There are several other misrepresentations of Asian women in American popular culture throughout the nineteenth century through the transformation of “bad Asian” to “good Asian” in Hollywood films such as The Good Earth. The novel was both wildly popular and internationally influential, inspiring the similarly famous 1904 Italian opera Madame Butterfly by Giacomo Puccini. The semi-autobiographical story of a naval officer stationed in Nagasaki depicts his temporary Japanese wife as a dainty plaything to be acquired like a prized object. French writer Pierre Loti's 1887 novel Madame Chrysanthème is a notable example. The increase of Western power and presence in Asia also spawned well-known works of art that contributed to the depiction of Asian women as simultaneously innocent and over sexualized. At the same time, the coercive opening of treaty port cities in China, Japan, and Korea following the First Opium War created a trade route to feed demands for Oriental art and collectibles, which often depicted sexualized geishas.
In terms of Asian Americans, he states that their negative depiction continued through the nineteenth century as a yo-yo effect from “bad” to “good” to “bad” depending on the political climate at that time.
In Cornel West’s book, Race Matters, he describes the flaws of American society and its roots in historical inequalities and longstanding cultural stereotypes. These women were feared to lack moral character, assumed to engage in prostitution, and spread sexually transmitted diseases to white men. Harmful stereotypes of Asian women in America influenced the first U.S immigration law based on race, the 1875 Page Act, preventing Chinese women from entering the United States. It is important to uncover the history of these cultural misrepresentations and its relationship to pop culture in order to begin to examine the subsequent implications of potential misrepresentations in the 21st century. This is evidenced by the cultural attitudes reflected in both the politics and arts of the time. Though there is no single origin for Asian fetish, the corresponding stereotypes of Asian women emerged in the 1800s due to the increasing Western imperialism in Asia throughout the century. Such stereotypes are widely accepted as the driving factor behind the fetishization of Asian women in the West. The oversimplification of these cultures portray homogenous versions of these groups. In the United States, women of primarily East Asian (and Southeast Asian to a lesser extent) origin and or descent are most commonly misrepresented through stereotypes as subservient, passive, mysterious, villainous in nature, and hyper-sexual. When using a search engine such as Google, Bing or Yahoo check the safe search settings where you can exclude adult content sites from your search results Īsk your internet service provider if they offer additional filters īe responsible, know what your children are doing online.See also: Stereotypes of East Asians in the United States Use family filters of your operating systems and/or browsers Other steps you can take to protect your children are: More information about the RTA Label and compatible services can be found here. Parental tools that are compatible with the RTA label will block access to this site. We use the "Restricted To Adults" (RTA) website label to better enable parental filtering. Protect your children from adult content and block access to this site by using parental controls. PARENTS, PLEASE BE ADVISED: If you are a parent, it is your responsibility to keep any age-restricted content from being displayed to your children or wards. Furthermore, you represent and warrant that you will not allow any minor access to this site or services. This website should only be accessed if you are at least 18 years old or of legal age to view such material in your local jurisdiction, whichever is greater. You are about to enter a website that contains explicit material (pornography).