From the Exotic and the Assimilated into the Hybrid: Questioning Representations of Asian Women in Australian Popular Media
Monika S. Sw. Doxey (School of Humanities Faculty of ArtsAustralian National University)
The paper examines how Asian women are essential sites of contestation in Australian multicultural identity in this era of globalisation. Asian women characters are analysed as an embodiment of not only assimilated ‘safe’ multicultural Australian identity but they remain exoticised and marginalised to control a perceived threat to Australia’s idealised image as the ‘western’ civilisation in Asia. This is exemplified in simultaneous depictions that produce, reproduce and perpetuate orientalist and assimilationist discourse of Asian women in exported quintessential Australian soap operas selling ‘the Australian lifestyle’ like Neighbours and Home and Away.
However, a third depiction, that of the hybrid Asian – Australian television drama characters, also exists and provides a challenging comparison. For example in the internationally exported Heart Break High series and in the mockumentary Bondi Banquet drama, Asian women characters expresses a cosmopatriot identity of emotional attachments to their Asian country of birth while being part of a cosmopolitan diverse cultural setting. The Asian women characters, although are limited by the genre, are depicted as having complex hybrid lives full of anxieties, contradictions and hope. Moreover these characters expresses their hybridity as both bounded, where cultures are seen as a fixed entity, and translocal, moving and forging new identity strategically.
This paper will shed light to Australia, Indonesia’s seemingly ‘Western’ neighbour, and its understanding of and expressions of its global identity in relation to the Asian region through its popular cultural medium. In summary, can Australia ever expresses itself as a part of the Asian region where it sees its diasporic Asian cultural communities as central to its identity formation? Furthermore, why are these expressions of Asian-ness in the Australian popular cultural medium gendered and feminised?
