Unpacking Harms Against Asian Women

A transnational feminist look at the roles of colonialism and capitalism in the objectification of Asian women’s bodies

In 2018, Constance Wu spoke during the Women’s March in Los Angeles: “I march today for Asian American women who have been ignored or judged or fetishized.” Photo: Getty Images

As we saw this year in the tragic Atlanta spa shootings, the continued stereotype linking Asian women to sex is incredibly harmful. Of the eight people shot in this tragedy, six of them were Asian women, and the motive given by the shooter was that he wanted to resist sexual temptation due to “sex addiction.”

Since the pandemic began and president 45 made some notably harmful remarks about the Asian community, there has been an increase in reported microaggressions toward Asians in the United States — with two-thirds of them reported by women, according to the StopAsianHate report. As Sung Yeon Choimorrow, executive director of the nonprofit National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, tweeted: “I’ve experienced racism. I’ve experienced sexism. But I never experienced the two like that as I have when I came to the United States.”

The gendered racial microaggressions Asian women face include assumed submissiveness, sexual fetishization and exoticization, and restrictive and universal body image assumptions, such as increased expectations to be small. These invalidations come from “historically persistent subjugation” of Asian women to…