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Abstract

We applied critical race theory’s concept of intersectionality to analyze the experiences of discrimination among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (APIs) in the United States, across race, gender, and sexuality. We collected tweets from October 2016 through December 2017 using the hashtag #thisis2016 on the social media platform, Twitter. Data were scoped down to 3,156 tweets and were coded by four members of our research team—all of whom identify as Asian American female social workers. Only intersectional themes related to the convergence of race, gender, and sexuality among APIs are reported in this article. These six themes include the following: (1) API women are perceived to be exotic and are overtly sexualized, (2) API women are expected to be passive, (3) API men are perceived to be weak and asexual, (4) Both API men and women are the objects of racialized violence and sexual harassment, (5) Queer APIs have unique experiences of sexualized harassment and violence, and (6) APIs are the subjects of neocolonialist attitudes. Taken together, these themes portray an intersectional understanding of the Asian American experience that counteracts stereotypes of Asians as the “model minority,” who do not experience racialized, sexualized, and gendered microaggressions.

Keywords

Asian American microaggressions Pacific Islander racism sexism social media

As a racial/ethnic group in the United States, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (APIs) are a diverse and growing population. According to the 2017 Census estimates, there are 22.2 million APIs in the United States (U.S. Census Bureau, 2019). The American Community Survey reports that 5 million people in the United States are of Chinese descent, 4.4 million are Asian Indian, 4.0 million are Filipino, 2.1 million are Vietnamese, 1.9 million are Korean, and 1.5 million are Japanese (U.S. Census Bureau, 2019). As a group, APIs are highly educated with 87.5% holding at least a high school diploma and 53.0% holding at least a bachelor’s degree (U.S. Census Bureau, 2019).

However, aggregated data across API groups mask social, educational, and health disparities within this diverse population. It also hides the high degree of cultural, religious, and ethnic differences across Asian American communities. This intragroup variance is often eclipsed by myths that depict Asian Americans as the “model minority,” perpetually working diligently in professional jobs and continuously accruing upward social mobility. These myths suggest that Asian communities are self-reliant, financially successful, and politically uninvolved (Chua & Fujino, 1999). Ultimately, these myths work to minimize the effects of racism against Asian Americans or make their experiences with racism seem less legitimate than those of other racial or ethnic minorities. Contrary to these model minority myths, APIs have historically been the subject of racism, xenophobia, and discrimination (Alvarez et al., 2006; Chou & Feagin, 2015; Kurashige, 2016). Asian Americans are racialized as “forever foreigners” and assumed to be non-English speakers and/or noncitizens (Tuan, 1999), regardless of their country of birth or the length of time they have spent in the United States. We seek to problematize this model minority myth, which reinforces the belief that racism is no longer a problem in the United States (Chou & Feagin, 2015; Museus & Kiang, 2009; Shih et al., 2019) and that America is a postracial, equitable, meritocratic society.

Study Objectives

Applying critical race theory (CRT) to analyze the content of the hashtag #thisis2016 on the social media platform, Twitter, we sought to understand the concurrently racialized, gendered, and sexualized experiences of APIs in a particular sociopolitical moment in American history. Specifically, we applied intersectionality to analyze how gender, sexuality, and race socially construct experiences of prejudice and discrimination for APIs as documented in the hashtag #thisis2016.

The #thisis2016 hashtag was created by New York Times columnist and editor, Michael Luo (Woo & Al-Hlou, 2016), who first composed a tweet in 2016, which later turned into a longer open letter in the New York Times, regarding an interaction with a woman he encountered in New York City: “Well-dressed woman on Upper East Side, annoyed by our stroller, yells: ‘Go back to China…go back to your f---ing country.’ #thisis2016.” After sharing his experience, Michael Luo tweeted again, calling for others to share their own experiences with anti-Asian microaggressions and racism: “Asian Americans, tweet at me your own racist encounters and I’ll try to collect them. Hashtag it like I did #thisis2016.” APIs responded on Twitter with their own stories of experiences with racism, resulting in an outpouring of over 5,000 tweets, utilizing the #thisis2016 hashtag.

Racialized stereotypes of APIs as model minorities intersect with other stereotypes regarding the gender and sexuality of API men, women, and gender-nonconforming people. There are certainly a number of different identities that we could have selected to analyze that intersect with race, including citizenship, disease, native language, or religion. In the sample of tweets we analyze here, we focus on gender and sexuality as this issue often goes unaddressed in scholarship regarding microaggressions against API communities. Applying intersectionality to the experience of microaggressions highlights how the overlap of racialized and gendered experiences becomes manifest in subtle, behavioral, verbal, and environmental expressions of oppression (Lewis et al., 2016). The usage of the prefix “micro” is not intended to indicate the level of significance of the interaction, but rather that they occur in everyday interpersonal interactions, as compared to macroaggressions, which take place in the context of social structures and institutions.

Social constructs of race, gender, and sexuality are used to structure social experiences, such that sexuality is approached under a white, cisgender, Christian heteronormative context. These notions are further complicated by histories of colonization and imperialism that have directly impacted API communities for centuries, both in the United States and abroad (Kanuha, 2002). In contemporary times, colonial tropes of conquering the Exotic Other continue to be recreated in an American political climate that has become increasingly suspicious of people of color who are deemed to be foreigners. In the contemporary era of Trump, the equation of white nationalism with patriotism has led to widespread xenophobia that have directly affected API communities, even more so in the wake of the current COVID-19 pandemic. Further, we find that much of the extant qualitative research on racial/ethnic minority communities focuses on a specific racial group without considering the intersectional microaggressions that occur between and across gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class, or other positionalities (Nadal et al., 2015).

