GON LADIES

Lucy Liu

Charlie's Angels

Growing up, I remember admiring Lucy Liu and her ruthlessness in Charlie’s Angels. Wielding chains and kicking in mid-air, Lucy commanded my attention accordingly. My favorite movie is still Kill Bill, where Lucy embraces her kimono-clad femme fatale and slices men’s heads without hesitation. Confronted with the many narratives of Asian female passivity, I savored every bit of the Asian dominatrix/sex queen embodied by Lucy. However, after learning of the harms of hypersexuality tropes, I began to question if my admiration for Lucy's roles is conducive to a liberatory racial and feminist politics. Shimizu also questions how we should “reconcile the guilt that haunts our enjoyment of sexual performances with our admiration of the celebration of sexuality in the performances of, say, Nancy Kwan and Lucy Liu?” (3). While I am still grappling with this question, I am certain of one thing— contradictorily appreciating problematic tropes does not always signify false consciousness. Agency does not always entail resistance to norms, as is typically assumed. Nevertheless, it is imperative to give Asian/American women their voice back to create and shape their own narrative, regardless of whether it endorses or denies the hypersexuality trope.