Asian American Body Research Articles

“Eliminating Temptation”: Anti-Asian Fetishization, Criminalization, and Violence in America

This project seeks to examine the ways in which the unique history of fetishization and criminalization of the Asian American body has been and continues to be used to justify violence against the Asian American community, especially those groups most marginalized, such as women, migrants, and sex workers. From early-held Western ideas of Asia as an exotic land ripe for conquest and resource extraction, to notions of early Asian American laborers as machine-like “coolies” who drove down wages and threatened white livelihoods, to the Atlanta tragedy against female spa workers being justified through “eliminating temptation” rhetoric, the desire to consume the Asian American body through labor and sex has been and continues to be used to justify and perpetuate violence and exclusion against the Asian diaspora in the United States.This paper will focus on how Asian and Asian American women exist at a unique intersection of labor and sex that leaves them particularly vulnerable to violence. In Part I, I will examine the development of the cultural and legal consciousness of the Asian woman in the United States and the impact of this construct upon the law. In Part II, I will explore non-carceral approaches to healing and forward movement for our communities.

The Emergence of the Asian American Sporting Body: Michael Chang and Model Minority Discourse in the Post-Reagan Era

This research stems from an interest in the sudden rise of Asian American athletes' crossover appeal, both as athletes and as celebrities, within the conservative backlash climate of the post-Reagan United States. In this article, I examine the cultural meanings attributed to former professional U.S. tennis player Michael Chang (from 1988 to 2003) and offer counternarratives to tropes of American diversity and inclusiveness commonly found in stories about him. I first discuss the model minority discourse and its implications. Then I examine how the model minority discourse was embodied through the media's Orientalist representation of Chang's Asian American body and how his model minority identity was used to make sense of the Asian American athletic body's success in the White-centered tennis field. Finally, I examine Chang's images in television advertisements and explore how these images satisfied the New Right's conservative desire to create a rugged-individual persona to prove that the American dream remained a possibility without state intervention, even for minorities.

Model Minority Terrorist: Post-9/11 Asian American Racial Formation and Brown Peril Narrative Discourse in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Model Minority Terrorist:Post-9/11 Asian American Racial Formation and Brown Peril Narrative Discourse in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist Stephen Hong Sohn1 (bio) Over approximately a single decade (1965–1975), the landscape for Asian Americans changed radically: the harshest quotas for Asian immigrants were lifted, ethnic studies programs were created, and academic excellence became associated with Asian Americans. Given all these seemingly positive changes, how can we engage the continued production of novels that fixate upon damaged Asian American subjects? How does racism get configured in today's age of unparalleled legislative inclusion? If the model minority stereotype merely represents the flip side to the yellow peril (Okihiro 142), then Asian American racial formation continues to revolve around a subtle dialectic in which oppression and prejudice emerge in more insidious ways. We can thus read the work of contemporary Asian American fictions through their illumination of the malleable contours of racial formation, as it has changed during the post-1965 period. Since 1966, the predominant racial formation attached to Asian Americans has been that of the model minority. Presumed to be astute, hardworking, and obedient, Asian Americans have been promoted as the minority ideal. However, South Asian Anglophone and South Asian American fiction writers have been incisive in their attention to racial formation, as it was re-scripted in the post-9/11 moment and as civil liberties [End Page 232] began to erode in light of the war on terror. In a range of novels, the South Asian American body transforms into a site of racial anxiety that manifests in acts of prejudice and violence. Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist takes a prominent place within this grouping, which includes Marina Budhos's Ask Me No Questions, Saher Alam's The Groom to Have Been, H. M. Naqvi's Home Boy, Nafisa Haji's The Writing on My Forehead, and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's Queen of Dreams. But Hamid's status as a transnational author has moved critical considerations of his work largely into the purview of postcolonial and global studies. Though published in 2007, the novel has already received widespread critical attention in dozens of articles, book chapters, reviews, and conference papers. Some scholars read the novel as exemplary of a global or world novel (Medovoi; Morey, "'The Rules of the Game Have Changed'") or as a postcolonial narrative boasting a trenchant critique of American imperialism and globalization (Singh; Haider; Keeble). Others focus on its unique combination of formal elements and social contexts (Adami; Mandala White). My article builds upon the work of Anna Hartnell, who argues that the novel reveals the complicated dynamics of religion and racial formation. As Hartnell notes, "The fact that America hosts a far more assimilated and upwardly mobile population of Muslims and Arabs than any European country suggests" (340) a form of privilege that some minority groups could not claim, at least prior to 9/11. Hartnell's larger point is that the novel critiques the melting pot formulation precisely because America's racial and religious minorities rarely inhabit the same positions in social hierarchies and are often positioned against one another. I extend Hartnell's argument by emphasizing the shift in American ethnoracial and religious alignments that repositions South Asians alongside Arabs and Muslims in the period following 9/11. The novel's depiction of a Pakistani transnational necessarily places this text within the purview of Asian American Studies, its attendant critical methodologies, and its central thematics (such as racial formation). At the same time, this novel encourages further interdisciplinary dialogues. With respect to US ethnic studies after 9/11, Ibrahim G. Aoudé provocatively considers how "Ethnic Studies, especially Asian American Studies, is compelled to deal with Arab American issues if it wants to remain a relevant field and revitalize its traditional commitments" (144). [End Page 233] Nadine C. Naber notes the affiliations between Asian American and "Arab/South Asian/Muslim American(s)" in that same period through the germination of activist coalitions (217–27). In light of the heightened paranoia, Shireen Roshanravan investigates how the targeting of Filipino airport screeners after the terrorist attacks demonstrated a large-scale attack on civil liberties in the name of...