Theoretical Framework

In analyzing the racialized and gendered experiences of Asian Americans, we utilize the perspectives of CRT. We draw from the CRT principle that racism is not a series of isolated acts but permeates every aspect of social life and is ingrained into American social structure (Bell, 1992; Delgado & Stefancic, 2000). CRT helps in “making sense of the constant mutability and complexity of our social worlds” (Gillborn, 2015, p. 283). CRT builds on the critical legal studies movement, which critiques formalism and objectivism in law and social policy (Unger, 1983). Critical legal theorists posit that lawmaking and law application diverge in both how they function and how their consequences may be justified (Unger, 1983). CRT, as “the heir to both CLS [Critical Legal Studies] and traditional civil rights scholarship” (Bell, 1995, p. 899), develops on these themes, rejecting the idea of race as a natural category while also supporting demands for equity made by feminist and antiracist scholarship (Nash, 2008). CRT theorizes how law and policy structure racial inequality within U.S. social institutions to reproduce institutional racism and maintain white supremacy. Ultimately, CRT seeks to understand the social and legal constructions of marginalized identities. We apply CRT here to explain how APIs can be associated both with model minority myths and negative stereotypes regarding race, gender, and sexuality.

Racial inequity in the United States is the direct consequence of the power of white supremacy (Christian et al., 2019). White supremacy leads to the differential racialization of minorities in the United States where lighter-skinned Asian Americans, African Americans, and Latinos may, in some contexts, be provided some degree of proximal whiteness. Differential treatment based on skin color may also help better contextualize the differences in experience between people of varying Asian ethnicities, religions, national origin, and skin color.

A key concept emerging from CRT is intersectionality, a primary framework for conceptualizing positionality and the interconnectedness of systems of oppression (Mehrotra, 2010). Black feminists have asserted that race, class, and gender are interlocking systems of oppression that are experienced simultaneously (Hill-Collins, 2000; hooks, 1984). Intersectionality refers to how the experience of membership in a category varies qualitatively as a function of the other group memberships one holds (Crenshaw, 1995). Intersectional feminism and queer theory help us recognize how systemic heterosexism, sexism, and transphobia are embedded in all aspects of American society, causing individuals who do not conform to traditional conceptualizations of gender or sexuality to experience discrimination (Nadal et al., 2015). We draw our analysis from the notion that racism does not simply occur as the consequence of irrational actors and historic curiosities. We instead understand racism as the ideology of a racialized social system that creates and sustains racial domination (Bonilla-Silva, 2017). Further, intersectional analyses are often characterized by four theoretical foundations: (1) placing the lived experiences of people of color and other marginalized groups at the center of analysis, (2) exploring the complexities of individual and group identities while making visible how diversity within groups is often ignored, (3) demonstrating how social inequity in the power structure is manifest, and (4) promoting social justice through research and practice (Dill-Thornton and Zambrana, 2009).

Critical race theorists have noted a tendency to reduce racial discourse in the United States to a binary regarding black and white populations (Yoo et al., 2010). This relegates all non-black minorities to the margins of the margins, invalidating their experiences as not being severe enough to be included in discussions on American racism. Racism and discrimination against Asian Americans have been associated with several deleterious health and educational outcomes including poor mental health (Alvarez & Shin, 2013; Nadal et al., 2015), psychological distress (Yip et al., 2008), lower self-esteem (Fisher et al., 2000), physical and emotional isolation (Crocker et al., 1998), depression (Yeh et al., 2008), and student alienation from both peers and parents (Yeh et al., 2008). The model minority myth eclipses these consequences of anti-Asian racism by blanketly portraying all API communities as being socioeconomically and academically successful. Additionally, the model minority myth isolates Asian Americans who exist outside of these stereotypes, including queer Asians, creating deep emotional and psychological impacts (Eng & Han, 2000).

Coupled with these racialized stereotypes regarding the assumed higher education and wealth of APIs are coexisting stereotypes regarding their gender and sexuality. In American context, Asian women are often portrayed in overtly sexualized ways as the objects of desire for men, particularly white men (Sue et al., 2007). Conversely, Asian men are portrayed as effeminate, emasculated, weak, and sexually undesirable. Fewer representations of transgender, gender-nonconforming, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer Asians exist in mainstream American culture, although similar gendered expectations, performances, and fetishizations affect these members of the community as well. For example, Fung (1997) describes the regulation (and outright censorship) of artists of color whose work explores sexualities from a non-white perspective and actively challenges the “distorted sexual constructions of racist and colonial discourse” (para. 8).

Racialized and sexualized stereotypes of API communities in the United States may result from what Said (1978) termed Orientalism or the representation of Eastern societies, cultures, and histories as being wild and disordered in opposition to the rational and orderly West. It then becomes “the White man’s burden” (Kipling, 1899) to civilize the natives by forcibly injecting Western law, religion, and language into indigenous Asian cultures. The juxtaposition of the backward perceptions of Asian societies against advanced occidental societies is an ongoing paradigm recreated through the processes of racialized desire in America. The “Orientalization” of Asian women as the Exotic Other in discursive practices in the United States is the byproduct of immigration, U.S. and other Western military involvement in Asia and the Pacific Islands, and neocolonial attitudes regarding the social position of women of Asian heritage, even within American borders (Uchida, 1998). Using an intersectional approach emphasizes the interplay of these relationships within social institutions and other systems of power (Dill & Kohlman, 2012). Queer and feminist theories are limited in scope without the integration of racial, ethnic, cultural, and class differences (Dill & Kohlman, 2012).

