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Asian women's paradoxical position of hypervisbility and invisibility is a result of society caricaturing and fetishizing their sexuality and bodies while simultaneously denying their humanity and personhood. Despite the long history of objectification and fetishization of Asian women in the United States, extant mental health counseling training programs and literature offer limited guidance to counselors on this concern, perpetuating an epistemic lapse in mental health counselors' competency. With rising anti-Asian hate, the racialized COVID-19 pandemic, and anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States, there exist increased threats to Asian women's mental health. Responding to a paucity of counseling literature, this article offers strategies grounded in the multidimensional model of broaching behavior to broach racialized sexual harassment experienced by Asian women. Implications for counselor training and future research are also offered.
Despite differences among Asian immigrants, multiracial Asians, and Asian Americans based on immigration status, health outcomes, regions of origin (e.g., East Asia) and worldviews, each of the communities face the common daunting challenge of anti-Asian hate and crime in the United States. Although Asian communities are far from monolithic, they face a collective challenge of being the target of anti-Asian violence and the model minority myth in the United States (Ahn et al., 2021; C. D. Chan et al., 2021).
Although the historic roots of the model minority myth can be traced to the 1800s, the term gained salience in the 1960s (Wu, 1995). Essentialized and homogenized data on racial disparities in the United States were made available in the Moynihan Report. Individuals with various racial and ethnic backgrounds were masked under an umbrella term of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI), denying their significant heterogeneity. Arbitrary markers of success such as employment and educational achievements of AAPI communities were used to pathologize Black communities and blame them for their challenges (Yi et al., 2020). In other words, the seeming success of AAPI communities was weaponized to justify the supposedly limited or nonexistent impact of racism. AAPI communities were presented as the ideal or model minorities, who essentially did not need any institutional support to succeed. Thus, White supremacist caricatures of minoritized communities were used to pit one community against another (Yi et al., 2020).
Facing stereotypes grounded in toxic model minority myth and nativism,...