Volume 35, Number 1 doi 10.1215/10407391-11101348
© 2024 by Brown University and dif ference s : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
anna m. moncada storti
Racist Intimacies; or, The Femme Alter Ego
and Her Retribution
This article seeks to lay bare a rather straightforward phenom-
enon: some intimacies are racist. When one thinks of racist intimacies, one
may consider relations of racial fetishism, sexualized racial desires, and
even an unsavory but explicit racial preference in one’s romantic history or
sexual practice. Taking the idea at face value, intimacy acts as a euphemism
for sex and desire. Within this train of thought, racist intimacies describes
an event that happened in March 2021 when a twenty-one-year-old Southern
Baptist man sought to destroy his sexual temptations, murdering six Asian
women and two others in three Atlanta-area massage parlors. Alternatively,
if one were to engage intimacy as a heuristic, racist intimacies offers a
means to observe the never absent influence of empire’s racial ideologies,
specifically as they haunt the sexual and reproductive spheres of social
life. As a framework, racist intimacies indexes an ideological dilemma
in which race becomes both the problem to be solved and the solution to
the problem. Within this train of thought, racist intimacies reflects upon,
for instance, how a white man’s murderous desires illuminate a deeper
history of how the sexualization of Asian women functions as an ongoing
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