#StopAsianHate: Intersectionality, Misogyny, and the Asian Woman

By Valerie Wu

Graphic courtesy of SPEC Design team.

About a month ago, Minari star Steven Yeun spoke with the New York Times Magazine about the Asian American experience in America. In a quote that has been cited many times on Twitter, Yeun said: “Sometimes I wonder if the Asian-American experience is what it’s like when you’re thinking about everyone else, but nobody else is thinking about you.”

Like many Asian Americans, I believe these words feel especially significant now, with the news that six Asian women were killed at three different spas in Atlanta, Georgia by a white man. 

For all that’s been written about Asian-American struggles, it often feels like society doesn’t fully care or understand. The shooter, who appeared to believe that Asian women were the cause of his “sex addiction,” described the spas as a “temptation” he wanted to “eliminate.” 

Authorities dismissed the fact that six out of eight people killed were Asian women; though the shooter deliberately visited Asian-run spas, they claim the crime was gender-based and not “racially motivated.” 

This response is evidence of a larger issue at hand: ignorance of the intersectionality between racism and misogyny. Failing to acknowledge the overlap between racial and gender-based discrimination implicitly tells Asian Americans that our collective trauma is a personal problem, and that the Asian-American woman’s experience in particular isn’t worth recognizing.

There are conversations surrounding the lack of accurate Asian “representation,” but they often lack a willingness to probe deeper at the sexual and racial politics of representation. As an Asian girl growing up, I struggled with the idea that desire was politicized, and that I was invisible without it. 

Like many other Asian Americans, I was familiar with the Hollywood tropes that have so often characterized Asian women and representation in entertainment: the soft and docile “China doll,” the cold and domineering “Dragon Lady,” the “me love you long time” woman whose only purpose was to cater to the white man. 

I struggled with these representations because they taught me that being desired as an Asian woman meant being objectified, hypersexualized, and robbed of other parts of your identity.

I felt conflicted because I wasn’t sexy and powerful or small and docile; I didn’t know how to be the Asian woman I had grown up learning about. I was just me, invisible in the media and invisible to myself. 

This point in my life was the first time I became aware that there was a politics of visibility, and that being visible meant conforming to certain dominant ideals. Being visible as an Asian woman meant writing yourself into dominant narratives without the possibility of writing your own. It was why I grew up feeling like I had to be either this or that, or why I was always thinking about how I could construct myself to be more appealing to the male gaze. It was why I grew up craving visibility that I knew deep down would never be genuinely mine.

The underlying systems of white supremacy and misogyny are why we need to pay attention to how Asian women are systematically devalued in our society. The politics of visibility in the recent hate crime is about acknowledging that whether or not the Asian women were sex workers, they weren’t just abstract concepts in a white man’s imagination. They were real people. They, and the lives they lived, were and are important regardless of a white man’s relation to them in the headlines.

The cultivated erasure of Asian women throughout history and even in much of the media coverage of this crime contextualizes the willingness to support and “empathize” with the white man. That silence and erasure comes from a long history of Western colonialism and imperialism in Asia. It’s not only about the Vietnamese sex worker in Full Metal Jacket, but also the Orientalist frameworks white men used and still use to fantasize about Asian women. 

It’s the reason why white men can continue to perpetrate hate crimes against Asian women — because ultimately, police authorities can label the murder of Asian women as the result of simply “having a bad day.” Invisibility is, at its core, about representation and the politics of it. 

Once, I spoke to a white therapist about a racist incident that had happened to me during high school. During that short period of time, I was made to feel as if I was the one who had done something wrong, that I was too sensitive, or that there was something innately wrong with me for speaking up about it.

Walking out of that room, I felt gaslighted and unsure of myself — maybe it was just me. In that way, I was taught to keep silent about racism the way many Asian Americans are — not only out of fear of retaliation, but because we’ve been taught that our silence is a benefit to society as the alleged “model minority.” 

So support Asian women. Support Asian women because we deserve to live without being threatened by white male fantasies. Support Asian women not because you’re our “savior” and want to “prove” our humanity, but because we’re human too.