Butterfly
What animal does Kaila Yu use as an important symbol throughout the reading?
What is a butterfly?
What famous magazine did Sung-Hi Lee appear in?
What is Playboy?
Growing up, Yu wished she could become what?
What is beautiful and desired?
What term means treating someone more like an object than a complete person?
What is objectification?
What does ABG stand for in the reading?
What is “Asian Baby Girl” or “Asian Baby Gangster”?
Who was the first Asian model Yu remembers seeing and becoming obsessed with?
Who is Sung-Hi Lee?
What 1922 movie does Yu identify as helping bring the Asian butterfly trope into mainstream culture?
What is The Toll of the Sea?
What type of women did Yu often see represented as beautiful in American media?
Who are white women/models? She describes admiring white supermodels while noticing the lack of Asian models in media such as Victoria's Secret catalogs.
What is the term for someone who has a strong fetish for Asian people or Asian culture that Yu uses in the reading?
What is an Asiaphile?
The original teenagers who inspired the ABG image were mainly from what part of Asia?
What is Southeast Asia?
What nickname did Sung-Hi Lee's fans give her because of her butterfly tattoo?
What is “the Korean butterfly”?
The Toll of the Sea was based on what famous opera?
What is Madama Butterfly?
How did being rejected by her high-school crush affect Yu's view of herself?
It strengthened her belief that she was undesirable and that women with her features could not be considered beautiful.
What beauty standard influenced Yu and other Asian women to change their bodies?
What are Western beauty standards? Yu discusses how these standards influenced some Asian women to pursue breast augmentation.
Name two features associated with the later ABG look.
Any two of: bleached hair, hoop earrings, revealing clothing, tattoos, eyelash extensions, or winged eyeliner.
Besides beauty, what negative qualities does Yu say the butterfly can represent?
What are fragility, vulnerability, and objectification?
What do Madama Butterfly, The Toll of the Sea, and Miss Saigon have in common according to Yu?
They repeat stories in which Asian women are exploited or abandoned and ultimately sacrifice themselves, reinforcing the image of Asian women as fragile and disposable.
Why was Sung-Hi Lee's success so important to Yu when she was younger?
Sung-Hi was the first Asian model Yu saw, making Yu believe someone who looked like her could also be viewed as beautiful. However, Yu began connecting that beauty with being sexualized.
How are the “butterfly” stereotype and the ABG stereotype different?
The butterfly represents an Asian woman as delicate, submissive, and easily controlled, while the ABG is presented as rebellious, outgoing, sexual, and independent.
What stereotype was the ABG aesthetic originally meant to resist?
What is the model minority stereotype/myth?
How does Yu connect collecting butterflies with the fetishization of Asian women?
Both can involve turning something living into an object to possess, display, or use instead of recognizing its individuality. Yu compares butterfly collecting with men “collecting” Asian women and connects this stereotype to a history of war and oppression.
Why does Yu argue that sexualized media representations are harmful even when Asian women appear desirable?
Because being seen as desirable does not necessarily mean being seen as a full person. Yu argues that Asian women can instead become objects onto which people project fantasies, ignoring their personalities and individuality.
How did beauty standards affect Yu's sense of her authentic identity?
Yu felt that her authentic self was not desirable enough, so she gradually changed her appearance and behavior to match what she believed others considered attractive, writing that she “systematically erased anything authentically” herself.
Despite appearing opposite, what major problem does Yu see in both the butterfly and ABG stereotypes?
Both can reduce Asian women to sexual stereotypes instead of recognizing them as complex individuals. Even when Asian women rebel against the delicate butterfly stereotype, Yu argues that the ABG stereotype can still reduce them to a hypersexual image.
What contradiction does Yu identify within the ABG identity?
The ABG image could represent individuality, rebellion, femininity, and empowerment, but its focus on physical appearance and sexuality could also appeal to the male gaze and reduce Asian women to another stereotype.