The Fetishization of Asian Women in America

Abstract

            The fetishazation of Asian women in America explores an unexplored hidden potential within the group and as an impediment to foster their interests. The image of a women of Asian descent in the mainstream media and the American public, is that of an exotic dancer always willing to entertain. They are usually geisha or courtesan. The dressing and hairdo are stereotypical adopting postures, which are sexually suggestive, but submissive. The portrayal of Women with Asian descent features stereotypical text alluding to quiet and subservient characteristics. Nevertheless, making claims about a whole group of women of Asian descent runs the risk of generalization. It is more politically correct and accurate to separate women as Japanese, Vietnamese or Chinese rather than Asian in scholarly works. Thus, approaching fetishazation of Asian-American women in a comprehensive methodology is important to expose the stereotypical nature in scholarly works and mainstream media in America. In analyzing how Asian-American women are subject to misrepresentation, the current exploration will delve into portrayal of the group and a history of stereotyping and its impacts. The aim will be to establish how Asian-American are portrayed in various avenues consumed by the public in form of film and mainstream media. The postulation of the research is that the group is adversely portrayed, forming part of the adverse representation of the group in America today. The narrative has to change to foster a positive opinion of the group in the America we know today. The solution is eliminating stereotypes while curtailing the narrative.

Introduction

            The portrayal of women of Asian descent is that of an entertainer possibly a geisha or courtesan. The image that comes to mind is a woman wearing a pseudo-Chinese dress and hairdo. She curls her hands in front in a dance-like manner. The notions are what comes to mind of many Americans because of fetishization of Asian women.  

            However, the thousands of Asian-American female life experiences in the United States have not made a large enough impact, for the image of the "Oriental Woman" continues to exist at all levels of discourse: from the level of mass media to the level of interpersonal exchanges in everyday life (Creef 56). The stereotypical images of Asian women in American media propagate the modern phenomenon of the "Asian fetish", which refers to the sexual preference of Asian women had by Caucasian or other non-Asian males.

            In exploring this notion of the media creating such a “fetishization,” the analysis took on an interdisciplinary approach. Through a process of combining methods of the critical study of scholarly works on American images of Asian females with creating artistic works regarding the subject, which allowed the two modes of exploration to influence each other. It is important to recognize that the preference, the fetish, the interaction dealt in is precisely the heterosexual interaction between the Caucasian or non-Asian male and the Asian female, American or non-American. While the term, Asian fetish, has expanded to encompass the opposite situation where the Asian male is preferred, and while it is sometimes used when referring to homosexual relationships regarding preferences of Caucasian or non-Asian males.

 

            In Western popular culture, the men afflicted with such behavior are sometimes referred to as “rice kings,” “rice chasers,” or “rice lovers.” These loaded terms and nicknames are used by Asian Americans and other Westerners and have become accepted slang terms in their vocabulary. The terms refer specifically to Caucasian or other non-Asian males who are attracted to Asian females with more intensity or frequency than is shown for other groups of women. The Asian women of interest are primarily East Asians, such as Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Koreans, and Taiwanese. While the term regards interracial associations, it is not meant to concern customary, healthy interracial relationships and marriages.

            While this question often arises as Asian Americans and Asians come into contact with Westerners, a deeper analysis of racism should be explored. The Oxford Dictionary (2005) lists two entries for racism. The belief that there are characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to each race. Discrimination against or antagonism towards other races. Due to a history of slavery and bigotry, Americans may be inclined to correlate racism with the latter description. However, according to the first definition, whether it is like or dislike, a judgment about someone, how he or she might think, behave, appear, or anything else, according to his or her race, is a form of racism.

            It is vital to note that when such pre-judged categorization pertains to cross-cultural expectations and exchanges it poses a threat to the group and daily existence. The term “Asian fetish” is becoming commonplace. The terms also relate to racism targeted at a specified group. Matthew Wray, a renowned sociologist, ascertains that it pertains to racism arising from commodity fetishism and sexual fetishism. In regards to racial fetishism as a type of commodity fetishism, Neomarxist defines it as a process by which things, which have no important value, for example, money, have an exchange value, such as the exchanging for essential values. Racial fetishism takes an added value in that Western culture portrays them in a given frame. In the Western sexual stereotypes, they are submissiveness, innocent, and display latent promiscuity forming part of their daily living reality.

