The Seoul of black folks African-American women's experiences with the "gaze" in Korea and Japan

Abstract

In this study the concept of the gaze will be used to analyze the travel experiences of African-American women in Korea and Japan. Gazing is worth exploring in this context because the complex identities African-American women possess of Western and black simultaneously affords and denies them access to political and social power abroad. Historically, gazing is considered a unilateral act, however, critical analyses of the gaze demonstrate that gazing is a multilateral process, with both actors simultaneously constructing their subject, while creating a self-identity that transgresses their gazer's attempts to position them as an inferior other. Thus, recent studies on the gaze challenge the notion of fixed positions of dominance and claim that power moves freely between the porous lines of subject and gazer, positions that are also difficult to define as fixed and unchanging. Thus, this study explores how racializing the Western traveler as black deepens our understanding of the gaze. To examine how the dynamics of the gaze operate for African-American women in Japan and Korea, a content analysis was conducted on seven travel blogs written by six different women living in Japan and Korea for at least one year.