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

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.