Fetishization of Asian Women Is Not a Privilege
“I want to try my first Asian woman.”
This was the opening line of a Tinder conversation that Lilian, a 20-something-year-old Asian-American woman, received in 2017. Lilian runs a meme account @thefleshlightchronicles on Instagram dedicated to humorously chronicling and exposing people she encounters with “yellow fever.” She also posts the racist messages men send to her and other Asian women on dating apps.
Racial fetishization is defined as “fetishizing a person or culture belonging to a race or ethnic group” by Homi Bhabha in “The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse.” It dehumanizes people of color into objects that are no different than other fetishes. Furthermore, it includes being solely fixated upon and enamored with racial phenotypes, sexualized biases, and the cultures of non-white people.
Not only are these factors the only thing acknowledged about a person when they are fetishized, but they are novelized into a fictitious fantasy landscape of the fetishizer that is packaged in positively and harmlessly. But this grants serious emotional, physical, and psychological consequences upon the fetishized.
These consequences range from massive murderous events like this year’s Atlanta massacre of East Asian massage parlor workers to the “lotus blossom” trope—sexually servile and socially subservient East and Southeast Asian women—in the media, to many Asian-American women’s trauma from personal experiences. These occurrences are part of a vicious, self-supporting cycle and are only a few of the many ways in which racial fetishization permeates all corners of life for Asian women.
Ethnicity and gender are inseparable when you are a woman and not white. The purpose of Instagram accounts, like Lilian's, is to combat racial gaslighting by emphasizing the different, dehumanizing experiences that Asian women have and white women don’t.
The most common form of racial gaslighting that Asian women must endure is that their hyper-sexualized subjugation is a harmless compliment. The high right-swipe rates of Asian women by men of all races on dating apps are often perceived as a privilege, when it stems from racial fetishization. Beyond this being the direct result of racism and sexism, it is the byproduct of a violent and imperialist Western history.
Long before dating apps, the immigration of Asian women was outlawed in The Page Act of 1875 (preceding and paving the way for the Chinese Exclusion Act) due to Chinese women being racially profiled as dirty and diseased prostitutes. This only helped pave the way for American imperialism to thrive and wage countless wars full of rape and genocide across East and Southeast Asia throughout the 20th century. All of this, and thus racial fetishization, was made possible by xenophobic and imperialist policies, with a ripple-wave effect on the culture, allowing for Asian women’s existences as objects in the West to be conditional upon the sexual submission and devotion they can be forced to provide.
If this imperialist and colonial history of racist, gender-based violence isn’t confronted, true liberation and safety for Asian women can never be achieved. Fetishization has never been a compliment, nor has it ever been remotely close to acceptance and respect—let alone a privilege.