Re-ornamenting Asian Femininity: Ornamentalism as Opportunity in Representations of Asian Women in High-tech Popular Media

Abstract

<p>The Asian woman has historically been objectified and fetishized in popular media and visual culture, and is portrayed as an expendable, hypersexualized object of desire (Cheng, 2019). Despite the notions of desire and fetish attached to Asian women, Asian femininity remains underexplored in studies of race and gender. Cheng (2019) explores the intertwining notions of corporeality and objecthood associated with Asian femininity and proposes the theory of Ornamentalism as a way of understanding the Asian woman's negotiation of her existence. Through a visual social semiotic analysis of 40 samples of promotional materials from three East Asian musical artists, this study explores the ways in which high-tech and AI-mediated media representations may allow Asian women to assert and establish visibility despite objectification, through the lens of Cheng's (2019) theory of Ornamentalism.</p>