cal injustice

As previously established, Asian/American women navigate the dating scene with the additional burden of grappling with their perceived hypersexuality. Yet, one might argue that many Asian/American women remain oblivious to how their race, gender, and cultural background influence their romantic relationships. Miranda Fricker’s theory of hermeneutical injustice might help explain such unawareness. According to Fricker, hermeneutical injustice occurs when a marginalized individual is systematically unable to fully comprehend their own experiences, especially those related to their social identity, because of “prejudicial flaws in shared resources for social interpretation” (1).

For the case of Asian/American women, traditional narratives of racial discrimination tend to exclusively focus on Black or Latinx experiences, inadvertently obscuring the centuries of racial abuse Asian/Americans undergo. Thus, Asian/Americans suffer from a double invisibility an erasure within dominant Western academic discourses and racial minority culture. This double erasure contributes to the silence and acceptance surrounding the unspoken issue of fetishization towards Asian/American women Remaining “ on the margins of contemporary academic philosophy” (Zheng 401), Asian/American women are left unequipped with the social vocabulary necessary to understand and process the many instances of fetishization they may encounter.