The Plaid Bag Connection

Tag Archives: perpetual foreigner


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Can a Kim or a Mao rise to the national stage?

Jason Reed/Reuters /Landov. Via NPR.

Last night, as San Antonio mayor Julián Castro delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, ill-informed commentators on social media wondered aloud if Castro were related to Fidel:

Some who were better informed made light of Castro’s name:

Grace Lee’s tweet raises a good question. If someone with an “infamous” name like Kim or Mao rose to the national stage, in the US or elsewhere in the West, what kinds of questions and commentary would that provoke? If I were to give a speech on a national stage, I would expect Twitter to be abuzz with questions about whether I’m related to Hồ Chí Minh.

The answer, by the way, is no. (And let’s not even bring up that whole refugee thing.)


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WLR: Men in media

Photo by Tamara Abdul-Hadi.

UnVilifying the Arab Man: A Portrait Series
Via Schema Magazine:

Abdul-Hadi’s project aims to break these stereotypical images that often misrepresent Arab men in the media. She wants to redefine the dominant narrative to shift from hyper-masculine, angry, terrorist to more realistic images. Her formula to achieve this is simple—she’s literally taking images of real Arab men to juxtapose the erroneous characters in popular media that honestly, reflect no one.

Uploaded: The Asian American Movement

This documentary aims to uncover the extent to which Asian Americans have utilized new media such as YouTube to infiltrate American popular culture and where this momentum will lead. The documentary will focus on the current struggles and successes of important Asian Americans in entertainment, from both online celebrities and industry professionals.

Is it just me, or does this trailer foreground the experiences of Asian American men a little too much? I haven’t seen the film, but come on, where are the Asian American women YouTube stars in this?

Continue Reading →


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Links: Foreign yet familiar, wanted yet unwanted

Portrait at the first pride celebration in Shanghai in 2009. Photo: kris krüg (Flickr/Creative Commons).

Race-based attraction

Benjamin Law, author of The Family Law, writes about being at the bottom of the racial hierarchy in the Western gay marketplace of attraction:

Like some gay hybrid of a GPS, personals section and neighbourhood beat, Grindr pinpoints your location and presents you with photos of nearby men. Naturally, Grindr users all look for different things: hairy/smooth, slim/athletic. Many also state what they’re avoiding. “No femmes,” say some. “No fat, no old,” say others. “No Asians.” That last one – “No Asians” – comes up a lot. Which is to say, they’re avoiding guys like me.

“No Asians” would be a silly policy among Asians in Asia, of course, so personal understandings of hierarchy of attractiveness change dramatically according to the locale:

In the past, when I’ve been asked what guys I’ve found attractive, the answer was rarely Asian men. It wasn’t until I spent time travelling through Asia – in Japan and India, especially – that I found the men beautiful, even ruggedly handsome. Some­thing else changed, too. In Beijing, Tokyo and Delhi, I suddenly became a massive hit in gay clubs. For all these complicated questions about race and desire, perhaps the answer is quite simple: we all just need to get out more. Continue Reading →

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