Research

“Kawaii Sweets and Boba Liberalism: Desire and Disgust for Asian American Girl Culture”
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 50, no. 2, Winter 2025

This article explores how attitudes toward the sweetness and cuteness ascribed to Asian American girlhood are interlaced into what has derisively been called “boba liberalism,” or the reduction of Asian American politics into a form of mainstream liberal activism embodied by the Taiwanese beverage. As a complex political symbol of Asian America, boba’s qualities—sweet, cute, colorful, frothy, plastic, and fun to drink—associate it with normative conceptions of girlishness. This article questions how the politics of race, gender, and age converge around boba and artifacts of Asian American girl culture that draw from Japanese kawaii (“cute”) aesthetics, inspiring feelings of desire and disgust among diverse Asian American communities. Since the emergence of the term, “boba liberal” has shifted from a concept used to critique liberal multiculturalism into a slur used to harass Asian American feminists in digital spaces. This article argues that the affective ambivalences produced by sweetness and cuteness cast light not only on this contemporary phenomenon but also on long-standing anxieties in Asian American politics that have clustered around Asian American girlhood. Finally, this article works through the problem of how to critique liberal multiculturalism without denigrating sweetness, cuteness, and the satisfaction of girlish pleasures.

“Racist Attachments: Dakko-chan, Black Kitsch, and Kawaii Culture”
positions: asia critique, vol. 30, no. 1, February 2022

This article explores the ties between anti-Black racist kitsch and kawaii culture through the history of the Dakko-chan doll. In what came to be called the “Dakko-chan boom” of 1960, tens of thousands of Japanese people lined up to purchase an inflatable blackface doll with a circular red mouth, grass skirt, and winking hologram eyes. Dakko means “to hug,” and Dakko-chan's astronomical popularity resulted in part from the way the doll could be worn as an accessory, attached to the body by its hugging arms. This article asks what it meant for Japan, a nation still recovering from World War II and the American occupation, to quite literally embrace American blackface in the form of an embraceable doll. Rejecting the claim that blackface loses its significance in a Japanese context, this article argues that Dakko-chan cannot be considered devoid of racist meanings. Emerging amid the political turmoil surrounding the revision of the US-Japan Security Treaty, Dakko-chan came to express a wide range of contradictory feelings about race, sex, and nation, illustrating how affective attachments to racist forms have accrued rather than dissipated through their movement into new cultural contexts.

“Imperial Innocence: The Kawaii Afterlife of Little Black Sambo”
Victorian Studies, vol. 62, no. 4, Summer 2020

This essay argues that the Victorian racial imaginary of Helen Bannerman’s 1899 children's book Little Black Sambo lives on in the kawaii, or “cute,” aesthetic of postwar Japan. While studies of Victorian children's literature have drawn attention to the ways in which these books reflect and reproduce the racial ideologies associated with British imperialism, I contend that Victorian “imperial innocence” continues to haunt children's culture far beyond the temporal and geographical boundaries traditionally ascribed to the period. After World War II left Japan subject to the American occupation, Little Black Sambo became a runaway bestseller, prompting anti-Black racist imagery to proliferate in kawaii commodities. By tracing the book’s afterlife in kawaii, I illustrate how Victorian children's fantasies have been transmuted into flexible signifiers of racial forgetting.

“Yellow Peril, Oriental Plaything: Asian Exclusion and the 1927 U.S.-Japan Doll Exchange”
Journal of Asian American Studies, vol. 23, no. 1, February 2020

This essay illuminates the role that Asian girlhood has played in the transpacific circulation of racial affects by reexamining the history of the 1927 U.S.-Japan doll exchange from an Asian American feminist perspective. In 1927, just a few years after the 1924 Immigration Act banned Japanese immigration, hundreds of “friendship dolls” traveled across the Pacific Ocean, bearing messages of peace and goodwill. I contend that although the exchange was designed to alleviate racial tensions, the warm welcome that the dolls received was contingent upon Orientalist notions of Asian femininity and the containment of attendant sexual anxieties through an appeal to girlhood innocence. Challenging the black-white binary through which childhood studies often understands race, I show how Asian girlhood calls for a transpacific framework that attends to histories of imperialism, militarism, and commodity capitalism while elucidating the figure of the doll in recent scholarship on Asian femininity and decorative embodiment.