[1] It developed to seek for a space that challenges hetero-patriarchal aspects of Asian America studies and racial marginalization by mainstream white feminisms.
[2] As part of the national reckoning on racial justice inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, college students organized on college campuses for ethnic studies, and eventually Asian American studies, to be established, most notably through the protests of the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) at San Francisco State University.
At the same time, revolutions in China and around the world, Cold War tensions, and the US military campaign in Korea, Vietnam, and other parts of Southeast Asia led to conferences like the 1971 Indochinese Women's Conferences in Vancouver which mobilized Asian American women around the continent and developed a transnational awareness against war and imperialism across the US empire and Asia.
[6] Scholars have argued for an alternative historiography to complicate depictions of Asian American history as based solely on racial exclusion, thus overlooking the importance of gender and sexuality and marginalizing the experiences of women and queer people.
[7] The first wave of Asian immigration coincided with westward expansion at a time when femininity was determined by women's ability to perform domestic labor.
The underlying message of the Page Act was that Asian women fail to meet the moral standards of American society.
[7] Nineteenth century morality in the US was based on the ability to maintain a two parent nuclear household which was determined by race and class.
[7] Therefore, Chinese women were allowed to immigrate as long as they could uphold the middle-class values of a male breadwinner and a female homemaker.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 allowed reunification of the immediate family—parents, children under 21, and spouses—reproducing the heteronormative middle-class nuclear family structure.
[10] Movements critiqued South African apartheid and US imperialism, supporting armed resistance in Honduras, El Salvador, Chile, Grenada, Beirut and the Philippines.
[4] Triple Jeopardy depicted Chinese and Vietnamese women living under Communism as revolutionary, serving as inspiration for a socialist, anti-colonial revolution in the US.
However, this has been critiqued for what is called "radical orientalism" which idealized and romanticized Asia as an alternative to imperialism and capitalism, while still maintaining the separation between East and West.
[4] Additionally, TWWA lacked an analysis of how people of color in the US are complicit in upholding imperialism and benefit from the exploitation of the "Third World."
Co-founder Frances Beal, when talking about the origins of TWWA, emphasizes the importance of understanding how racialized state violence, for example the forced sterilization of Puerto Rican and Black women, is connected to US imperialism, while refusing uniformity.
In cultural studies, Asian American feminist scholars have developed theoretical contributions to the literature stating that gender and race cannot be excluded when analyzing the material conditions that lead to social domination.
[11] In The Intimacies of Four Continents, Lowe connects the figure of the Chinese coolie to the African slave in making an intimate network between empire and slavery.
[19] In other contexts, it has been referred to as the various ways people resist "legacies of power," or the oppressive structures that define our lives, not only in politics but in everyday life.
However, Lee Boggs was doing the solidarity work of Asian American feminism "decades before civil-right, antiwar, and feminists activists redefined US culture and politics".
[27] The AAFC uses creative feminist medians, such as zines and poetry, to amplify intersectional experiences of Asian American women and to emphasize collective solidarity building.
[28] The AAFC's objective is working to dismantle systems of capitalism, racism, and patriarchy by providing channels for community building, and political education.
[30] The zine was aimed to archive and collect Asian American feminist political mobilization through community care during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The work of Ananya Dance Theatre (ADT) emerges from women of color feminism, which emphasizes understanding and connecting through difference.
As imperialism spread in the Pacific, Enlightenment-era Europeans differentiated themselves from the "other" based on emerging notions of race, nationality, gender and proper sexuality.
In Aloha America: Hula Circuits through the US Empire, Imada described the process of colonialism and representations of Hawaiians and the commodification of Haiwaii through the tourism industry.
[36] In Pinay Power: Peminist Critical Theory Melinda L. de Jesús distinguishes Peminism from Asian American Feminism as "the gendered analysis of imperial trauma" as the Philippines was colonized by both Spain and the US.
The "model minority myth" refers to the misleading racial stereotype of Asian Americans as a class defined by the high value they place on education professional success and upward mobility, values which are assumed to come from ethnic culture as opposed to class resources and the pressures to succeed as immigrants.