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Discourse Studies
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Mixed-ethnic girls and boys as similarly powerless and powerful: embodiment of attractiveness and grotesqueness

Laurel D. Kamada

TOHOKU UNIVERSITY, JAPAN, laurel{at}he.tohoku.ac.jp

An ongoing study examining the discursive negotiation of ethnic and gendered embodied identities of adolescent girls in Japan with Japanese and `white' mixed-parentage is extended to also investigate and compare boys . This study draws on Feminist Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis which views women and girls as `simultaneously positioned as relatively powerless within a range of dominant discourses on gender, but as relatively powerful within alternative and competing social discourses' (Baxter, 2003: 39). Here, this is taken further by also giving voice to boys. Furthermore, ethnic discourses are examined alongside of gender discourses. Not only girls constructed the `idealized Other', within discourses of femininity, but boys similarly viewed their bodies against a model of idealized masculinity within discourses of masculinities. The boys revealed a feminized, narcissistic body consciousness where they struggled to resist a `discourse of foreign grotesqueness' and instead worked to embody themselves within a positive `discourse of foreign attractiveness', as did the girls.

Key Words: adolescents • attractiveness • embodiment • empowerment • Feminist Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis Japanese • grotesqueness • mixed-ethnicity

Discourse Studies, Vol. 11, No. 3, 329-352 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1461445609102447
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