Hypersexuality and Disciplining Femininity

The social construction of Asian women as hypersexualized—both “delicately and dangerously” (Yamamoto, 2000, p. 4)—requires the disciplining of femininity among those bodies. Asian women are depicted as the objects of sexual desire but rarely as the subjects or agents of that desire (Yamamoto, 2000). The constructs of hyperfemininity, and presumed demure behavior, act as disciplinary norms policing the racialized bodies of Asian women (Azhar et al., 2020). Through contradictory stereotypes of sexual prowess and, alternately, sexual ignorance, Asian women’s bodies, desires, and femininities are constrained to the imaginary—from geishas to dragon ladies (Labao, 2017)—and exist solely to please the white male gaze. Additionally, Asian women are perceived to exist outside of (or perhaps in opposition to) white feminism (Yamamoto, 2000). This facilitates additional tensions between and among women, further adding to the fetishization and othering of Asian women.

Imperialist and neocolonial desires can be easily projected onto Asian woman (Azhar, 2019; Chang, 2015). Any outward displays of deviant femininity are viewed as needing to be disciplined. Additionally, the hyperfeminity of Asian women acts as a foil to other femininities and in fact serves to discipline other women as well (Chang, 2015). Particularly harmful to Asian women is the underlying lack of agency that exists within the perceptions and expectations of hypersexualized bodies, feeding a powerful message of control, domination, and discipline (Labao, 2017) and contributing to the development of internalized racism and sexism (Museus & Truong, 2013).

Deviant Masculinity

Scholars argue that gender and sexuality identities are inseparable from racial identities (Liu & Chang, 2007). Therefore, the motivational and developmental forces that influence API masculine identities need to also capture the sociopolitical dynamics from which racial identities are formed. Masculinity is defined by the standard of the white, middle class, heterosexual man with all other men being measured or compared to this rubric (Kimmel, 1994). API men are often represented as asexual or impotent beings, furthering stereotypes about API masculinity as deficient (Chang, 2015). Because of these tropes of Asian American men as passive and asexual, they are perceived to embody deviant forms of masculinity (Liu & Chang, 2007), including queerness or the association with queerness. Iwamoto and Liu (2009) describe this phenomenon as the “Asianized attribution,” referring to the contradicting intersections of masculinity, race, and sexuality that pose API men as adhering to traditional patriarchal values, being less emotionally receptive, and being considered physically unattractive. These incidents of exclusion and rejection lead to an experience of both racial isolation and symbolic castration for Asian American men (Chou, 2012).

Exclusion in Queer Spaces

Dominant social forces impact how API communities are viewed. These forces include androcentrism, ethnocentrism, and heteronormativity or the tendencies to center experiences on men, on the dominant racial/ethnic group, and on heterosexuality (Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008). Such framings exclude those with other intersecting identities as nonprototypical members of their subordinate racial/ethnic or gender/sexuality groups, resulting in “intersectional invisibility” (Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008). Social constructions of race, gender, and sexuality are fundamental to structuring experiences of violence for queer people of color as racism, homophobia, and sexism work together (Meyer, 2003). Queer Asian people might therefore be viewed as metaminorities or minorities within a minority population (das Nair, 2006). The relationships between racism and heterosexism, namely, heterosexism within communities of color, internalized heterosexism, and race-related dating and relationship problems, have been shown to create psychological distress for queer Asian Americans (Szymanki & Sung, 2010). Even the usage of the social labels of “queer” and “Asian” work against essential determinism by being caught in endless chains of signification without fixed referents and predetermined signifiers, demanding continuous realignment and assemblage (Chiang & Wong, 2017).

Emerging digital scholarship has noted that gay API men frequently experience rejection in sexual encounters in cyberculture on the basis of their race or ethnicity (Cheng, 2011). The cyber dating marketplace has impacted queer male relationships and identities, conflating identity groups and quantifying certain bodies and identifications (Dinshaw et al., 2007). For gay API men, homophobia may be experienced both from the largely straight API community, and racism may be experienced from the largely white gay community. Gay API men “do not experience homophobia in the same way as do gay white men, and they do not experience racism in the same way as do straight men of color” (Han, 2008, pp. 20–21). How subaltern groups may marginalize other subaltern groups, such as the marginalization of gay API men from other heterosexual Asians as well as from gay white men, has largely gone unnoticed in scholarship (Han, 2008). By experiencing rejection even within queer spaces, gay Asian men may feel shame and self-hate with respect to their racial and ethnic backgrounds (Cheng, 2011). This experience of social exclusion is heightened for APIs who are transgender or gender nonconforming and who may have been met with silence, both within API spaces and within queer ones (Leong, 2014). With these themes in mind, the objective of this project was to analyze intersectional themes related to the convergence of race, gender, and sexuality among APIs through content analysis of the tweets in the hashtag #thisis2016.

Method

Social media analysis is an effective modality for analyzing a large degree of respondent data regarding contemporary social and political experiences around racism (Cisneros & Nakayama, 2015; Litchfield et al., 2018). While there are a number of ways to analyze social media content for intersectional themes regarding race, gender, and sexuality, we selected to analyze the hashtag #thisis2016 because it highlighted many of the issues on which we sought to focus in this research study.

This study investigated themes related to the interlocking experiences of race, gender, and sexuality for APIs, as represented by tweets in the #thisis2016 Twitter hashtag and explored the implications of these themes from a social justice framework. We found that a social media analysis was a more fitting avenue for data analysis over the completion of a survey or the conduct of in-depth interviews. Because of the anonymity that online formats can provide to users, social media allows researchers to examine intersectional experiences in a way that may be less filtered than other modes of data collection (Grieve et al., 2014). Social media users, particularly those who are anonymous, may be less likely to be moved by social desirability in their responses as they may be during in-person interactions with researchers (Akbulut et al., 2017). Nonetheless, many Twitter users are not anonymous, so these same social desirability or performativity pressures may still apply in the virtual space.

