For this text review assignment, I am going to discuss the acceptance of transgender in society by sharing a Taiwanese movie Miss Andy . The background of Miss Andy was set in Malaysia where the state law enforced prohibiting “a male person posing as a woman”, hence prosecuting people whose gender identity differs from the sex assigned to them at birth. Miss Andy describes a transgender male: Evon and her struggles of being accepted by her own family and creating her own family. Evon did her transgender surgery after her wife died, but was rejected by her kids. One night, Evon met and help a woman Sophie and her kids who did not have food and a house to stay. At that time, Evon was also attracted to a man Tank who was her ex-co-workers and had hearing impaired, and getting along with these three imperfect people seems to give Evon a hopeful life again. However, after Tank knew about Evon’s winning lottery ticket, he stole it and escape with Sophie and her son, leaving Evon alone.
The injustice elements were highlighted by the challenges and discrimination that Evon faced- not accepted by the society and her right to have warmth and love from family. In fact, Malaysia government has law enforcement on not recognizing transgender on identity cards, which prevent most of the transgender individuals to get a official job, and they only can work under market that increase their risk in threat. Those contrains on law increase the stereotypes in the society that prevent transgender people’s rights to live a normal life. The one and the other concept that we talked in class relates to Evon’s situation. From the depiction of the movie, Sophie, Tank, and Evon were all recognized as other from the society. However, at the end of the movie, the escape of Sophie and Tank highlight that Evon is the only other in this movie. From this aspect, even though these three people are all imperfect, Sophie and Tank are still physically recognized as the One; thus the one and the other concept can be applied in self recognition, mentally, and physical appearances.
Yo is this hate crime?
Hello everyone welcome to the podcast show this is your host Joey Lo. Hope everyone is doing well in this holiday season, and 2021 is almost over! When we review 2020, a lot of my memories are of staying at home and just doing online classes. However, a big event that happened was the pandemic the covid 19 which changed a lot of people’s lives. Their life plan may be different, or they have to delay something they are currently working on. However, when we continue to move on in 2021, there are also a lot of injustice issues that are not fully discussed or given a solution toward Asian Americans. In particular, I want to bring people’s focus to the social injustice that happened within Asian American communities and I want to discuss the murder that happened last year in Atlanta and an attack that happened in Manhattan. So just to give more information about the two events I just said, and the below information was based on the article written by The New York Times.
The first one is a murderous rampage at three spas in the Atlanta area that killed eight people, and surprisingly six of them Asian women. After this murder was unfolded, there has stirred fear and outrage among Asian-Americans who see it as the latest burst of racist violence against them, even as the shooter himself offered a more complicated motive.
Another case that happened even earlier in a 36-year-old man was stabbed near the federal courthouse in the Lower Manhattan area, and he has later taken to the hospital in critical condition. The authorities initially said they would pursue hate crime charges, but on that later Saturday they had settled on several charges, none of them related to hate crimes, according to a law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation.
So, I want to ask the audience a question: Why this is not charged as a hate crime but instead it is just charged with attempted murder or something else.
So, let’s take a little deeper look at what is a Hate crime or hate speech? First, hate speech: According to the American library association, hate speech was an expression through an intention to humiliate or incite hatred against a group or a class of person based on their race, religion, skin color, sexual and gender identities, or even their disability, or national origin. Additionally, to define hate crime, a criminal offense motivated by the above reason I just stated.
After, we get to know a little more about hate crime and speech. We can have a better understanding that this kind of certainty and specific level of law framework is really hard to define by prosecutors. Because when the case is unfolded, the police cannot find any evidence or language to conclude it as a racially motivated crime or harassment. This investigation gets to the heart of, is it racial or is it not when it comes to Asian-Americans? Like, do we believe that the race of these women had nothing to do with why murder targeted them? It’s just too soon to know right now, and that’s not the answer that many Asian-Americans want to hear. The event created more anxiety in Asian American communities, and they were still seeking validation from the law enforcement that proves that they are not being oversensitive but also can go outside safety without encountering any harassment or crime against them.
Moreover, happened at the same time in 2020, the pandemic has brought an intense relationship between people in the United States and the Asian American in the United States. New York police have reported that a huge jump in verbal and physical harassment toward Asian communities had raised from 3 events in 2019 but in 2020 the reported incident has raised to 28 based on the article written by the New York Times. A lot of these might be related to the political atmosphere between China and United States, for instance, President Trump around calling this the Kung Flu and the China virus, we see this now being parroted on the street level in many of these attacks. And I think it’s bringing into really sharp focus specifically what is happening to Asian-Americans, that this pandemic has now become racialized in a way that we haven’t seen before. And as a result, it’s drawing all this attention to attacks on Asian-Americans, and people are using language that we have not seen in recent history.
All this media and news information creates a “single story” of Asian American folks and tight their image with Covid-19. Just as the Ted talk, we saw at the beginning of the class, the danger of one single story could create prejudice and bias or like based on people’s assumption and dedicated an unfair treatment to that certain person or groups. In this case, we can see because of the news and the against verbal or any other expressions, a lot of American folks blame the origins of covid -19 toward Chinese people. How this single story can harm all these international Chinese folks or American Asians just because they share the same skin color, and the origin of one country was not the cause of the pandemic.
How actually can the United States communities and justice bring comfort to Asian or Asian American communities right now? One thing important was the missing Asian American history in our education and this lack of awareness about the history of Asians contributing to this kind of sentiment, which cause the problem invisible, and the solution must come with an informed way which is the visibility of Asian American history. Ms. Helen Zia is the author of Asian American dreams. She also stated that the forced missing history example causes people to fight against each other but not fight together. One example of Asian American racial history was during the 1800s, a serious riot happened in the Chinatown in LA, and this led to the Chinese exclusion Act that banned Chinese immigration to the U.S., which happened again during World War 2, Japanese Americans became in the eye of the attacker because of the enemy strike on Pearl Harbor.
