- You know, Adrian, my understanding of anti-Asian laws was
that they always started at that 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.
So I was pretty surprised to learn from you last week
that there was something that came before that law
that specifically bans, well, Chinese women
- That was the Page Act of 1875.
We promised we'd go back to this topic.
I think today's that day.
Here's the thing.
The line between violence towards Asian people
and the hypersexualization of Asian women is very thin.
So what can the Page Act tell us about exclusion
and the "Asian fetish"?
- Welcome to a People's History of Asian America.
- When the Page Act was first introduced,
it was intended to and I'm going to quote,
"End the danger of cheap Chinese labor
and immoral Chinese women."
(immoral Chinese women reverberates)
- This idea of ending the danger
of immoral Chinese women sounds oddly familiar.
- The suspect In the deadly Atlanta area, shooting spree
telling police he was motivated by a sex addiction.
- He does claim that it was not racially motivated.
He apparently has an issue.
What he considers a sex addiction
and it's a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate
- In that 2021 Atlanta mass shooting.
Eight people were killed, six of them were Asian women.
How can one associate a sexual addiction
with Asian-run businesses yet claim
that their crime was not race-related?
- That's a great question Dolly
Here's what I think we need to do.
We got to connect the dots
between the Page Act and the Atlanta shooting.
- We are going to be talking to Jamiee Swift, the founder
and executive director of Black Women Radicals.
- When we think about how Asian women and even Black women
the stereotypes attached to our bodies that indicated how
legislation was to be enacted in regards to our livelihood
- [Dolly] For example anti-miscegenation laws,
criminalized interracial relations between Black
and white people to preserve white racial purity
despite rape and sexual abuse
being common experiences of enslaved African people.
These laws eventually extended to all non-white groups
- Legislation in the United States,
such as the Page Act discriminated and barred Asian women.
They've been stereotyped as a seductress,
as subservient, as diseased. And we can tie that directly
to what happened in the Atlanta shooting
- [Dolly] To get some historical context
on how these stereotypes about Asian women
could lead to sexual violence.
We talked to Dr. Rena Heinrich, who takes a critical look
at recent gender in popular culture.
- I think that the hypersexualization contributes
to Asian fetish.
It has roots historically, and then it also has roots
in representation.
There's this notion that Chinese women who immigrated
to this country in the late part, the 19th century
were prostitutes engaged in sex work.
We also start seeing representations of Asian women
at the end of the 19th century that are specifically written
or imagined by white men.
So I'm thinking specifically of Madame Chrysanthemum
by Pierre Loti, Madame Butterfly, by John Luther Long,
the play by David Belasco, which then turns of course
into Madama Butterfly, which is the opera by Puccini.
The voice behind all of these narratives is
a white male subjectivity.
And it's that fantasy of what Asian female body is
- [Dolly] One force behind both the fear
and fetishization of Asian people is a concept known as
Orientalism.
- Orientalism is a term that was coined
by a cultural literary theorist Edward Said.
And what he discovered is that bodies
of the East are always represented in a particular way.
And that is in opposition to the West.
If the West is strong than the East is weak.
If the West is rational, the East is irrational.
If the West is masculine than the East is feminine.
If we understand the East as already being feminine
then we see a masculine body as feminine.
And we see a feminine body
as kind of uber feminine, hyper feminine.
- Do you think Orientalism can lead to sexual violence?
- It's absolutely possible
for Orientalism to lead to sexual violence
because if you have a body that's presenting
in front of you, that is Asian, but
as we understand it through Orientalism also hyper feminine
also weak, it's horribly damaging.
- Well, I think Rena and Jamiee have made it clear why race
and gender simply cannot be disassociated.
- Exactly. I actually turned to the work
of Kimberlé Crenshaw, a critical race theorist
who coined the term intersectionality. Simply
put intersectionality, asks us to think
about race and gender inequities,
not only as intertwined but it asks us to think
about how they actually exacerbate each other.
- Like when we talk about that first anti-Asian law,
the Chinese Exclusion Act, that law itself was race-based.
But the origins
of that law began with the exclusion of women
- Intersectionality! And the tropes
of Orientalism that shaped the way Asian women
are perceived are part
of the same forces that emasculate Asian men.
- But what about the men who are like
how does feminism apply to me?
What does Asian fetish have to do with me?
- Well, Asian men, have you ever had someone say
that you have a small eggplant?
That emasculation serves the same agenda of white supremacy.
Here's the thing, Asian men in the 1800s,
if you remember our first episode, were made to
serve not only on plantations and railroads, but also
in domestic work and what these jobs did and stereotypes
around them did was that it rendered them as less masculine.
So in short, the long history
of misogyny that impacted Asian women, likewise bleeds
into the specific forms of racism that Asian men experience.
- So to really get to the core of anti-Asian racism
we have to look through a lens
of intersectionality that brings together race and gender
to leave us with some parting words
of wisdom and a little hope for the future.
Here's Jamiee, once again:
- The future of Black and women of color organizing
and solidarity is political education
- [Dolly] For Jamiee.
This means having events like sisters
and siblings in the struggle
co-hosted with the group,
the Asian American Feminist Collective.
- With everything going on with COVID.
I think it's important to have these conversations
about what's going on in our world.
And most importantly, how we can build solidarity together.
Well, what keeps me hopeful is
that the future generations will look back and see not
just myself or the Asian-American Feminist Collective,
but a whole litany and legacy of Black and Asian women
and gender expansive people who decided to
come together when it was difficult.
And that we are doing the work of Sankofa.
which means go back and get it.
- If you like our show, A People's History of Asian America,
make sure to let us know in the comments below.
And join us next week
for another episode, we'll see you then
- [Dolly] This episode was made possible
by the corporation for public broadcasting.
Thank you.