The conversation about women's bodies by Ashley Judd

            A few days ago, a famous actress Ashley Judd, who is acting in the new television series Missing, posted an editorial article on the Daily Beast Web site. In the promoting event of the new show, she had a ‘puffy’ face, and media doubted she had plastic surgery, so the rumor has spread. She denied the rumor and criticized the attitudes of media in the article. This is a link.

The Article by Ashley Judd

            In this article, she referred her ‘appearance’ issue as the problem of the whole women. She pointed out that media make the conversation about women bodies every day, but the conversation “define and control us.” As we discussed in gender class, media want to show ‘beautiful and young faces’ to their audience regardless the reality. The characters in television shows all have extremely thin and well balanced body shapes and baautiful faces. The media make us believe the media content is the reality. Therefore, audience think there should be only beautiful and handsome people rather than normal appearances on television shows. Many researchers criticize the media outlets in this stuation, but I think sometimes audiences, who make gossips about celebrities, are a kind of companies of those media outlets, even though the start comes from the media.

In addition, she criticized the attitude of media outlets to deal with conversation about her ‘puffy’ face without examining the truth or fact befor publishing. Actually she denied the plastic surgery, and explained that the reason of her ‘puffy’ face was medicines. And she blamed that any medium outlet did not ask her what happened to her face. These days, many media publish unreliable articles about celebrities. I think sometimes celebrities are victims of extreme competition between media outlets. Media outlets might publish reliable coverage by accident, but in many cases, they do not have interests in the truth. They just want to get attention from the audiences. In this process, gossips about celebrities, especially female celebrities are a good source, and they cannot complain about that because media have a power in the relationship between celebrities and media. These days, many actresses and women singers suffer for the reproduction of media coverage about their private.

Ashley Judd surprised me because she wrote a clear and powerful article about the fault of media dealing with women’s issues. She suggested we need to have conversation about women such as women’s appearance and beauty, but not in the way of that media have done.  

Asian Stereotypes in Harold and Kumar series

What images do you have about Asians or Asian Americans? Do you think they are laundry-men or owners of supermarkets? Or Asian students all are good at Mathematics and science? And where did you get those images of Asians and Asian Americans? You might get those from your direct experiences and media representations.

We can watch a bunch of racial/ethnic stereotypes in Hollywood movies. In the past, images of Asian Americans were portrayed as urban gangsters and criminals in a drama genre, such as gangster movies and serious movies dealing with social problems.The Killing Field (1984) is the good example that Asians were represented as dark criminals. For a long history of Hollywood films, the portrayals of Asians and Asian Americans were negative, and the number of Asian roles of mainstream movies lacked. However, these days, extremely negative images are changing to somehow positive and familiar ones, even though Asian characters in Hollywood movies are still just supporting and negative characters compared to majority groups and even other ethnic groups.

Lately, some comedy movies represent Asian images. Starting with the Rush Hour series (1998-2007), The Hangover series (2009-2011) and the Harold and Kumar series (2004-2011) are significant examples to show Asian casts acting in comedy movies. These movies got box-office success, and influenced more familiar Asians and Asian Americans’ images. Among them, Harold and Kumar is the significant movie because Eastern Asian (Korean American) and Indian American are the main characters. These two actors John Jo (Harold) and Kal Penn (Kumar) played very good comedy scenes, but this movie uses the stereotypes of Asians to make a laugh as well as other multiracial comedy movies. In order to examine how this movie makes racial jokes, I want to introduce some scenes of this movie.

In the second movie of the series, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008), these guys were misunderstood terrorists in a flight and sent to Guantanamo. FBI agents called their parents to Guantanamo. As we said, the main character Harold is Korean American, but the agents bring a Chinese interpreter to translate their language, and the agents do not admit Harold’s parent can speak English well even though they can (Of course, because they are Asian American and have been living in US for a long time). In many cases, the English speaking issue is the most frequent misunderstanding about minority groups in US society. We can just laugh at this scene, but this scene examines that US media treat Asian Americans and even other ethnic groups as aliens or  outsiders of the US community. The interesting thing is that the actor playing Harold’s father is actually a Japanese actor not Chinese or even Korean. HAHA.

The second scene is the flight scene. Harold and Kumar took an airplane, and an old lady in the plane thought that they were terrorists because they had a bomb-shaped object. This scene is the starting of this movie, after this, they were sent to Guantanamo. This scene was really funny, but we cannot ignore the racial joke to make normal citizens into terrorists. I watched many movies and television shows dealing with this issue of Middle East Asians and terrorism. I totally understand historical backgrounds of this situation, but sometimes I think that many Arabian Americans might have suffered from this misunderstanding with political issues which do not involve themselves. Of course, a comedy is just a comedy. I just want to remind the treatment of racial issue should be more careful. In addition, like Harold’s case, actually in this movie, Kumar is Indian American not Arabian American. The nationality issue sometimes is a good source of racial jokes. I think this misunderstanding, even a joke in a comedy movie, stems from ignorance about other countries and ethnicity. 

Obviously, I like comedy movies because comedies deal with racial issues, but not seriously, so it should not be taken as extreamly seriously by people. In addition, I think I can accept negative stereotypes in comedy movies as just jokes. However, these small scenes contribute accumulations of stereotypes of Asians these days. Even though media do not have extreme influence to their audience, parts of the audience, including children, can be affected by those media images about minority groups.