As a social movement continues to grow challenging the justice system that fails to prosecute and convict police officers use of deadly force, it is crucial to note what hegemonic constructs maintain the institutional power structures that continue to harm people of color. When police officers are acquitted when they inflict deadly harm on unarmed citizens the justice system is working to maintain the power structures that devalues Black lives. When hegemonic power structures perpetuate injustice it appears necessary to challenge and deconstruct the system as a whole. Do the protest movements choose to challenge hegemony or rather seek to conform to the ideals of the justice system? I ask this question utilizing a Cultural Studies framework putting Stuart Hall, Antonio Gramsci, and Slavoj Zizek in conversation with each other in order to illuminate how activism must contend with hegemony. Activist movements do not seek to radically dismantle hegemony, but work within it in ways that reform and redefine how the concept of justice can be present in the lived realities of communities of color.

The Pillow Book by Sei Shônagon, Empress Sadako's lady in waiting from about 993-1000, offers rich detail about the meaning and power of dress during the Heian period [794-1185]. Throughout Yone Noguchi's novel The American Diary of a Japanese Girl (1902), Morning Glory, a newly arrived Japanese immigrant to the U.S., experiments with a multitude of different identities through clothes. Both narratives appropriate (cross-) dressing as a means of overcoming gender, cultural, and class borders. Shônagon and Noguchi engage in “authorial crossdressing” to inhabit a social, cultural, and national space onto which they only have a precarious hold. It is especially the portrayal of what Marjorie Garber has delineated as a “category crisis” that links Japanese medieval writing and early fictional accounts by Japanese American authors. This article demonstrates that cross-dressing originates in moments of personal crisis and that its practice is sustained by the anxiety of cultural dislocation. The parallel identified between The Pillow Book and The American Diary —both texts largely ignored by academia—promises to clarify further early Japanese immigrants' experimentation with their bodies, citizenship, and other markers of identity to create a Japanese American subjectivity.