As details emerge about Robert Aaron Long, the man accused of killing eight people in the Atlanta area – six of them Asian women – discussions have reignited over how women of Asian descent are vulnerable to violence.
Authorities said Long told investigators that he was motivated by “sexual addiction” and denied having racially motivated shootings in three spas. Police said Long said the spas were “a temptation he wanted to eliminate”.
While it is unclear whether the companies had anything to do with sex work, experts and activists said it was almost impossible to divorce race from speech – regardless of Long being accused of a hate crime – given the historical fetishization of Asian women, which made them exceptionally susceptible to sexual and physical violence.
Catherine Ceniza Choy, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California at Berkeley, said that disregarding race in acts of violence would erase the harassment and violence that Asian women have faced for more than a century since they arrived in the country. .
“To say that this violence is not racially motivated is part of a story related to the denial of racism in the Asian American experience,” said Choy. “Racism and white supremacy were and tragically continue to be part of the Asian American experience.”
Although most of the violence against Asian American women does not reach the national spotlight, experts say it is not an uncommon occurrence and has been amplified during the coronavirus pandemic. A report on hate incidents released Tuesday by the Stop AAPI Hate whistleblower forum revealed that among 3,800 incidents were reported over about a year during the pandemic, 68 percent of respondents were women. A much smaller proportion, 29 percent, were men.
“Killing Asian American women to eliminate a man’s temptation speaks of the history of Asian and Asian American women’s objectification as variations on the Asian temptress, dragon ladies and lotus flowers, whose value is only in relation to fantasies and desires of men. This is horrible. Stop fetishizing us, “said Catherine Ceniza Choy, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Even outside the pandemic, research shows that 21 to 55 percent of Asian women in the United States report having experienced intimate physical and / or sexual violence during their lives, according to the Asian Pacific Institute on Gender-Based Violence. The variation is based on a compilation of studies of disaggregated samples of Asian ethnicities in local communities. About a third of women in the general population of the United States are victims of sexual violence.
Sung Yeon Choimorrow, executive director of the non-profit organization National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, said that what is often lost in the discussion is how Asian women experience a very specific form of sexism, which she said should not be confused with misogyny of other groups, such as white women, may face.
“Asian American women, our experiences, are very particular because of our race and gender,” she said. “White women don’t understand why my experience of sexism and sexual harassment is different from their experience of sexual harassment.”
Choimorrow said that many of the attacks and much of sexual misconduct can be attributed in part to the rampant perpetuation of stereotypes around Asian women as exotic, hypersexualized and submissive. These stereotypes create the perception that Asian Americans are therefore less threatening and easier to take advantage of and that they will not fight back. Echoes of other archaic beliefs can be found in statements that officials attributed to Long, Choy said.
“Killing Asian-American women to eliminate a man’s temptation speaks of the history of objectification of Asian and Asian-American women as variations on the tempting Asian, dragon ladies and lotus flowers, whose value is only in relation to fantasies and men’s desires, “she said. “This is awful. Stop fetishizing us.”
These ideas are particularly dangerous, experts say, as they place the burden on women of preventing violence, further fueling society’s “misogynist mentality”, Choimorrow said.
“It is similar to ‘I raped her because her skirt was too short.’ No – you raped her because society said you have a right to women, “she said.” It’s absolutely fantastic for Asian women, and [it] plays on how we are hypersexualized by society. “
Beliefs were shaped by the legal code, the history of US imperialism and the prevailing culture, said historian Ellen Wu, author of “The color of success: Asian Americans and the origins of the model minority”. One factor that helps explain the toxic environment for Asian women is the type of work they were relegated to in the United States in the early 19th century, she said.
The gold rush ushered in a new era of immigration, with many people from China coming to work in the American West, Wu said. Most were men; however, a small number were women, including sex workers. In the late 1860s, white Americans began to form opinions or impressions about Asian or Chinese women, in particular, and lawmakers sought to ban or regulate their entry into the United States. Wu said one of the first exclusion policies was the Page Act of 1875, which banned the importation of women “for the purpose of prostitution”.
According to research published in The Modern American, the legislation may have been designed to mitigate prostitution, but immigration officials have often used it as a weapon to prevent any Asian woman from entering the country, granting them authority to determine whether a woman had “high moral character.”
“Let us move forward, then, through the 20th century. These associations that Americans already have of Asian women engaged in this type of ‘lascivious and immoral’ behavior expand as the United States begins a series of imperial excursions, essentially, or wars in Europe. Asia-Pacific region, “said Wu.
As the United States surrendered to its imperial ambitions and fought wars in the Philippines, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, local communities were impacted by the devastation and women suffered heavy losses, said Wu. To deal with the militarization of the United States and the damage caused by the war, some women resorted to sex work, as many think in the traditional sense, in exchange for money, but also cohabited with American GI boyfriends, for example.
“In fact, at that time, all the capital they have is their bodies,” said Wu.
Popular culture continued to confirm many dehumanizing perceptions of Asian women, said Wu. Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 film “Full Metal Jacket” perpetuates the stereotype of women as sexual deviants with a scene in which a Vietnamese sex worker exclaims, “I’m so horny.” And jokes like “I love you for a long time” persist to this day, giving the impression that Asian women are “good only for certain things”.
“Perhaps because we know this story, it is difficult not to link it to this other pattern, which is the United States waging these terrible wars in Asia-Pacific and really treating Asian lives as if they are completely disposable,” said Wu, saying that sniper in Georgia “considered these women, the lives of these people disposable”.
Phi Nguyen, director of litigation at Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Atlanta, said the hypersexualization of Asian women, which has been normalized, in part helped to create the conditions for white supremacy, aggression and violence.
Defenders are calling for public safety nets and support for families in such situations, as well as for more public leaders to speak out against violence, especially in Georgia.
“The people who live in that community and, frankly, American women across the country are experiencing this trauma in some ways. There is an idea that ‘it could have been me’,” said Choimorrow.
For now, said Nguyen, the Asian-American community in Atlanta is feeling the pain and anger associated with the shootings. But many are also in “quick response mode” to ensure that they can assess what the victims’ families and the community need.