The failure of Asian American representation in All-American Girl and The Cho Show |
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| Authors: | Jane Chi Hyun Park |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Department of Gender and Cultural Studies and the United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia;2. Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, SOPHI, Faculty of Arts, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia |
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| Abstract: | This article examines Korean American comedian Margaret Cho's attempts to represent Asian American identity as the star of two television sitcoms, All-American Girl (1994) and The Cho Show (2008). It begins with All-American Girl, showing how its contradictions around race, ethnicity and gender demonstrate the ideological boundaries of the network sitcom genre. It then looks at how the post-network ‘celebreality’ sitcom, The Cho Show, reproduces the assimilationist identity politics promulgated in All-American Girl even as it purports to critique them. The commercial failure of these shows is traced ultimately to the broader institutionalised racism and sexism of the US entertainment industry, its perpetuation of the neoliberal ideology of the American Dream and the internationalisation of that ideology by social minorities. |
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| Keywords: | Asian American television sitcom race humour |
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