"The Daughter of Fu Manchu": The Pedagogy of Deconstructing the Representation of Asian Women in Film and Fiction

Courses regarding race, gender, and representation are not easy to teach under any circumstances, but even more so in predominantly white classrooms in the post 9/11 U.S. where the masses have been fed a diet of xenophobic, anti-Asian propaganda inculcating an "us" versus "them" mentality. I analyze the discourse of empire, a metaphor that has been used time after time to construct a mythical and menacing Other. In contrast, the portrait of Asian women in cinema and television news as traditional, veiled, and inhabiting a separate sphere adds to this representation of Asian cultures as premodern and irrevocably opposed to the West, much as portrayed in Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" theory (Huntington 1996). I illustrate this transnational feminist critique with a documentary used in Women's Studies classes: Deborah Gee's landmark film Slaying the Dragon (1988).