Graduation Semester and Year
Spring 2026
Language
English
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy in English
Department
English
First Advisor
Penelope Ingram
Second Advisor
Timothy Richardson
Third Advisor
Cedrick May
Abstract
This dissertation contributes to Asian American studies, Cinema and Media Studies, and Critical Theory by interrogating how contemporary Asian American representation is shaped by the intertwined pressures of racial politics, neoliberal market demands, and psychic life. Working across race studies, media studies, psychoanalysis, and phenomenological questions of ontology and being, the project argues that Asian American film and television cannot only be understood through the language of popular culture representation, narrative progress, media visibility, or political inclusion. Instead, I combine such angles to examine how popular culture media participates in the contradictory production of Asian American subjectivity as culturally present yet politically unstable, increasingly visible yet still constrained by historic stereotypes, and as affectively compelling precisely because these representations circulate through fantasies of pleasure, pain, catharsis, and recognition. In this way, the dissertation extends Asian Americanist critique by placing racial representation in direct conversation with media circulation, libidinal economy, and the onto-epistemological problem of how Asiatic subjects are made legible within the U.S. racial imaginary. Centering Parasite (2019) and Minari (2021) to Turning Red (2022), Past Lives (2023), After Yang (2022), Netflix’s Beef (season one, 2023), and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), I work through class struggle, immigrant family life, gendered expectations, nostalgia, racial melancholia, masculinity, parenthood, sexuality, spectacle, and the contradictory promises of contemporary multicultural representation. These films and television narratives are assembled as evidence of increased Asian American presence and are simultaneously read as critical cultural objects that reveal how transnational media industries, U.S. audience reception, and racialized modes of feeling become mutually reinforcing. The project therefore treats genre, domesticity, and family as central sites through which race, class, and gender are narrativized, consumed, and recapitulated for financial gain. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that the so-called “golden” screen of Asian American representation from the late 2010s through the mid-2020s marks both an important cultural moment and a profound ideological impasse. Even while these narratives appear progressive, nuanced, and emotionally resonant, they often remain tied to cultural and financial systems of neoliberal multiculturalism, racial commodification, and the repetitive staging of diasporic trauma, intergenerational conflict, and cultural typecasting. I reveal a more complex contemporary mediascape in which Asian American representation combines sites of struggle, valuation, feeling, and being.
Keywords
Intersectionality, Literary Critique, Asian American Studies, Cinema and Media Studies, A24, Neon, Popular Culture, Neoliberalism, Film Studies
Disciplines
Aesthetics | Asian American Studies | Ethics and Political Philosophy | Ethnic Studies | Film Production | Metaphysics | Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | Other Film and Media Studies
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Mabaquiao, Jered, "Enjoying the Golden Screen of Asian American Representation in a Colorblind Era: Neoliberalism, Narrative, and Negotiation" (2026). English Dissertations-Archive. 119.
https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/english_dissertations/119
Included in
Aesthetics Commons, Asian American Studies Commons, Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons, Ethnic Studies Commons, Film Production Commons, Metaphysics Commons, Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Other Film and Media Studies Commons