Proceedings of the Global Conference on Gender Studies
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Dating as an Asian Woman: Attractiveness, Desire and Power in Online Dating with White Men
Wenyi Hu
ABSTRACT:
This research adopts an intersectional perspective focusing on the relations of power between Asian women and white men in online dating. With the competence of empowering every user with “equal” agency in endless dating choices and unlimited sexual freedom, the dating app as a virtual platform has undoubtedly added an even more complicated layer to the power entanglement of Asian fetish and White supremacy ingrained in interracial heterosexual intimacy between Asians and whites. To investigate how Asian women’s subjectivities and desires in the postfeminist online dating context would challenge or reinforce their structurally subordinate situation in relationships with white men, this research develops a qualitative autoethnographic method based on the author’s own dating experience along with interviews of other 12 Asian female Tinder users, questioning:
- Why do Asian women actively engage in online dating with white men?
- How do intersectional power relations shape the attractiveness between Asian women and white men?
- How do Asian women resist or reinforce their unequal power relations with white men through online dating?
Discussing with a theoretical framework of Orientalism, intersectionality, Foucauldian discourse theory along with the concepts of postfeminism and hegemonic masculinity, it is found in this research that although Asian women’s active dating engagement rejects the submissive and passive Asian femininity, their subjectivities are still constrained by the structural power relations of patriarchy and white hegemony, which thus restabilise Asian women’s subordination from intersectional perspectives of race and gender. Standing on this conclusion, this research further seeks to call for a political awareness of collective identity as Asian women.
keywords: autoethnography; intersectionality; online intimacy; Orientalism; postfeminism