra Nevada and laying tracks across the burning Utah desert. Their sweat and blood fueled the ascent of an interlinked, industrial United States. But those of them who survived this perilous effort would suffer a different kind of death--a historical one, as they were pushed first to the margins of American life and then to the fringes of public memory. In this groundbreaking account, award-winning scholar Gordon H. Chang draws on unprecedented research to recover the Chinese railroad workers' stories and celebrate their role in remaking America. An invaluable correction of a great historical injustice, Ghosts of Gold Mountain returns these "silent spikes" to their rightful place in our national saga. "The lived experience of the Railroad Chinese has long been elusive... Chang's book is a moving effort to recover their stories and honor their indispensable contribution to the building of modern America."--The New York Times
Call Number: Tisch: HD8039.R3152 C524 2019
Open Access
Identity and Performance
Tufts Resources
A View from the Bottom by
A View from the Bottom offers a major critical reassessment of male effeminacy and its racialization in visual culture. Examining portrayals of Asian and Asian American men in Hollywood cinema, European art film, gay pornography, and experimental documentary, Nguyen Tan Hoang explores the cultural meanings that accrue to sexual positions. He shows how cultural fantasies around the position of the sexual "bottom" overdetermine and refract the meanings of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality in American culture in ways that both enable and constrain Asian masculinity. Challenging the association of bottoming with passivity and abjection, Nguyen suggests ways of thinking about the bottom position that afford agency and pleasure. A more capacious conception of bottomhood--as a sexual position, a social alliance, an affective bond, and an aesthetic form--has the potential to destabilize sexual, gender, and racial norms, suggesting an ethical mode of relation organized not around dominance and mastery but around the risk of vulnerability and shame. Thus reconceived, bottomhood as a critical category creates new possibilities for arousal, receptiveness, and recognition, and offers a new framework for analyzing sexual representations in cinema as well as understanding their relation to oppositional political projects.
Call Number: Tisch: HQ76.2.U5 N49 2014
Afro-Fabulations by
Winner, 2019 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History, given by the American Society for Theatre Research Honorable Mention, 2021 Errol Hill Award, given by the American Society for Theatre Research Argues for a conception of black cultural life that exceeds post-blackness and conditions of loss In Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life, cultural critic and historian Tavia Nyong'o surveys the conditions of contemporary black artistic production in the era of post-blackness. Moving fluidly between the insurgent art of the 1960's and the intersectional activism of the present day, Afro-Fabulations challenges genealogies of blackness that ignore its creative capacity to exceed conditions of traumatic loss, social death, and archival erasure. If black survival in an anti-black world often feels like a race against time, Afro-Fabulations looks to the modes of memory and imagination through which a queer and black polytemporality is invented and sustained. Moving past the antirelational debates in queer theory, Nyong'o posits queerness as "angular sociality," drawing upon queer of color critique in order to name the gate and rhythm of black social life as it moves in and out of step with itself. He takes up a broad range of sites of analysis, from speculative fiction to performance art, from artificial intelligence to Blaxploitation cinema. Reading the archive of violence and trauma against the grain, Afro-Fabulations summons the poetic powers of queer world-making that have always been immanent to the fight and play of black life.
Call Number: Tisch: PS338.N4 O25 2019
Dance with Camera by
Against the backdrop of the histories of cinema, postmodern dance and performance art, Dance with Camera focuses on the myriad ways visual artists use dance to explore broader themes. Spanning six decades, works by 35 artists and filmmakers propose a rich history of pairing dance and the camera. In video dances made by Merce Cunningham and Charles Atlas choreography is designed for the camera's frame. The camera allows close-ups that bring us in proximity to the dance as in works by artists such as Tacita Dean, Maya Deren and Joachim Koester. Photographic series by Kelly Nipper, Christopher Williams and Elad Lassry freeze time while expanding the notion of dance as a time-based medium. Editing techniques conjure dances impossible in real time in works by Eleanor Antin, Oliver Herring and Bruce Conner.
Call Number: Tisch: TR817.5 .D36 2009
East Asian Men by
This book provides a fresh and contemporary take on the study of men and masculinity. It highlights new and exciting approaches to sexuality, desire, men and masculinity in East Asian contexts, focusing on the interconnections between them. In doing so, it re-examines the key concepts that underpin studies of masculinity, such as homophobia, homosociality and heteronormativity. Developing new ways of thinking about masculinity in local contexts, it fills a significant lacuna in contemporary scholarship. This thought-provoking work will appeal to students and scholars of gender studies, cultural studies and the wider social sciences.
