Asian Americans as Objects of Desire: Gendered Racialized Attraction Among White Spouses Married to East Asians

Previous scholarship demonstrates that White people are privileged gatekeepers of interracial relationships in the United States; their racialization of minoritized groups has consequences for these groups in mainstream society. This article, based on 34 in-depth interviews with White spouses, examines how heterosexually intermarried White men and women frame their sexual and romantic desire for their East Asian spouses by analyzing their “vocabularies of desire”—socially constructed systems of meaning through which individuals understand and express their romantic and sexual preferences. Assimilation theory suggests that high rates of Asian-White intermarriage indicate the blurring of racial boundaries between these groups. However, this study finds that White spouses’ vocabularies reify socially dominant perceptions of racialized differences between White and East Asian spouses, and White and Asian people generally. Consistent with sexual politics and racialized attraction scholarship, White men often use exotifying language to describe their attraction to East Asian women. Previous studies document White women’s exclusion of Asian men from their dating and marriage pools; conversely, this study shows that White women who marry East Asian men are not entirely exceptions to this broader pattern of racialized exclusion. Rather than including East Asian men in their sexual and romantic considerations, White women exceptionalize their husbands, setting them apart from other Asian men. Both hypervisible and invisible aspects of the racialization process are apparent in respondents’ vocabularies, intersectionally constructing East Asian Americans in sexual and romantic fields as racialized “Others.” These vocabularies reflect and reinforce race and gender hierarchies within the intimate realm of marriage.