Dr. Craig Robertson, December 8, 2023
Abstract
This essay examines transnational consumer encounters, drawing parallels between historical flows of “exotic” goods from East Asian countries to the United States and the contemporary circulation of digital content. Examining this trajectory, I explore how cultural commodities—whether tangible or digital artifacts—acquire the social and political nuances attributed to the “Far East Orient” as constructed and perceived by the U.S. Over the last several years, user-generated content has emerged as a pervasive mode of participation, collaboration and meaning-making online, particularly evident in the realm of social media-based cultural production. Tracing moments of transnational commodity exchange from the East to the West and focusing on Chinese women beauty and fashion social media creators, this study investigates how Oriental objects coalesce with East Asians’ racialized and gendered identities and how participatory globalized web cultures underscore the inner workings of Orientalism and the scale of the Western gaze.
Introduction
“Can someone explain to me why every Chinese trend gets rebranded as Korean or Japanese?” asks Annie Niu, a Chinese Canadian content creator primarily based on the online video-sharing platform TikTok, in a video posted January 30th, 2023, to her audience of some 188 thousand followers.
“I’m guilty of believing it too,” Niu admits, flashing an image of elaborate acrylic nail art behind her on-screen. “I saw these nails on TikTok, and right away you’re like, Wow, those are beautiful Korean nails, right? But no, they’re Chinese nails.” Niu moves to Google images, where she searches for “Chinese nails.” The results are cartoonish red, white and gold nail art renditions of dragons, koi fish and maneki-neko (the latter two of which are, ironically, most commonly associated with Japanese culture)—nothing like the feminine, bedazzled nails she shares at the start of the video. Niu gives the search engine the benefit of the doubt; “Maybe it’s just Google doesn’t comprehend what I’m trying to ask,” she reasons. She types “Korean nails” into the search bar, and the results produce images of the initial artistic, elegant nail art style.
“Wait, what is that?” Niu pauses to zoom into one of the image results, a set of water-color-like acrylic nails pulled from the American social media platform Pinterest. “Literally Chinese characters,” she says, pointing to a line of text on the nail photo printed in Simplified Chinese. The characters “@小平美香 | 小红书” refer to a Chinese content creator’s username on the platform 小红书, or Xiaohongshu, a Chinese social media platform similar to Instagram or Pinterest. Re-uploaded to Pinterest by user @monsieur_alinushka—whose recent posts are filed under “boards” named things like “Cybercore” and “Skin care,” plus two called “白の美学” and “한계 미학” in Japanese and Korean, respectively—@小平美香’s nail art image has been re-captioned with key phrases like “nails design 2022” and, plainly, “korean nails.”
Niu’s video has garnered over 3.7 million views—collecting over 616.2 thousand likes and four thousand comments. “douyin makeup rebranded into aegyo,” replied TikTok user @av.yukio_13, referring to the colloquial trend name for a makeup style that originated on the Chinese video-sharing platform Douyin (抖音)—the Eastern subsidiary of ByteDance, opposite the overhead company’s Western subsidiary TikTok—and to Korean aegyo (애교) or cuteness (Kaye et al., 2021; Puzar and Hong, 2018). “and Manhua lashes getting rebranded as Manga lashes,” added user @luizzzama, referencing an eyelash style that emerged from Chinese manhua comics and, separately, Japanese manga (Bao, 2013). In succession, users @iatemykeyboardbymistake, @collagenial and @xiasupporter put it simply: “Korea and Japan have a better pr team,” “Unironically geopolitics, most likely :/” and “It’s so obviously Sinophobia and it doesn’t get talked about enough.”
“Why does this happen?” Niu asks.
The frustrations that Niu and her thousands of commenters expressed in her January video are fueled by a backlog of beauty genre content on TikTok that is either “rebranded”—as @luizzzama referred to the phenomenon—as Korean or Japanese or is altogether dismissed and disembodied from its original Chinese creators. These creators have little opportunity to protest or prevent Western social media users from recirculating their work—and in the beauty genre, their bodies—throughout foreign platforms.
This circulation of digital content mimics a longer history of transnational cultural exchange between East Asian countries and a modern consumerist America that began with the importation of “exotic” goods from the “Far East Orient” into the United States (Kim, 2006). The traffic of Oriental furnishings like screens, cabinets, rugs, vases and prints throughout the early 1900s—roughly the period in which consumer culture took hold in the U.S.—gave way to the rise of Japanese kawaii and Korean pop music in the U.S. today (Kim, 2006; Bow, 2019; Jung, 2009). This process of transnational circulation and consumption allows for these cultural commodities—whether they take the form of ornamental Chinese cabinetry or digital K-pop song downloads—to gather the social and political problematics of the Orient as the U.S. understands it, to the extent that the countries of the “Far East Orient” become almost exclusively associated with the things that come out of them and into the hands of Western consumers (Kim, 2006).
