ABSTRACT
This project has conceived of ethnic femininity as both shifting and multiple, yet in its various incarnations bearing an important relationship to the way a nation sells itself and manufactures nationalist mythologies. Seeing film and film culture as important registers for our collective cultural unconscious, I have sought to examine the significance of the popularization of ethnic female star personae as a partial index of the way in which American culture wants to envision itself. In this respect, ethnic femininity has a long representational association with fantasy. In this chapter, I explore the notion of fantasy in more detail via a consideration of a contemporary star persona.
