Asian American feminism encompass a series of evolving sociopolitical movements, theory, and praxis that address the intersections of identities, struggles, and unique experiences of Asian American women and queer people in the broader context of feminism.
Asian American feminism considers the multiplicities of theory, praxis, and locations of women through solidarity with other women of color feminists and transnational feminists within the broader framework of ongoing legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and war. It developed to seek for a space that challenges hetero-patriarchal aspects of Asian America studies and racial marginalization by mainstream white feminisms.
Background As part of the national reckoning on racial justice inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, college students organized on college campuses for ethnic studies, and eventually Asian American studies, to be established, most notably through the protests of the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) at San Francisco State University. At the same time, movements like the Combahee River Collective inspired the formation of the Third World Women Alliance, which many Asian American women took part in forming. They came together in solidarity with the shared understanding of being subjects of US imperialism abroad and domestic racism. At the same time, revolutions in China and around the world, Cold War tensions, and the US military campaign in Korea, Vietnam, and other parts of Southeast Asia led to conferences like the 1971 Indochinese Women's Conferences in Vancouver which mobilized Asian American women around the continent and developed a transnational awareness against war and imperialism across the US empire and Asia. Asian American feminists, marginalized by mainstream Asian American studies and white feminism, came together to create spaces for themselves, forming journals, newspapers, and Asian American feminist courses.
Asian American feminists are not homogenous and tend to fall into one of two groups: women's rights support groups and radical activism Women's rights groups tend to focus on specific concerns with the goal of ending sexism and racism and working within existing systems to increase women's representation and involvement at all levels. Participants in radical politics seek to understand larger structures of oppression and how these common structures oppress specific groups differently, and they seek structural change, eliminating barriers based on race, gender, and class, leading to liberation.
History of immigration acts Scholars have argued for an alternative historiography to complicate depictions of Asian American history as based solely on racial exclusion, thus overlooking the importance of gender and sexuality and marginalizing the experiences of women and queer people. Asian women were seen as secondary concerns and as offshoots of men's identity, hence their derivative status. The first wave of Asian immigration coincided with westward expansion at a time when femininity was determined by women's ability to perform domestic labor. The Page Act of 1875 excluded contract laborers and "Oriental" women entering the country for "immoral purposes." The law was based on the assumption that all Chinese women entering the US were prostitutes brought to the US to fulfill the sexual needs of male Chinese laborers or to seduce white men, but its main effect was to limit the formation of Chinese American families. The underlying message of the Page Act was that Asian women fail to meet the moral standards of American society. Nineteenth century morality in the US was based on the ability to maintain a two parent nuclear household which was determined by race and class. Most Chinese families lived in multiple family households as they were unable to afford single family units. Views of Chinese families as unassimilable into "proper" family structures justified racial exclusion, therefore Chinese women were considered a threat to the normative family.
The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act barred Chinese laborers from entering the country, but also had significant impacts on Chinese women and families. Chinese merchants and those who could afford to maintain a middle-class nuclear family were not seen as threatening to the "proper" family structure and allowed to immigrate to the US. Therefore, Chinese women were allowed to immigrate as long as they could uphold the middle-class values of a male breadwinner and a female homemaker. Based on the assumption that all Chinese women immigrating to the US were prostitutes, women faced lengthy interrogations upon their arrival to Angel Island. The popular image of immigrants as threats was conflated with themes of epidemic outbreaks, immigrant bodies were seen as contaminants and carriers of disease.
The 1907 Gentlemen's Agreement allowed female migrants to join their husbands in the US as long as they could prove they would be housewives, not laborers. This led to "picture brides," where Japanese bachelors in the US would bring their prospective brides from Japan through arranged marriages, often exchanging photographs. Once again, the Gentleman's Agreement enforced the nuclear family structure and women's economic dependence on men. Women's immigration status depended on their ability to perform the role of the "good wife."
The War Brides Act of 1945 allowed members of the military to bring Asian women back to the US as wives. Racial inclusion of Asian Americans was dependent on the ability to uphold feminine ideals of maternalism. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 allowed reunification of the immediate family—parents, children under 21, and spouses—reproducing the heteronormative middle-class nuclear family structure. Through the family reunification act many war brides were able to sponsor their families. Heteronormative family structures, enforced through immigration laws, in turn, reinforced gender inequality and placed "alien spouses," mostly women, in a dependent relationship with their spouses.
