Faculty Directory

Summary of Expertise

Television history and theory, racial discourse, feminist criticism, Asian American media production, industrial practices and social change in both mainstream Hollywood and alternative media.

Research Interests

L.S.Kim is finishing a book manuscript, Maid for Television: Race, Class, and Gender on the Small Screen, which is a historical study of comparative racial representation and a book about the representation of domestic labor on television, a medium that is itself a domestic medium. This book investigates the cultural significance of the racialized female domestic – the maid – through the figure’s representational and narrative function in American television from 1945 to the present. The importance of looking at the figure of the maid is that she is a recurrent and patterned image of and occupation for women of color, simultaneously demonstrating and revealing the nexus of race, class, and gender hierarchies in American culture. As such, the focus is on the analysis how racial discourse works to define race and to encourage the reification of social hierarchies through the figure of the racialized domestic. Studying the representation of the relationships between servants and their employers gives access to contradictory, and displaced discourses on social issues specific to different historical eras such as a post-war economy, Civil Rights, the Vietnam War, the Feminist Movement, immigration, and American citizenship.

Biography, Education and Training

Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles
M.A., University of California, Los Angeles
B.A., Smith College

Selected Publications

• “Speed TV: NASCAR Nation, Class, and Convergence” in Flow TV: Essays on a Convergent Medium, edited by Michael Kackman, et. al. New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2009.
• “Asians Can Dance” for In Media Res, a project of MediaCommons: A Digital Scholarly Network sponsored by The Institute for the Future of the Book (part of the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC) and the MacArthur Foundation (Week of April 28, 2008).
• “Representation of Race” in Battlegrounds: The Media, edited by Robin Andersen and Jonathan Gray. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2007.
• “All in the Family: Reaganism, Capitalism, and American Television” in Neo-Conservativism and Mass Culture in America (in Korean), edited by Hee-Joon Chung and Hyun-Suk Seo. Seoul, Korea: Chaeksesang, 2007.
• “Air Time” in Ms. 35th Anniversary Issue. Fall 2007.
• “Making Women Warriors: A Transnational Reading of Asian Female Action Heroes in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” JUMP CUT: A Review of Contemporary Media, No, 48, Winter 2006.
• “AZN Television: The Network for Asian America,” Flow: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture, Volume 3, Issue 7 (December 9, 2005).
• “Be The One That You Want: Asian Americans in Television Culture, Onscreen and Beyond,” Amerasia Journal volume 30, no. 1 (2005).
• “Race and Reality … TV,” Flow: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture, Volume 1, Issue 4 (November 19, 2004).
• “‘Serving’ American Orientalism: Negotiating Identities in The Courtship of Eddie’s Father,” Journal of Film and Video, volume 56, no. 4. (2004).
• “The Performance of Multicultural Identity in U.S. Network Television: Shiny, Happy, POPSTARS (Holding Hands)” with Gilberto Moíses Blasini, Emergences: Journal for the Study of Media and Composite Cultures, volume 11, no. 2. (2001).
• “‘Sex and the Single Girl’ in Postfeminism: The F-word on Television,” Television & New Media, volume 2, no. 4. (2001).

Teaching Interests

Television History and Theory, Asian Americans in the Media, Music in Film and Television, Genres (specifically, the Action Genre and Reality Television), Feminism and Film/Video/Television.