Yellow Peril: Popular feminism forgets about Asian-American women, so we’ll make our own

Feminist axioms like “woman up” meant to encourage action and equality are empowering only when you’ve been marginalized solely on the basis of sex. In these cases, being a woman also means being white and middle class.

Gender is not the defining basis of discrimination for many who are vulnerable to state institutions and cultural representations. Women of color specifically are constantly forced to consider how our ethnic features shape our experiences of womanhood. 

For instance, Asian-American women are constrained by their “model minority” status and stereotypes of subservience. Both further diminish us by demanding that we put our heads down and nod along during dialogues that affect all women. 

My feminist values are not my own, but rather a set of ideologies that a privileged group superimposed on my minority group, casting a shadow of their values across what could have been our own. 

As Tiffany Diane Tso put it in a piece for Vice, “I’ve always felt at home in my Asian-Americanness and my feminism, but there was a time when I felt like the two identities didn’t fit together.” Many Asian-Americans neglect the intersectional nature of our feminism in this way and are unknowingly co-opted into an exclusionary, popular form of feminism. 

This version of feminism is one that demands we champion individualism, wear whatever we want, and remain fearless in voicing our opinions. While such sentiments sound objectively empowering, they only hold up when considered in a vacuum. 

This feminism undeniably undermines the identity basis of contemporary activism. How can Asian-Americans act upon it when it clashes directly with race-gender nuances such as internalizations of model minority myths and lack of representation? 

Asian households in particular can be very gender-essentialist and demand obedient daughters. If only considered using the popular feminist lens, this dynamic is denigrating, and the natural course of action is resistance.

However, to ask us to push against those power relations that we’ve learned comes with the interaction of our gender and ethnicity is equally reductive. Our traditions and the ways in which they are problematic can only be evaluated in the context of our own experiences. 

First generation immigrants — like my parents — are too preoccupied with basic livelihood to genuinely consider activism as a part of the American success paradigm. Consequently, they and their families are left to grapple with the learned gender essentialism and the new, white American ideals of womanhood. 

Through a sexual phenomena known as “yellow fever,” white men have perverted that obedience into a passivity that exists solely to satisfy their sexual desires.

The corporate world has also manipulated that obedience into different sort of passivity, which justifies Asian-American women’s lack of upward mobility. In their eyes we are passive women and therefore unfit to lead.

Asian-American women tread a fine line when trying to advocate for ourselves. We must simultaneously unlearn that obedience in order to protect ourselves while still respecting tradition. These expectations feel mutually exclusive and leave us little room to develop our own feminism. 

How are we supposed to meet those standards for a “good feminist” as women when being told as Asian-Americans to quiet down and do our work? We’ve been weaponized against other minorities so much that even those experiences of solidarity have faded away. 

It is our imperative, then, to create our own form of feminism that considers us and our experiences. Only then will feminism bring equality to all women.