Yellow fever is not a compliment. Fetishization, intersectional discrimination, and the human rights of Asian women in Germany

Abstract

In Germany, the fetishization of Asian Women is routinely received as a compliment rather than recognized as racism, a framing that renders a distinct form of intersectional harm structurally invisible before it can be named. Drawing on intersectionality theory and the human rights principle of due diligence, this thesis asks whether that fetishization constitutes an intersectional human rights violation in the German context, and argues that it does. The research combines ten semi-structured interviews with Asian Women living in Germany with a doctrinal analysis of German, European, and international anti-discrimination law, bringing lived experience and legal framework into dialogue. The interviews reveal fetishization as a structure that operates differently across national readabilities yet rests on a single mechanism, held in place by a “nicht böse gemeint” [not meant in a bad way] framing that transfers authority over the encounter from recipient to speaker and meets no institutional counter-pressure. The legal and policy analysis shows the same invisibility reproduced by the state. Anti-Asian racism is absent even from the National Action Plan against Racism, the General Equal Treatment Act cannot name harm at the intersection of race and gender, and the criminal law treats the racialized dimension as a sentencing factor rather than a constitutive one. The women in this sample are thus rendered invisible twice over, because the racism they experience is not recognized as racism, and because the harm arising at the crossing of race and gender has no category of its own. Germany, the thesis concludes, fails its due-diligence obligation to recognize, prevent, and remedy this harm.