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Gwen Stefani has clearly been around the track – more than once and in more ways than one – with regard to cultural appropriation.
The US singer has long drawn accusations of cultural appropriation for acts ranging from wearing the South Asian bindi to imitating Hispanic and Native American culture in her music videos. The most recent charge involves her response to her previous heavy use of Japanese-inspired imagery in a profile for Allure magazine.
Citing her father’s time working for Yamaha, Stefani responded: “That was my Japanese influence and that was a culture that was so rich with tradition, yet so futuristic [with] so much attention to art and detail and discipline and it was fascinating to me. I said, ‘My God, I’m Japanese and I didn’t know it’.” The response online was largely negative. “Being a superfan of Asian culture does not make you one of us. STOP,” responded one person online.
Singer Ariana Grande has been dogged by similar accusations. In December 2021, she posted photos of herself with single-edged eyelid make-up and a light skin complexion. The photos led to accusations she was copying the style of K-pop stars and criticism for so-called “Asian-fishing”. And she’s not the only one looking to have more “Asian” features. Oli London, a white British influencer who identified as a transracial Korean, went as far as undergoing “racial transition surgery” to appear like a member of K-pop group BTS.
For Grande, this follows separate accusations of “blackfishing”, a term coined by critic Wanna Thompson to describe white celebrities and influencers cosplaying as black women on social media. Specifically, she was accused of darkening her skin to appear racially ambiguous and using African-American Vernacular English – colloquially known as “blaccent”. Other celebrities have engaged in culturally appropriative acts, such as wearing dreadlocks or engaging in blackface.
The crux of the controversy over such acts is that they involve, in the words of Dr Neal Lester, professor of English at Arizona State University, “stealing something from a culture that is not one’s own and reaping the benefits or profits from it”. Critics argue that by adopting certain physical traits or stylistic features, celebrities like Stefani, Grande and singer Jesy Nelson can leverage a given “aesthetic” to achieve greater success and fame.
In the case of Grande’s alleged “Asian-fishing”, for example, it has been argued that she is using the Asian “aesthetic” to play off the popularity of Korean culture. The look can subsequently be abandoned if it loses its social cachet or no longer serves these celebrities. As such, they are able to reap the benefits of the cultural zeitgeist without ever fully interacting with the culture they are appropriating from.
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Signing off,
Jennifer Lee
Production Editor, Social Media
Lunar Member
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