LOVE ME LIKE YOUR ASIAN FANTASY
Name: Amy Choi
Guided by: Kelsey Dusenka
Female / 22 years old
Physically in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. Mentally, I'm the heroine of a magical girl anime.
INTRODUCTION
Growing up as an (East) Asian-American girl, my femininity has been reinforced over and over again through the web. From plastic surgery ads, shoujo anime/manga, K-Pop girl groups, I lived in a digital and physical world where hyperfemininity was and still is praised which fostered both comfort and toxicity at the same time.
This experience is probably not unique to me but
to many other Asian-American people.
The highly conservative Confucian culture we live in creates a dichotomy between the
fast progressing world around us and the traditions at home.
Funny enough a lot of East Asian media has become wildly popular around the world despite its often very misogynistic and capitalist viewpoints. For example, many K-drama storylines are about a “dumb”, poor, “average looking,” struggling girl falling for the rich, intelligent son of a chaebol family. These narratives, characters, and people today—particularly in the West—are now fetishized and sought after like commodities.
The digital experience for Asian femme bodies is one that is unique. Whether that's through media or online spaces. Tiktok has recently featured an autocaptioning feature allowing content creators to automatically generate captions for their videos. The idea is that the machine will write for you what it can and let you make edits to perfect it after. This autocaptioning feature also censors not-so friendly words for you. Among some of the words that get filtered are "little girl" and "Asian women". There's no evidence indicating that Tiktok is feeding its autocaptioning algorithm language from pornographic websites, however, it feels as though this is an acknowledgement to the hypersexualization and fetishization of Asian femme bodies through media and digital spaces.
We've created a space online and through media that perpetuates the narrative of the "submissive, Oriental woman". It's manifested in the shows we consume from K-Dramas to animes, to the songs we listen to, to how we communicate on social media, and to the products we sell.
