Meghan Markle has slammed the Austin Powers and Kill Bill films franchises for creating caricatures of Asian women.
On the fourth episode of her Archetypes podcast, Meghan sat down with comedian Margaret Cho, journalist Lisa Ling and sociologist Nancy Wang Yuen to discuss Asian-American figures in the entertainment industry.
Meghan spoke about Hollywood’s caricatures of Asian women in film on her podcast Archetypes.
(Image: Spotify)“Movies like Austin Powers and Kill Bill presented these characters of Asian women as oftentimes over sexualised or aggressive,” the Duchess of Sussex said.
“And it’s not just those two examples, there’s so many more. The Dragon Lady, the east Asian temptress whose mysterious foreign allure is scripted as both tantalising and deadly; this has seeped into a lot of our entertainment.
“But this toxic stereotyping of women of Asian descent, it doesn’t just end once the credits roll.”
Meghan said Kill Bill presented characters of Asian women as “oftentimes over sexualised or aggressive.”
(Image: Miramax)Nancy said Asian women are either stereotyped as “lotus flowers, who are quite submissive and quiet, or ‘dragon ladies,’ who are overbearing and unlikeable.”
Lucy Liu has previously addressed claims her Kill Bill character O-Ren Ishii was an example of the “Dragon Lady” trope.
The actress defined the stereotype as an Asian woman who is “cunning and deceitful … [who] uses her sexuality as a powerful tool of manipulation, but often is emotionally and sexually cold and threatens masculinity”.
Elsewhere in the podcast, Meghan discussed her childhood growing up in Los Angeles which is known to be one of the most multicultural cities in the world.
The mother-of-two revealed a “humbling experience” as an adolescent where she would regularly visit a Korean bathhouse with her mother.
“I had a real love of getting to know other cultures. And part of that, my mom and I would often go to the Korean spa together,” she said.
“Now those of you who haven’t been to one before, it’s a very humbling experience for a girl going through puberty, because you enter a room with women from ages 9 to maybe 90 all walking around naked and waiting to get a body scrub on one of the tables lined up in a row.”
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