An Intersectional Approach to Resistance and Complicity: The Case of Racialised Desire among Asian American Women

Abstract

Feminist research on non-Western/non-white women's sexual relationships and romantic desires for white Western men suggests they strategically engage a discourse glorifying white masculinity to resist ‘ethnic patriarchy’. In this paper, I offer an intersectional method for analysing the limits of this form of resistance within the matrix of gender and racial oppression by posing the question: where is the complicity with racism in this resistance to male domination? An analysis of interviews with 128 second-generation Korean and Vietnamese American women finds those who express a desire for white men invoke racialised gender stereotypes of masculinity that idealise white Western men as romantic ‘egalitarian knights’ and denigrate Asian American men as inferior, domineering partners. Those respondents who prefer white men see it as a strategy for resisting Asian American men's gender oppression; however, they overlook white men's gender oppression and some Asian American men's commitment to gender egalitarianism. The analysis finds respondents commonly draw on four widely circulating ideologies promoting white men's racial and gender domination in explaining their romantic preferences, they are a belief in: (1) essential racial differences, (2) white male supremacy, (3) ‘Orientalism’ and (4) pro-assimilationism. These findings suggest that the intersectionality of gender, racial and other forms of domination requires the rejection of simplistic either/or models of resistance and complicity and the need to consider how resisting one form of domination can inadvertently reproduce another form.