Celine Parreñas Shimizu discusses the representations of “Asian/American” women in theatre and film ranging from Miss Saigon and Hollywood films to the illegal stag films of the 1920s and 1930s, to present-day pornography and feminist films. She offers examples of “Asian/American” women who appear to utilize negative, hypersexual stereotypes in order to empower themselves and their performances, including the crotch-grabbing dancers in Miss Saigon, the narrative intervention of porn stars Asia Carrera and Annabel Chong via their websites, and Hollywood actress Lucy Liu's decision to tolerate stereotyping for the sake of future power and control.

Shimizu's account is compelling, as the subject of sexuality often is. Nonetheless, its elision of historicity and locality is glaring in the context of its aims – to provide an alternative perspective to the gender–race debate. Her choice of the slash over the hyphen in the epithet “Asian/American” is significant. Rather than constructing the “Asian-American” woman as one with a dual identity (which is by no means easily characterized), the slash alludes to a subjectivity that is “either/or and also both,” allowing Shimizu to address non-American Asian actresses, such as Lea Salonga (a Filipina) and Annabel Chong (a Singaporean), within the scope of her argument, though she does not explore their subjectivities in any detail. Salonga's nationality as a non-American was an issue of contention when Miss Saigon moved from the West End to Broadway. The Actors' Equity Association had insisted that casting priority be given to its (US) members. Hailing from the Philippines, the ex- and to date only US colony, Salonga's employment in a Broadway musical, adapted from Puccini's Madame Butterfly, set during the Vietnam War, written by French songwriters and produced by a British company, offers a multitude of cultural and political readings that may potentially inform the gender and racial one. Unfortunately, in Shimizu's account, these Asian women become as collectively undifferentiated as they do in the films and productions alleged to be portraying them as such.

While the volume recognizes that perceptions need to be changed, it does not question why, as a mode of address, female sexuality must be racialized, or why race must be sexualized, in order to be represented at all. What are the historical and institutional formations that compel both Anna May Wong and Lucy Liu, working nearly a century apart, to have to intervene in such similar ways in the processes of their (self-)representation? These processes seem, over time, to have taken on different forms without any true alteration in substance.