Josephine Baker: Gendered Ethnicity on a Mainstream Stage

Abstract

[M]y point in using discussions of the portrayal of African American and, for instance, Asian American women to support an overall argument of racial fetishism is to point to a politics of resistance. If the white male gaze blurs, paradoxically, Whoopi Goldberg, Josephine Baker and Lucy Liu as 'Asian' dragon lady in Ally McBeal, we may do well to combine black feminist thought and Asian American Studies to deconstruct the nature of such a myopic gaze - such will be the aim of this paper.