Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet: Race, Gender, and the Work of Personal Style Blogging

Dr. Pham (Pratt Institute) will examine the phenomenal rise of elite Asian bloggers who have made a career of posting photographs of themselves wearing clothes on the Internet. Whereas Asian superbloggers have been widely celebrated as part of a new empowered Asian creative class that prove old barriers to success (e.g., race, ethnicity, class, gender) are no longer obstacles in the digital economy, Pham argues that elite Asian bloggers' online productions of fashion taste may be new but they are not detached from earlier gendered racial histories of Asian fashion work. Her talk will discuss some of the labor conditions and constraints that shape style blogging even at the most elite level to show that the impact of race, gender, and class are evolving but not diminishing online.