Photo Essay: Asian American Feminism in our everyday lives by Tricia Duong

tduon050 — 2024-05-15 16:30:47 UTC

I took this photo of my grandmother during this past Mother’s Day, tending to her garden. She had just single-handedly picked out veggies for our family dinner that evening, and was cleaning and prepping them. This photo depicts my grandmother “doing gender” gardening and preparing a meal, while my grandpa sits inside watching the television. They are “doing gender” in their everyday lives without thinking about it (Lorber, 1994). This also plays into the stereotypical women doing most, or even all, of the household chores, while men can relax and rest when they are not working (Hooks 2003). These “behavioral aspects of being a woman or a man” are socially constructed by society around us, and especially the society that my grandparents grew up in (West & Zimmerman 1987). Vietnam’s society while they were growing up held very rigid gender roles. For example, men joining in the army or making money while the women only stayed home to take care of the children and prepare food. These gender roles still hold up today for my grandparents since it’s been so ingrained in their lives that it’s difficult for them to question these social rules.

tduon050 — 2024-05-15 20:26:52 UTC

This is a photo of my sister and I side-by-side. We are standing side-by-side to represent the closeness of our relationship, however we are constantly compared by our physical aspects, especially by Asian beauty standards. Asian beauty standards is a very prominent concept in Asian culture for women. Much of Asian beauty standards are deeply rooted in the belief of “oriental” women stereotypes and the pedestal we place on Western physical features (Yamada 1981). The biggest physical aspect that my sister and I are compared to is our skin tones. There’s always been a strong belief in the Asian community, and possibly even in Western society, that the lighter you are the more attractive you are. This popular belief I believe to be deeply rooted in racism, and the idea of the reality of racism in conjunction with feminism is that “white men are more willing to consider women’s rights when granting rights of those who maintain white supremacy” (Hooks 2003). These years of constant comparison and toxic Asian beauty standards seems to be a universal event since it’s happened to so many other Asian women, as seen in the Youtube video: “Asian American Women Share Struggles with Beauty Standards”. Similarly, those women explain how most of the Asian beauty standards are basically saying “the more European the better”.

tduon050 — 2024-05-16 00:41:41 UTC

Here, this is a photo of my grandma, mother, and aunt, different generations of women yet they all still face the same toxic beauty standards through all these years. Similarly to the Youtube video of “Asian American Women Share Struggles with Beauty Standards”, one of the beauty standards that stuck with my family is having prominent double eyelids, a very Western feature. It is so extreme in my family that my grandmother and aunt have felt the pressure and got double eyelid surgery, even though they already have double eyelids. They wanted to make it even more prominent. My mother has not gotten double eyelid surgery because she is afraid of going under for the procedure, however, at every large family gathering, there are always comments from the older generations about her eyelids and how she needs to get them done. Therefore, though they are all from different generations, at the end of the day women are always grouped together and binded through “sameness” and characterized by the same social aspects (Mohanty 1988). I feel as though similar to Asian American women feeling unheard by white women, sometimes within our own cultures it is difficult to break societal standards throughout generations. Possibly because we have a difficult time to listen and learn from one another and even have a hard time to speak up about these sorts of issues in our own community (Yamada 1981).

tduon050 — 2024-05-16 01:10:35 UTC

Yet, another encounter of Asian beauty standards in our everyday lives. This is a photo I took of my mom’s daily skincare products. A common factor of these products is that most of them have a “whitening” or “brightening” effect. My mother’s skin tone and the sunspots on her skin are things that she has always been taught to dislike about herself. In connection to, yet again, the Youtube video “Asian American Women Share Struggles with Beauty Standards”, some of these women, like my mom, have been taught these hurtful ideals that are difficult to unsee in yourself after being told countless times growing up. One of the products is even called “FAIRlucent, a whitening essence”, a Japanese product. Many of my mother’s skincare products are East Asian products, like Korean or Japanese. Commonly, the “stereotypical” East Asian complexion and physical appearance is known to be as the highest regarded beauty standard, as it emulates fair, perfect skin and tiny noses. This has noticeably caused a sort of divide in Asian American women, as there are many different types of Asian women and complexions. Therefore, this confirms how Asian women are “tokenized” to be the model immigrants because of the standards of how Asian women “should” look and act (Yamada 1981). It is very important for society to understand the dangers of beauty standards because as Anzaldúa mentioned in their book, “the dominant white culture is killing us slowly with its ignorance”, and in this case the “dominant white culture” has dominated the beauty standard for many years, damaging the security of women of color (Anzaldúa 1987).

tduon050 — 2024-05-17 01:17:44 UTC

Depicted in this photo is a recreation of a typical dinner with my mother and father. My mother, either cutting fruit or cleaning the house, while my father has dinner after work and watches the current news, a majority of the time it’s political news. In Asian culture, women are never expected to take part in politics, as a matter of fact, it is quite odd to see an Asian woman care about politics at all. My mother and other women figures in my life have never once mentioned politics or taught me about politics or feminism at all. It was just something that I was not supposed to care about or get involved in. Politics have always been seen as a “masculine” thing. Politics has always been male dominated since it was created. Asian women are typically not expected to get involved which I believe is rooted in the old idea that women are just the “subordinates of men”, where men dominate positions of power and place higher on the social structure (Lorber 1994). I have only ever heard the women in my family make small comments about the current political turmoil, for it to be disregarded and shrugged off by others. Yamada perfectly describes this phenomenon with her own experience where people looked at her “as if she had never spoken before… [an] audience of people who had never known an Asian Pacific woman who is other than passive, sweet, etc.” (Yamada 1981). As an Asian woman, similarly to other races outside of the Caucasian race, women of color are thought to be “politically dependent”, implying that women of color are not taken seriously in political aspects of society (Mohanty 1988). Where in our society, Asian women are just expected to be a model for others. I have seen many cases where when there are Asian women who do care about politics and social issues, they are seen as “aggressive” or too head-strong, which is not part of the standard for Asian women.