Letter from the Editor

Dear Readers,

Firstly, I would like to respectfully acknowledge that this zine was created on the traditional, ancestral, stolen, and current lands of the Monacan Tribe. My ability to create this zine here in Charlottesville and UVA is predicated on the dispossession and displacement of the Monacan Tribe. As an Asian American engaged in racial and gender politics, I recognize that the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) movement for social justice may not align with the struggles for Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. Furthermore, while a land acknowledgement is not enough, I believe it is an important decolonial practice that promotes Indigenous visibility and reminds us that we are on unceded Indigenous land I urge you to also reflect on the colonial histories of the lands you occupy.

This zine serves as my final project for PHIL 3810: Sex, Sexuality, and Gender, taught by Professor Elizabeth Barnes at the University of Virginia (UVA). With this zine, I intend to explore and invite nuanced, critical conversations about the hypersexuality of Asian women and its intersection with identity, power, and politics How do Asian/American women negotiate/challenge/uphold/complicate their identities as fetishized bodies under capitalism? What common tropes and stereotypes discipline and police the racialized bodies of Asian women? Should we politically interrogate discriminatory patterns of attraction? While these are a few of the many questions I attempt to answer throughout my zine, my research and subsequent analysis often beget more questions than answers

Nevertheless, in this zine, I analyze the relationship between hypersexuality and agency in conversation with Miranda Fricker’s theory of hermeneutical injustice and the well-known phenomenon of Asian Female White Male (AFWM). I trace how the cultural construction of Asian American women as hypersexual finds its roots within popular media, such as films. Finally, I end with a commemoration of the eight individuals, six of whom were Asian women, that were brutally murdered on March 16, 2021. The Atlanta spa shootings grimly remind us that the hypersexuality of Asian women has tangible effects even deadly ones.