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Full-Text Articles in Anthropology

The Model Minority Myth: (Benevolent) Racism Against (Asian) Americans, Angel Leung Jan 2016

The Model Minority Myth: (Benevolent) Racism Against (Asian) Americans, Angel Leung

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Asians and Asian Americans are considered the most well-to-do racialized groups in twenty-first century U.S. Their identity and ontology are incontrovertibly influenced by the model minority myth, a stereotype that envelops them as successful and as overcoming racial discrimination. This paper argues that the model minority myth exemplifies how putatively benevolent racial tropes are nonetheless racist against all communities of colour. Thus, Asian Americans are positioned as the ‘model minority’, as opposed to certain ‘problem minorities’, in order to further subjugate Black and Brown bodies. The myth is also problematic for Asian Americans themselves, demonstrating that to exist as an …


A Revised Feminist Analysis Of Disordered Eating And Weight Preoccupation, Angel Leung Jan 2016

A Revised Feminist Analysis Of Disordered Eating And Weight Preoccupation, Angel Leung

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Eating disorders (EDs) are often emblematized by the upper-class young white woman anorexic or bulimic, an archetype that constructs disordered eating as pathological and depicts it in a singular and comprehensible manner. Personal narratives of body dissatisfaction (rooted in both literature and qualitative research), as well as my own subjectivity as a poor East Asian-Canadian woman, will equip me with the theoretical frameworks and insights by which I problematize the homogenization of problematic eating. Subscribing to the tradition of interjecting first-person perspectives into research that is so characteristic to feminist theory, I demonstrate how a subject as visceral and commanding …


A Western Concept Of Honour: Understanding Cultural Differences, Realizing Patriarchal Similarities, Rebecca Meharchand Jan 2016

A Western Concept Of Honour: Understanding Cultural Differences, Realizing Patriarchal Similarities, Rebecca Meharchand

2016 Undergraduate Awards

The term ‘honour’ is surrounded by ample amounts of cultural anxiety. First appearing in mainstream news media in the early 2000’s, ‘honour’ is a term that has come to be associated with the ‘other’, the ‘third world’, the ‘backwards’ and ‘barbaric’ societies. Perhaps the most important thing about the term ‘honour’ is that it automatically places any honour-related incident in the context of culture. In this paper, I will draw attention to the way in which the West hypocritically cries ‘honour’, pointing a finger at the ‘Third World’, while claiming to have absolved itself of any conceptual form of honour. …