The history of fetishizing Asian women Author and film scholar Celine Parreñas Shimizu on how both hypersexual and docile tropes of Asian women play into the Atlanta shooting.
By Rachel Ramirez Mar 19, 2021, 4:00pm EDT
Rachelle Ann Go, center, a pop singer from Philippines, plays Gigi in Miss Saigon at the Prince Edward Theater in London in 2014. The musical, which premiered in 1989, has been criticized for Orientalist tropes. Matt Dunham/AP
Lillian, a young Asian American woman, was fed up with the flurry of fetishizing messages white men were sending her on Tinder. In 2017, she decided to create a meme Instagram account to show how men would slide into her inbox with remarks such as “I want to try my first Asian woman” or “I need my yellow fever cured.”
After more uncomfortable matches on the online dating app, Lillian used the account to speak out about the fetishization and intersection of racism and sexism that Asian women like her often face in real life. Although Lillian’s last post was in 2018, the account still has more than 19,000 followers, many of whom are Asian women who have expressed similar experiences of fetishization in the comments section.
For Asian women, the Atlanta spa shootings hit close to home. Robert Aaron Long — the white 21-year-old gunman who was arrested on Tuesday and charged with the killing of eight people, six of whom were Asian women — told the police he had a “sex addiction” and that the spas were a “temptation he wanted to eliminate.” Many were quick to note the intersections between racism, misogyny, and racial fetishization.
The stumbles of authorities and media outlets in distinguishing spas from massage parlors alone (the latter of which have a connotation of prostitution and sexualization) show that people were already viewing the case with certain tropes in mind without engaging in the vulnerable realities these workers face.
As Vox’s Li Zhou reported, Long’s statement about his “temptation” speaks to the longstanding stereotypes about not just the businesses, but also “Asian American women who have been exoticized and fetishized as sexual partners as far back as the 1800s,” Zhou writes.
Even before the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese immigrants from becoming US citizens, the US had passed the Page Act of 1875, which ultimately banned the importation of Asian women, who were feared to be engaging in prostitution in the country, whether they were or not. And while many scholars point to different origins of Eastern fetishization, film scholar Celine Parreñas Shimizu, author of the book The Hypersexuality of Race, says the emergence of films and artwork after US-led wars in Asian countries is when the trope of the hypersexual but docile Asian woman really took hold in America.
With Asian women, “there’s this construction of a being for others, and a being for the white man, usually that were in these drawings and films and other cultural materials, that really extends to the way that we are capable of giving voice to this gunman who says that he was ‘sexually addicted to the temptations’ that [these Asian workers] offered,” Parreñas Shimizu told Vox. Meanwhile, “the Asian women who were killed were essentially silenced.”
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I spoke with Shimizu about the history of fetishizing Asian women and how it translates to the shooting in Atlanta. Our interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
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Poster Comment:
I worked with two brothers at the same yard. The older one had been in Vietnam and was relief forces at the Battle of Hamburger Hill. He told me a mortar round landed right next to. It was a dud. I told him, "God had his hand on your shoulder."
His younger brother married an Oriental woman. He told me, "It's like a knife in my heart." :-/
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