Consuming Orientalism: Images of Asian/American Women in Multicultural Advertising

Past research has analyzed the gendered constructs of American consumption practices that underlie marketed images in the print media. This article re-considers the cultural constructs of multicultural advertisement strategies in the new global era. Based on an analysis of three advertisement campaigns, our contention is that the normalcy and positionality of White males in the U.S. society rely on the racialized and gendered representations of Asian/American women as the Other. It is argued that the emerging global culture has been packaged, commodified and marketed by multi-national corporations in a manner that widens their range of cultural repertoires but resurrects traditional hierarchies of American Orientalism.