Why Desire Asians? Gendered Racialized Attraction Among Whites Intermarried to Asians in the US

• In Event: 4344 - Culture, Racialization and Intersectionality (Co-sponsored with the Section on Race, Gender, and Class)

Abstract

In this comparative study, I explore how intermarried White men and women frame their attraction to their Asian American partners. Often Asian American partners were made exceptional either by their race or in spite of it. A significant number of White men in this study relied on racializing and exotifying discourses to describe their attraction to their partners and Asian women generally. Contrary to arguments in line with assimilation theory, these narratives may “brighten” racial boundaries rather than “blur” them. Comparatively, White women discussed their attraction to their Asian husbands primarily through personality characteristics rather than physical or racial ones. Instead of looking to their spouses as in example of an ideal like White men respondents, they exceptionalized their partners in comparison to other men and particularly to other Asian men. These narratives may “blur” boundaries in some ways by overlooking racial difference, but may also reify the place of Asian American men as a whole within the attraction hierarchy, and “brighten” the racial boundaries that White women draw against them. The discourses used by respondents highlight the racialized and gendered ways that White women and men describe their Asian partners and Asian people in the romantic market. These reflect and reproduce dominant racial and gender hegemony. This intersectional study complicates our understanding of intermarriage as boundary blurring, since some racial boundaries may be reinforced not lessened.

Author

• Louise Ly, University of California, Berkeley