Asian Americans as Objects of Desire: Gendered Racialized Attraction Among White Spouses Married to South Asians

• In Event: 30420 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 14: Race, Dating, Intimacies

Abstract

Assimilation theory presumes that the high rates of intermarriage among Asian-White pairings indicate a blurring of racial boundaries between them. South Asians, included in this racial category, however, have significantly lower rates of intermarriage compared to their pan-ethnic peers. Taking a contrary stance, sexual politics and racialized attraction scholarship hold that racialized differences and inequalities may be perpetuated in interracial relationships, including among groups with high intermarriage rates. For instance, the hyper-sexualization of Asian women and hypo-sexualization of Asian men persist in intimate interracial relationships, including with spouses. However, given the South Asian Exclusion Bias in research, there is a dearth of research on whether these assumptions hold for South Asians. Scholarship on relationships confirms that White people act as gatekeepers to interracial relationships in the U.S.; their racialization of minoritized groups has significant consequences for them in mainstream society. Based on 25 in-depth interviews with White individuals, this study analyzes how heterosexually intermarried White women and men frame their desire for their South Asian spouses by examining their “vocabularies of desire”—socially constructed systems of meaning through which individuals understand and express their romantic and sexual preferences. Given proclamations of Asian Americans’ racial assimilation, this aims to understand processes of intimate racialization for an understudied subpopulation of this group. In contrast to assimilation theory, and consistent with scholarship on sexual politics and racialized attraction, this study finds that White individuals’ vocabularies of desire for their spouses are flexibly based on perceptions of their spouses’ racialized differences. A significant number of White respondents attribute a “brown masculinity” to South Asian men and a general exoticism to South Asian women. This paper addresses how their vocabularies recirculate social meanings that attribute physical and cultural racialized differences to South Asians. These narratives reinforce gendered racialized differences within their intermarriages and family life.

Author

• Louise Ly, University of Maryland