"you are what you eat"

Often a motivating phrase to encourage healthier eating, I expand upon the idea “you are what you eat” to critique cultural cannibalism as a means of domination. Drawing from bell hooks, I question: what embedded practices operate within the capitalist strategy of commodification in “becoming” another race by consuming the other’s culture? What are the sociopolitical ramifications of influencers asserting that they are in their “Chinese era”? What phenomenon occurs when outgroup members consume and attach personhood to other marginalized cultures (i.e. Black people getting calligraphy tattoos)? How does perpetuated othering by cultural consumption extend the mechanism of white supremacy/fragility? This is not simply a debate of cultural appreciation versus appropriation. Those of privileged social status “consume” and adorn aesthetics, food, practices (albeit in typically bastardized ways) without the traumas that are inextricably linked to the lived experience of the Other. 

By maximizing the affordances of the AV essay, I lean into “creative and performative critical approaches” to research (Grant, 2014, p. 49). I simultaneously juxtapose conceptual ideas of cultural consumption alongside literal eating, crunching, and munching. I contrast clips of me eating traditionally ethnic foods in the first montage as opposed to Western foods in the final close-ups to represent the reciprocated consumption/idealization of whiteness in people of color. I play with ideas of cannibalism through voyeurism and parodies of the introductory scene from American Psycho and Sam Rockwell’s monologue from White Lotus. I incorporate glimpses into my personal experiences with fetishization as Rockwell’s character narrates that he’s “always had a thing for Asian girls.” However, to illustrate that this voyeurism extends beyond white men, I include the visual of the hyena and leopard eating the same carcass to signify different groups consuming one another’s culture. Through the process of splicing, decontextualizing, and remixing different resources between pop culture and my own archives, I challenge the very premise that identity is achievable via consumption–as if one can become whatever they (don’t) want through eating and digesting.

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I used quite a bit of self-insertion in this AV essay, but the prominent featured clips are the introductory segment in which I parody Margot Robbie’s beauty routine parody of Christian Bale’s performance in American Psycho and my dress up segment taking over/wrestling with the narration from Sam Rockwell’s monologue in White Lotus. In the former clip, I play into an ideal and create a voyeuristic opportunity for the viewer. I intentionally mispronounce my last name (in contrast to the first line) when I say, “there is an idea of Annie Wang” to lean into the exaggerated stereotypical image painted of Asians/Chinese women (“dragon lady,” obsessed with rice, perfectly “petite” and “youthful.”) Hall describes a similar phenomenon with Black women who are simultaneously oversexualized and infantilized when elaborating on exotic fetishism as an unregulated voyeurism in “The Spectacle of the Other.” As for the latter, I take over Sam Rockwell’s monologue when he says, “then I put on some lingerie” visualized by a clip of my putting on a Chinese silk top as a “real” Asian girl performing the act. While this performance is intended to be a reclamation of embodied identity, I also use this segment to challenge whether that possibility is achievable with the distortion of self (which parts are me, which am I performing to be palatable to a cis het white male gaze?). By remixing the lines and implementing multivocality, I transformed the monologue into a dialogue as Rockwell remarks, “I became insatiable,” I respond with his other lines “hey, we all have our Achilles’ heel, man.” Overlayed with the AI-generated images of Rockwell, this segment conveys that there is no “becoming” a race we are not, no matter how much we consume of the other.