The research team collected and sorted through more than 5,000 tweets from October 2016 through December 2017 that used the #thisis2016 hashtag on Twitter. We selected these dates as Michael Luo’s original open letter in the New York Times occurred on October 10, 2016, just preceding the 2016 election. The selection of the data analysis time frame gave us over a year from Luo’s original call to gather Tweets. After removing duplicate and unrelated tweets, a total of 3,156 tweets were included in the final analysis, all of which responded directly to the original call from journalist Michael Luo for Asian Americans to tweet about racist encounters they had experienced. We conducted a content analysis of the tweets using descriptive coding that was informed by CRT (Maguire & Delahunt, 2017). Content analysis is a systematic coding approach used for exploring large amounts of textual information unobtrusively to determine trends and patterns of words used, their frequency, their relationships, and the structures and discourses of communication (Vaismoradi et al., 2013).

Tweets were initially organized by date. In the first round of coding data, two members of the research team analyzed a subsample of the first 100 tweets in the data set and documented descriptive themes related to stereotypes and racist encounters, ranging from microaggressions to verbal harassment to physical attack. Applying the ideas of intersectional feminism to our analysis, we looked across these various descriptive categories for crosscutting themes regarding gender and sexuality. We applied three principles in CRT to our analysis: (1) the centrality and intersectionality of race and racism to the American experience, (2) a commitment to social justice, and (3) the use of interdisciplinary perspectives (Solorzano & Yosso, 2000).

These principles provided a conceptual framework to structure and organize the codes. They also served as anchors for our data analysis and social implications. However, we acknowledge that a critique of intersectionality is the lack of a defined methodology to structure data analysis (Nash, 2008). Other scholars have noted the methodological difficulties of translating intersectionality theory into research methods (Fotopoulou, 2012; McCall, 2005). In this project, we applied principles of CRT, including the frequent use of the first-person perspective, the importance of analyzing social context, examining narratives and counternarratives, centering an individual’s voice, and an unapologetic use of creativity (Bell, 1995).

An initial codebook was devised by two members of the research team who descriptively coded the first 100 tweets. To assess interrater reliability and to refine the clusters of intersectional codes, an additional two members of the research team went through the same 100 tweets, using and modifying the existing framework of descriptive codes. Consensus was ultimately reached on all coding decisions through a process of negotiation and discussion. The iterative process we used (Saldaña, 2015) aligned well with our intersectional approach because we were able to analyze the data from multiple perspectives.

In second round of coding, the sample of 3,156 tweets was divided into four parts, and each part was coded by a different member of the research team with a few hundred overlapping tweets coded by two or more researchers. After the next 500 tweets were coded, the research team again regrouped themes for a final codebook that was used for the remaining tweets. The themes identified in the second round of analyses include both inductive and deductive themes related to anti-Asian racism in the United States, as well as crosscutting themes of race, gender, and sexuality. Additionally, we searched for particular keywords in the tweets, including, among others, the words queer, gender, sex, sexuality, harassment, and exotic.

In alignment with reflexive qualitative methods, our team regularly reflected on our own positionalities and the emotional impacts of this work. We included qualitative memo writing as a necessary aspect of this reflexive research and spent significant time discussing the ways our identities impacted our research. It is beyond the scope of this article to describe this iterative process in detail, but we will share our team’s composition here. Our team is composed of four researchers who identify (in order of authorship) as (1) cisgender, Indian Muslim American female; (2) queer, cisgender, mestiza Filipina American female; (3) Asian American female; and (4) lesbian, cisgender, Asian American female. Within our group, all four members were born in the United States and had differing experiences in terms of their Asian heritage. We are all social work scholars based at predominantly white academic institutions throughout the United States. In the third round of data analysis, we also added an Asian American male social work graduate student to code those tweets that specifically mentioned or signaled a male or female author (through the use of pronouns or other gender-identifying descriptors). Our intention was that the addition of a male perspective would help broaden our analysis of narratives, particularly for experiences involving API men. While the addition of this fifth coder was not meant to invalidate the analyses of the women on our team, we hypothesized that creating more diversity in the perspectives from which we evaluated tweets would contribute to a more holistic understanding of the gendered experiences of Asian Americans. The study was deemed to be exempt from Institutional Review Board review from St. Louis University in 2017.

Drawing from the theoretical framework of CRT and the tenet of the centrality of the experience of racism in American life, the research team explored a range of overarching themes, including microaggressions; denial of intraethnic difference; model minority myths and stereotypes; being seen as the “other”; verbal harassment, violence, or attacks; and witnessing racism. Specific themes related to intersecting positionalities of gender and sexuality within the API experience are reported in this article. These subthemes were mainly found under larger codes related to microaggressions; model minority myths; and verbal harassment, violence, and attacks. However, given the intersectional nature of our conceptual framework and the crosscutting analysis of our coding process, tweets included in our analysis were found across all parent themes.

Results

We identified six recurring themes regarding the intersecting positionalities of gender and sexuality for APIs: (1) API women are perceived to be exotic and are overtly sexualized, (2) API women are expected to be passive, (3) API men are perceived to be weak and asexual, (4) Both API men and women are the objects of racialized violence and sexual harassment, (5) Queer APIs have unique experiences of sexualized harassment and violence, and (6) APIs are the subjects of neocolonialist attitudes. In the passages below, we will explore these themes in greater detail, providing the tweets exactly as they appeared on social media, maintaining any spelling or grammatical errors or instances of racial or sexual slurs.

