Double Consciousness or More: Asian, American and (Queer) Woman

• In Event: Race, Gender, and Class Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 6) Gender, Sexuality, and Masculinities

Abstract

In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois (1903) first introduced the phenomenological concept of “double consciousness” to describe the formation of minority identity in the United States. African Americans struggle between being “a Negro” and being American, living constantly under the white gaze, which creates a persistent gap between how they perceive themselves and how they are defined by dominant society. Recent studies have argued that double consciousness also applies to other ethnoracial minorities in the United States (Joseph and Golash-Boza 2021). However, it remains understudied how double consciousness develops across multiple intersectional identities, particularly among (queer) women of color.
This study examines how (queer) Asian American women negotiate multiple layers of identity. Drawing on 23 interviews with U.S.-born Asian American women, I argue that Asian American women struggle between being Asian and being American not only because of the white racial gaze but also due to intra-Asian gaze and colorism within Asian American communities. In addition, Asian women confront evolving forms of diasporic patriarchy, including control over their bodies and expectations of racial sexual loyalty from Asian men. Queer Asian women are further marginalized within a highly heterosexualized process of racial formation, resulting in intensified identity conflict. By foregrounding these layered tensions, this paper extends the concept of double consciousness to account for the ways gender and sexuality complicate racial formation.

Author

• Wendy Chao, Columbia University