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The Asian woman’s body and its connection to the Atlanta shootings

The deaths of six Asian women have magnified fears during an already-terrifying year for AAPIs.

A string of shootings that left six Asian women dead in the Atlanta area have spurred nationwide outcry about the violence, racism and misogyny intertwined with the historical fetishization of Asian women. 

  • The gunman told investigators he targeted the three massage parlors because he had a “sexual addiction.” The parlors were a “temptation” he needed to “eliminate,” according to authorities. 
  • Law enforcement officials have said it’s too early to determine whether the shootings were a hate crime.
  • There is so far no confirmation that the parlors offered sex work, but the U.S. has “long stereotyped Asian women as objects of white male fantasies in popular culture,” I reported for Axios. Sociologist Pawan Dhingra told me that race can be considered a factor in attacks on Asian women because of that history—especially if the perpetrator treats them as sex objects.
  • "If you think about sex work as a moral problem that must be eradicated—because Asian American women do kind of fit a profile of historically being in this role—it's hard to separate race from this even if the motivation wasn't anti-Asian," Dhingra said.

Framing the scene: Anti-Asian hate isn’t new. In many ways, it was built into the country’s DNA—think the Chinese Exclusion Act, anti-miscegenation laws, Japanese American incarceration, Asiatic Barred Zone Act, etc.

  • Chinese women were actually explicitly denied entry into the U.S. before the law extended to all Chinese people.   
    • The Page Act of 1875 targeted Chinese women because they were viewed as a threat that would “corrupt” white men and the institution of marriage (the law equated all Chinese women to immoral prostitutes). 
    • As a result, the Chinese women who did find themselves in the U.S. were usually undocumented, forced to work for low wages, and often pushed into sex work.

Fast forward: The pandemic has sparked new surges in anti-Asian hate incidents across the U.S. with people blaming Asians for the coronavirus, which originated in China. 

  • Former President Donald Trump and other public officials’ rhetoric—calling COVID-19 the ”Chinese virus” and “kung flu”—only made things worse, leading to spikes in anti-Asian hate.
  • Why?—COVID-19 gave people permission to fall back on the age-old notion that Asian bodies are “different” (the perpetual foreigner stereotype). Combined with the pre-existing sexualization of Asian women’s bodies, disease and fetishization became interconnected, reinforcing a sense of “Othering” from the idealized white body.
  • In that vein, white supremacy and domination of the Asian body are inherently connected, experts say. 
    • It ties into white sexual imperialism, Sunny Woan writes—the sexual gender dynamic that involves a white man and a non-white woman who “descends from a culture or community that has been historically colonized by European or Anglican nations.”
  • Fetishization of the Asian woman derives from the same belief.
    • It lives at the intersection of two myths: the model minority, or the false notion that Asians’ success and compliance grant them assimilation into white America, and the submissive, hypersexualized Asian woman.
  • Since March 19 last year, Stop AAPI Hate has tracked nearly 3,800 self-reported anti-Asian hate incidents. What’s noteworthy, though, is the fact that Asian women report hate incidents 2.3 times more often than men.
    • While the data doesn’t include a specific category for sexual violence, Asian women also face hate-motivated sexual attacks, one of which occurred as recently as last week at a public train station. 
  • Even before the pandemic, AAPI women routinely experienced “racialized misogyny,” according to the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF). “Now, our community, and particularly women, elders, and workers with low-wage jobs, are bearing the brunt of continued vilification.”

For what it’s worth: Asian women have long carved out a space in the sex work industry. But the dehumanization of Asian sex workers and the stigma surrounding their bodies are predicated on the white gaze’s desire and control.

  • Even if the victims were not sex workers, the shooter’s words reduced Asian women to nothing more than a “temptation” he had to “eliminate” in order to better his own “addiction.”
  • Some media outlets’ attempts to profile the shooter—painting him as an innocent, Bible-loving Christian—have also come at the expense of the victims, whose own lives and stories remain fractured.
    • Of note: It’s not lost on people that a white, evangelical man “went on a murderous rampage against Asian women, using the Christian purity language of ‘eliminating temptation’ to explain his violence,” the faith-centered podcast “Reclamation” wrote.
    • The religious influence is directly tied to the dehumanization of his victims.
  • Stigma surrounding the sex industry has also limited sex workers’ ability to seek help from law enforcement, especially if they are not native English speakers, as illustrated by the “shocking and painful case of police abuse” seen in the 2017 death of Yang Song, Diana Lu writes for Hyphen.
  • The hypersexualization and fetishization thus further the cycle, contributing to physical assaults against Asian women, especially vulnerable working-class women like the Atlanta victims.

(Courtesy of the New York City Council)

“Why keep killing us? For hours I couldn’t breathe and I wanted to claw my own heart out of my chest. I can’t think of anything to make this hurt less for all of us,” New York state Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou tweeted Wednesday.

  • In the immediate aftermath of the shootings, many were outraged when 172 House Republicans voted against reauthorization of the federal Violence Against Women Act.
    • It was reminiscent of last year’s House resolution to condemn anti-Asian sentiment. The measure passed 243-164, but all 164 votes against it came from Republicans.
  • “My mother, aunts, and I have been in a steady state of tension this entire pandemic,” Thu Nguyen, director of OCA – Asian Pacific American Advocates and Houston nail salon manicurist, said in a statement. “We’re fearful of our lives in circumstances where we would otherwise feel safe—in our homes and at our jobs. Now, not only are we risking infection when going to work at the nail salon, we risk deadly targeted violence. It is not lost on me that the identified shooter is a white man; we must understand as a product of systematized and institutional racism.”  
  • “You go to work and you’re trying to earn money, and you have your family to feed and you’re just trying to survive and be like everyone else,” said an Atlanta hair salon worker who issued a statement as the mother of a NAPAWF Georgia Chapter member. “And then stuff like this happens and it’s so scary. I am a part of the Vietnamese immigrant community, and I fear for our safety.”
  • Georgia AAPI leaders will meet with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday. They emphasized the importance of centering the victims and their families in a presser Wednesday.
  • Niou put out the same request on Twitter: “My wish is for everyone to see and humanize these women. They were working so hard to survive and provide for their families and loved ones. They were someone’s mother or aunt or daughter or niece….and loved.”

Giboom Park, author of the book “Not Your Yellow Fantasy: Deconstructing the Legacy of Asian Fetishization," contributed reporting.

Shawna Chen is a reporter at Axios. 

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