“You’re So Exotic Looking.” API Women Are Perceived to be Exotic and Are Overtly Sexualized

Assumed to be foreign and to stand out as different, Asian women describe the othering of peoples’ perceptions of them. Many people contributed tweets describing how strangers ask repeatedly where they are “really” from, but the tweets in this subcategory are interpreted through the lens of gender. These tweets imply a level of sexual desirability inherent to the Other status. In several tweets, we see the repeated usage of the word “exotic” to refer to API women, reinforcing the CRT concept of the perpetual experience of everyday racism in the lives of racialized Americans (Bell, 1995).
I was auditioning to be a model. The talent agent looked at my photos and said I’ll get hired because “I have that exotic look”

“What are you? You’re so exotic looking.” #thisis2016

#beingasian + a woman is a drunk stranger leaning over a bar to tell you “you’re so exotic looking where are you from”

r: My sister came home from the mall outraged, b/c a guy had stopped her to tell her that she looked “exotic” #thisis2016
In all these cases, being perceived as Asian—and potentially as an Asian foreigner—has direct implications for the eroticization of API women. In a similar fashion, API women were repeatedly referred to as “China doll” or “Oriental princess.”
Two years ago Guy at Walmart demanded “smile for me China doll” I’m not Chinese and all the creeps call me this.

I’ve been called every racial slur, was told “you’re English is real good,” & boss called me his China Doll.

Ching Chong China Doll’, ‘When does your work visa end?’ ‘Your English is so good’ + other slurs. #ThisIs2016

The China doll comments, the Asian fetishism, the randomly blurted out “Ching Chang Chong” while I’m walking down the street.
Similar experiences are reported around the usage of the term “Oriental” to describe Asian ethnicity. While the term has largely disappeared from academic circles, it continues to be used vernacularly to objectify Asian women. Using language that is at once demeaning and condescending in the context of the sexualization and othering of Asian women is a particularly harmful intersection of gendered, racialized, and sexualized discourse (Yamamoto, 2000).
Man asks me, “I’ve never gotten down with an oriental before. Want to change that?”

Guy says to me at a bar, “I ain’t never had an Oriental before.” #thisis2016 (PS I’m not a fucking rug.)

8 AM: “how is my oriental princess doing today?”
When invited to share their experiences via tweets, API women respondents described common experiences of sexual fetishization and objectification. In the Orientalist imaginary, API women may be fetishized as demure, sultry, mysterious, and submissive. The white man, abbreviated in the following tweets as “yt man,” makes a repeat occurrence as a symbol of unwanted sexual attention. In this set of tweets, the bodies of API women are hypersexualized and treated as the objects of erotic desire, particularly by older, white men. We are careful here to note that the experiences that these API women had may not be generalizable to all Asian women nor all white men but certainly highlight a racialized and gendered encounter that was reported in multiple tweets.
On 1st date, old yt man takes pic of me+BF w/o consent, then solicits us to be porn actors on his MOC fetish site

[b]eing objectified not only as a woman but also exoticized and fetishized as an Asian woman

“If I were to have sex with an Asian, I’d want it to be you.” “I’ve always wanted to be with an Asian.”—many gross men

Lost count of the number of times some white guy told me “I always wanted to marry a Chinese/Japanese/Korean girl”

On date with yt man (mistake! lol), he traces my eyelid w his finger, says “The shape of Asian eyes turn me on so much”
These brief encounters reflect the positioning of API women as a fetish that is to be consumed, an experience that is to be encountered, and an adventure that is to be had. Often, the people with whom these writers interact are unable to differentiate their Asian heritage, falsely equating Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and other API women into a universally sexualized Asian being. Indeed, the particularities of identity are unimportant here as the Asian female trope is reinforced across a myriad of women.

“You’ll Be Taken Care of.” API Women Are Expected to Be Passive

As a group, API women are often portrayed as quiet, demure, and controllable. When API women do not meet cultural expectations of submissivity and passivity, those with whom they interact are sometimes surprised by these unmet gender role expectations.
“You aren’t passive and sweet like other Asian girls.” ((Is that supposed to be a compliment?))

“Asian women are docile and quiet. What’s wrong with u?” That’s cause I’m a professional at work conducting business…a_hole. #thisis2016
Additionally, API women are sometimes treated as trophies, as others assume that their male suitors will financially take care of them.
Also…“You could quit your job & be fine. You’re a young, attractive Asian woman in America. You’ll be taken care of.” #ew #thisis2016
Being perceived to be an attractive and desirable woman encompasses not only the cultural commodification of sexuality but a literal commodification in that Asian women’s sexuality is seen to provide financial security for them.

“Is It True That You Have a Small d***?” API Men Are Perceived to Be Weak and Asexual

As much as API women are exotified and sexualized, API men are emasculated and asexualized. When API men do not meet the expectations of these perceptions, they are considered an exception to the rule—an anomaly in their sexual attractiveness.
he “oh I don’t find Asian men attractive, maybe the women cause they’re like, you know, little China dolls….

Getting complimented like…“You’re very normal looking for an Asian. Most of their faces look weird.” #thisis2016
Notions of hegemonic masculinity, from which API men are seen to deviate, are innately connected to notions of nationality and how Asian men are perpetually seen as foreigners, and moreover, weak foreigners.
A lot of passive racism: as an Asian male, there is the expectation that I be quiet, reserved, & not aggressive.

#thisis2016 why isn’t Hollywood portraying Asian male as successful and heroic?
One of the most recurring insults against API men documented in our sample is the insinuation that they possess small genitalia. In the white, heteronormative context, labeling a man as having a smaller penis, much like being short or not having chest hair, are treated as indicators that their manhood is inadequate or compromised. They are therefore not considered as strong or manly because of these perceived deficits.
“Is it true Asian pssies/pnises are smaller?” too many times to count over the years.

I had a coworker tell me “biological” I probably have a small penis because I’m asian. #NoHingofSarcasm

Countless women in the bars of Los Angeles “But you’re Asian. Your penis must be {makes small gesture}” #thisis2016

another person I dated insisted that there was scientific proof that asian men had smaller penises than average

“Asian girls love us because we’re real men and you all have small dicks.”—White guy to me a few months ago.

