Portrayal of Asian Women in U.S. Media

One of the characteristic ways that human beings process information is to organize it in categories and use those categories to make sense of the world. According to Robert Emtman (1996), these stored categories, or schemas, are like mental filing cabinets which allow individuals to assimilate new information into categories of old information. The problem with this is that schemas can be unflattering stereotypes that resist change. New data is simply assimilated with the old and seen as reinforcing it, in many instances.

The way that stereotypes operate is by organizing information about some racial group into a homogenous category, in which all, or most members of the group, are seen as possessing certain undesirable characteristics, in contradistinction to members of elite groups. In the United States, the dominant group is white and European-American; other groups are compared to white Americans and generally found lacking in certain respects. These stereotypes can be altered, or reinforced, by ongoing portrayals of minority group members in the media.

Portrayals of Asian and Asian-American women in the United States' media are much more rare than portrayals of European or European-American women. The question under consideration in this study is the nature of those portrayals, along with the reason for their rarity. An expectation is that Asian women will generally be portrayed in the media in one of two ways: (a) as

Asian, 1998). During the 1990s, plays also have presented significant images of Asian women, although these have been more stereotypical. For example, in Miss Saigon, the Asian woman is essentially the same character as the earlier Asian woman in the opera, Madame Butterfly (Mattimoe, 1996). She falls in love with an American in Vietnam, thinks she has married him, bears a son, and waits for him to return to her. When he does return, he comes to take home his son, but he has an American wife, and clearly never considered returning for the Asian woman. In the play, she gives the son back to him, then, as in the opera, kills herself. Clearly, this play does not represent any improvement over the image portrayed in the earlier opera. This is the "good" woman as tragic victim. Interestingly enough, however, Mattimoe (1996) also discussed the story of a real-life Vietnamese woman who had a similar experience to the woman in the play, but with a different end. She fell in love with an American man, has pictures showing what she believed to be an actual wedding, and had a child by that man. When she came to the United States, she found out where the man lived - with his American wife. However, she did not kill herself. Inste

Category: Psychology - P