Interracial Violence, Western Racialized Masculinities, and the Geopolitics of Violence Against Women

Abstract

This article examines violence against racialized women in North America and how this violence is obscured through liberal conceptualizations of violence. I focus on cases of interracial stranger attacks of Asian women and girls by men. I contend that these cases – that range from homicide, sexual assault, prowl by night, to tampering with a food product – are connected and are local manifestations of national and global power relations. I end by foregrounding how some of the non-Asian men targeting Asian women are men of colour. I argue that this violence is an assertion of the right to place and space in both national and global hierarchies informed by the neoliberal uplift of elite Asian men and capital, and western constructions of the Asia Pacific century. In highlighting the specificities of Asian gendered difference, the intent is less to include Asian women in theorizing on violence, and more to examine how an intersectional, relational, historically specific and structural analysis of gendered violence brings into clearer view the systems of domination that violence secures.

Why Yellow Fever Isn't Flattering: A Case Against Racial Fetishes

“…Many Asian/American women detail the racial stereotypes they feel subjected to by men with yellow fever, along with the significant emotional labor required to fulfill, resist, or otherwise negotiate those stereotypes (Chou 2012; Chou, Lee, and Ho 2012, 2015; Nemoto 2009; Sue et al 2007). Even worse, stereotypes about Asian women render them particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment and violence by men who target them on that basis (Cho 1997; Lee 1996; Patel 2009; Park 2012; Woan 2007). There is thus ample reason to be morally concerned about sexualized racial stereotypes of Asian women.…”

Sexual Violence and Two Types of Moral Wrongs

“…Indeed, feminist scholars have been taking this perspective for long to reveal some contributing factors that put women into social positions in which they are more vulnerable to sexual violations, 6 and have described the various ways in which the axes of gender, race/ethnicity, class, disability, sexuality, etc., interact and result in a more complicated picture of such structural restrictions. 7 For example, the Western stereotype about Asian women as submissive and exotic has compounded with patriarchal norms that deny women's agency, making Asian and Asian American women more vulnerable to the threat of sexual violence in the North America (Cho 1997;Pyke and Johnson 2003;Park 2012;Zheng 2016). Some obscured social understanding and background assumptions surrounding sexual violence (e.g., it always involves overwhelming physical force or is only committed by strangers), ideal perpetrators (e.g., perpetrators are monstrous and mentally ill), and ideal victims (e.g., victims should physically resist when encountering violence) stop victims from appropriately understanding their experiences.…”

Women of Color Undergraduate Students’ Experiences with Campus Sexual Assault: An Intersectional Analysis

“…Yet, feminist resistance movements that are meant to empower all women often dis/empower and subordinate Women of Color because white women often dominate and dictate the concerns of these movements while negating intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989(Crenshaw, , 1991. Subsequently, feminism and antiracism do little to address violence against Women of Color, let alone sociohistorical stereotypes that construct Women of Color as sexually permissive (see Museus & Truong, 2013;Park, 2012;West, 1995) and non-rapeable (Smith, 2005). Thus, competing discourses of resistance not only silence Women of Color, they also position the rape of Women of Color as less believable, and less likely to be addressed, than the rape of white women (Crenshaw, 1991).…”