Each of the Tuesday films covered the portrayal of women in media, the Lee reading also tied into this. I thought that The Joy Luck Club was amazing. I really felt connected to some of the daughters’ due to shared experiences, and they showed such depth that made them feel so much realer. The mothers’ stories were absolutely heartbreaking as well. The cast was amazing, nearly all of my favorite Asian American actresses were in it.

In Lee’s Orientals, the chapter deals with Orientalizing women in media and the stereotypes in film. I thought that this really gave insight into why The Joy Luck Club is so great. Thought it’s about Chinese and Chinese American women, they portray such a wide array of character types that it is so far from where the industry started.

Slaying the Dragon took a good look at the trials of Asian American women in media and, as the class might indicate, popular culture. It wasn’t quite as female centered as the film we watched later, The Slanted Screen, but I did feel that it was somewhat female centric, or at least had a good focus on the women’s roles in movies over the years.  Because of the two films being shown very close together, we were given an excellent view into the two parallel but different worlds of Asian American men and women in media.  The most jarring thing about Slaying the Dragon was probably how truly fetishized movies have made Asian women. They either seduce or are made into objects to lust after, and they rarely get to break out of this stereotype unless it’s to be a stereotypical doting housewife-like figure. Not only is this lack of change unfortunate, it’s actually depressing.

The same can be seen in the lives of the women of The Joy Luck Club. Being about a large group of women, it shows the lives and hardships of some of the older women. How one was literally sold at a young age to be married at fifteen, and the emotional abuse she suffered later in life at the hands of her husband. The scars from this lingered with her for years, and I can’t help but feel that was happened to her wasn’t a great deal different from what media does to women as well.

As an aside, I accidentally did the wrong reading, and my comments on the reading that should have been here can actually be found over in this post.