"I'm not White, I have to be pretty and skinny": A qualitative exploration of body image and eating disorders among Asian American women.

The purpose of the current study was to examine the relationships between body image, eating disorders, and treatment-seeking motivations among Asian American women in emerging adulthood (ages 18-24). Twenty-six Asian American women participated in qualitative focus groups of 4 to 6 individuals each from December 2015 to February 2016. Constructivist grounded theory was used to analyze focus group data. The resulting theoretical model, the "Asian American Body Image Evolutionary Model," maintains that a central phenomenon of perceptions and interpretation of messages about body image and eating, is rooted in three influencing factors: (1) Societal influence of mainstream White culture and Asian culture; (2) interpersonal influences of immediate family and close others; and (3) individual influence. An individual's perceptions and subsequent interpretation of messages may lead to disordered eating and decisions around treatment-seeking. The model developed can be utilized by practitioners or clinicians to help obtain a better understanding of the societal, interpersonal, and intrapersonal forces that may shape conceptualizations about body image and eating behaviors among Asian American women. In addition, findings from this study can be incorporated into prevention programs and interventions that focus on mental health among this population.

Complicity and Resistance: Asian American Body Politics in Black Lives Matter

Complicity and Resistance: Asian American Body Politics in Black Lives Matter

Performing Race, Speaking the Body

Performing Race, Speaking the Body

Homegrown Terror: Projective Identification and Wafaa Bilal’s Domestic Tension

At the intersection of Asian American studies, performance studies, and psychoanalytic theory, this article issues a study of the work of performance artist Wafaa Bilal. Drawing on the work of psychoanalytic theorist Melanie Klein and, in particular, Klein’s theory of projective identification, Homegrown Terror issues a theory of projective identification’s role in the process of racialization, and, in particular, the production of the racialized figure of the so-called homegrown terrorist. Bilal’s work allows us to see the process through which members of the dominant culture disaggregate their own fear and terror of the Middle Eastern, South and Central Asian American body (apprehended as Muslim or Arab), externalizing these negative affects by projecting them onto and in some cases into the body of the racialized subject.

