Religious Experience Among Second Generation Korean Americans

✍ Scribed by Mark Chung Hearn (auth.)

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US
• Year: 2016
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 145
• Series: Asian Christianity in the Diaspora
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book explores the ways through which Korean American men demonstrate and navigate their manhood within a US context that has historically sorted them into several limiting, often emasculating, stereotypes. In the US, Korean men tend to be viewed as passive, non-athletic, and asexual (or hypersexual). They are often burdened with very specific expectations that run counter to traditional tropes of US masculinity. According to the normative script of masculinity, a “man” is rugged, individualistic, and powerful—the antithesis of the US social construction of Asian American men. In an interdisciplinary fashion, this book probes the lives of Korean American men through the lenses of religion and sports. Though these and other outlets can serve to empower Korean American men to resist historical scripts that limit their performance of masculinity, they can also become harmful. Mark Chung Hearn utilizes ethnography, participant observation, and interviews conducted with second-generation Korean American men to explore what it means to be an Asian American man today.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-xi
Introduction....Pages 1-5
Situating Korean American Men in Asian America....Pages 7-25
Listening to Korean American Men Tell Their Lives....Pages 27-41
Sports and Korean American Men....Pages 43-64
Korean American Spirituality and Gender....Pages 65-99
Forming Korean American Men: What Can We Do?....Pages 101-119
Back Matter....Pages 121-139

✦ Subjects

History of Korea;History of the Americas;Religion and Society;Spirituality