Research Paper: “Asian American Women in Advertisement, Sex Sells” By: Christopher Aba, Mao Otajima, Amanda Reyna

(An Asian woman as a doll-like object in Vogue magazine)

Advertisements are extremely influential in terms of forming stereotypical images. Advertisers commodify an image of a specific group and basically sell it to their viewers. Advertisers’ goal is to sell products efficiently; therefore, they often ignore the reality of people. Stereotypical images are constructed by the media and are standardized, the media use false images to attract people’s attention. In this paper, we will be addressing Asian American women, who are stereotyped sexually in advertising, how these advertisements affect Asian American viewers, and how advertisers create and place messages targeted to various audiences in the Asian American population as a consumer group. We will be looking at how Asian American Women are viewed as in advertisements. This idea is extremely important to representing Asian American women in advertising. The Asian American population is such a valuable group to market to because of their increasing purchasing power in today’s society in the United States.

(A representation of Asian women as a typical image of an Asian woman and white man couple)

There are two main origins of the stereotypical images of Asian American Women. The international relationship during World War II produced the aggressive behavior of US soldiers toward local women. This is because the soldiers were aliens in this land, the soldiers had developed the thought of dehumanization of people in the enemy countries. Also, the images of Asian women as passive and submissive objects were reinforced by the experience of Chinese prostitution in nineteenth century when they immigrated to United States. Asian women in prostitution was at 61% of Chinese women in California where occupied in prostitution. The women immigrated to US often illegally to seek economic success; however, their desperate economic needs turn these new immigrant Chinese women to sexual workers. Though the past history give Chinese women a stereotypical image of sexual belonging it is no longer relevant in today's society.

In today’s capitalist culture, there is a lack of knowledge on the intersection of race, and gender in advertisements. As the U.S. population becomes more ethnically and culturally diverse, advertisers have started to cater to different ethnic groups with strategies that go beyond traditional advertising campaigns. Specifically targeting certain members of an ethnic group such as Asian American women in different life stages is an important variable for advertisers to take into consideration. Basically people from different age groups would rather watch a show with the same age group or life-stage to which they can identify with. Exploring the differences in behavior and attitudes of Asian American females at different life-stages (student and non-student) can increase advertising efficiency.

We will argue that representations of ethnic minority groups in such advertising campaigns are usually based on gendered and racialized reflections of global culture that draw on resurrected themes of colonialism and American Orientalism. This particularly holds true in their depictions of Asian/American women. Multiculturalism is essentially a way of pretending there is racial harmony in different cultural groups in America, and tries to show the openness of “color-Blind” Americans the traditions of different racial groups. Multiculturalism is a marketing strategy that corporations have recently started to use to market their products. This approach allows corporations to do two things: Expanding their market to a diverse population of consumers, and also using the visual consumption of women’s bodies, and the bodies of women of color to re-package and sell their product by portraying these women in advertisements as sexual objects.  Advertisers create advertisements that mimic multiculturalism which leads to false images of diversity. This leads to homogeneous outlooks on race, and gender in advertising.