Introduction

Introduction Susie J. Pak (bio) and Elda E. Tsou (bio) The purpose of the following collection of essays is to analyze the epistemologies of the field of Asian American studies through the disciplines of literature and history. The interdisciplinary focus of this volume emerges from a set of political and methodological obligations shared by both disciplines as "Asian American" bodies of knowledge. Specifically, this involves what we are calling an "epistemology of the given," defined by an approach toward representation that regards it as self-evident. The process of naturalizing representation implies an epistemology that commands a "metaphysics of presence," an erasure of the historicized process of signification such that the meaning of the sign appears immediately "present" to itself without mediation.1 For history, this epistemology occurs as the "body" of the Asian American subject; for literary criticism, it occurs as an instrumental approach to literature such that its relationship to "Asian America" appears present to itself. Collectively, these essays ask: How might Asian American history be constructed without an Asian American body? How might a literature called "Asian American" be reterritorialized without the content-driven tether of "Asian America"? In the four decades since the inception of Asian American studies as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry, the question of the body has been a central issue. But for just as long, scholars have problematized the coherence, the utility, and the limitations of an "Asian American" body. From [End Page 171] the beginning, the field understood its intervention as a two-part project for the recovery and invention of the Asian American subject, the effects of which produce a critique of dominant hegemonic frameworks and institutions.2 Working against a history of exclusion, absence, and misrepresentation, Asian American scholars concentrated on accounts of Asian American experience that rectified the omissions and errors of the past by featuring prominently Asian American voices, bodies, and points of view. Literary critics emphasized the authenticity of literary counternarratives, while historians focused on oral histories and ethnographies. Terms like "excavation" and "discovery" served as indices of an Asian American "body" of knowledge conceived as a visible, empirical, and self-evident proof of Asian American presence. In the ensuing decades, as scholars noted more than twenty years ago, the parameters of the field have drastically shifted from "claiming America" as changes in immigration, a rising professional middle class, and profound economic, social, and political transformations have altered the landscape of "Asian America."3 Nevertheless, even in a vastly reshaped terrain where terms like "difference," "diaspora," "transnational," and "comparative" have replaced the cultural nationalism of the 1970s, something like the old essentialism still persists as the reigning epistemology of the field. Asian American historiography and literary criticism continue to depend on Asian American "bodies" as the primary means of identifying Asian American knowledge. By "body," we mean not only the bodies of actual Asian American subjects but also a reliance on the immediacy of representation itself such that some form of an Asian American subject, whether conceptual, empirical, or synecdochical, acts to secure the identity of the field. Historically, Asian American studies has been strongly marked by a narrative of the body and its various iterations (voice, agency), perceived as cognates for presence (truth, experience, knowledge). This narrative involves the recuperation and the representation of an Asian American presence that has been negatively defined by the exclusion, expulsion, and exploitation of Asian bodies; that is, by absence. But the significance attached to the body in Asian American studies has resulted in an epistemological attitude assuming the transparency (or at least lack of complication) [End Page 172] of the representational apparatus itself, referring to the "body" of knowledge or the Asian American "body" as self-evident entities without historicizing or problematizing their representation. This special issue seeks an interdisciplinary engagement with these questions. What we are calling the "epistemology of the given" occurs in both disciplines as the following: first, as a critical tendency to devalue the apparatus of representation, such that the content under analysis appears self-evident; second, as a narrative of social transformation justifying the field's continued existence by connecting its increasingly institutionalized subject matter to its so-called subjects, a connection figured...

Guest Editor's Introduction: Asian American Performances and a World of Differences

