Abstract
The media's showcasing of nose rings, mehndi, and bindis in U.S. fashion is contemporary appropriation of South Asian symbols by Western popular culture. This paper employs a critical analysis of media images of White women adorned in the symbols of Indian femininity to explore the circulating economy of seeing and representation. The theoretical intervention offered here turns on the notion of the Third Eye - the potential for the object of ethnographic spectacle to return the gaze. The analysis reveals that the contemporary ‘ethnic chic’ preserves power hierarchies by locating the White woman as sexual object, and the Indian woman as the disembodied fetish that supports White female sexuality. The implications for South Asian American women include the need to re-imagine sexuality with reference to critical race theory and the potential to return an oppositional gaze.
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