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Hello readers, I’m sure we’re all familiar with or have heard of the term ‘Asianfishing’ recently, especially if you’re spending a lot of time scrolling through the ‘For You’ page on TikTok. Lots of people might not be sure of what it means exactly, so we hope to bring some awareness to Asianfishing and help you understand it as a global issue.
Asianfishing typically refers to when a non-Asian individual tries to pass as Asian mainly through appearance, but sometimes through other characteristics like stereotyped behaviour. More often now it is being associated with Western beauty trends, which many Asian people find constitutes appropriation and creates damaging representations.
But this is not a new phenomenon…
In many Hollywood films, dating back to 1915 with Madame Butterfly (dir. Sidney Olcott), white actors play Asian characters. This is called ‘yellowface’ and is inherently the same idea as Asianfishing, only the representations are justified through fictional stories. These films developed stereotypes of Asian people as villains, with typically evil, cold and calculating personalities, otherwise known as ‘yellow peril’.
Watch this clip from with Christopher Lee starring as Fu Manchu below:
(clip from Brides of Fu Manchu - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV-TZnSwRQY)
As Asianfishing spreads through platforms like TikTok, Gen-Z have become more aware of how it can be linked to certain beauty trends like ‘fox eye’ makeup. This social media trend, which rose in popularity in 2020, is when users create a ‘slanted eye’ look through eyeliner, pulling their face back. The gesture itself has been attacked for promoting racist agendas in the past, connected to prejudiced practices against Asian people. (See post 2 for more about ‘fox eye’).
The derogatory way in which Asian people have been treated over time because of their appearance is clear, so we believe these so-called ‘trends’ are closely linked to wider problems of racism and Orientalism. Jasmine Harris writes an interesting account of Asianfishing on social media, explaining how Asian beauty is “repackaged” to benefit Western standards (2021). She poses an important question about how Asianfishing is bringing back ideologies of Orientalism.
Read her article here https://theboar.org/2021/06/asian-fishing-orientalism.
We find that Asianfishing derives from Orientalism[1], as representations are masked with a ‘curiosity’ for Asian culture, and racist notions are kept close in Western thoughts. This can be key to how modern uses of social media are intertwined with ways of knowing about different cultures, and how we adopt aspects of other cultures for our aesthetic gain.
The importance of Asian representations in changing Western beauty culture is that these ideals are highly feminized and sexualised. Asian men as well as women are often treated like commodities and feminized by Western representations (Zhou, 2021). When young Caucasian girls display themselves as “Asian” in hypersexual ways, this influences a global audience, in which harmful and racist stereotypes of Asian women can worsen.
Overall, we wish to bring light to this issue as something more serious than comments or ‘trends’. Social media gives us the ability to spread ideas across the globe, but we must be wary of how representations and shaping of our identities impact other cultures as well as our own.
References
Harris, J., 2021. Asianfishing: the rise of orientalism. [online] Theboar.org. Available at: <https://theboar.org/2021/06/asian-fishing-orientalism/> [Accessed 22 December 2021].
Said, E.W., 2003. Orientalism, London: Penguin.
Zhou, T., 2021. Communicating ‘Race’ in A Digitized Gay China. In: R. Ramos and S. Mowlabocus (eds.) Queer Sites in Global Contexts: Technologies, Spaces, and Otherness. New York: Routledge. pp. 162-178.
Paramount Pictures, 1915. Madame Butterfly. [Image] Available at: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0005682/mediaviewer/rm2882094592/ [Accessed 21 January 2022].
Filmography
Madame Butterfly. 1915. [film] Directed by S. Olcott. USA: Geffen Pictures.
The Brides of Fu Manchu. 1966. [film] Directed by D. Sharp. Britain and West Germany: Hallam Productions.
Footnote
[1] Orientalism is a theory (created by Edward Said), in which the East is thought of as either exotic and strange and/or inferior to the West (Said, 2003).
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