Last, I want to conclude that how in real life we can support our Asian American folks when they are seeing this kind of challenge, one way to support is to get to know more about Asian American history, or just bring Asian American harassments topic into dialogue that can indirectly raise awareness between people.
Mental health became an important topic during the past year especially the quarantine time when people were isolated from each other and had more time to reflect on themselves and their being in daily life. In one of my systematic injustice diaries, I point out the reason why minorities got into therapies is a less seeing situation in our country. In this post, I am going to emphasize the reason by analyzing its context and the background.
In one newspaper article, one of the most popular systematic injustices topics is pointed to the mental health barriers in the Black community. Moreover, from the website, National Mental Health Alliance, negative attitudes and beliefs towards people who live with mental health conditions are pervasive within the U.S. and can be particularly strong within the Black community. One study showed that 63% of Black people believe that mental health disabilities tights with personal weakness. There are mainly two reasons that cause these effects: the difference in culture and how these cultures influence their socioeconomic status, and the effect of the discrimination that still happening in nowadays society. Due to the fact slavery existed in African American history, the misconception is that African Americans are not sophisticated enough to develop depression, anxiety, or other mental health disorders, and this led to a misconception of mental health issues and learning to ignore mental illness or call it other terms, like ‘stress’ and ‘being tired. Thus, according to the website, they often refer to their mental illness like physical illness. For instance, describing bodily aches and pains when talking about depression. Additional to African American communities, Asian Americans were also suffering from misconceptions of mental disabilities. Many Asian Americans also have strong family obligations that center around traditional and cultural values. Asian philosophical traditions strongly identify someone’s self-value with their ability to care for their family and community. These cultural thoughts encourage the idea that people with mental illness, who may not live up to these stereotypes, obligations, and values, are failures, valueless, or have no identity or purpose.
The second reason was mostly that many discriminations that minorities still encounter in their daily as living in this systematical injustice society. For example, due to this phenomenon, African Americans would not turn to therapists for help with a fear of being judged. The National Mental Health Alliance also indicated this situation can be stressed by provider bias and inequality in healthcare. In nowadays, we can still examine that health providers, both conscious and unconscious, and a lack of cultural competency can result in misdiagnosis. This ultimately can lead to mistrust of mental health professionals and create a barrier for many to engage in treatment.
Linking back to our course example, the topic of mental health issues in minorities can mostly relate to Deming’s Example in the book The Leavers. Due to his new environment in his adopted family, he struggled to identify and recognized his personal value and true identities. Another issue that is stressed in minorities’ mental health is that they often felt that could not relate to others in their environment. Deming’s experience is relatively unique due to his experience of shifting communities and his memories with his mother, we can understand how personal experience can influence their emotions and every person is a case by case but not represented as a single story, which is an important concept in psychological studies today.
This week we are going to read “The story of my body” by Judith Cofer. The story of my body describes the story of Judith Cofer’s significant life moment when she moved from Puerto Rico to the United States and her experience of how she was criticized by her body image when coming into another culture. In her book, she mainly described how her body image was changed in different environments. For example, she mentioned she was superior and highly regarded even though she was a minority. However, when she moved to the United States, she encountered a hierarchy for popularity that was dominated by white girls. Therefore, in this context of research, I am going to discuss the development of how people viewed their bodies image in western culture.
Body image and self-esteem were highly influenced by social media and people’s perspectives. Actually, people’s points of view toward bodies image can be trackback the 18th and 19th centuries. Historically, women’s bodies size and images were the best survival tool in patriarchal societies; expectations about a woman’s physical characteristics were based on male’s desire and marriageability. Consequently, women’s decisions are often restricted by women’s notions of selfhood, and their decisions must follow society and cultural expectations that forcing them to transform their body image into an idolized image. For example, in Victorian England, women would dress in corsets and crinolines to physically transform themselves into hourglasses ideal shapes. Another example is that in ancient China, women’s bodies are equated to power.
The perspectives toward women’s bodies images were changed until the start of feminism activities, which is the time women started to bring positivity and optimism when viewing their bodies image. Among the four waves of feminism, only until the third wave, which begins in the mid-’90s and engaging by post-colonial and post-modern thinking. In this phase, many opinions were finally established, including the thoughts of “universal womanhood,” body, gender, sexuality, and heteronormativity. The topic of females pretty was slowly playing an important role when coming into discussions of gender equality. Nowadays, even though social media still exist the view of ” standard women’s image”, we are seeing more opportunities to every kind of woman such as clothing brands is seeking plus-size models.
The image is describing the invention of corsets and crinolines and the 18th and 19th women shaping themselves into society’s expectations. Women are putting on corsets and crinolines.
The image is describing the value toward women’s bodies image in he 21st centuries.- there’s no perfect bodies image, and you are just beautiful as you are
Citation:
Four waves of feminism. Pacific University. (2020, July 13). https://www.pacificu.edu/magazine/four-waves-feminism.
Ngo, N. T. (2019, October 1). What historical ideals of women’s shapes teach us about women’s self-perception and body decisions today. Journal of Ethics | American Medical Association. https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/what-historical-ideals-womens-shapes-teach-us-about-womens-self-perception-and-body-decisions-today/2019-10.
Bruk, D. (2017, June 14). ‘Feminist’ approach to body positivity is actually really condescending. Observer. https://observer.com/2017/06/feminist-approach-to-body-positivity-is-actually-really-condescending/.