Legacies of war and colonialism Asian American feminism has roots in Third World feminism, which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, building upon decolonization, women's movements and movements for racial equality, and sought to create a US movement of Women of Color that transgressed nations and ethnicity. Movements critiqued South African apartheid and US imperialism, supporting armed resistance in Honduras, El Salvador, Chile, Grenada, Beirut and the Philippines. The anti-war movement played a critical role in critiques of US imperialism and militarism. Women in socialist Asia became symbols of revolutionary struggle, and served as inspiration due to their political heroism. The 1971 Indochinese Women's Conference (IWC) gave US and Canadian women to meet six women from Southeast Asia fighting US imperialism.
Asian American feminists also contributed to the Third World Women's Alliance (TWWA) which was born out of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), and became an independent organization in 1970 under the name Black Women's Alliance, becoming the TWWA in 1971 after a group of Puerto Rican women asked to join. Founded on ideas of solidarity between those impacted by US imperialism abroad and those impacted by state violence domestically, the organization sought to highlight the connections between US imperialism and military interventions abroad and the exploitation and violence women of color faced in the US. Their publication Triple Jeopardy, refers to the intersection of race, class, and gender. TWWA was one of the first organizations committed to intersectionality based on unity through difference, or understanding the ways hierarchies and structures of oppression impact racialized groups differently. Triple Jeopardy depicted Chinese and Vietnamese women living under Communism as revolutionary, serving as inspiration for a socialist, anti-colonial revolution in the US. However, this has been critiqued for what is called "radical orientalism" which idealized and romanticized Asia as an alternative to imperialism and capitalism, while still maintaining the separation between East and West. Additionally, TWWA lacked an analysis of how people of color in the US are complicit in upholding imperialism and benefit from the exploitation of the "Third World." Co-founder Frances Beal, when talking about the origins of TWWA, emphasizes the importance of understanding how racialized state violence, for example the forced sterilization of Puerto Rican and Black women, is connected to US imperialism, while refusing uniformity. In other words, understanding how common structures impact certain people differently, and resist equating the struggles of different groups.
Contributions to theory
Cultural studies In cultural studies, Asian American feminist scholars have developed theoretical contributions to the literature stating that gender and race cannot be excluded when analyzing the material conditions that lead to social domination. Lisa Lowe, a prominent scholar in Asian American cultural politics/studies, examines the contradictory position of Asian American immigrants through historical and literary analysis, building upon the works of Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams from the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Lowe shows how Asian immigrants were marked as unassimilable and 'foreign,' to justify racialized labor exploitation in her foundational work, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. In The Intimacies of Four Continents, Lowe connects the figure of the Chinese coolie to the African slave in making an intimate network between empire and slavery. She argues that racialized labor across continents has been foundational to the development of modern capitalism and liberalism. Grace Kyungwon Hong ties gender into racial capitalism by uncovering how capitalism invaded the domestic sphere through bureaucratic surveillance. Through labor bureaucracy, American identity was restructured around a normative white idea of consumerism and family. Switching from history to the modern digital age Lisa Nakamura, in Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet, demonstrated how racial identities are constructed, represented, and performed in digital spaces. She argues that the internet is not a neutral, deracialized space; certain raced bodies become hyper-visible whereas others are invisibilized. Further, her work explores the global outsourcing of tech work and the underlying racial hierarchies within the digital economy.
Postcolonial and transnational frameworks The postcolonial and transnational feminist theorist Chandra Tapalde Mohanty and her foundational work, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses," criticizes western feminist's tendencies to homogenize third world women into a singular, oppressed group while also promoting the white savior rhetoric by positioning western feminists as the savior to these third world women.
Radical feminism vs Liberal feminism Asian American feminists do not agree on a set path to Asian American liberation. While radical Asian American feminists saw decolonization and socialist movements–and thus saw political role models in socialist Asian women–as paths to liberation, liberal feminists, like Patsy Mink, worked within U.S. institutions, advocating for policies that sought equity through inclusion. Radical Asian American feminists, like Jean Quan, felt fundamentally alienated from America and its electoral process, and Asian American liberalism faced criticism from scholars like Haunani-Kay Trask, Candace Fujikane, and Jonathan Okamura, for maintaining and reproducing Asian American settler colonialism that led to the disenfranchisement of Native Hawaiʻians.
Women of color politics, coalition, and solidarity building with other communities