            In regards to sexual fetishism, this is a situation wherein the object of affection is an inanimate object or a specific part of a person. A phenomenon studied and reworked by Sigmund Freud, his theory on fetishism declared that this behavior in men is the result of childhood trauma about castration anxiety where a boy, curious to see his mother's penis, averts his eyes to an object or body part in terror when he realizes his mother has none (Freud 252). While a shoe or a glove serve as examples of objects of sexual fetishists’ affection, the newly coined term Asian fetish appropriates the concept, and what is fetishized is an ethnicity. For Asian-American females, here lies an arena in which racism and sexism intersect.

            The answer is that it is not normal when on the receiving end of that attention, Asian and Asian-American women such as Mizuno, Liao, and the women of whom they speak feel objectified and not valued as individuals but rather for their race, stereotypes, or perceptions of the culture from which they come. Thus, it is evident that, at the very least, discussions must be drawn by the woman on the receiving end. Also, as the research contends that American society should communicate and hold open dialogue regarding the phenomenon and its effects on life experiences, it is vital to note that the stereotypes propagating the Asian fetish and the subsequent experiences have evolved over nearly one hundred and fifty years.

A History of Stereotypes and Their Impacts

            In past centuries, the term "Oriental" denoted the exotic difference of distant, foreign land east of the "Occident" the Western world. Today, in the global world, this definition of the Oriental can be found at times in the West. It can be evoked by exotic environments, artifacts, and other markers of far-away culture, as well as a person’s race categorized by his or her physical appearance (Kim et al. 67). Thus, on one hand, the Oriental is objectified in terms of culture and geography, and on the other hand, it is also objectified.

 

 

            The United States media depicts Asian-American women as glamorous, sexy, and subservient. The image portrayal can be analyzed into two contrasting stereotypes. First, is diabolical, immoral, seductive type of Lady. Second, is docile, passive, obedient doll the Lotus Blossom (Uchida 162). The paradoxical portrayals are both extremely sexed and highlight the progression of white America's encounter with Asian women largely through U.S military presence and immigration in countries of Far East Asia in the twentieth century. Particularly, there has been significant character development of Chinese and Japanese women as women of oriental background, reflecting the historical forces of the last one hundred and fifty years (Harper’s Magazine). As mass media popularized it, the image of the Oriental Woman has come to represent Asian-American women in American cultural memory; and consequently, this impacts Asian-American women's individual life experiences.

            In the U.S today, the "typically Oriental" woman is usually a woman of East Asian origin, regardless of if she may be American and may have lived her entire life in the U.S. It is true that Confucianism, a complex Chinese system of moral and religious thought, influenced many East Asian cultures and deals with certain patriarchal, sexist ethical standards that shape cultural notions and practices toward women; however, the circumstances under which America came into contact with East Asian women have had a more direct effect on the creation of the Oriental Woman (Uchida 163). The origins behind the dominating and defining of Asian-American women can be found in the anti-Chinese period from 1870 to the 1900s during which the Oriental Woman image emerged initially as "seductive and sinister” (Okamura 90). The following is a brief overview regarding the major elements during this time that fostered the stereotype.

            At the end of the nineteenth century, the majority of the Chinese in the U.S. were immigrant men, partly because of White Americans' interest in employing them as contract-based, wage laborers. Caucasians feared Chinese women owing to the "Yellow Peril," the population of Chinese reproducing and thus taking over the labor in the country. As a result, most of those able to immigrate were smuggled in large numbers as prostitutes (Hooks 99). Men of Chinese descent were dependent on the prostitutes to satisfy their sexual needs, and Chinese prostitution flourished in San Francisco's Chinatown in the mid and late nineteenth century; in 1870 almost two-thirds of the Chinese women who resided in San Francisco were prostitutes (Uchida 163), and they were sexually exploited several times a day by both Chinese and Caucasian men. Their widespread prosperity and public slander fueled anti-Chinese sentiments, and Chinese women were generally accused of being sexually corrupt, "demoralizing, tainting the blood of White American youths, spreading diseases, and stealing the jobs of white boys and girls, thus forcing them into lives of sin and crime” (Uchida 163).

