Representations of Foreign versus (Asian) American Identity in a Mass-Shooting Case

Abstract

Scholarship on media representations of Asian minority identity has established that historic constructions of the Other perpetuate a conflation of ethnic with foreign. Previous studies of Seung-Hui Cho and the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings concluded that though Cho was a South Korean national, news media overemphasized his foreign identity, despite his living in the United States most of his life. This study examines newspaper coverage of the 2009 mass shooting at an immigrant-services center in Binghamton, New York, and of perpetrator Jiverly Wong, who immigrated from Vietnam, had lived in the United States for two decades, and was a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Shifting Signifiers of Otherness: The 2002 “DC Snipers” in the U.S. Press

“…The trajectory of contemporary news-media studies on race and Other identity, particularly in relation to crime and terrorism, has focused on the evolution of stereotypical representations that tend to focus on a single signifier of Otherness (blackness, immigrant identity, Muslim identity, etc.) and link perpetrators' violent, deviant motives to that identity feature (Campbell, 1995;Chuang, 2012;Chuang & Chin Roemer, 2013;Covington, 2010;Entman & Rojecki, 2000;Gandy, 1998;Jaysane-Darr, 2010;Karim, 2000;Kumar, 2010;Lipschultz & Hilt, 2003;Nacos & Torres-Reyna, 2007;Wilson et al, 2013). This theoretical case study sought to challenge that paradigm by applying semiological analysis to a high-profile crime case in which the perpetrators embodied multiple salient Other identities, some distinct, some overlapping-and each with its own history and patterns of representation.…”

“…This study builds on previous work that analyzed more typical newspaper coverage of minority perpetrators, in which one or two dominant signifiers were assigned to them. These studies examined Jiverly Wong, a mass shooter primarily characterized as an Asian immigrant (Chuang, ), and Faisal Shahzad, a homegrown terrorist primarily characterized as an apparently assimilated, but ultimately alien, Muslim immigrant (Chuang & Chin Roemer, ). By conducting a similar analysis on Muhammad and Malvo, this study suggests that representation of insider versus outsider status can be understood through a more complex lens, and that news media do not always arrive at a conclusive representational pattern.…”

Local Television News in Salinas, California

“…However, mixed-methods studies focused on television news exist as well, such as the 2002 study by Chiricos and Eschholz. More recently, Chuang (2012) and Chuang and Roemer (2013) utilized mixed-method analyses to examine, respectively, representations of Asian American identity within the context of media coverage of the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings and representations of Muslim identity in the 2010 attempted Times Square bombing. However, unlike Chiricos and Eschholz, these latter studies looked at local and national newspapers focusing on a specific news event, not television news sources.…”

Virtual Theme Collection: Immigrants as Minorities in the Media

“…In addition, his struggle with the English language was commonly featured in news coverage. Chuang (2012) argues that this emphasis on foreignness is used as an "explanation for . .…”