Fiery Latina or submissive Asian chick?

A guest post by Laura Basu

Laura Basu is an academic and a writer. Originally from London, Laura now lives between the UK and Netherlands. She’s a visiting fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London, and was economics editor for the media organisation openDemocracy until 2023. Her work looks at understanding and transforming social systems — and she has a strong focus on racial capitalism and decolonialism in her writing. Her recently launched Substack, Loveconomics — which has quickly become one of my favourite, not-to-be-missed reads — is all about about capitalism and love: where the personal meets the political.

Laura, like me, is mixed. She is of Indian and Eastern European heritage. And, like me, how this mix has expressed itself in her appearance impacts how she's treated in the world. When Laura articulated to me that where people presume her to be from impacts how they perceive her femininity, I realised she'd given words to a feeling I've lived with my entire life: how I’m sexualised depends on where people think I’m from.

I hand you over to Laura for more.

Fiery Latina or submissive Asian chick — what are you?

How we are sexed through our race and raced through our sex

A few years back, we went on a family trip to India, where my dad is from. My brother’s mixed race ethnic ambiguity served him really well. With Polish broad shoulders, height and lighter skin, he was repeatedly mistaken for a Bollywood star.

The same mix didn’t work quite so well for me. My broad shoulders, let's say ‘characterful’ nose (which is from my Polish Catholic side, not my Jewish side, thank you very much) and frizzy hair (which comes from God knows where), did not get me mistaken for a Bollywood starlet.

While my brother’s ethnic combo made him more masculine and hunky, those same traits made me less feminine and alluring.

Being an unusual mix, ethnically ambiguous and having lived in different places, I’ve seen first hand how people perceive your gender and sexuality differently according to how they perceive your ethnicity.

When I’m in the US, people often think I’m Latina, and then they treat me as fiery and sexually free. When I'm in the Netherlands, where I live much of the time, they often think I’m Muslim — I can see all the Islamophobic cogs turning, placing me as subordinate and having to walk 10 steps behind my husband.

The ‘mixed race’ idea often gets me associated with being, generally, ‘exotic’ which is, apparently, sexy. The general ‘Asian’ vibe gets me seen as demure which can be sexy in a different way, though not always.

The point is that the way you are gendered and sexed depends on the way you are raced, and the way you are raced depends on how you are sexed and gendered.

Understanding how race and gender relate to each other in this way goes beyond intersectionality. Intersectionality sees race and gender as two separate categories that criss-cross each other. This is very important because it helps us see, for example, that Black women face different kinds of oppression from either white women or Black men. But, actually, we can go further and see that race and gender don’t just intersect — they are formed through each other. They co-create each other.

I’m so used to this kind of mashed up coding of my body that it barely even shows up consciously on my radar. Often, it’s funny.

But if we trace this co-creation of race and gender back to its roots, we find colonial oppression and violence in the service of a global economic system driven by an obsession with profits — capitalism. And we see that the same gender and race-based violence remains today.

The root

The renowned Black feminist scholars Angela Davis and Patricia Hill Collins explored how enslaved Africans and African Americans were coded in terms of their sexuality and gender during the Transatlantic slave trade of the 16th to 19th centuries. This didn’t just happen randomly but served commercial purposes for a rising economic system — capitalism — that had its foundations in slavery and colonial plunder.

Black women were painted as masculine and Black men as hyper-masculine. This was convenient for a system in which both men and women were worked to the bone in plantations — not exactly seen as a fitting occupation for demure and ladylike upper class white women.

At the same time, Black women were painted as sexually promiscuous and lascivious — also convenient for a system in which rape of enslaved women was literally a business investment for slave owners: the children of enslaved people also became the property of the master.

Meanwhile, Black men were portrayed as sexually aggressive sexual predators — a good excuse for the mass lynchings of Black men that were part and parcel of the Jim Crow era in the American South from the late 19th century until the mid 20th century.

In different colonised parts of the world, people were gendered and sexualised differently according to different strategies for profit-making. The academic Sita Balani, in her brilliant book Deadly and Slick, shows how the British institutionalised prostitution among Indian women as part of their imperial strategy in the 19th century. It was a way of controlling the sexuality of working class British men who were increasingly being brought over to the colony as soldiers. This policy of registered prostitution then spilled over into seeing any Indian woman as sexually available to British men.

Whole continents were coded as sexually available by imperial forces, with the entire region known as ‘the Orient’ often portrayed as a reclining exotic woman ripe for penetration by white colonising men. Asian men were also coded as feminine and therefore as ‘deviant’ and in need of forceful subjugation.

All of these ‘other’ sexualities and genders were of course set up in contrast to the ‘proper’ embodiment of man and woman (of course, always with a strict gender binary!), epitomised by upper class white folks.

Fast forward

Fast forward to today and it's shocking how little has changed. We see how race and gender shape each other everywhere in our culture. Just look at how Serena Williams gets accused of being ‘too masculine’ and even of, literally, being a man. East Asian men, meanwhile, are still often perceived as feminine while Asian women are seen as hyper-feminine.

This everyday raced and gendered stereotyping is still linked to structural inequalities baked into the global capitalist economy. Academics and racial justice advocates use the term ‘racial capitalism’ to stress that the profits that fuel capitalism are often made through racist inequality. And being gendered and sexualised as somehow ‘other’ or ‘deviant’ is a core way that people are put into racial hierarchies and then treated accordingly (including things like how much we are paid and which services we have access to or are denied).

Just look at the multi-billion dollar porn and sex industry that profits massively from the fetishisation of East Asian women.

Meanwhile, stereotyping both Muslim men and women as having deviant genders (men being aggressive and ‘traditional’ and women being meek but untrustworthy) is a key part of an Islamophobic ‘War on Terror’ that has made billions for western fossil fuel and defence firms.

And Black people are still stereotyped as ‘too masculine’ and sexually aggressive, which is linked to mass incarceration, state violence and economic exploitation — along with Black women facing sexual assault at higher rates than women belonging to other ethnic groups.

Free love

We can laugh about how our sexuality and gender get pigeonholed according to how our ethnicity is perceived. I love comparing notes about it, and even playing with it. But those are strategies for coping and thriving within a system that isn’t made for us.

Those strategies are essential. They’re a kind of group therapy and play that help us find each other and grow stronger together. But as we connect and grow stronger, we should keep our eyes on the real prize: a new system that doesn’t rely on racist and sexist oppression but lets all our brown bodies be free.

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A huge thank you to Laura for her words this week. You can subscribe to her Substack here — which I highly recommend you do. She’s currently doing a video series which is well worth a watch too.

As always, sharing the piece, talking about it with a friend, or dropping a note in the comments goes a long way in supporting Brown Bodies and the conversations we want to have in the world.