Today, this is as much an embodiment of historic Orientalism in the West as it is an extension of growing prosumer culture. The phenomenon of “prosumption,” wherein production and consumption are mutually constitutive (Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2010), occurs within new participatory web cultures that have—over the last several years—become culturally ubiquitous as a consequence of the rapid development of “Web 2.0” platforms and the rise of user-generated content as the de facto form of participation and collaboration online (Beer and Burrows, 2010). Through social media-based cultural production, Chinese women beauty and fashion creators merge the hyper-personal with the hulkingly public and actively construct their racialized and gendered identities in communion with global networked publics (Zhang, 2017). The women behind this niche of transnational social media content become “prosumers” not only as online video producers, but as visual objects for a—supposedly borderless—public to engage with and, when their videos cross international borders onto U.S. platforms, as discursive sites of distinctly Chinese identity co-constituted by a Western gaze.
The exchange of Chinese cultural commodities across the United States problematizes the relationship between America’s globalized capitalism and its Orientalist self-ideation (Kim, 2006). This relationship foregrounds U.S. social media users’ consumption of content produced by Chinese women online and reveals lasting Western ideas about so-called “Chineseness” and about the creative and corporal identities of its producers.
Orientalism and the Western Gaze
The positionality of Asian peoples in the United States has been predicated by the enduring social and political jurisdiction of Orientalism, a critical concept developed by postcolonial academic Edward W. Said (1978) to describe a Western vision of the world wherein “the Occident” West is definitively opposite—or at least, safely distanced from—”the “Orient” East. According to this sharp and pejorative global binary, the West is familiar and the East is strange (Said, 1978). The West is seen as progressive but the East is traditional; the West is modern, the East is backward. Developed over the course of centuries of transnational interaction between European and American nations and Asia, Orientalism is a conception of reality meant to dominate and restructure “the great Asiatic mystery” (Said, 1978)—all within the geographic borders of the West, by Westerners, for the Western imagination.
Said traces the roots of Orientalism—of the Orient East becoming a complementary opposite to the West—back to antiquity and cites the transnational endeavors of Marco Parlo, the Crusaders and the Christian Bible as Western works that altogether contribute to a specific genre of literature: “the journey, the history, the fable, the stereotype, the polemical confrontation” (1978). These initial materials document the language and form of the East and West encounter as the process of the West encountering the East, its exotic Other (Said, 1978). At an institutional level in the United States, this process of “Orientalization” (Said, 1978) is generally understood as the central motivator behind the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited all immigration of Chinese laborers for 10 years (Minami, 2023). But even earlier, the lesser-known Page Act of 1875 prohibited the immigration of unfree laborers and women for “immoral purposes”—a law that was enforced primarily against Chinese women. These laws were imposed against Chinese migrant workers who had come seeking employment during the California Gold Rush (1849) and the laying of transcontinental rail lines (1863–69) (Berry, 2019). As such they were part of an early form of Sinophobia, a state-centric extension of Orientalism and a specific anti-Chinese sentiment in the West that sits at the historical center of anti-Asian sentiments in the U.S. (Zhang, 2008). The “Sinophobian” attitude that emerged in the second half of the 18th century and prevails today is invested in rendering China as the preliminary model of a despotic, Other society (Zhang, 2008), using a more meticulous vocabulary drawn from U.S.-Sino geopolitical relations than that of broad Orientalism (Zhang, 2008).
Although the Chinese Exclusion Act was officially repealed in 1943, the rise of McCarthyism fueled a new wave of “Yellow Peril” sentiment directed toward China, which had “fallen” to the Chinese Communist Party (Minami, 2023). Paranoia surrounding renewed Chinese immigration gave way to the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Chinese Confession Program that terrorized Chinese American communities in the country’s largest Chinese immigrant hubs, until the 1965 Immigration Act eliminated prior national origins quotas and triggered the modern wave of Asian immigration based on family connections and employability (Minami, 2023). The threads of historic Orientalism, racism and evolving political agenda—or French philosopher Michel Foucault’s “state phobia” (Dean and Villadsen, 2016)—have shaped how the U.S. conceives of China and of Chinese people as its supposed representatives. This Sinophobia has become the de facto lens through which the West conceives of China, turning to generalizations about China as a threatening, deviant, backward, and inferior Other in order to reconstitute the power and hegemony of the West (Zhang, 2008).
