Asian/American Women: Resistance against Invisibility

In the collection Making More Waves (1997), Asian/American activist Helen Zia raises a question: “Where are the Asian women?” By reviewing violent crimes against Asian/American women between 1984 and 1992, Helen Zia demonstrates that despite being frequent targets of racist violence, including brutal sexual assaults and lynchings, Asian/American women (following David Palumbo-Liu’s resistant deconstruction of the obscured term “Asian American” with a “/”) remained largely invisible within dominant social discourse. Twenty-four years after 1997, the COVID-19 pandemic witnessed another surge in anti-Asian violence. According to NBC news, the research released by Stop AAPI Hate’s report shows that 68% anti-Asian hate incidents over roughly a pandemic year were reported by Asian/American women, including heinous incidents resulting in the victim’s death.

Invisibility as History

This disproportionate violence toward Asian women demonstrates the never-fading aftershocks of the Exclusion Acts in the last two centuries. While the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 restricted the entry of Chinese laborers and their spouses into the United States due to the rise of local protectionism, the earlier Page Act of 1875 legitimized the dehumanization of Asian female immigrants from “China, Japan, or any Oriental country” by stigmatizing them as prostitutes emigrating for “lewd and immoral purposes.” The Page Act not only set huge obstacles for the formation of Asian immigrant families and generations, but also exacerbated the exclusion circumstances of Asian immigrants before implementing a more extensive policy of racial exclusion that lasted for more than 60 years. By juridically reifying Asian women as sexualized objects, the state reproduced and reinforced the mutually constitutive mechanisms of patriarchy and racism at the national level. According to Erika Lee’s historical research, John H. Wise, the collector of customs and chief of the Chinese Bureau in San Francisco, stated unequivocally in 1895 that all Chinese women would be considered prostitutes until they can sufficiently prove that they were not. Such an institutionalized discourse of stigmatization expressed in an essentialist way provided the justification for the incarceration of Asian immigrants at Angel Island, the immigration detention headquarters, as well as the invasive medical examinations imposed upon them.

The collusion between racialized gender violence and juridical-political discourse not only constructs Asian women as sexualized objects unworthy of historical recognition, but also deprives them of the opportunity to construct their history in the public sphere. According to the oral history edited by Judy Yung and Him Mark Lai, numerous first-generation Chinese immigrants remained reluctant to speak about their experiences on Angel Island, often suppressing these memories in order to protect their families from renewed state scrutiny and to safeguard the precarious legality of their residency status. It was not until the 1970s, the period that Asian/American women begin to broadly engage in community and mainstream politics, that the history of female victims on Angel Island began to be documented as a part of history. On the level of material resources, the poems written by the imprisoned people of Angel Island on wooden planks during their darkest days were only found in the men’s barracks. In 1940 there was a fire that burnt the women’s barracks to ashes, destroying all the women’s writing during this painful historical period. We can only glean fragments of this history of pain and resistance behind the bars of women’s barracks from the memory of a very limited number of survivors recorded in Island: “It was like songs people would sing […] I didn’t write on the walls, but I did compose some poems, crying at the same time.” Oral histories also record a range of practices undertaken by Asian women from tactical acts in response to inspection to more explicit forms of resistance, like the circulation of coaching notes, legal appeal, and even suicide as the most desperate refusal.

Although oral histories testify to the existence of poetic writing by Asian women during their detention on Angel Island, the loss of these poems, a century of forced reticence in the hidden history of incarnation, has resulted in an unfillable void in the history of Asian women immigrants. As mentioned in Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past (1995), the entry of silence in the production of the historical narrative emerges at four moments: “the moment of fact creation; the moment of fact assembly; the moment of fact retrieval; and the moment of retrospective significance.” The dispersal of first-hand physical materials related to the place-based resistance of first-generation Asian immigrant women exemplifies the silences produced at the first two moments of historical production through the convergence of accidental catastrophes and deliberate racialized gendered violence. These silences lead to Asian/American women being largely portrayed as passive, submissive, and hypersexual objects devoid of autonomy in mainstream and exclusive historical narratives, an image that is repeatedly reinforced by the institutionalized power. The U.S. military prostitution system in the Asian-Pacific region after World War II, the Atlanta massacre during the pandemic, as well as the stereotypical depiction of Asian/American figures in the mass media, all exemplify the afterlife of exclusion and objectification, through which Asian/American women continue to be constituted as targets of corporeal and psychic violence.

Resistance Against Invisibility as Presence

Within professional fields, this structural violence manifests itself in the consequent tendency to dismiss Asian American studies as immature and as lacking systematic framework. In Immigrant Acts (1996), Lisa Lowe stresses that higher education system’s promotion of a “prior” Western civilization not only imposes a kind of voiceless invisibility on students of color in the classroom, but institutionally alienates interdisciplinary fields such as Ethnic Studies and Gender Studies as merely empirical and underdeveloped.

This constructed absence also permeates more traditional academic disciplines. The essay Rendered Invisible: Are Asian Americans a Model or a Marginalized Minority (2021) reveals Asian women’s invisibility in psychology despite their working as trailblazers in this field since the 1970s. The similar problem also stands in the field of philosophy, where Asian/American feminism lies at the margin of its marginated fields. This absence stands in great contrast to Asian/American women’s active engagement in the construction of Third World feminism since the 1970s. In an APA newsletter in 2014, David Haekwon Kim stresses the strikingly low representation of Asian/Americans in the American Philosophical Association (APA). By tracing the historical Exclusion Acts and the identity construction of Asian/Americans, Kim argues that this absence is rooted in complicated structures of derogation, which simultaneously perpetuate the Anti-Asian process in American history and allow white people to maintain their ignorance of Anti-Asian racialization.

