Visual Manipulation of East Asian Women in American Pop Female Performances

Abstract

The dawn of the MTV era in the 1980s pushed the genre of popular music into a highly visual art form that has allowed many Western pop acts, including many female pop stars, to create their unique brand of public persona, or “star-text.” Through music videos, major non-Asian female artists have appropriated Asian culture, particularly the incorporation of imagery of East Asian women into the visual presentation of their music. In the twenty-first century, thanks to YouTube’s hugely popular and influential platform, music videos and recordings of stage performances now reach unprecedented numbers of viewers by being freely available and on-demand. Mainstream non-Asian female artists continue to employ racial masquerade and visual segregation in their image creation process, in which East Asian women are gendered and racialized. American pop singers such as Madonna, Katy Perry, Rihanna, and Nicki Minaj, for instance, have employed mute Asian female artists in their music videos; these women’s voiceless images reinforce the stereotype of Asian women as subaltern through the concept of Orientalism and techno-Orientalism.