The United States’ continued investment in its Orientalist construction of China is aided and abetted by its political and imperial endeavors against and into Asiatic entities. Said (1978) argues that Orientalism is more valuable as a signal of Western power over the East than as any kind of rigorous, pure discourse about the East as it is. The West’s material investments in drawing a bi-hemisphere border down the globe, its projection of inferiority and strength across that boundary line and its array of characteristics assigned to the Orient party all testify to the existence and staying power of a deliberate theoretical and geographic division between the East and the West (Said, 1978). The United States’ enduring, ready willingness to elucidate China through a language that draws from exoticism, foreign invasion and, currently, authoritarianism and “anti-American” Communism illuminates the West’s white-supremacist self-imagination (Zhang and Xu, 2020).
At its core, Western Orientalism hinges on a spectator-subject relationship between the West and the East, wherein the West is able to impose a sort of Western gaze over the Orient that is constituted through its transnational encounters with and domestic reconstructions of the East (Cartwright and Sturken, 2018). The concepts of spectatorship and the gaze are derived from film theory, but this conceptualization of looking as a part of power negotiation has also emerged as a part of postcolonial theory, a body of scholarship that examines how Western discourses constitute non-Western peoples as disparate and deferential to the authority and political righteousness of white, Western hegemony (Cartwright and Sturken, 2018). This kind of theoretical work is concerned with the historical and cultural positionality of a human subject according to its representational media texts and challenges the neutrality of the practice of looking, which is inherently fraught with a sliding scale of power (Cartwright and Sturken, 2018). The postcolonial conception of spectatorship and the Western gaze problematizes how Western forces have rendered “the Other”—in this case, the Asiatic Other—to forge and moor oppositional Western identity. Orientalism—the discursive ability of the West to dominate, restructure and exercise jurisdiction over the East (Said, 1978)—is structural and relational, and the subject-object dynamic suspended within Orientalism invokes a necessary interrogation into which cultural, political, militaristic and industrial power has agency in the gaze organized around representations of the other.
Encountering the Orient
The contemporary encounter between East Asian—Chinese, South Korean and Japanese—“prosumers” and American media audiences is predicated by the United States’ histories of imperialism and commodity capitalism, through which any “embrace” of the East by white Americans is “literalized and materialized” in the embrace of cultural commodities (Kanesaka, 2020). By the turn of the 20th century, consumerism as a vehicle for social identity formation and recognition was emerging in American culture, and the United States’ working figuration of the “Far East Orient”—both as an object and as a concept—became a central force in mediating the relationship between this new form of identity-based consumption and American consumers themselves (Kim, 2006). Beyond Said’s “planetary consciousness” (Kim, 2006) of the Orient East drawn initially from Western travel narratives, the Oriental object itself actively problematizes the modern American neoliberal market of identity.
From roughly 1880 to 1920, a market for art and other decorative goods from the exotic “Far East” escalated in the United States, preconditioned by centuries of Western collectors’ interest in Chinoiserie and Japonaiserie and the aesthetics’ promised sensibilities (Kim, 2006). In an early iteration of modern neoliberal consumer culture, this market emerged, commercially, as an antidote to “over-modern” industrialization. The cultural capital that came with buying, owning and peacocking commodities from East Asia was derived from the lasting Western impression of the Orient East as antiquated and antimodern—though with an air of foreign grace or beauty—beacons of what consumers understood to be “Asiatic tradition” as opposed to American industry and capitalism (Kim, 2006). During this period, artists and journalists documented their visits to East Asian countries for popular magazines, enumerating the Orient as a sort of geographic display case for aesthetic goods and merchandise that, when purchased and brought back to the United States, would bestow upon their buyer their innate aura of Asiatic distance and difference (Kim, 2006). This conception of East Asia as a mass curation of commodities ripe for Western picking reconfigures the more abstract construct of Orientalism en masse within the vocabulary of modern consumption. The very workings of U.S. consumer culture have contoured how Americans are able to conceive of the Orient and its commodity exports, as interchangeable or even synonymous with one another. The homogenization of the “Orient-as-concept” and the “Orient-as-object”—and of American consumers’ conflation of the two—into Western Occidentalism attests to the material staying power of the Orient’s almost exclusive association with its commodity goods. In the Western imagination, the Orient is best recognized and recited as a list of items; inventories of East Asian cultural commodities are indicative of an intimate proximity to their countries of origin; and, in a cyclical state, the objects themselves re-invoke the West’s conception of the East (Kim, 2006).
