Racialized Romance: An Intersectional Analysis of East Asian Women’s Masculinities Construction Processes

Abstract

Individuals’ understandings of gender are profoundly shaped by racial formation processes. Yet scholars have not sufficiently investigated how people construct racialized masculinities beyond a White/non-White racial paradigm. The present study begins to address this limitation by analyzing 40 in-depth qualitative interviews with East Asian women in relationships with White, Black, and South Asian men. I ask, How do participants construct racialized masculinities in romantic contexts? Respondents with White partners often constructed Asian masculinity using White masculinity as an idealized benchmark. By associating Asian masculinity with patriarchy and White masculinity with gender egalitarianism, some women with White partners reinforced controlling images of Asian men while rendering White male patriarchy less visible. In contrast, participants with partners of color often linked White masculinity to undesirable traits like ignorance, arrogance, and entitlement. While challenging dominant narratives about the superiority of White masculinity, however, some respondents with partners of color also reproduced race and gender hierarchies by drawing on racial stereotypes to explain their preferences for Black and South Asian men over East Asian men. These findings reveal important mechanisms undergirding the reproduction of social hierarchies in the United States—mechanisms that do not necessarily center White masculinity as an idealized standard but nonetheless (1) homogenize non-White masculinities in ways that reinforce longstanding stereotypes about men of color and (2) entrench White masculinity as the normative standard of desirability.