1.”You speak english so well.” 2.”Do you have a lumpia-sized dick?” 3.”Do you eat dogs?” My reply “I was born in North Dakota” #thisis2016
The intersections of race and gender stereotypes are further qualified by ethnicity, as evidenced in the following tweet. The respondent makes note of the emasculation of API men but goes on to specify that the purview of this stereotype only refers to Chinese men, not Vietnamese or Thai men.
Me: “Emasculation of Asian men is racist.” White woman coworker: “No it’s not. You Viet+Thai men are so different from Chinese.”
In this tweet, we see the further interplay of ethnicity on racial and sexual attitudes as Vietnamese and Thai men are perceived to be distinctly more masculine than Chinese men. While it remains unclear how these particular stereotypes developed, their existence reiterates the intersectional nuance in how Asian men are viewed.

“Yellow c.” Both API Men and Women Are the Objects of Racialized Violence and Sexual Harassment

A number of tweets reported on the escalation of Asian fetishization of women into full-scale verbal assaults, sexual harassment, and violence.
When older white men see you as an object they can reach out and touch on the face or smack on the butt

a man pulled me over his lap at a bar and whispered in my ear saying he loved exotic girls

After 3 days on OkCupid, I had to remove “Japanese” from my profile because of all the explicit race fetish messages.

uber drive: are you korean? Me: no, I’m Chinese uber driver: no way, koreans are the only beautiful asians #thisis2016

That time a woman called me a “yellow c” and followed me for blocks in the loop until I hailed a cab to escape.

My flatmate was out walking with a group of her classmates, some guy behind them yells “I LOVE ASIAN PUSSY” #thisis2016
In these instances, API women are the objects of sexual harassment or verbal assault. API women are repeatedly seen as being sexually available to men, and again, particularly to older white men. API women are disciplined and harassed by other women through the use of racialized and sexualized language.

Similar experiences also occur for API men but often with less sexualized overtones. In the next set of tweets, we see how API men as the targets of racialized violence, discrimination, and attacks:
My dad worked on public works projects as an engineer—sued for discrimination in a old white boys network and won. He heard derogatory comments, passed for promotions, shitty lawyer colluded w/ his employer. In HS I worked on his case.

Got a new job. Company owner starts calling me “Feng,” says it’s an acronym for fucking new guy; sure thing boss. #thisis2016
In this example, the experience of marginalization is discrimination in the workplace. By explaining that the use of the term, Feng, was workplace-oriented, the boss was able to continue to engage in the usage of a racial slur.

“Go Back to Making Eggrolls You Fucking Faggot.” Queer APIs Have Unique Experiences of Sexualized Harassment and Violence

Social constructions of API men as weak or submissive are not only reflected in heterosexual encounters but also in queer communities as well. Similar assumptions regarding passive gender roles are recounted by some queer API men who reported that others expect that they will be the receptive partner in sexual intercourse. These experiences confer more than just preferences for sexual positioning but an assumed proclivity for sexual submission and symbolic domination.
When old gay white guys hit me up & assume I’m a bottom b/c I’m asian & are shocked to find out that I’m a top #ThisIs2016 #GrindrProblems

In 2011, a furniture delivery man in LA said to my friend and I, ‘you’ve got to be kidding me. These two are fags and chinks.’ #thisis2016

Getting called fag bcuz they c effeminate Asian guy not butch Asian American queer woman
In these tweets, we see the recurrence of the stereotype of Asian men as weak, intersecting with the stereotype of queer men as sexually passive.

“chk Shouldn’t Be Dating a white Girl.” APIs Are the Subjects of Neocolonialist Attitudes

Several tweets in the #thisis2016 hashtag made explicit references to war and violence as a means of justifying anti-Asian racism and sexism in the United States. Drawing from CRT, we recognize how global whiteness is upheld through macro-, meso-, and micropractices linking modern geographies to contemporary global racial hierarchies (Christian, 2018). These hierarchies can recreate colonial dynamics that have subjugated Asian communities.
A man confronted me on the lightrail because a “chk shouldn’t be dating a white girl.” #thisis2016

When I was walking around with my friends, a white woman said “Enjoy your freedom while it lasts.” We were only 14 years old. #thisis2016

I was called a zipper head by a young male on Facebook. Didn’t know what it meant so I had to google it. Floored and astounded.

boy @desk in front of me in hx class, turns, “we shoulda bombed all of you so I wouldn’t have to sit next to you. #thisis2016

“so what are you gonna do? Bomb our table like you did pearl harbor?”—white guys’ response to me calling out their racism
These passages elucidate the neocolonial ways that API communities continue to be viewed and how racial and sexual domination appear as the logical consequence of war. Lowe (2001) argues that racial, class, and state interests formed colonial archives that have profoundly restricted how we currently view interracial social interactions. This causes contemporary observers to fail to acknowledge how global colonial processes continue to inform how Asian communities are viewed by others and the ways by which we view ourselves. A recognition of these histories helps situate the ongoing escalation of microaggressions and xenophobic sentiments that substantiate the perceived threat of Asian immigrants in contemporary American discourse.

Additionally, a number of tweets spoke to the experience of interracial sexual relationships between Asian people and white people and, namely, between Asian women and white men. Stereotypes regarding gender and sexuality within interracial relationships build upon historical representations of APIs as subjugated global populations whose sexuality, much like their land and resources, become the property of their colonizers (Stoler, 1991). Interracial relationships may also recreate colonial interactions and Orientalist fantasies regarding Asian female sex workers and white male soldiers, who may have interacted with one another as a result of American foreign military intervention, or at least were subjects of the American imaginary. API women appear at once as a symbol of both conquest and control in these tweets. The fantasy of the brothel and the massage parlor appears repeatedly in these passages as a source of racialized and sexualized domination, namely, of white men over Asian women.
the old Caucasian Amer. men who wanted to talk to me b/c I reminded them of Asian women in towns they occupied in during the war

When strange men call me “mamasan” and ask for a massage with a happy ending it’s really #notokay especially because #thisis2016

Two separate middle aged white male strangers have, unprompted, shown me pictures of their Asian wives.

