In Rina’s third and fourth tracks, “STFU!” and “Comme Des Garçons (Like The Boys)”, she tackles the issues of fetishization and the double standards regarding confident women. Asian women frequently have to deal with people with “yellow fever”, a slang term for an Asian fetish. There is a strong historical context for Asian fetishes, especially among White men, where Asian women are portrayed and thus monolithically thought of as sexual deviants, conservative, docile, and submissive, and were as such the ideal sexual partner. This would then often shift the blame for the White man’s hypersexuality onto the Asian women he pursued, saying that they were a corrupting force.[10] This reasoning would be used to excuse anti-Asian laws and to rationalize violence against Asian Americans. In March 2021, Robert Long shot and killed 8 and injured 1 at 3 Asian spas in the Atlanta area. He called the spas “a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate”, showing that, despite the locations just being spas and massage parlors, the fact that they were Asian made them inherently sexual in his view.[12]

Rachelle Ann Gao as Gigi in Miss Saigon

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Minority Stress Theory is an extremely important theory in regards to the mental health outcomes for minority groups. It becomes especially salient when talking about minoritized racial groups that are also sexual minorities. This is because of something called the buffer hypothesis. The buffer hypothesis posits that strong social support can “buffer” the pathogenic effects of stress.[14] Social support thus becomes exponentially more important for queer people of color.

Drawing for The Confusing Intersectionality of the Queer Asian Identity

A Good Morning America video about an online community of queer Asian women and nonbinaries (above) and a collage for For Queer Asians, Community Means Family (below)

[5]

SAWAYAMA Track No. 3, “STFU!” and Track No. 4, “Comme Des Garçons (Like The Boys)”

Asian women have been portrayed as sexually deviant in media for over a century, which helps perpetuate the stereotype. Rachel Ramirez’s Vox article explains the history of the sexualization of Asian women, showing how Asian women were banned from being imported for fears that they were engaging in prostitution, despite the lack of base.[8] The stereotype of Asian women also being quiet and docile play into how young Asian girls are socialized. Through gender and racial socialization, Asian girls are taught, sometimes by their own parents, that in order to perform their Asianness and their womanhood, they should be quiet and repress their own sexuality.[9] Confidence is often seen as abrasive, even though confidence is one of the main tenets of how boys are socialized. Rina addresses this in “Comme Des Garçons (Like The Boys)”, where she subverts expected gender roles by exclaiming things like “I’m so confident” and “Excuse my ego”, while telling girls “…it’s okay, you should never be ashamed to have it all”.[13]

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However, if it is their intersecting identities that makes social support more important, it is also their intersecting identities that makes finding social support more difficult. If a queer Asian were to look for a queer community for support, they can be faced with overwhelming Whiteness and experience race-based discrimination.[15] If they were to go to their Asian community for support, they might find that there is little to no queer representation in their circle. As a result, in order to not be forced to sacrifice one identity for the other, an affinity group that is catered to their intersecting identities is crucial. Otherwise, it can be hard for queer Asians, especially in their youth, to find comfort in their intertwined identities, which Kay Patel talks about in her op-ed The Confusing Intersectionality of the Queer Asian Identity.[16] It is especially hard to embrace your entire identity when you belong to a racial group that oftentimes sees part of you as a disturbance or burden to the norm.

SAWAYAMA Track No. 11, “Chosen Family”

When a queer Asian is finally able to find a support system, the mental health outcomes are great. Because they are in a group that understands their struggles, they are set up for the buffer hypothesis to be more successful. When a member of the group goes through a stressful event related to their identity, they will have a group of people that share that identity to support them through the stressful event. This is what the Good Morning America video about Subtle Asian Sapphic Squad (SASS), Xtra article For Queer Asians, Community Means Family, and the 11th track of SAWAYAMA, “Chosen Family”, are about. SASS is an online community of over 7,000 members at the time of Good Morning America’s coverage, and the event coordinator, Chieko, described the group as “…your closest group of friends”. Chieko also said that she feels like she can relax more in SASS than she can in a White space. Other members expressed how good SASS has been for their mental health, especially since they felt like they had to hide their identity originally because of cultural norms.[17] The Xtra article highlights queer Asian communities in Canada and how liberating it is for some people to be able to blend their sexuality or gender expression with their culture. The group is especially important because it also gives queer Asian youth a space to find community and to see adults like them living their lives, something Kay Patel expressed she felt lost about, as she hadn’t seen queer Asian adults in her life that could show her healthy relationships with their identities.[16][18] Rina expresses the same sentiment about finding community in “Chosen Family”, the 11th track of SAWAYAMA. “Chosen Family” is explicitly about using communities to help each other get over stressors and pain that they’ve suffered through, using the term chosen family, which has been used extensively within the queer community. Rina describes the buffer hypothesis in her verses, singing “Give me a pen and I’ll rewrite the pain”.[19]