Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet

This is an ambitious project, but Pham is up to the task. Pham's attention to the blog as both a cultural form and a commercial project is supported with textual and visual evidence garnered from blogs themselves. In doing so, she not only makes her argument, she demonstrates a model of digital analysis that is both traditional and novel at the same time. After reading this book, it will be hard to argue against the merits of 'blog studies.' -- Erin M. Arizzi * Feminist Media Studies * Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet is a compelling book to read, deserving critical acclaim for its originality and insightful contribution to digital fashion media studies concerning the dynamic relations of race, gender, class, and labor. It is good for researchers who are interested in, and classes where the focus is on, fashion studies; digital media; and critical cultural analysis of race, gender, and class. -- Sara Liao * Journal of Asian Studies * Pham's is one of the first of its kind in offering a critical investigation of the personal-style blogosphere.... Though the work of creating selfies and writing blog entries about clothing is often considered more within the realm of leisure than labor, Pham convincingly argues that the work of being a superblogger is highly labor intensive. -- Anita Mannur * American Quarterly * Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet makes an important scholarly contribution not only to the field of media and cultural studies but to ethnic, gender, and queer studies as well. In this sense, it is an excellent example of intersectional, feminist digital culture research that continues to be needed in order to better understand how the visibilities and movement of embodied identities work across digital culture. -- Jessalynn Keller * Cinema Journal * With Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet, Pham makes a significant contribution to scholarship on fashion, race, gender, and online media by eloquently demonstrating the ambivalent outcomes when Asianness becomes productive of economic and cultural value. While Asian superbloggers serve as evidence that the previously marginalized can gain entry into fashion's highest status venues, Pham deftly shows that behind the veneer of this apparent democratization lies an unpaid or underpaid, racialized labor force. -- Ann Marie Leshkowich * Media Industries * Pham's book is sharp, punchy and eminently readable. It is full of shrewd visual and textual analysis of the content of blogs and puts forward a muchneeded critique of the kinds of critiques that bloggers themselves tend to have launched at them. . . . I thoroughly enjoyed reading Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet, and I would recommend it to any scholar interested in blogging, social media, personal style, creative labour or race and gender politics in fashion today. -- Brent Luvaas * International Journal of Fashion Studies * [A] deeply engaging and sophisticated discussion of the race and gender dynamics that affect Asian fashion labor. -- Christine Wu * Japan Times * Theorizing an unstudied yet influential cultural archive, Minh-Ha T. Pham offers an engaging and sophisticated analysis of personal style blogs that breaks new ground in our understandings of the intersections of technology, aesthetics, racial formation, and cultures of consumption. An important and timely contribution to Asian American studies, media studies, fashion studies, and critical race studies. -- Denise Cruz, author of * Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina * Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet is a fiercely imaginative and inspiring book. Minh-Ha T. Pham's discussion of the garment industry's racialization and the details she provides about bloggers' lives and the conditions of their labor is impressive. She acknowledges and debunks the writing on overly utopian and breathless views of digital media as 'participatory culture' while giving full credit and agency to the bloggers she writes about. Stunning! -- Lisa Nakamura, author of * Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet *