Today, more women of Asian identity are experiencing successful careers in the pop culture industry than ever before. The prominent Anglophone pop culture industries of music and film have been full of barriers that impede the success of women of Asian identity, including pervasive stereotypical representations of Asian identity and femininity in the mass media. The Hollywood film industry in particular has been criticised of stereotypical representations of Asian identity, even into the 2010s. With the concurrent influx of women of Asian identity in the popular music industry, some artists have used their musical output to speak on their lived experiences of being stereotyped as Asian women. 

This is a case study analysis of two musical works by Rina Sawayama and Alice Longyu Gao. This thesis asks the questions: 1) how do contemporary Asian pop musicians, Rina Sawayama and Alice Longyu Gao, represent their Asian femininity in their musical works, primarily in their respective songs ‘STFU!’ and ‘Karma Is A Witch’? 2) how do their representations fit into the context of existing representations in the popular media sphere, particularly representations by Hollywood? 3) To what extent do their representations engage with Asian stereotypes, and how? In order to compare the artists’ representations of selves in their music and existing representations of Asianness in popular culture, a background of stereotypical representations of Asianness in the Hollywood film industry is included. Past scholars have identified the Lotus Blossom and Dragon Lady as the most prevalent on screen stereotypical representations of Asian women in Hollywood media. Through musical, lyrical and visual analysis of the case study songs, I compare Rina and Gao’s unique and empowering representations of their Asian femininity to the stereotypical representations of the Lotus Blossom and Dragon Lady. 

The findings of this thesis is that Rina and Gao’s representations of themselves in their musical works directly challenge stereotypical expectations of Asian femininity, especially those portrayed by the Hollywood film industry. In each of their respective case study songs, both Rina and Gao use intertextuality and take on well-known characters from Japanese media franchises. These characters do not conform to the reductive Lotus Blossom or Dragon Lady stereotypes. Through taking on these characters, they emphasise that they as artists and Asian women are not to be reduced to feminine Asian stereotypes. Simultaneously they draw from their cultural identities and incorporate this into their musical work. In doing this, Rina and Gao construct empowering representations of Asian femininity that often directly engage with negative stereotypes.