In an early commodity-fueled transnational encounter between the West and its “Far East Orient,” hair emerged as a significant subject in the American justification of the country’s immigration restrictions levied against the Chinese that began in the mid-19th century and lasted until the mid-20th century (Berry, 2019). Through the early 1910s and the rise of American consumer culture, majority-male Chinese migrant workers wore their hair in long braids, according to Manchurian style, which the white American imagination imbued with gendered, racialized and sexualized impressions, so much so that the hair became synonymous with “Chineseness” in the U.S. (Berry, 2019). As an Oriental object, the hair came to visually verify a specific form of Chinese Otherness, material evidence that the white American state expelled its producers from within its boundaries. Yet this hair, when cut, packaged and shipped to U.S. consumers to support American women’s turn-of-the-century pompadour hairstyle, became a beauty commodity and the immediate poster-child Oriental object of an expanding global beauty market, one that was suddenly reliant on China for its supply (Berry, 2019).
At the center of American consumers’ paradoxical relationship with Chinese laborers and producers and the beauty commodities derived from their bodies lies a tug of war between the racialized and gendered identity of the Chinese—which itself was imbued with hazardous notions about Chinese migrant workers’ proximity to manual labor—and the security of the United States’ self-conception as a white nation (Berry, 2019). The tension between U.S. consumer capitalism that is unrestricted by physical borders—while benefiting from inequities across those borders—and the nation’s exclusionary, Orientalist self-conception relies upon precarious, shifting intersections of race, gender and nationality (Berry, 2019). Historically, the U.S. flocks to uphold this exhaustive ethnocentric Occidentalism when the nation’s borders are imagined “under siege” (Berry, 2019). The United States’ abject Orientalization of East Asian cultural commodities—and according to this process, of East Asians themselves—invokes these objects as pillars of Otherness, subject to Western taste and commercial decree.
The latter half of the 20th century saw the widespread circulation and subsequent fetishization of East Asian Oriental objects following the appearance of Japan’s powerhouse of deliberate commodity exports—particularly according to its kawaii cultural phenomenon, which birthed its own vast inventory of goods—and South Korea’s burgeoning pop music industry in the American consumer market (Kanesaka, 2020; Bow, 2019; Jung, 2009). Under this form of commodity Orientalism, a product of the convergence of the United States’ consumer culture and imperialist history, Western consumers’ confrontation with similar, racialized Oriental objects became an encounter with difference or Otherness on an external political scale (Bow, 2019). When anti-Japanese sentiment became notably volatile in the mid-20th century, American consumers’ fetishistic impressions of Japanese cultural commodities collided with racist Yellow Peril rhetoric aimed at a growing population of Japanese Americans and the imagined threat they posed to the United States’ white supremacist self-conception (Kanesaka, 2020). The position that Oriental objects hold in the United States’ global consumer market is insecure at best, subject to the virulent throes of the nation’s political agenda and its corresponding—often racist—cultural moods.
Despite moments of resistance, Japanese and South Korean cultural exports have spread throughout the U.S. with a—fetishistic and Orientalist, although undeniably present—fanaticism and consumer earnestness that Chinese cultural commodities have yet to acquire. The United States’ contradictory rendering of its “borderless” capitalism divides China from its geographic neighbors Japan and South Korea. From the beginnings of the United States’ modern global consumer culture, Oriental objects have come to take on the problematics of the Orient. Chinese people and Chinese commodities, as the United States’ foremost migrant Others and the supposed representatives of its contemporary political and economic rival, are subject to the core contradiction at work in the intersection between the United States’ desired “borderless” capitalism and its investment in defining ethnocentric nationhood by excluding others according to race and gender (Berry, 2019). As the Oriental object, a racialized thing, circulates throughout the global market into the hands of Western consumers, local imperial histories, uneven economic powers and shifting boundaries of racial difference condition its reception across the the Americas, Asia and the Pacific Rim (Bow, 2019).