While “white ignorance” continues to sustain the epistemic neglect of Asian/Americans, Asian/American Philosophy as a new subfield dedicated to theorizing Asian/American oppression and diaspora from a philosophical perspective challenges such neglect by producing a new visibility. Helen Ngo’s (2017) and Boram Jeong’s (2021) discussion of racism as an embodied process that is constantly being produced and experienced in daily life reads racism as the resemblance of phenomenological events. While Ngo emphasizes racism as the violence of intersubjectivity on the ontological plane mediated by gestural expressions and cultivated habits that are constantly shrouding the bodies of racial and ethnic minorities in existential stress and uncanniness, Jeong discusses racism from the perspective of epistemological violence. Jeong stresses that the dominated, white-centered perception deprives people of color of shared time and space by altering its ontological mapping of the world, a kind of deprivation manifest as denial and invisibility upon Yellow bodies. In fact, when writing this post, I was constantly attacked by the existential stress mentioned by Ngo, as my position as an Asian subject both excluded from and complicit within structures of white supremacy and anti-Blackness urges me to re-examine my words to ensure my appeal for Asian visibility does not fuel hatred of other races. In Shireen Roshanravan’s (2018) interpretation, it is this self-consciousness of being an inside-outsider to the Black/White racial binary that promotes the formation of a cross-racial coalition, a new terrain for resistance. Youjin Kong (2023), on the other hand, reveals this inner struggle and its manifestation in social practice as a fluid and non-stop multifaceted process by which Asian/American women construct their own identity under identity symbols such as “yellow peril,” “model minority,” and “critical race feminist.” Kong also demonstrates intersectionality theory as a non-ideal theory that helps women from different racial background to mobilize and transform their identities in ways deconstructing the dominated social power that shapes different ethnic groups into isolated, antagonistic relationships. Only through this process can cross-racial coalitions come into existence.

The history of Asian/American women cultivating cross-racial solidarities and resisting insularity and animosity toward other racial groups—especially with Black people—produced by the “Model Minority” myth through social movements echoes the theoretical claims of Asian/American feminism. From the Third World Women’s Alliance in second-wave feminism to the #Asians4BlackLives campaign and the recent publication of We Are Each Other’s Liberation (2025), Asian/American feminists are constantly seeking to conceive an international coalition of Asian and Black feminism. Asian/American women’s engagements in social movements echo Mitsuye Yamada’s early appeal in This Bridge Called My Back (1981) that political action and the articulation of oppressed histories are the only ways of dismantling the constituted invisibility of Asian/American women. Through movements and coalitions, Asian/American feminists refuse to be deployed as tools of reproducing anti-Blackness within a white-centric social order. They instead make themselves and others visible as subjects of resistance.

Despite efforts by Asian/American activists at all levels to break the silence, invisibility remains a pressing problem. In May 2026, as the New York city council still had not enacted a vote for the No More 24 Act, the Intro 303 bill aimed at abolishing the mandatory 24-hour workday, home care workers at City Hall launched a hunger strike. Asian/American women in their 60s and 70s, who constitute the majority of protesting immigrant women of color, highlighted the gap between the legal provisions and the real practice. While New York State Department of Labor’s 13-hour rule stipulates that employers must guarantee home care workers at least 8 hours for sleeping with 5 hours uninterrupted and 3 hours for meal breaks, workers in fact can hardly rest during their shifts and only receive wages for 13 hours at a low rate. Before this hunger act, Ain’t I A Woman?! coalition had been fighting for over a decade against the injustice facing home care workers. The government’s indifferent attitude to the dehumanized oppression suffered by lower-class Asians, coupled with the structural invisibility caused by the historical continuity of exclusion, make it difficult for Asian/American women to advocate their rights.

The No More 24 Act manifests the harm of the “Model Minority” myth by exposing the brutal exploitation maintained by the institutionalized juridical-medical-political discourse concealed under the flattened image of Asian/Americans as successful elites. The struggle of Asian home care workers also reveals the exploitative logic through which the capitalist market forcibly subsumes reproductive labor into a regime of abstract labor time, despite the fact that the rhythm of care work cannot be fully reconciled with the standardized hourly wage—care for infants and incapacitated patients has to be 24 hours a day. As Maya Gonzalez and Jeanne Neton (2013) emphasize, the specific feature of reproductive labor limits the extent to which its costs can be reduced through productivity gains, making it impossible for reproductive labor to be fully allocated through the market. To ensure this indispensable form of labor can be performed cheaply, the state’s institutionalized intervention is implemented as the most efficient strategy of redistributing reproductive labor to the impoverished immigrants and women of color. In this process racialized minorities are continuously produced as disposable instruments of capital accumulation.

The unique challenge faced by Asian/Americans and other common challenges shared among minority groups revealed by No More 24 Act underscores the urgency of cross-racial coalition and resistance. In the era when the racialized socio-economical structure is constantly alienating people of color into disposable resources through the apparatus of invisibilization at the intersection of racism, patriarchy, and poverty, the only way out is to confront the imposed reticence with collective strength.

The Gender, Sexuality, and Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender, gender identity, and sexuality, issues of gender and sexuality injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender and sexuality injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series co-Editors Elisabeth Paquette or Zinhle ka’Nobuhlaluse.