Feeling Yellow, Performing White: Exploring the Racialized Gendered Experiences of Chinese Faculty Members in Canadian Higher Education from an Affective Intersectional Lens

Zhao, Chenzi Feng

Feeling Yellow, Performing White: Exploring the Racialized Gendered Experiences of Chinese Faculty Members in Canadian Higher Education from an Affective Intersectional Lens

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Zhao_Chenzi Feng_PhD_2025_thesis.pdf (2.43 MB)

Date

2025-10-17

Authors

Zhao, Chenzi Feng

Abstract

What is it like to live and work as a faculty member in Canadian higher education institutions while Chinese? This qualitative case study answers this question through in-depth interviews with 26 academics of Chinese descent who have worked in universities and colleges across Canada, analyzing their experiences and insights from a critical intersectional, affective lens. The study found that Chinese academics confront structural constraints as they navigate neoliberal, colonial, patriarchal Canadian institutions. Their embodied, linguistic, and socio-racio-cultural differences are used to discredit their professional legitimacy and exclude them from career advancement and leadership opportunities. Their professional lives are deeply influenced by historically constructed Asian stereotypes, including the “model minority”, the “perpetual foreigner”, and the “yellow peril,” which situate them in a liminal space where they must undertake extra affective and intellectual labour to perform whiteness. This in-between position causes alienation, ostracization, and inter- and intra-group aggression, while rendering their contributions and struggles invisible. Chinese women face exacerbated discrimination, bullying, disrespect, exploitation, and structural devaluation of their care labour and service work in academia. Consequently, Chinese faculty members experience intensified stress and precarity, unbelonging, and emotional burdens. Yet despite marginalization and constraints, they maintain strong emotional attachment and commitment to their academic careers through various affective reorientation strategies including emotional self-regulation, denial and reframing, and individual resilience and entrepreneurialism. These findings reveal how racism and gender regimes are intertwined in Chinese academics’ experiences in Western institutions. The study further explores the ways in which neoliberalism and whiteness together shape the affective structures of Chinese faculty members. These affective structures, necessary for their survival in hostile institutional spaces, simultaneously reinforce white dominance and the status quo. The goal of this inquiry is to interrogate the social and structural through the lived, embodied, and emotional. It aims to provide counternarratives to neoliberal institutional claims of equality and neutrality, and the belief that Chinese individuals are academically successful and free from discrimination. The study also aspires to advance understanding of racialization through Asianization, inspire solidarity in collective anti-racist, decolonial endeavours, and inform policies and practices that transform academia and society towards equity.

Summary for Lay Audience

What is it like to be a Chinese professor in Canada? Despite the general perception that Chinese individuals are overrepresented in higher education, and Canada's reputation for diversity and inclusion, academics of Chinese background face significant challenges that are often invisible. This study interviewed 26 Chinese faculty members working at universities and colleges across Canada to understand how their experiences and emotions are influenced by factors such as race, gender, language, and culture. The study found that Chinese faculty members encounter discrimination that questions their abilities and legitimacy. They are frequently seen through harmful stereotypes, either as the “model minority” naturally good at academics, the “perpetual foreigner” too alien to truly belong in Canada, or “yellow peril” that threatens whiteness. These stereotypes create impossible situations: they are expected to overperform and meet Western institutional standards, but are simultaneously treated as outsiders who do not deserve leadership roles or career advancement. For Chinese women who face both racial and gender disadvantages, the situation is even worse. They experience bullying and disrespect from colleagues and students, with their work and contributions exploited and undervalued by their institutions. Chinese faculty members described constantly having to work extra hard to prove themselves and fit in through self-monitoring, self-censoring, and suppressing parts of their cultural identity. Such intellectual and emotional labour is exhausting and isolating. Many participants reported high stress, lacking the sense of belonging, even feeling suffocated and stuck. Yet they tend to persevere in their academic careers, developing coping strategies to survive in unwelcoming environments. However, these strategies add to their emotional burdens and reproduce the inequities they face. By examining the specific forms of exclusion Chinese academics confront and their unique position in complex racial and cultural dynamics, this research advances understanding of how racism operates through myths that hide white dominance and prevent solidarity among marginalized groups. It reveals the gap between Canadian universities’ claims about diversity and fairness and the lived reality of their faculty, and demonstrates that institutions and society as a whole need to move beyond surface-level diversity initiatives to truly decolonize and create equitable environments.