Īsian women are often stereotyped as either the dangerously cunning “Dragon Lady” that seduces White men, leading to their inevitable downfall, or as the submissive “Lotus Blossom.”īoth are meant to be demeaning and demonizing. However, many of her roles throughout the 90s and early 2000s, such as Ling Woo on Ally McBeal or as O-Ren Ishii in Kill Bill, were also ones that showed Asian women as beautifully evil, aggressive, and also mysterious. It was her, the Yellow Power Ranger (Thuy Trang), and Mulan.įor me, Liu is badass – both for being one of the only Asian American actresses in mainstream Hollywood and also for playing roles that literally kick ass.
Growing up, Lucy Liu was one of the only East Asian women I saw on TV and in movies. She doesn’t go to assertiveness-training classes, insist on being treated like a person, fret about career moves…” -Tony Rivers, “Oriental Girls”, Gentleman’s Quarterly, 1990 “mall, weak, submissive and erotically alluring…She’s fun, you see, and so uncomplicated. Mainstream Media Creates the Submissive ‘Lotus Blossom’ and Evil ‘Dragon Lady’ Stereotypes While today, some people might think of fetishes and sexual stereotypes as “not a big deal,” the history behind these tropes is rooted in violence and war, which get oppressively reimagined by mainstream media and entertainment.īelow are five ways East Asian women became fetishized and how that fetishization horribly impacts our lives. So, where did the fetishization and objectification come from? How did Asian women get the hypersexualized stereotypes of being docile and submissive or being dangerous and seductive? Fetishizing someone’s race and gender means not caring about someone as an individual. This is different from an interracial partnership where all partners are equally respected. When my identity as an “Asian woman” becomes the only thing that’s important to someone in an interaction, that’s a problem. The fetishization of Asian women even has a name, “ yellow fever” – as if the obsession with Asian women were also a disease.
Racial fetishes are about objectification, fetishizing an entire group of people – in this case Asian women, means reducing them down to stereotypes instead of recognizing their full personhood.īeyond just personal preferences or “ having a type,” racial fetishes project desired personality and behavior onto an entire racial or ethnic group. Or that, an image search of “Asian women” pulls up excessive pictures of women posing in lingerie. The hyper-sexualization and fetishization of East Asian women is problematic – I am not “lucky” that my race and gender is imagined as sexy and exotic, that Asian women “ all so beautiful. On top of that, in my dating history, I was expected to be more quiet and less assertive. Throughout my life, I’ve received unwanted comments and questions about my body, specifically my anatomy, including being harassed on the street with calls like, “Ni hao,” “Konichiwa,” “Are you Chinese, Japanese, or Korean,” and recently, “Hi Ling Ling.” This has happened to me, too – and I’m sure to so many other Asian girls.įrom racist humor in mid-1800s brothels to today’s playground jokes, the race and gender identity of Asian women is seen as so foreign, so “alien,” that our vaginas magically defy biology.
Recently, a friend and I were talking about growing up Asian American in predominantly white neighborhoods and schools, and she told me that when she was in fifth grade, boys teased her on the playground by saying that she had a “sideways vagina.” A young person sitting in a dimly lit room, gazing at the camera.