Lillianna Lamagna

She/her

Education: Majoring in English

Mentor: Mary Kohn, Ph.D.

McNair Project: ‘You’re just making up sounds’: resisting Western stereotypes of Asian Americans in Everything Everywhere All at Once

Linguistic choices in film can function as a tool to flesh out characters, locations,
relationships, broader thematic aspects of the film, etc. (Lippi-Green 1997; Hodson 2014).
Language in film also serves as a way for audiences to hear portrayals of groups inaccessible to
them, which can enforce harmful stereotypes (Lippi-Green 1997; Feng 2018). For example, film
scholar Peter X. Feng observes that in Western films “...Asian women functioned as ‘Lotus
Blossoms,’ ‘passive figures who exist[ed] to serve [white] men’” (2018), or ‘Dragon Ladies,’
their evil counterparts. These stereotypes not only function to structure character, but to also
structure language. Stereotypes can also influence perceptions of accentedness (Lindemann &
Subtirelu 2013). The film Everything Everywhere All At Once (EEAAO), generates a
conversation on the importance of language in film as it portrays family dynamics of a
multilingual Asian American family while simultaneously subverting Asian stereotypes often
depicted in Western film and redefining what it means to be a hero in Western film. Research on
subversion of Western stereotypes of Asian identities through a sociolinguistic lens has not
been done for EEAAO. Following methods established by Lippi-Green (1997) and Hodson
(2014), this analysis examines language variation and stereotype in EEAAO. Codeswitching,
language choice, and metalinguistic commentary were coded alongside character profiles to
identify how language contributed to character development. Results show that the protagonist
subverts previous stereotypes of Asian identities regarding gender, trustworthiness, and linguistic
dexterity in Western film through codeswitching strategies, language choice, and variety of
language.