Writing about the multimedia performances of Dan Kwong, Chinese Japanese American artist, Robert Vorlicky suggests the position of centrality is one that might be reimagined through Asian American performance. Even as the Asian American body can be recentered on stage in an effort to respond to history of exclusion and misrepresentation, when it occupies that space performatively, it has the potential to make visible the dynamics that produce centrality in the first place: The performer soon realizes that the central position can be deceiving one. While it reveals insights, it also demonstrates that many centers co-exist at any given moment. Stories overlap, histories collide, identities blur--no one story can capture it all. For there is no all, after all. The best one can do is to tell his or her own story, to experience--however briefly--the centrality of that phenomenon and be aware, ever so vigilantly, that multiple stories with their fluid loci co-exist alongside one's own. In the United States, the floating centers that characterize one's multiple stories, and those of others, are among the most vivid manifestations of living democracy. (74) Rather than replacing one locus of power and visibility with another, the Asian American body in can highlight the existence of many centers, many stories, and many possible enactments. This special issue testifies to the diversity of positions Vorlicky evokes. In so doing, it highlights variegated Asian American performances in order to suggest the richness of field of study worthy of further attention. In Performance in America: Contemporary U. S. Culture anal the Performing Arts, David Romfin laments the relative lack of attention paid to drama and in American Studies. According to Roman, notwithstanding the popularity of performance metaphors--borrowings that denote little interest in the fields themselves except for ... [their] language (24)--scholarly invocations of tropes ironically evince performance's peripherality, which often manifests as a tradition of critical self-consciousness and anxiety (30). Such paradoxical attentive inattention might be characterized as commonplace in the field. However, Diana Taylor suggests that perhaps the term itself, rather than devaluing the field's practices per se, makes so elusive that [i]ts very undefinability and complexity.., carries the possibilities of challenge, even self-challenge within it, precisely because it simultaneously connot[es] process, praxis, an episteme, mode of transmission, an accomplishment, and means of intervening in the world (15). Reading Roman's assessment of the field in relation to Taylor's definitions of and Vorlicky's sense of the counter-intuitive possibilities of centering the Asian American body in performance, I suggest that the oscillation between centrality and peripherality, visibility and invisibility, popularity and inscrutability--a movement that constitutes the grounds of Asian American performances that always exist both within and outside of mainstream tradition--generates enormous critical energy. Such critical energy manifests in variety of ways, as the wide-ranging subjects covered in this special issue attest. Perhaps some of the most visible Asian American performers are those who have been working in art, that contested, multiply defined field whose foregrounding of the conceptual in conjunction with the body-in-performance has lent itself as readily to college campus tours as to theatrical and gallery exhibition. Korean American conceptual and artist Michael Joo's three-decade career has been preoccupied with (re)figuring the ways Asian American bodies constitute and challenge Western narratives of national progress. Joo's provocative performances draw our attention to the material elements--salt, sweat, urine--that make up and are excreted by the body. …

National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (review)

National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (review)

“Where's My Parade?”: Margaret Cho and the Asian American Body in Space

Margaret Cho rose to fame as the star of the first television sitcom to feature an all Asian American cast. Her one-woman show, I'm the One That I Want, recounts that disastrous experience, as it also maps American culture as a series of segregated spaces. Lee's article explores Cho's construction of her bodily excesses—her dirty vagina, collapsed bladder, inability to be decidable as either gay or straight—and theorizes these bodily tactics in terms of a spatial rather than temporal dialectic.

National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage; Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America

National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage; Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America

National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (review)

National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (review)

National Abjection: The Asian American Body on Stage (review)

