THE DRAG

N A N C Y K W A N

Flower Drum Song

In the first major Hollywood musical featuring an all-Asian cast, Flower Drum Song features Nancy Kwon as the sexually liberated and ostensibly assimilated Linda Low With her alluring gazes and seductive dance moves, Linda Low impeccably embodies the dragon lady stereotype. However, Linda's celebration of her hypersexuality has detrimental effects on her ultimate goal: assimilating into society as a white woman. In order to assimilate successfully, Linda believes she must assert her gender over her race. Linda’s insistence of her gender becomes especially evident in her famous performance of “I Enjoy Being a Girl,” where she flaunts her body in a short white towel Despite her earnest attempts to transgress her race, Linda must ironically embrace her hypersexuality as an Asian female in order to do so From my reading of Linda, her hypersexuality allows her to achieve white beauty standards but at the expense of simultaneously reaffirming her Asian heritage. This interpretation demonstrates the gendered and racialized dimensions of hypersexuality for Asian-appearing females you cannot assert one dimension and escape the other. One’s sexuality as an Asian/American female becomes ascribed to her particular raced and gendered ontology.