The marginalization of Asian American women's experience in the public discourse

During our class discussion on stereotypes about Asian Americans last week, we talked about the concept of "model minority" and how it contributes to the stereotyping of Asian Americans as being "apolitical." Not only that the voice of the Asian community is seldom represented in the major public debate, but whenever there emerges a controversy regarding Asian Americans, it is about cultural differences in parenting style (such as the "Tiger Mother" debate) or about fashion, acting and the construction of beauty ideal (as it appears on the top Google search results). I remembered following the past midterm election and was struck by the fact that only the state of Hawaii had Asian Amercian candidates. In formal politics arena, Asian American women's voice is even further diminuated as out of the 12 Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders currently serving in the 112th Congress, only three are women.

I also noticed that in the arena of feminist movement and women's studies, a parallel could be drawn in that the issue concerning Asian American women seldom makes onto the syllabus. From the Intro to Women's Studies to Junior Feminist Theory Seminar, I have read plenty of writings on Third World feminism, but the readings mostly covered Chicana feminism and African American feminist thoughts. Asian American women's writings had been sporadically inserted into the syllabus here and there, as if merely to complement the diversity spectrum. Before taking this ASAM course, and because of these impressions I got from the mainstream discourse, I used to hold that perhaps the reason why Asian American women's writings weren't on the syllabus could be explained away by the "fact" that there simply aren't many literatures available. However, I came to realize that such conception is totally wrong.

Now that I have learned about the politics and history of Asian American women, through literature, class readings and documentary films, among other mediums, I start to see the above-mentioned instances as the structured consequences of the construction of the "model minority" image, which constrained the public knowledge on the participation and representation of Asian American women's community. As we mentioned in the class, while it's true that stereotypes may only be canged when the dominant society no longer need such stereotypes, people can still implement changes by breaking the controlling images and change the social context under which current stereotypes have been propelled.