Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Representation in Modern Asia

Representations of Islam, especially in the Western world, have spread negative images of the religion such as in American mass media, Hollywood movies, or news outlets. These biased attitudes are deep-rooted in histories of colonialism and Orientalism. Orientalism is a way of seeing that imagines, emphasizes, exaggerates and distorts differences of Arab peoples and cultures as compared to that of Europe and the U.S. It often involves seeing Arab culture as exotic, backward, uncivilized, and at times dangerous. Portrayals of Muslims in American popular culture spread misconceptions about the religion throughout the world. The stereotypes associated with Muslims include terrorism, fundamentalism, and extremism. These stereotypes then encapsulate the impressions that people may have of Islam and Muslims and makes it difficult for them to view the religion as anything but the violent extreme religion it is portrayed as. After the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York by the...

Foot binding in Chinese culture is a practice that is said to date back to the time of Emperor Li Yu (Troy, "The History of Foot Binding in China"). He created a six-foot tall golden lotus adorned with pearls and jewels, asking his concubine to bind her feet into the shape of a lotus and dance of its points. This slowly became a widespread practice among the royal court and then the whole of China. This practice is an example of corporeal and physical representations of women in both historical and modern Asia. They are subject to processes of othering and fetishization as a result of the process of foot binding. This blog post aims to first introduce the history and culture of foot binding, its effects on Chinese women, the effects of European missionaries on the practice, and its fetishization. T H E   H I S T O R Y   O F   F O O T B I N D I N G By the early Qing Dynasty in the 17th century, the process of foot binding became widespread throughout China- ...

With the French colonization of Indochina, it was inevitable that interracial unions, or the metissage, would occur between the French and the Indochinese. This was seen as a 'threat to white prestige' and 'moral decay' of Europeans. The rejection of 'mixed bloods' or metis portrays theories of both racial hierarchy and European superiority (Stoler, 517). This post aims to explore the questions of how the history of colonization affected the perception of the modern Indo-European metis and their exclusion in society, based mainly off Stoler's Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia . The metissage in Indochina changed political, legal, and social institutions, as well as marginalized the metis as an inferior social group and a threat to the prestige of Europeans (Stoler, 515). ("The Formation of French Indochina") History of French Indochina The colonization of Cochin-China, Annam, Tonkin, Cambodia, Kwangchowan, a...