“Prosuming” the Orient
The economy that has sprung around Oriental novelties bestows upon objects the properties of persons—in this case of East Asian persons—that remain in keeping with commodity fetishism (Bow, 2019). In this “affective economy,” Asianized objects like Oriental porcelain, anime television programs and K-pop music videos reinforce a specific racial conception of Asian people and specifically underpin the specificity of Asian American racialization in the United States, specifically that of Asian American women (Bow, 2019). In a significant deviation from the early experiences of Chinese migrant-worker men—whose racialized positionality in the Western imagination is certainly still imbued with racist abstractions about sexuality—the power dynamics between the East and West are rendered through sexual metaphor around women (Kanesaka, 2020). This realm of the Western imagination has historically been invested in the “romance” of the “Far East Orient” and its violent climax in imperialist American militarism in Asia and the Pacific Rim, figured as rape (Kanesaka, 2020). The presence of Asian femininity in the U.S. is reliant upon compensatory shows of loyalty and national allegiance meant to soothe anxieties about Asian women’s supposed sexual infidelity and political deviancy (Kanesaka, 2020). Doubly subordinated at the intersection of femininity and the “Far East Orient,” the Asian woman elicits the West’s intrigue with feminized exoticism while simultaneously dispossessing it of its ability to retaliate against the West’s racialized projections (Kanesaka, 2020).
By conferring upon objects anthropomorphic meaning, commodity Orientalism surrounding both material and media objects colludes race with racial fetishism (Bow, 2019; Kanesaka, 2020). The globalization of Japanese kawaii culture beginning in the late 20th century and enduring through the present day has spurred a clear articulation of the consequences of Western consumers’ equating people with aesthetic objects, amid historic and ongoing exclusion from immigration and citizenship (Kanesaka, 2020). The near-ubiquitous circulation of Japanese “cute” aesthetic objects fed upon seemingly contradictory notions of East Asian women’s subservient, nonviolent sexuality and virulent political attitudes toward Japan and Japanese Americans on the heels of World War II—arguably, equally sinister cultural forces (Kanesaka, 2020). Half-Japanese, American writer Kathleen Tamagawa recalls of her childhood: “I felt myself to be a comicality, a toy. I was often spoken of as a ‘Japanese doll,’ or worse still as the ‘cute’ little Japanese” (Kanesaka, 2020). In any case, this rendering of commodity-defined Japaneseness, Asianness or Asian femininity was necessitated by white Westerners’ understanding of Asian women as “Cute, but Yellow,” as the San Francisco Examiner put it in 1920 (Kanesaka, 2020). The mass circulation and recirculation of supposedly Asiatic aesthetic objects among American consumers embodies an ironic back and forth between Asianness as an “Oriental plaything” and as the Yellow Peril (Kanesaka, 2020).
Take, for instance, the 2008 American re-release of K-pop artist BoA’s single “Eat You Up.” The original music video directed by Cha Eun-Taek and released in South Korea featured the singer dressed in pants and a hoodie, dancing on the street with a group of men—a markedly less euphemistic variation of the music video compared to its later repackaging (BoA, 2009). When the song and corresponding video were readapted for U.S. audiences, American director Diane Martel was brought in, and the “Eat You Up” video suddenly featured a then 22-year-old BoA in short, tight clothes brushing against the faces and bodies of white men (jessouloulou, 2009). In the face of backlash from South Korean and Asian American viewers, BoA’s agency SM Entertainment withdrew the American version and eventually released a third iteration of the music video based upon the original Korean version (Jung, 2009). Despite this and similar attempts at Western fame and her unprecedented success in non-Korean international markets like Japan, BoA remains a relatively minor figure in the U.S. pop market (Jung, 2009). The uncanny dual handling of her U.S. debut and the discourse that followed it serve as reminders of the ways in which a legacy of Orientalism in American mass media—and the culture it stokes—co-constructs Asian women as exotic sexual commodities (Jung, 2009). In the most extreme interpretation of her debut, it was BoA’s “Asianness”—her physical features, voice and accent—that limited her embrace in the West (Jung, 2009). In spite of the United States’ relatively positive economic and political relationship with South Korea as a similar capitalist, democratic nation, Boa’s racialized and gendered embodiment and inscription outlines a contemporary tether between the West’s conception of the Orient and commodity-hood itself (Kanesaka, 2020).
Just as the emergence of 20th-century commodity Orientalism coincided with the period’s widespread fetishization of Asiatic objects and its tumultuous imperialism and immigration histories, the hyper-modern recirculation of Chinese social media creators’ content across Western platforms, by Western users, coincides with the United States’ stake in Sinophobia, or anti-Chinese sentiment, and ethnicity-blind Orientalism. Today the division of parallel platforms like Douyin and TikTok—and to a similar extent, Xiaohongshu and Instagram or Pinterest—and American users’ ability to traverse that boundary and displace Chinese content from its native platforms and onto U.S. sites indulges the cultural power imbalance between the U.S. and China as a deliberate act of asymmetrical cultural exchange (Bow, 2019).