            The anti-Chinese sentiments were also reflected in media, such as in Hollywood films, which further perpetuated the convictions regarding Asian women. Although the audiences understood that the movies were fantasy, the visuals of exotic, corrupt, deviant Chinese women only strongly enforced their already misconstrued perceptions. In the “Thief of Baghdad” (1924) Anna May Wong played a Mongol slave girl who assisted the evil ruler from taking over the world (Eranios 67). The image she portrayed was a dangerous, mysterious, seductive vamp, from which came the Dragon Lady of the silver screen. Wong was the only widely watched Asian female actress in Hollywood during the first half of the nineteenth century since most Asian women were played by Caucasians due to such disapproval of Asians and Caucasians kissing onscreen. To achieve the “seductive, exotic look”, Caucasian actresses used the technique of placing tape over their eyelids to create “slanty eyes”.

            During this time, the Oriental Woman was cast into a desirable light compared to earlier in the century. Using sexism and racism to objectify Japanese women was a psychological tactic aimed at instilling a mentality necessary to become effective soldiers, or in other words, effective killers (Uchida 166). Perceiving them as “dolls useful toys or something to play with” enhanced the notion that Asians were something less than human and thus much easier to kill in battle (Uchida 166). The dual characterization of being sexually exotic and passive was perpetuated for the soldiers in another aspect of their media with cartoon character, “Babysan.” The comic strip, created by an American serviceman, was featured in the pages of the Far East edition of the Navy Times and spoke directly to these contradictory qualities (Hume 37). Sketched in short, see-through, American-style. It dresses, the images of the young, curvaceous, slanted-eyed woman were juxtaposed with texts depicting "Babysan” as childlike, playful, obedient, and naïve.

            The stereotype of dually exotic and subservient creatures able to please men in special ways transferred to characterize Asian-American women as well; however, images of bar girls and geishas were not the only impressions of the Oriental Woman that the soldiers brought back to the U.S. After World War II, the U.S. Congress passed the War Bride Act, which allowed the country's servicemen to bring Japanese and European wives home (Uchida 166). Along with the war brides, America became saturated with impressions of Japanese women as excellent homemakers with “wifely virtues and male pleasing attributes”, not so different from the geisha as they both represent the same image of an “Oriental Woman who exists to please men (Uchida 166).

            Notably, it is crucial to compare the image of the war brides to the earlier image of picture brides of Asian immigrant men. “War brides of the Western Man are acceptable, but picture brides of Asians are not” (Uchida 166). This may have occurred because the war brides symbolized the winning of the war; they were war prizes. Moreover, the segregation between the Oriental Woman and the White Woman was still upheld, for the "virtues" of the Oriental Woman did not transform her into a white or even Western woman. Anti-miscegenation laws not repealed until 1967 evidenced this (Huisman 6).

Once again, the silver screen of Hollywood during the 1930s mirrored U.S. views towards Asians during monumental political events. The antagonists at the time were the Japanese. The films portrayed Japanese men as evil and abusive towards their women. In turn, the storylines depicted the Japanese women   played by Caucasian actors as submissive and always supportive of their husbands and even their mistresses.

            Subsequently in the 50s in post-war Japan, the Geisha girl was released, with Japanese actresses playing leading roles. Among the films portraying geisha girls include Madame Butterfly, which glorifies servitude and suffering of an oriental woman for her love for a white man. "Teahouse of the August Moon" (1956), a film about the Americanization of Okinawa, Japan, after the war starring the popular and prominent Marlon Brando as a GI whose needs are catered to by the character, Lotus Blossom. It is important to keep in mind that film was popularizing during this time, thus media portrayals of ethnic groups and the racial difference became more powerful in creating something real for the Caucasian American society.

Conclusion

            The storylines of Asian theme became more common in the late 1900s as the Oriental Woman image became more desirable to watch. Accordingly, Asian-American actresses gained more onscreen exposure but still played characters such as the memorable Suzie Wong, who again projected the image of being secretive, subservient, and sexy. Also, as media had previously reflected political activities repeatedly, Vietnamese women became the new performance subject during the 70s and 80s with the Vietnam War. Evidence of this can be found in the highly acclaimed films Deer Hunter (1978) and Good Morning Vietnam (1987). According to Uchida (168), the popular, modern musical, Miss Saigon (1989) is yet another adaptation of Madame Butterfly by only changing the historical context into the circumstances of the Vietnam War softening the explicitness of the Orientalist theme.

 

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