Asianized Asians, Twinkies, and North Face Puffy Jackets: Constructing Racialized Gender
Identities among Second Generation Korean American College Women
Introduction
The passage of the 1965 Immigration Act ushered in an era marked by a massive influx of non-
white immigrants to the United States. Contrary to previous waves of immigration that included
primarily Europeans, the past four decades have seen a surge in non-European immigrants from Asia,
Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Caribbean. However, while civil rights and
immigration reforms have, on a legislative level, legitimated the entry of previously excluded groups to
the US, social acceptance of these “new immigrants” and their children has been slow to follow.
Assimilation patterns of European immigrants and their children have historically resulted in an
eventual racial blending into the white majority. In contrast, non-European immigrants and their
descendants have primarily been excluded from the white mainstream, viewed as “others” on the basis
of their physical attributes and national background combined (Tuan 1998).
This social hierarchy based on an inextricable relationship between cultural assimilation and
race/ethnicity provides various theoretical and empirical opportunities to understand the identity
formation process for the children of non-white, non-European immigrant groups. As the primary
undertakers of defining what it means to be “Hyphenated Americans,” second generation children
realize their identities much more so according to American norms than to those of their parents’
countries of origin (Zhou 1999). Numerous scholars have argued that traditional assimilation models
attentive to the pathways of white Europeans and their descendants into the US majority are inadequate
when applied to the newer, more ethnically and nationally diverse immigrant population because of the
continuing significance of racial difference in assuring complete integration into the white mainstream
(Almaguer 1994; Blauner 1972; Lieberson & Waters 1988; Omi & Winant 1994; Takaki 1989). While
some maintain that subsequent generations of non-European immigrant groups will eventually be seen
as white and, therefore, socially accepted on the basis of race, most agree that the physical
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Convention