I remember being floored by Celine Parreñas Shimizu’s 2007 monograph, The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene. In the opening pages, she proudly proclaims her adoration for “sexy Asian women gyrating in bikinis on stage in Miss Saigon.” She further celebrates “the whorish, the bad, and the dangerous” in films by her fellow Asian/American women filmmakers.

Even as she concedes that her pleasure in these fetishist images may run counter to her pro-feminist and anti-racist politics, she nevertheless draws attention to their underlying complications, linking colonial histories to hypersexualized and oversimplified stereotypes of the dragon lady, angelic prostitute, silent geisha, and dominatrix. She also insists that in these perverse and restrictive representations of sexuality, Asian American women can find empowerment.

Shimizu’s film, So to Speak, colors all of these complications with the literal and figurative paintbrush of a Filipina American college student named Morena. Through her work—which features the actor Ariel Dizon Barish’s paintings—Morena navigates her sexuality within these larger contexts, and more importantly in personal ones—such as dealing with her own desire, the weight of her ancestral legacies, and all the grief, play, and messiness she needs to embrace to accept all the parts of herself. Morena’s journey is not without controversy. Her initial exploration of sexuality as servility—which begins when she first shows up to class in geisha makeup—is met with skeptical looks by her classmates. 

Besides being an enjoyable film with engaging visuals, introspective scenes, and some relationship drama (!), So to Speak celebrates the need for all of us to pursue art as a form of self-expression. Whether it is through fashion and makeup—as seen in the radiant and varied wardrobes of the characters and their transformations—or through visual and performance art, the characters of Shimizu’s movie find community and trust through art in all of its collaborative and dialogic forms.

April 2025