In France, the stereotype of people of Asian origin - which conventionally refers to people from East and Southeast Asia in the French context - is that they are a discreet and apolitical community. Since the mid-2010s, there has been a growing body of research on the political engagement of people of Asian origin (Chuang, 2013, 2018; Luguern et al. 2023; Luu & Zhou-Thalamy, 2022; Terray, 2012; Wang, 2022; Wang and Madrisotti, 2023). However, little is yet known about the process by which Asian and socially endowed women politicize around themes of race and gender, even less about how experiences of multiple forms of racism and sexism, as well as class resources, jointly participate in structuring the process of their politicization. This paper proposes to fill this gap by looking at the process of politicization of young graduates of Asian origine, first-generation migrants or descendants born in France. Here, politicization refers to the way in which individuals become involved and position themselves in the fundamental conflicts that structure society (Duchesne and Haegel, 2003).
The empirical data for this paper come from an action-research project on the experiences of racism and discrimination of young graduates from East and Southeast Asia in France (REACTAsie, October 2020 - September 2022). We focus on the women’s life-stories (20), with a perspective based on the whole corpus (32) to better identify the specificities of women’s trajectories.
From a processual perspective on political commitment (Fillieule, 2001), we studied Asian women’s racial and gender socialization processes, their awareness of race and gender relations, and their forms of political commitment. Our study presents three original contributions to the following fields of research: on intersectionality, on the conscientization of race and gender relations, and on the politicization of racialized people. Firstly, our study of Asian women's process of political engagement complexifies the intersectional approach by giving importance to lived events and the temporality of awareness of different social relations over a life course. Next, the study extends the analysis of racialized women's politicization by considering two key social properties of the respondents: class position (of origin and arrival) and migratory generation. By cross-referencing these two social factors, the analysis distinguishes politicization processes between those that first politicize around gender and then around race, and those for whom both processes take place simultaneously. The politicization process is further differentiated between descendants and first-generation migrants, due to the distinct temporality with which the two groups socialize around race. Finally, this work on socially privileged women of Asian origin - given their social position on arrival - differs from previous studies that have often focused on the collective actions of mobilizations and demonstrations organized by socially precarious actors. Often ignored, the everyday strategies of resistance deployed by middle- and upper-class racialized people, illuminated here through the case of women of Asian origin, provide a fine-tuned understanding of the intersecting mechanism of white and male domination, as well as of ordinary forms of resistance in contemporary French society (Karimi, 2020).