Reviewed by: National Abjection: The Asian American Body on Stage Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns National Abjection: The Asian American Body on Stag. By Karen Shimakawa. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003. For the past decade, we have seen a burgeoning of scholarly production in Asian American theater and performance studies. Archival and theoretical projects on Asian American theater and performance simultaneously developed at the end of the twentieth century.1 In one decade, we witnessed the publication of groundbreaking anthologies like Between Worlds, edited by Misha Berson, Politics of Life, edited by Velina Hasu Houston, and Unbroken Thread, edited by Roberta Uno. Other publications include collections of Asian American theater work such as Asian American Drama, edited by Brian Nelson, Tokens, edited by Alvin Eng, and But Still, Like Air, I'll Rise, also by Velina Hasu Houston. The presence of Asian American theater work in such recently emergent multi-genre literature anthologies like Bold Words edited by Rajini Srikanth and Esther Iwanaga also testify to the liveliness of the field. At the same time, scholarly publications of and that include Asian American theater and performance began to proliferate: James Moy's Marginal Sights, Josephine Lee's Performing Asian America, Dorinne Kondo's About Face, Yuko Kurahashi's Asian American Culture on Stage, Una Chaudhuri's Staging Place, and Meiling Cheng's In Other Los Angeleses, are among the most notable of such critical studies. A welcome addition to the expanding list of scholarly inquiry into the Asian American stage is Karen Shimakawa's National Abjection: The Asian American Body on Stage. National Abjection is an important intervention, primarily in the fields of performance/theater studies and Asian American Studies. While Shimakawa deploys a range of theories including postcolonial theory and theories of globalization, it is Julia Kristeva's notion of "abjection" that is the primary theoretical anchor grounding her analysis of Asian American work. Shimakawa's coupling of the psychoanalytic dimension of the "abject" with U.S. racial formation [End Page 73] and national concerns enriches the possibilities for interpreting and understanding Asian American theater, performance, and arguably Asian American cultural production in general.2 "Abjection," as defined by Kristeva and deployed in this text by Shimakawa, is "a state and a process," "a national/cultural identity-forming process, as a way of 'reading' Asian Americanness in relation and as a product of U.S. Americanness—that is, as occupying the seemingly contradictory, yet functionally essential, position of consistent element and radical other" (3). In other words, the deployment of "abjection" to understand Asian Americanness helps us to see the place of Asian Americans in U.S. (cultural, political, and social) hegemony, and illuminates Asian Americanness, albeit produced as abject, as constitutive of U.S. nation formation. Shimakawa's discussion of various works by Asian American theater artists, including Yankee Dawg You Die by Phillip Kan Gotanda, 12-1-A by Wakako Yamauchi, The Year of the Dragon and Chickencoop Chinaman by Frank Chin, Talk-Story by Jeannie Barroga, Tea by Velina Hasu Houston, and Deshima and Chinoiserie by Ping Chong, elucidates her thesis of Asian American abjection. In her introduction, Shimakawa analyses critical historical moments in Asian American history to delineate how Asian Americans have been made abject within the U.S. national context. Her discussion of the internment of Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans in World War II and the U.S. government's denial of citizenship (and hence benefits) to Filipinos who fought for the U.S. government in World War II sets up her argument of Asian Americans as abject vis-a-vis U.S. nation formation. This engagement with historical events is important given the underlying questions that animate National Abjection: "what is the connection between histories of nationalization/racialization/gendering, and theatrical performance? What can being attentive to the processes of national abjection tell us about performances that take place within the nation? Conversely, what can performance tell us about national abjection? And perhaps most important, what can performance do to/about that process?" (163). Throughout her analysis of the very emergence of contemporary Asian American theater and various play texts, Shimakawa decisively demonstrates how Asian American artists have mobilized the...

National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage. By Karen Shimakawa. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002. xi, 192 pp. $54.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).

National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage. By Karen Shimakawa. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002. xi, 192 pp. $54.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).

National abjection: the Asian American body onstage

National Abjection explores the vexed relationship between and Americanness” through a focus on drama and performance art. Karen Shimakawa argues that the forms of Asian Americanness that appear in U.S. culture are a function of national abjection—a process that demands that Americanness be defined by the exclusion of Asian Americans, who are either cast as symbolic foreigners incapable of integration or Americanization or distorted into an “honorary” whiteness. She examines how Asian Americans become culturally visible on and off stage, revealing the ways Asian American theater companies and artists respond to the cultural implications of this abjection. Shimakawa looks at the origins of Asian American theater, particularly through the memories of some of its pioneers. Her examination of the emergence of Asian American theater companies illuminates their strategies for countering the stereotypes of Asian Americans and the lack of visibility of Asian American performers within the theater world. She shows how some plays—Wakako Yamauchi’s 12-1-A , Frank Chin’s Chickencoop Chinaman , and The Year of the Dragon —have both directly and indirectly addressed the displacement of Asian Americans. She analyzes works attempting to negate the process of abjection—such as the 1988 Broadway production of M. Butterfly as well as Miss Saigon , a mainstream production that enacted the process of cultural displacement both onstage and off. Finally, Shimakawa considers Asian Americanness in the context of globalization by meditating on the work of Ping Chong, particularly his East-West Quartet .

