Orientalism and the Legacy of Racialized Sexism: Disparate Representational Images of Asian and Eurasian Women in American Culture Kendall Matsumoto | Stanford University The representation of Asian women in popular media and cultural artifacts has historically underscored reductive and damaging stereotypes of hypersexualization and objectification. For Eurasian women (half white, half Asian), however, whose racial difference is only partial, media representation takes a starkly contrasting form that leads to entirely different popular perceptions. This article explores how forces of misogynistic objectification have disparate impacts on Eurasian and fully Asian women in contemporary American culture and society. Using contemporary media analysis, prominent celebrity case studies, and personal interviews, I argue that contemporary entertainment media objectify and sexualize both Asian and Eurasian women to generate public allure; however, these media use Otherness as a medium for the sexualization of fully-Asian women, whereas the ambiguous Eurasian racial appearance leads to a dera- cialized sexualization that allows both agency beyond race lines as well as cultural and racial erasure. This deracialization, however, comes with double-edged implications for Eurasian belonging: while it may seem that Eurasians have greater access to hegemonic American media and audiences, they lack a sense of belonging within pre-established racial paradigms. Their biracial identity thus has highly-nu- anced implications for professional mobility, individual erasure, and community belonging. I can’t escape the fact that I am an Asian know—utter strangers—smile and attempt woman: my physical appearance prevents to speak to me in a foreign Asian language, that. As an Asian American woman of full asking my name or my age, in demeaning Japanese ancestry, the outside world always and objectifying tones. It has become pain- will, from the moment I am laid eyes upon, fully clear to me that my Asian identity and instantly recognize my racial identity and my identity as a women are deeply entangled, hold me to it. To Euroamericans, I will causing reductive and dehumanizing stereo- always be inescapably Other despite my fam- types. Unfortunately, I am not alone, nor is ily’s perfect English and four generations in this experience isolated. this country. While friends and strangers These stereotypes are not solely products of alike often attempt to appreciate my cultural contemporary social politics; they have his- heritage, my skin crawls when I inevitably torical and political roots that have curated a hear the words “exotic” and “beautiful” used one-dimensional, hypersexualized image of together to describe not only my culture but Asian women. This pervasive imagery is rein- my own appearance or body. Men I do not forced and perpetuated by familiar portrayals 114 | Young Scholars in Writing of Asian women in mainstream American stereotyped view of Asia, the Middle East, entertainment media, where sexualization and North Africa that embodies colonialist and racism work together as sociopolitical attitudes of Western superiority (Said). tools to reduce Asian female celebrities to Coined by scholar and author Edward Said exotic objects of desire. While fully-Asian in his 1978 book Orientalism, the term women often fall victim to the dual specter of describes the conception of the Middle East these coalescing dynamics, the treatment of and Asia—the Orient—as an entity con- half-Asian women–specifically, Eurasian (half- structed by the Western gaze. Built upon white, half-Asian) women—in cultural arti- militaristic conquest and consisting of socio- facts and media is noticeably less restrictive. political, cultural, and aesthetic inventions, In this article, I argue how forces of race, this reductive understanding is designed to misogyny, and objectification have disparate provide Western power with a contrived impacts on Eurasian and fully-Asian women sense of knowledge and superiority (Said). in contemporary American culture and soci- This power dynamic persists in American ety. Asian American women experience mainstream media: present-day popular cul- rampant sexualization that is inextricably tural artifacts capitalize on the suffocating linked to their racial identity. While the con- confluence of racism and sexism, resulting in fluence of race and gender constrain Asian monolithic, highly reductive archetypes: in American women, Eurasian women experi- the case of women, predominantly the flat- ence both personal agency as well as ethnic tened, objectified “geisha” figure. and cultural erasure due to an ambiguous In the Orientalist framework, Asian appearance free from racialized exoticization. women become repositories of Western fan- Such