Call Number: ebook
Men in Place: trans masculinity, race, and sexuality in America by
Daring new theories of masculinity, built from a large and geographically diverse interview study of transgender men American masculinity is being critiqued, questioned, and reinterpreted for a new era. In Men in Place Miriam J. Abelson makes an original contribution to this conversation through in-depth interviews with trans men in the U.S. West, Southeast, and Midwest, showing how the places and spaces men inhabit are fundamental to their experiences of race, sexuality, and gender. Men in Place explores the shifting meanings of being a man across cities and in rural areas. Here Abelson develops the insight that individual men do not have one way to be masculine--rather, their ways of being men shift between different spaces and places. She reveals a widespread version of masculinity that might be summed up as "strong when I need to be, soft when I need to be," using the experiences of trans men to highlight the fundamental construction of manhood for all men. With an eye to how societal institutions promote homophobia, transphobia, and racism, Men in Place argues that race and sexuality fundamentally shape safety for men, particularly in rural spaces, and helps us to better understand the ways that gender is created and enforced.
Call Number: Tisch and ebook: BF692.5 .A26 2019
Model Minority Masochism by
There are few grand narratives that loom over Asian Americans more than the "model minority." While many Asian Americanist scholars and activists are quick to disprove the model minority as "myth," author Takeo Rivera instead rethinks the model minority as cultural politics. Rather thandisproving the model minority, Rivera instead argues that Asian Americans have formulated their racial and gendered subjectivities in relation to the model minority relation that Rivera terms "model minority masochism." With specific attention to hegemonic masculine Asian American culturalproduction, Rivera details two complementary forms of contemporary racial masochism: a self-subjugating masochism which embraces the model minority, and its opposite, a self-flagellating masochism that punishes oneself for having been associated with the model minority at all.
Call Number: Tisch: E184.A75 R58 2022
Unmasking Masculinities by
Unmasking Masculinities: Men and Society is a new anthology that provides a fresh and comprehensive introduction to the field of critical masculinity studies. Grounded in the theories of masculinities with explicit connections between various theoretical perspectives and the readings, this book examines unique domains, such as the Presidency or men's responses to feminism. Through the book's emphasis on cross-cultural perspectives and experiences, readers will find new and provocative takes on masculinity today, such as nerd masculinity, female masculinity, misogyny through social media, feminism and men, and men's intimate relationships with other men.
Call Number: TISCH: HQ1088 .U56 2018
Open Access
- Article: From Merging Histories to Emerging Identities: An “Asian” Museum as a Site of Pan-ethnic Identity Promotion Abstract "In this paper, we explore the significance of the Wing Luke Asian Museum (WLAM) in Seattle, Washington as a site where pan-ethnic Asian American identity can be promoted by analyzing the strategies employed by the staff and artists of the WLAM to promote, foster, and disseminate a larger Asian Pacific Islander American pan-ethnic identity. We argue that museums are a significant site that can “provide a setting for persons of diverse Asian backgrounds to establish social ties and to discuss their common problems and experiences.”
- Podcast: Asian American Men’s Gendered Racial Socialization and Fragmented Masculinity: Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis In this episode of The Counseling Psychologist podcast series, Dr. Brian Keum talks about the article recently published in TCP titled, "Asian American Men’s Gendered Racial Socialization and Fragmented Masculinity: Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis."
- Pew Research Center: Diverse Cultures and Shared Experiences Shape Asian American Identities Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to understand the rich diversity of people of Asian origin or ancestry living in the United States and their views of identity. The study is part of the Center’s multiyear, comprehensive, in-depth quantitative and qualitative research effort focused on the nation’s Asian population. Its centerpiece is this nationally representative survey of 7,006 Asian adults exploring the experiences, attitudes and views of Asians living in the U.S. The survey sampled U.S. adults who self-identify as Asian, either alone or in combination with other races or Hispanic ethnicity. It was offered in six languages: Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), English, Hindi, Korean, Tagalog and Vietnamese. Responses were collected from July 5, 2022, to Jan. 27, 2023, by Westat on behalf of Pew Research Center.
Fraternity Resources
Greek Life at Tufts
National fraternities came to Tufts with the establishment of the Zeta Psi chapter in 1855, only three years after the university’s founding. Next came the Theta Delta Chi fraternity in 1856. Local sororities began at Tufts in 1895, almost as soon as the school became coed, and eventually merged with national sororities, bringing Tufts into the larger Panhellenic system. In the early years, these organizations functioned as a way to cement friendships and bring social life to campus, and coexisted with many local social clubs and organizations. Despite their quick establishment, a culture of Greek life never gained a significant traction on campus, especially during the economic struggles of the 1930s and political strife of the 1960s and ’70s. Many organizations were plagued by controversies over the years involving recurring complaints of discrimination, alcohol use, and hazing. Others suffered the ebbs and flows of Greek life’s popularity, experiencing continually declining membership before closing for good. Currently, there are only four active national fraternities at Tufts, three of which are in good standing with the university, and two active national sororities. Recently, several organizations became defunct or had their recognition revoked or restricted and several others faced disciplinary action when groups came under fire for hazing in 2017. A Tufts investigation into allegations of hazing and sexual misconduct was heavily publicized and led to a significant downturn in the already low popularity of Greek life on campus, with calls for banning national Greek organizations altogether.
Tufts Resources
Brown and Blue and Greek by Call Number: Tisch: LJ41.T8 T73 2017- Myths, Rites, Symbols byCall Number: Tisch: BL304 .E43 1976
Open Access