Journal Entry #13: Rodriguez & Gonzalez

     In the second section of this reading, “Can you feel my bass?”, Rodriguez and Gonzalez explore the circumstances that surround Young Asian American men in the world of muscle car enthusiasts in America. What both authors observe is that this Asian American youth is essentially excluded from the mainstream and dominant culture that is being produced by traditional American muscle car enthusiasts. In response, these Asian American young men have developed their own subculture in which they can express their passionate interests in Japanese cars and their upgrades in appearance, sound, and performance/power. This subculture allows for Asian American men to not only establish an identity for themselves but also create a social space in which some transnationalism is taking place.

        This section of the reading reminded me of a previous excerpt the class read by Antonio Tiongson Jr., which was called, “Djing as a Filipino Thing”, because there were several parallels between this Asian American group and the Filipino youth that he discussed in his writing. In Tiongson Jr.’s reading, there are several instances in which the Filipino youth is relying on DJing as their source of establishment for their identity. He explains that because their status and visibility is being denied “to them through the conventional channels of the dominant culture, DJing becomes “an important mode of self representation.” The main similarity between these two groups is that these young men are also depending on their muscle cars as a source or a platform to develop their own identity, especially one where they can exemplify their masculinity.  

However, despite this developmental progress for these young men, their subculture is now being seen as a threat to the dominant culture that they were initially excluded from. The authors write, “The participation of a group traditionally excluded from the American mainstream as inassimible aliens threatens the “law of genre,” under which American muscle cars and the tradition of hot-rodding constitute the traditional American auto-biography”. So, the effects of this subculture struggling against the mainstream culture reminds me of the power struggle that Stuart Hall described in his reading, in which he says that “the absolutely essential relations of cultural power between domination and subordination is an intrinsic feature of cultural relations”. Basically, this group is not only being excluded from a dominant culture within society but they are also seen negatively for developing their own subculture by those same individuals within the dominant culture.