Faculty of Arts & Science

Visual and Critical Studies

Kathy Wang

The Fantasy within the Spectacle: through the films of Valerie Soe and Patty Chang

The fantasy of the Asian woman is a set of myths mediated by images for the colonial male gaze. Defined by their sellable attributes: passive, submissive, and hypersexual, the fantasy adheres to the racial tendencies of fetishization and objectification that becomes a consumable product within the spectacle. Critically evaluating Debord’s spectacle, this paper explores the representation of Asian women set within the visual narratives of Western film and media By undertaking an in-depth analysis of two film works that explicitly engage with the spectacle as a method of critique: Valerie Soe’s experimental film, Picturing Oriental Girls: A (Re) Educational Videotape (1992), and Patty Chang’s super 8 film Paradice (1996); I explore how both films react and confront the fantasy through productive perversity, détournement, and parody. Drawing on the work of film scholar Celine Shimizu, I intend to examine how race-positive sexuality can reclaim the agency lost through the spectacle.