In a Nutshell

These last few months, I’ve been ruminating over the comments and feedback we gathered from our focus group last October, and for those of you who showed up, thanks very much! And for those of you who couldn’t make it (but have been wanting to know what we covered), here’s a tidbit or two:

This time out, instead of our focus group being about Asian-American men, we thought we’d get more specific by focusing our attention on the experiences of Asian-American Christian men. Reason one was to gather more insights and opinions to better flesh-out the backstory (and future hoped-for stories) for one of our leads (Richard, the pastor-fireman); reason two was that we wanted more feedback on how men who happen to be Asian-American as well as Christian might see see themselves in a world where (more often than not) they are instantly assumed (i.e. pidgeonholed and/or typecast) to be anything but.

We enumerated first on the qualities of Asian-American men and Asian-American Christian men as desirable husbands and fathers, but unfortunately ran aground (for a number of reasons) with regard to the “hallmarks of a desirable Asian-American Christian boyfriend.” To this effect, it seems that more positive modeling of such a man is still wanting (and yet still very much desired) in pop culture, mass-media Americana — thus we believe there is much work (and much good) that can be accomplished on behalf of these, our Asian-American brothers with such sitcoms as our “Wingmen”…

We hasten to add, not that such men do not exist (because invariably they do!), but so that they receive the validation (and encouragement) by mainstream America that has long been denied them.

Okay, off our soapboxes!

Bye for now,

Marie

This entry was posted on January 13, 2010 at 7:01 pm and is filed under Asian American men, Chicago, Music, Television, Asian Cinema, Wingmen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.