APA voices in feminism—New exhibit at the Wing Luke

WING LUKE MUSEUM CLOSED MARCH 14 – APRIL 13

By Carolyn Bick
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY

Asian Pacific Womens Caucus at CID Festival 1979 (Photo courtesy of Maria Batayola)

As a Filipino woman of mixed heritage who immigrated to the United States with her family when she was 14 years old, Maria Batayola knows what it’s like to simultaneously feel the need for feminism and be shut out and alienated by it.

Batayola was a student at the University of Washington, during the Vietnam War era, and remembers that veterans and enlisted men would hit on her, first in Vietnamese, expecting her to understand it, and then in Tagalog, the native language of the Philippines, once they learned she was Filipina. She learned to navigate these interactions, but she always did it in a way that would preserve what she calls her “likeability factor,” because of the implied expectation in said interactions that East Asian and Pacific Islander women be meek and submissive.

But she didn’t find the support she needed from the feminist movements on campus, dominated as they were by white women who did not understand her position, leaving Batayola unsure of where her voice could be broadcast. This unsteady feeling was underscored by her upbringing.

API Chaya Vigil 2019 (Photo by Auriza Ugalino)

“As an immigrant, I was born and raised to be a Filipino woman. I am socialized and inculcated to it. … When I came here, there is no articulation, no regular articulation of what it is to be American, and what it is to be an American woman, other than the articulation of marketing and media,” Batayola said. “So, I think, for many of us who are immigrants, and I think still for the second, third, maybe even fourth generation, the [Asian Pacific American (APA)] values are still brought through––and, again, there is no universal APA value. It goes back to the specific nationality, which, in itself can be very diverse.”

This is why Batayola is so excited about the exhibit at the Wing Luke Museum, called, “Hear Us Rise: APA Voices in Feminism,” which opened on March 6. The exhibit features the works of different women in the APA community, such as the visual and textual work of Tessa Hulls and that of Krista Suh, who created the Pussyhat Project. The exhibit’s main goal is to showcase APA women who are fighting gender discrimination, with the added backdrop of racism, colonialism, and imperialism, said Wing Luke senior exhibit developer Mikala Woodward.

“These things are intersectional, and the way race and gender intersect for Asian women and Pacific Islander women is different than for other women of color,” Woodward said.

Though she has since amplified her voice—starting in her time at the university, when she co-founded what became the Northwest Asian American Theatre, and now as part of the Asian Pacific Women’s Caucus, as well as the founding board member of what is now known as API Chaya—Batayola sees that the struggle for equal footing in the feminist movement is far from over, because of the nuances of what it means within her community.

“When you’re dealing with both sexism and racism, sometimes the most predominant issue is the racism that not just affects our women, but our men and our families, also,” Batayola explained. “So, to that regard, the feminism isn’t just separating from the men, starting our own businesses, that kind of thing, although, that happens, too. But a perfect example of how we approached this is organizing for anti-domestic violence. … We knew it had to be a healing of the family—that women couldn’t always just leave.”

Batayola serves as a member of the Wing Luke’s community advisory committee, which helped the museum create the exhibit. The committee teamed up with the Asian American Feminist Collective in New York City, hiring the group’s co-founder, Tiffany Tso, to write the informational texts, timelines, and backgrounds for the exhibit.

As a Chinese Taiwanese woman, Tso holds a similar view of feminism as Batayola. From her own personal experience, Tso has often found feminism boiled down to a literal Black-and-white issue.

“We are becoming a larger population, first of all, and second of all, I think we are becoming more politically engaged as a community of people who, historically, have been more disengaged, when it comes to politics,” Tso said. “So, I think the same would definitely apply to feminism, because feminism is a political identity that, I think, can be seen as controversial, for whatever reason. … I think that the identification of being an Asian American and a feminist, or a Pacific Islander and a feminist, is a complex identity that less people can really identify with.”

Tso said that, for her, this identity is so complex, because of the way it mixes with traditional Chinese values.

“People think that, you know, in East Asian countries like China, women are not equal, that we can’t identify as something as radical as feminism, because you look back at traditional Chinese values, and that’s antithetical to the two things going together,” Tso said. “But I think that that is clearly not true. In every single community, in every single country, there has been a feminist movement of some sort. And maybe they don’t use those exact words, but that there are people who are practicing radical feminist ideology in every single culture, and there has always been a fight for whatever people might consider feminist fights.”

And like Batayola, Tso, too, has experienced fetishization and being hypersexualized by Western society.

“There is definitely this aspect of being sexualized, but without any agency. … There are several stereotypes, of course. We’re both nerdy and studious, as well as being, for some reason, like, a dragon lady that is super hypersexual and a dominatrix. How can we be both of these things all at once?” Tso said.

But, Tso admitted, some of this also comes from her own upbringing.

“I’ve personally felt myself coming into this realization and reckoning with my own sexuality, where I realize that so much of it was projected onto me because of either racialized stereotypes, or even, sometimes, your family, where chasteness is valued, and being pure—you know, like just saying, ‘Don’t even talk about sex.’ … I internalized a lot of things around heteronormativity and cisnormativity … and then also the way I should be viewed or how I should move through the world.”

Tso said she also understands that the way she practices feminism wouldn’t necessarily work for her older female relatives, because she is part of the younger generation.

“There are differences, and no one way is correct—it just is what it is, and we all adapt the way that we can,” Tso said. “I never look at the way that my mom or my aunt practiced their femininity or the way they identify themselves politically—I would never judge them or project American values onto them. This is the whole practice of Asian American feminism … we do have to have this initial lens that we do things through, that we understand the straddling of two different cultures, and that one person’s liberation doesn’t look like someone else’s liberation.”

Hear Us Rise: APA Voices in Feminism is at the Wing Luke Museum, 719 South King Street, Seattle, WA 98104. Tickets may be purchased online or at the museum.

Carolyn can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.