Body image: a handbook of theory, research, and clinical practice

Part I: Conceptual Foundations. Pruzinsky, Cash, Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Jackson, A Sociocultural Perspective. Kinsbourne, The Brain and Body Awareness. Krueger, Psychodynamic Perspectives on Body Image. Cash, Cognitive-Behavioral Perspectives on Body Image. Williamson, Stewart, M. A. White, York-Crowe, An Information-Processing Perspective on Body Image. McKinley, Feminist Perspectives and Objectified Body Consciousness. Part II: Developmental Perspectives and Influences. Smolak, Body Image Development in Children. Levine, Smolak, Body Image Development in Adolescence. Whitbourne, Skultety, Adulthood and Aging. Tiggemann, Media Influences on Body Image Development. Kearney-Cooke, Familial Influences on Body Image Development. Tantleff-Dunn, Gokee, Interpersonal Influences on Body Image Development. Fallon, Ackard, Sexual Abuse and Body Image. Part III: Body Image Assessment. Gardner, Body Image Assessment of Children. Thompson, Gardner, Measuring Perceptual Body Image among Adolescents and Adults. Thompson, van den Berg, Measuring Body Image Attitudes among Adolescents and Adults. Radika, Hayslip, Projective Techniques to Assess Body Image. Cash, Assessing Body Image States. Pruzinsky, Cash, Assessing Body Image and Quality of Life in Medical Settings. Part IV: Individual and Cultural Differences. Striegel-Moore, Franko, Body Image Concerns among Girls and Women. Westmoreland-Corson, Andersen, Body Image Issues among Boys and Men. Schwartz, Brownell, Obesity and Body Image. Olivardia, Body Image and Muscularity. Davis, Body Image and Athleticism. Rumsey, Body Image and Congenital Conditions with Visible Differences. Celio, Zabinski, Wilfley, African American Body Images. Kawamura, Asian American Body Images. Altabe, O'Garo, Hispanic Body Images. Rothblum, Gay and Lesbian Body Images. Part V: Body Image Dysfunctions and Disorders. Cash, Evaluating Epidemiological Evidence. Cash, Fleming, Body Image and Social Relations. Wiederman, Body Image and Sexual Functioning. Garner, Body Image and Anorexia Nervosa. Stice, Body Image and Bulimia Nervosa. Phillips, Body Image and Body Dysmorphic Disorder. Pruzinsky, Body Image Disturbances in Psychotic Disorders. Part VI: Body Image Issues in Medical Contexts. Koo, Yeung, Body Image Issues in Dermatology. Kiyak, Reichmuth, Body Image Issues in Dental Medicine. Heinberg, Guarda, Body Image Issues in Obstetrics and Gynecology. Tovian, Body Image and Urological Disorders. Gilmour, Body Image Issues in Endocrinology. C.A. White, Body Images in Oncology. Rybarczyk, Behel, Rehabilitation Medicine and Body Image. Chapman, Body Image Issues among Individuals with HIV and AIDS. Part VII: Changing the Body: Medical, Surgical, and Other Interventions. Foster, Matz, Weight Loss and Changes in Body Image. Martin, Lichtenberger, Fitness Enhancement and Changes in Body Image. Sarwer, Cosmetic Surgery and Changes in Body Image. Rumsey, Optimizing Body Image in Disfiguring Congenital Conditions. Pruzinsky, Body Image Adaptation to Reconstructive Surgery for Acquired Disfigurement. Allen, Hollander, Psychopharmacological Treatments for Body Image Disturbances. Part VIII: Changing Body Images: Psychosocial Interventions. Krueger, Psychodynamic Approaches to Changing Body Image. Rabinor, Bilich, Experiential Approaches to Changing Body Image. Cash, Strachan, Cognitive-Behavioral Approaches to Changing Body Image. Winzelberg, Abascal, Taylor, Psychoeducational Approaches to the Prevention and Change of Negative Body Image. Levine, Smolak, Ecological and Activis

Closing Essay: Developing a Collective Memory to Imagine a Better Future

This closing essay to a symposium inaugurating UCLA Law School's Program in Critical Race Studies suggests that the racialized Asian American body can operate as a site for collective memory and thus serve as reminders of past mistakes in order to restrain current and future abuses of power. One of the lessons to be learned is from World War II when extreme subordination of one Asian American group, Japanese Americans, was accompanied by the elimination of certain barriers for another Asian American group, Chinese Americans. A similar dynamic may be happening now following September 11. With the increase in legal and extralegal discrimination against Middle Easterners and South Asians, other previously marginalized groups may experience an apparent lessening of discrimination directed against them. The essay argues that this is illusory or temporary and that discrimination directed against one group ultimately reinforces the system of racial stratification and discrimination that harms all racial minorities.