In April 2023, TikTok user @eri.jpg uploaded a video with a text overlay title: “korean id photo makeup.” The video shows a woman putting on makeup and @eri.jpg has tagged it with hashtags like “#koreanmakeup” and “ulzzangmakeup,” even though the video’s original Chinese subtitles are still visible on-screen. In the post’s caption, @eri.jpg wrote, “korean id photo makeup look” followed immediately by “id: xiaochunriqi,” presumably in credit to a Chinese creator. In another April re-upload to TikTok, user @eunoiaely6 posted a video with a new opening screen card: “dark ulzzang makeup look tutorial” in reference to Korean ulzzang (얼짱), a term that translates to “best face” or “good looking” (Loo, 2014). As in @eri.kpg’s re-upload, this video shows a woman putting on makeup with the post’s original Chinese subtitles playing on-screen, this time with the post’s original watermark from Xiaohongshu written in Chinese still visible in the corner.
This transnational niche genre—wherein Western users download content from Chinese creators on Douyin and Xiaohongshu, repurpose it or redefine it on their own terms and then recirculate it across American platforms—has become so ubiquitous on TikTok that other North American Chinese users have produced discursive content in adverse reaction to the original (or perhaps, non-original) content. “Why does everyone see China as a meme or Chinese things get rebranded as Korean?” TikTok user @iluvxin writes across a video uploaded to TikTok February 2023. In this video, @iluvxin shows their own screenshots of a video from the platform where a user has re-uploaded photos downloaded from Chinese creators on Xiaohongshu—with a visible watermark left from the Chinese platform—and re-titled their content “gangnam fashion” and “hongdae fashion” in reference to the Seoul neighborhoods. In May 2023, TikTok user @baotinggs posted a similar video wherein they mimic Niu’s methodology and search for “korean makeup” and “chinese makeup” on Pinterest. The search term for Korean makeup results in images of delicate, attractive makeup styles on East Asian women. The search for Chinese makeup results in images of garish and abjectly racist images of East Asian women with cartoonish white and red faces, or with their eyes and mouths edited into thin lines.
Much of what these TikTok users have found and recirculated or criticized is a quite literal materialization of Orientalism, as an expression of the West’s conception of the East—take @baotinggs’ “Chinese makeup” search results that are densely reminiscent of racist stereotypes about East Asian physiognomy, for example. But as the material of an active Web 2.0 participatory culture of prosumption (Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2010), these videos—their creation and Western re-creation—reveal more about the inner workings of a media-fueled modern iteration of Orientalism. Out of a relatively dated dichotomy drawn between “Western consumers vs. non-Western consumers,” Chinese women social media creators have emerged as “non-Western prosumers” who are at work in transforming labor and consumption within China itself as the nation further integrates into global capitalism (Zhang, 2017). When American social media users then remove the work of these women from its native context, they themselves become “Western prosumers” who are at work in remaking, reposting and ultimately reconstituting “Chineseness” and the “Far East Orient” as they reconfigure socially representative—and often corporal—media produced by Chinese women. In this process of recirculation online, the bodies, labor and self-representation of Chinese women are reimagined as nonspecific, inconsequential, unappealing, deplorable or inferior to that of democratic Japanese or Korean women’s. This circular prosumer niche imagines Chinese women and their social media work as ultimately subservient to Western projections rather than to any innate identity they might carry on their own, untethered from Western supremacy across global capitalism and culture, and as blank slates upon which white Westerners can enact their own constructions of Asianness.
Conclusion
Said’s Orientalism begins with a quote from Karl Marx: “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented” (1978). Within modern global web culture and across material cultural exchange in the past, the person, their product and the “Far East Orient” they come from are altogether inseparable under enduring commodity Orientalism. By recirculating Chinese creators’ prosumptive work—and often actively changing its identifying properties—Western social media users are reconstituting so-called “Chineseness” according to an Orientalist Western gaze, a regurgitative process that says as much about the reality of China and Chinese diasporic peoples as it does about the Western imagination (Zhang and Xu, 2020). The transnational recirculation of Chinese social media content across American platforms exposes how Oriental commodities—whether they are ornamental vases traded along the Silk Road or thirty-second makeup tutorial videos posted to Douyin, then to TikTok—take on the problematics of the West’s “Far East Orient” and problematize the overwhelming cultural jurisdiction of that Occident power.
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KARISSA KORMAN 