Fabric district in LA: Guy walks up my husband to ask if he got me from the Philippines. #ThisIs2016

#thisis2016 and people still assume English is not my first language…and attempting to date while weeding out men with Asian fetishes.

In elem school I got made fun of bcuz of my eyes. Today, people judge my hubby and I bcuz we are a biracial couple #thisis2016
For API men in relationships with white people, there is an assumed defiance to the American norms of masculinity and a potential affront to white male sexuality. This assumed defiance is sometimes met with a compliment (for breaking free from the confines of the demasculinization of Asian men), and other times is met with a territorial assault (for possessing or desiring property that belongs to the white man).
A man confronted me on the lightrail because a “ch**k shouldn’t be dating a white girl.”

A neighbor said that I should go back to my own country and stop raping and stealing the white women….

“Your dad is Asian? I didn’t know white women could get yellow fever”

when looking at my dad people have said “oh HE’S the Asian one? How’d he score with a white woman?” #thisis2016

Got called “open-minded” as I’m married to a Vietnamese man. #thisis2016

The manager asks my Korean bf and I to stop hugging and says ‘there’s hotels for that kind of thing’ #interraciallove

dating as an asian male, seeing prfiles listing preference as “all-american,” getting replies like “no chinks”

Same white guy on FB said, “Asians should marry normal (white) guys”

my husband was asked, “where did you get your Asian.”
API sexuality is again shaped in ways that maintain the social and political dominance of white men. As such, API men are derided for having relationships with white women as such unions are perceived to be a challenge to the existing racial order.

In summary, this set of tweets reveal how white hegemonic masculinity relies on the subordination of women and other conceptions of manhood that do not conform to rigid gender roles. Further, neocolonial attitudes, regarding the sexual overtaking of API women as symbolic conquests of war, also permeate these tweets.

Limitations

In terms of qualitative research analysis, our methods are limited by the length of the tweet. We had less than 120 characters per tweet to interpret the statements made by Twitter respondents to the #thisis2016 hashtag. Using Walton and Oyewuwo-Gassikia’s (2017) analysis of the hashtag #BlackGirlMagic, we were intentional about the hashtag having been created to document API experiences of racism. There is a selection bias here as the call for tweets in and of itself asked participants to document their experiences of racism, so it is predictable that those are the types of experiences we would collect. However, we do not find this to be any different in nature from any other hashtag regarding racism (or other oppressive social forces), nor different from asking participants in an interview about their experiences with these issues.

Throughout the analytical process, we have attempted to discern the race, gender, or sexual orientation of hashtag participants, using cues from their tweets as indicators of social identity. The validity of our assumptions is limited because we have never met the writers of these tweets and are unable to probe or authenticate the veracity of their assumed identities or their reported experiences. Such limitations are common to social media analysis where there is always the possibility for there to be minimization, exaggeration, or falsification of experience on the internet. Given the limitations of identity on social media, there is no way for us to validate the representativeness or generalizability of this set of tweets to the experiences of Asian Americans at large. However, given the racially sensitive nature of this call for tweets, we would like to assume that most responses were accurate and truthful. Nonetheless, given the limitations of the length and nature of tweets, we are limited to analyzing these passages as representations of experiences of racism. We are unable to make inferences regarding the impact that these racist acts had on people’s lives, unless this was explicitly shared in the tweets.

We would also like to note that there were other relevant subthemes that we have not including in this article. For example, the theme of resistance emerged among a number of the tweets, including how people responded, or wished they had responded, to the microaggressive incident. While this theme of resistance is important, only tweets relevant to intersectional themes are reported in this article.

Through the course of the project, the research team became aware of the emotive consequences of participation in this study. As investigators who study the complex interplay between race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, we had not initially anticipated the emotional toll of repeatedly reading about experiences of bias, discrimination, and prejudice against communities of which we are all a part. Many of us were triggered by reading these experiences with racial slurs, sexual harassment, and violence—experiences that are all too familiar to women of color. We are clear about our understanding of these sensitive social issues from an emic anthropological viewpoint and are aware that our own feelings and experiences may have played a role in how we interpreted these tweets. We recognize that a team composed of all white, cisgender, heterosexual male investigators may not have had the same emotive response to these tweets. Our collective positionalities may work to both better understand the social contexts for these passages and may conversely make us more sensitive to them. Given our embeddedness within this research, there is no way for us to objectively evaluate this bias. We are simply aware that it is an omnipresent aspect of our research process.

Discussion

The specific themes that emerged from our data analysis align with previous literature on racial microaggressions and stereotypes regarding Asian American gender and sexuality (Chang, 2015; Labao, 2017; Liu & Chang, 2007; Museus & Truong, 2013; Yamamoto, 2000). These themes are counternarratives to the model minority myth and instead involve the intersectional nature of stereotypes regarding APIs. Social representations of race, gender, and sexuality communicate knowledge and shape the relationships of domination and subordination in which they are embedded (Bhavnani, 1991). As we saw in the tweets analyzed in this project, these social representations have impacts at both local and global levels for API communities. Such representations can be understood as part of a historical process that has largely placed APIs and other communities of color in systems that have served to subjugate and exclude them. As Nkrumah (1967, p. ix) points out, “The neocolonialism of today represents imperialism in its final and perhaps its most dangerous phase.”

