China Girl Stereotype Essay

Interestingly, the other dominant media depiction of Asian women, to a certain extent, is the opposite of the China doll/geisha girl stereotype. The dragon lady stereotype often features cunning, powerful, icy, merciless yet sexually aggressive Asian female characters. This line of stereotyping is said to originate from the fear of the inscrutable East and from Yellow Peril (Biswas, Kim, Lei, &Yang, 2008; Prasso, 2005). The history of competition for jobs in the frontier rationalizes people in the U.S. to distort the representations of Asians as evil, profit- seeking aliens feeding on the innocent White, which gives rise to the negative stereotype of the dragon lady.

When we enter the era in which diversity is encouraged and appreciated, the

interracial and intergroup hostility is reduced, or at lease repressed, in terms of the media representations.

The previous negative dragon lady stereotype is transformed into the one featuring martial art mistress or the kick-ass lady, who is physical competent, tough, and independent. The seemingly positive depictions may thus cater to the call for multiculturalism and free the female images from the confined “cult of true womanhood.” Riodan (2008), however, argues that though such images may at the first glimpse appear positive, for they seem to embody powerful women and their implications are “pro-women,” they in fact tactically eschew the demanded confrontation to deal with the roots of sexism and racism. Therefore, their effects are external and superficial.
Studies have been conducted to examine how those stereotypical portrayals above mentioned affect the Asian females’ self-esteems and the ways Westerners perceive them in the real-world settings (e.g., Chan, 1988; Srividya, 2011).

Other research has devoted to unveiling the origins and the development of their stereotyping and put them among the historical contextual frameworks (e.g., Kawai, 2003, 2005; Prasso, 2005). Research has shown that those stereotypes are not all without merits. The China doll/geisha girl stereotype, to some degree, presents us with a romanticized woman who embodies many feminine characteristics that are/ were valued and praised. The evolving stereotype of the Asian martial arts mistress features women power, which might have the potentials to free women from the gendered binary of proper femininity and masculinity. Nevertheless, the Western media cultural industry adopts several gender and race policing strategies so as to preserve patriarchy and White supremacy, obscuring the Asian women and diminishing the positive associations those images can possibly imply. The following section critically analyzes two cases, The Memoirs of a Geisha and Nikita, that I consider to typify the stereotypical depictions of Asian women as either the submissive, feminine geisha girl or as a powerful yet threatening martial arts lady. I also seek to examine

and

explain how Asian women constructed in the U.S. media are censored by the patriarchal, Orientalist and White-ethnocentric ideologies.