I browse my camera roll, sifting through both pre-after hours and post-hair appointment selfies and ask my roommate to AirDrop me that one pic they took when I decided to dye my black hair with an underlayer of blonde.
In the search for love, whether for life or the night, it feels inevitable to succumb to the task of getting back on “the apps.” Online dating applications like Tinder ask us to market ourselves as desirable and available potential partners, requiring us to distill our essence as fully formed human beings into a few words and a carousel of five photos. The process of using the applications relies on an unknown audience deciding whether or not you are a viable partner – or if you’re hot enough – within seconds of a selfie popping up on a screen. The first, and often only, impression is dependent on the image.
Relying on an image to find a deep and lasting connection is a double-binded contradiction: you want to attract someone who is into the real you, not just the image of you, but can this be possible when the mechanism is founded solely on the image itself? The template of a dating profile necessitates that we craft illusory façades, cropping our facsimilated bodies to condense ourselves into carefully curated pictures to be longed for or lusted after. We serve ourselves up as images of desirability in a marketplace of yearning, to be either discarded (swiped left) or consumed (swiped right). Self-commodification is a prerequisite. Therefore, we must do our best to advertise our authenticity, charm, and sexual magnetism, promoting ourselves as the best potential partner in the economy of attraction.
In navigating the intricacies of online dating, the politics of representation become further nuanced, particularly when it comes to what type of body is on display. For me, using the tool of the dating app requires an interrogation of what is at stake when the body being presented is that of an Asian woman. If a dating profile necessitates the reduction of the self into its most superficial parts, then I must inherently participate in the process of self-fetishization that comes with the display of my body as romantically or sexually available. What are the consequences when I consent to presenting my image under these terms and conditions? In Leslie Bow’s book Racist Love, she states that “colloquially understood, race fetishism involves sexual objectification and the same process of reduction and exaggeration bound to the stereotype: Asian woman as hair, eyes, or skin.”¹ Uploading myself as an image comes at a cost, and the price paid is the consent I must give to be reduced to my most abstracted racialized signifiers. I ask myself: Is this person interested in me or do they just have an Asian fetish?
I decide to upload the thirst trap I took in six-inch patent leather boots while wearing my mom’s silk, mandarin-collared shirt that she had custom-made while teaching English in Chongqing, China.
Addressing the concept of the image, Stuart Hall states that photography is not a “unitary thing,” but a set of multiple “practices, institutions and historical conjunctures in which the photographic text is produced, circulated and deployed.”² If the location of the photographic text’s production, circulation, and deployment is the dating app, then in order to participate, I must willingly give my image up for an ascription to this conjunction based on the signifiers of my body. Within the context of a dating profile, specific conjunctures become bound to my image as an Asian woman. It becomes impossible to disentangle myself from how the Orientalized female body has been historically exploited and canonized as one which is passive, subservient, and hypersexual.
The legacies of imperial and colonial histories have etched enduring marks on the bodies of Asian women. These imprints can be traced back to countless historical junctures: From Canadian immigration policy and the amendment to the Head Tax, which created an exemption for Chinese women contingent upon their marriage to non-Chinese men; to militarized sex enslavement through the trafficking of hundreds of thousands of women predominantly from Korea and China during World War II; to the rise of Asian mail-order brides from Southeast Asian countries like Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam in the ’80s and ’90s. The long historical narrative of the Asian woman as both something to fear (temptress) and something to tame (servant) determines the way in which her image becomes culturally coded in our contemporary perception.
The image of the Asian woman as a vessel for racialized anxiety and desire has been explored throughout contemporary art by artists ranging from Yoko Ono to Laurel Nakadate. In the work of artist Charlotte Zhang, she too contends with these constructions of Asian womanhood, addressing the psychosexual pulse that underscores her representation under the weight of wartime, legislative imperial history, and colonial violence. In the exhibition Paradise Holds Itself Shut (2023), images of the Asian woman as devoted nurse, mukbang entertainer, dutiful mother, pornographic actress, and abiding fiancée are collaged together to make a nightmarish polysatin quilt of distorted faces and bodies. The Asian image exists in Zhang’s service, be that of sexual fulfillment, submission, or maternal duty.
Zhang’s textile work The punisher/The ecstasy of Saint Donaldina (2022) specifically draws on the legacies of Chinese indentured labour, sex slavery, and missionary saviourism, highlighting the overt contradictions of Asian immigrant women as those “who must be protected from and protected against.”³ In this citation, Zhang refers to how the United States government enforced its protection against the sexual immorality of Chinese women by legislating their exclusion in the Page Act. Meanwhile, Christianity claimed to provide protection to Chinese women who had become sold into sex slavery as a result of illegally immigrating under this very same legislation. In Zhang’s piece, the image of the Asian woman is completely steamrolled and mangled into two dimensions. She is a nameless substitute sitting in as an avatar for the prescription of the Asian female body and its implications. Her amorphous face permits her multiplicities as she becomes both villain and victim simultaneously.
The presentation of the Asian image becomes a site where a score of engendered histories is played out. How do these histories inform contemporary manifestations of the Asian woman in the Western racial imaginary and give rise to fetishisms such as hentai porn body pillows or acts of violence such as the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings? Imperial and colonial narratives and their resulting desires and anxieties determine how the Asian female body becomes encoded with meaning, thereby affecting the way that I choose to represent my own identity as a flattened or cropped version of myself. There becomes a sheer irony in making myself available on a dating app considering that the value of the Orientalized female body has historically been attributed to her sexual availability to begin with.
I pause before uploading my last image. It’s a mirror selfie in front of my bed. I am wearing a very plain white t-shirt and a denim miniskirt – an ultimately banal photo except for the Hitachi hiding in plain sight on top of my sheets.
In front of the screen, I invoke two irreconcilable realities: I am fully aware of the way my body is a receptacle for narratives of racialized sexual desire; at the same time, I participate and take pleasure from presenting myself as someone with a sexual desire of my own. My ability to experience sexual agency becomes inexorably linked to my complicity. All at once, there is a paradoxical struggle in which I know I occupy both subject and object at the same time. And the way for me to find an agency is to exercise my subject position: I desire to be desired.