In the past several decades, queer theory has largely shifted its focus from psychoanalysis and gender performativity (Butler, 1993; Foucault, 1995) to critiques of imperialism and neoliberal homonormativity (Chiang & Wong, 2017). Queer theory utilizes Asian studies to overcome its Euro-American centrism and its Orientalist leanings; meanwhile, Asian studies utilize queer theory to disentangle itself from narratives that focus on the nation-state as a primary locus for identity formation and sociopolitical analysis (Chiang & Wong, 2017). Following World War II, Asia became a site for American foreign expansion, including the colonization of the Philippines, Hawaii, Guam, and Samoa; wars in Korea and Vietnam (Lowe, 2001); and current military intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Syria. The Asian immigrant—and we would argue, by extension their American-born children—often function as a site upon which the United States projects its anxieties regarding threats to the coherence of the nation state (Lowe, 1996).

Taken together, the themes from the collection of tweets presented in this study reiterate that APIs in the United States do not uniformly meet the myths of the model minority, which posits that Asian Americans achieve universal and unparalleled academic and occupational success (Museus & Kiang, 2009). Regardless of their socioeconomic or educational successes, APIs in the United States are nonetheless portrayed in gendered, sexualized, and racialized ways that ultimately operate to uphold white supremacy.

Although these are social forces that have global origins and local impacts, they can nevertheless be resisted. Mohanty (2003) describes how “feminist solidarity” can be created through the recognition that the local and the global exist together and constitute each other. Such a solidarity requires an appreciation of the consistent racialization of communities of color, who in varying ways are perceived to be un-American. Such an understanding of feminist solidarity helps explain the positionality of women of color as being perpetually embedded within global systems of oppression. The ultimate objective of this solidarity project is to create a more egalitarian state of affairs that empowers views traditionally excluded from mainstream social, legal, and academic spaces (Bell, 1995). Several scholars have engaged in critical settler colonial critiques of Asian and Asian American communities, arguing for the necessity of decolonial relationality (Day et al., 2019), an abolition of colonial capitalism, and the dismantling of white supremacy (Saranillio, 2013). While these arguments go beyond the scope of this article, we acknowledge the importance of recognizing these critiques.

Consistent with the social movement underpinnings of intersectional analyses, we seek our research findings to be part of a larger social activism project to help bring light to sexualized issues affecting racial/ethnic minority communities in the United States. Through a process of critical reflection, social workers need to be able to confront how we uphold and reproduce social oppression (Mattson, 2014) through our educational, professional, and research practices. By combining critical reflection with intersectionality, we may be able to better focus on how social structures related to gender, sexuality, class, and race contribute to the oppression of marginalized groups. Although sometimes divorced from social activism in academic spaces, intersectionality as a conceptual framework is deeply rooted in campaigns for social justice and is well-suited for social work practice. As social work educators and practitioners, we believe that at its core, intersectionality is a social movement strategy and recognize that it has been leveraged by socially marginalized groups advocating for social change (Chun et al., 2013).

Reflecting the intrinsic political nature of cultural critiques, praxis has always been a key site for intersectional intervention (Cho et al., 2013) and a strategy for social work practitioners. We hope that our research will help social workers recognize the interconnectedness of social justice issues, appreciating that single-axis struggles for issues like feminism, racial equity, or economic justice must be tied to each other in order to be both meaningful and effective in the long term. As practitioners, we further argue that intersectional gender- and race-based movements explicitly seek to politically unify disparate groups, in this case, APIs, who are diverse in composition but often share common histories of marginalization. Future research may seek to examine how the intersectional microaggressions against API communities—and other communities of color—impact mental health outcomes, like depression, anxiety, self-esteem, and identity development. Although it is important to recognize the harm of structural oppression based on singular identities, it is also necessary to investigate how intersectional positionalities may complicate people’s experiences with bias and discrimination (Nadal et al., 2015). Reflecting on the work of intersectional scholars, we appreciate that the political dimensions of intersectionality embody a motivation to go beyond comprehension of intersectional dynamics to attempts to transform them (Cho et al., 2013). As others have pointed out with social media activism involving other hashtags, #thisis2016 presents opportunities for intersectional social work research that examines how race, class, gender, and other aspects of identity shape experiences (Walton & Oyewuwo-Gassikia, 2017) for communities of color. Further, we identify that in the current social context, much of life is mediated via social media and has become an important mode for the racialization of people.

For our work to be truly intersectional, the results of our research project must be tied to broader movements within social activism for communities of color. We see this work to be part of a larger social conversation that challenges social work scholars and practitioners to think beyond the substantive silos by which our work, and indeed our own identities, have been categorized and defined. We seek to challenge artificial divides that exist between the roles of “scholars” and “activists,” seeking instead a working environment that allows for both the study of social problems and the application of these studies in active efforts to address solutions in our everyday lives. As API social workers and educators, we aspire to see social work research engage more fully with minority communities—both racial/ethnic minorities as well as gender/sexual minorities—in meaningful, participatory, and respectful ways.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Sameena Azhar

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“You’re So Exotic Looking”: An Intersectional Analysis of Asian American and Pacific Islander Stereotypes

Abstract

Keywords

Study Objectives

Theoretical Framework

Hypersexuality and Disciplining Femininity

Deviant Masculinity

Exclusion in Queer Spaces

Method

Results

“You’re So Exotic Looking.” API Women Are Perceived to be Exotic and Are Overtly Sexualized

“You’ll Be Taken Care of.” API Women Are Expected to Be Passive

“Is It True That You Have a Small d***?” API Men Are Perceived to Be Weak and Asexual

“Yellow c***.” Both API Men and Women Are the Objects of Racialized Violence and Sexual Harassment

“Go Back to Making Eggrolls You Fucking Faggot.” Queer APIs Have Unique Experiences of Sexualized Harassment and Violence

“ch**k Shouldn’t Be Dating a white Girl.” APIs Are the Subjects of Neocolonialist Attitudes

Limitations

Discussion

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

ORCID iD

References