For Christine Liwag Dixon and others, the bloodshed in Georgia – six Asian women among the dead, allegedly killed by a man who blamed her “sexual addiction” – was a horrible new chapter in the shameful history of Asian women being reduced to objects sexual.
“I have had people who have assumed that I am a sex worker or that, as a Filipino woman, I will do anything for money because they assume that I am poor,” said Dixon, a freelance writer and musician in New York City. “I had an old boss who once offered me money to have sex.”
Tuesday’s unrest at three massage companies in the Atlanta area prompted Asian American women to share stories of sexual harassment or humiliation. They say they often had to tolerate racism and misogynism men who cling to a narrative that Asian women are exotic and submissive.
Elaine Kim, who is Korean-American and a professor emeritus in Asian-American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, remembers being harassed by white youth when she was in high school. Later, one of her white students made sexual comments about Asian women in her class and hid outside their apartments.
Kim remembered those moments when he heard that the accused man in the Atlanta area shootings said he acted because his targets tempted him.
“I think it is likely that the killer had not only an addiction to sex, but also an addiction to fantasies about Asian women as sexual objects,” she said.
Two of Georgia’s massage companies have been the target of repeated prostitution investigations over the past 10 years, according to police records. The documents show that 10 people have been arrested on charges of prostitution, but none since 2013.
The shooting suspect, a 21-year-old white man, considered women inside the spas “sources of temptation,” police said.
Grace Pai, director of organization for the Asian branch of the American Justice Advancement in Chicago, called this characterization of the attacks “a real slap in the face for anyone who identifies herself as an Asian American woman.”
“We know exactly what this racialized misogyny is like,” said Pai. “And to think that someone targeted three Asian-owned companies that were operated by Asian American women … and had no race or gender in mind is just absurd.”
Framing women who were killed as “sources of temptation” places the blame on women like those “who were there to tempt the sniper, who is just the victim of temptation,” said Catherine Ceniza Choy, a University of California, Berkeley, professor of ethnic studies and a Filipino-American woman. She said that this scenario echoes an old stereotype that Asian women are immoral and hypersexual.
“This may be the way the alleged sniper and killer thinks about it, that you can compartmentalize the race in this box and addiction to sex in a separate box. But it doesn’t work that way, ”said Choy. “These things are intertwined and race is at the heart of this conversation.”
Stereotypes of Asian women like “dragon ladies” or sexually available partners have been around for centuries. From the moment Asian women started to migrate to the United States, they were the target of hypersexualization, said Ellen Wu, professor of history at Indiana University.
The Page Act of 1875 prohibited women from coming to the United States from anywhere for “immoral purposes”, but the law was widely applied against Chinese women.
“As early as the 1870s, white Americans were already making this association, this assumption that Asian women were walking sex objects,” said Wu.
Asian lives are seen as “interchangeable and disposable,” she said. “They are objectified, seen as less than human. This helps us to understand the violence against Asian women, as we saw this week. “
The US military detachment in Asia also played a role, according to Kim. She said the military had long fueled sex trafficking there, starting after the Spanish-American War, when traffickers and brothel owners in the Philippines bought and sold women and girls to meet the demands of American soldiers.
During the Vietnam War, women from Thailand and many other Asian countries were used for sex by American soldiers in various places of “rest and recreation”. The bodies and perceived submission of Asian women were eroticized and hypersexualized, Kim said, and eventually these racist stereotypes were brought back to the United States.
In American culture, Asian women have been fetishized as submissive, hypersexual and exotic, said Christine Bacareza Balance, a professor of Asian American studies at Cornell University and a Filipino woman.
An excellent example is the extremely popular 1887 novel, “Madame Chrysanthème”, a French narrative, translated into English, in which Japanese women are called “toys” and “Chinese ornaments”. More recently, an Asian woman has generally been portrayed in films as “a tempting manipulative dragon woman or the submissive and innocent ‘lotus flower’ designed to please a man,” said Balance.
Choy, the professor of ethnic studies at Berkeley, said Tuesday’s shootings and subsequent efforts to remove the race from the conversation are yet another example of the denial of racism and sexism that Asian and Asian American women face.
“In American society, Asian Americans are not seen and heard,” she said. “We are sometimes seen in specific ways, as model minorities, as projections of male and white fantasy, but we are not seen as full-fledged Americans. We are not seen as complete human beings. It is a kind of erasure and dehumanization. “
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Associated Press writer Noreen Nasir of Chicago contributed. Tang, Fernando and Nasir are members of the Associated Press’s Race and Ethnicity team. Tang reported from Phoenix and Fernando from Chicago.