Meghan Markle spoke out against a specific racist stereotype over-utilized in many Hollywood films of the last few decades during a recent episode of her Archetypes podcast. The Duchess of Sussex explained “the dragon lady” trope – a way of representing Asian women in media as oversexualized and violent – and hoped that Hollywood would reign it in. Two of the most prominent examples she provided were the movies Austin Powers in Goldmember and Kill Bill.
“Movies like Austin Powers and Kill Bill – they presented these caricatures of women of Asian descent as oversexualized or aggressive,” Markle said on her Spotify podcast. “This toxic stereotyping of women of Asian descent… this doesn’t just end once the credits roll.” Markle was joined by sociologist Nancy Wang Yuen, who wrote about this trope at length in her book Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism. Yuen was certain that the “dragon lady” stereotype had influenced people outside of movie theaters because she herself had been catcalled by a man using a quote from Full Metal Jacket.
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“I myself have been propositioned in an airport in Atlanta of all places by a stranger who said, ‘Me so horny,’ just yelled it out to me,” she said. “I knew why because I looked around and I thought and I saw that I was the only Asian woman in that area. I knew he was talking to me, even though I don’t even know if he’d [ever] seen Full Metal Jacket.”
Markle and Yuen also touched on the long history of this trope and how it has evolved over the decades. In its current form, they agreed it was recognizable at least as far back as the 1924 movie The Thief of Bagdad. There, Anna May Wong played a Mongol slave. However, they were more concerned with the recent examples, as they showed that Hollywood still hadn’t reckoned with the harm this kind of representation could do.
Lucy Liu played the assassin turned Yakuza crime boss O-Ren Ishii in Kill Bill, where her gift for violence was sensationalized in a climactic fight scene with “The Bride” (Uma Thurman). Meanwhile, Diane Mizota and Carrie Ann Inaba played the parody femme fatale characters Fook Mi and Fook Yu in Austin Powers in Goldmember. The latter movie is mainly a parody, but that doesn’t absolve it of all representational missteps.
Markle’s Archetypes podcast has aired five episodes so far, all diving deep into “the labels that try to hold women back.” New episodes do not seem to air on a consistent schedule, but they are available on Spotify. Yuen’s book is available in print and digital formats now.