biracial identity grants freedom from tasies as a result of the larger conception of the historical and contemporary burden of the geographical region itself. The Orient the Western gaze that restricts, demeans, represents not merely a site of historical and objectifies Asian women. Using contem- occurrences, but, rather a site for collective porary media analysis, prominent case imagination that leads to both exploration studies, and personal interviews, I examine and exploitation. As Meyda Yegenoglu how sociopolitical legacies have shaped dis- writes in Colonial Fantasies: Towards a parate perceptions of fully Asian women and Feminist Reading of Orientalism, “latent Eurasian women. By examining the role of Orientialism reflects the site of the uncon- Otherness in the process of sexualization, I scious, where dreams, images, desires, interrogate the pathways by which hegemonic fantasies and fears reside,” allowing the institutions commodify Asian female bodies Orient to become “an object of knowledge for consumption by mainstream audiences. and an object of desire” (23). Innate in this construction of the Orient, Yegenoglu argues, is the notion of sexuality and sexual Historical Roots of the Sexualization utility. Just as the region becomes an avail- of Asian Women able canvas for exotic Western fantasies, The exotic, overly-sexualized Asian archetype Asian women are flattened to empty vehicles is the result of a long historical legacy. It is for sexual desire. Thus, as Yegenoglu asserts, the byproduct of Orientialism—the the discussion of Orientalism itself is Matsumoto | 115 painfully incomplete without the recogni- dynamics in the 1970s, asserting that “[The tion of the role that sexualization plays; local] women are usually the creatures of a “sexual difference” is in fact “of fundamental male power-fantasy. They express unlimited importance in the formation of a colonial sensuality, they are more or less stupid, and subject position” (1-2). This sexual colonial above all they are willing” (qtd. in Woan subjugation is a byproduct of equating the 282). The referenced “willingness” of Asian allure of the Orient as a region with the sex- women speaks to their perceived submissive- ual allure of its women. As a result of this ness as sexual vehicles, characters in white large-scale conceptualization of the Orient, men’s “power-fantasy” who lack personal Asian women themselves become the victims agency or dignity. The extremely profane of a militaristic violence. Yegenoglu defines nature of these characterizations speaks to a this character as “the figure of the ‘veiled lack of respect afforded to Asian women of Oriental woman’” which signifies “the the region as self-sufficient, complex individ- Oriental women as mysterious and exotic” as uals. Even the very words used to refer to well as “the Orient as feminine, always veiled, Asian women and the precise role they play seductive, and dangerous” (11). This confla- in relation to white men are humming with tion is dangerous: because the Orient is a a violence still painful to read. territory to be conquered, women of Asian Disturbingly, this violence does not persist descent also become a goal of conquest. merely in words or recorded histories; it The history of the United States in Asia remains extant for women of Asian descent has shaped a colonialist attitude towards far removed from this historical chapter. Asian women that is grounded in Western Although these times of militaristic aggres- superiority, racism, and sexism. In times of sion seem distant, this constructed archetype occupation, white American men viewed persists in our contemporary moment as a and treated local women in dehumanizing, result of Orientalism’s powerful legacies. reductive ways that sexualize their racial and Evidently, Orientalism and the racialized sex- cultural identities in order to fulfill men’s ism it birthed survives beyond occupation: pleasures. In fact, as scholar Sunny Woan “As a result of White imperialism, ‘Asians and writes, “the sexual conquest of Asia’s women members of the Asian Diasporas have existed correlates with the conquest of Asia itself” and still exist through a colonized experi- (282). Woan explores the interconnection ence’” (Woan 284). Imperialistic forces between race and sex in the eyes of imperial- persist in the American cultural conscious- istic white men: Asian women are ness as mechanisms for reducing Asian simultaneously sexually objectified as a women to sexual utility. Even contemporary result of misogyny as well as racially exoti- Asian American women such as myself, living cized as a result of white supremacy. These at great geographical and temporal distance two dynamics hinge on one another. In fact, from the birth of this Western male