A Guide to Self-Fetishization: “South Asian” Edition

I always thought of my body as a canvas for identity. The black body hair growing out of my stark brown skin as an ode to my roots. Skin stretching over fat and muscle forming curves and flat planes, sprinkled with stretchmarks to remind me how seamlessly I’ve grown. Skin that the sun greets like an old love, glowing bronze with gentle strokes of light and wrapping around almond-shaped eyes in the darkest of brown. Eyes under brows stubborn and erratic when ungroomed like the mind behind them. I look at my body and see an inseverable connection to a culture I was once so wholly immersed in. A connection to a country where no one had to guess where I came from, where I fit into the homogeneity with an almost addictive ease. And now that I am away, my body is my most intimate connection to an identity that was, once upon a time, all of who I was. 

I often turn to this physical representation in the United States, where identity is not as straightforward as ethnicity. Immigrants migrate into the US from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and build lives for their children on soil foreign to them. Their children are Americans – most of them Americans that know no life in depth outside of the United States. But their features are different from those around them. They eat other food at home, speak another language with their parents. And these additions to the basic American identity create a feeling of otherness, established in qualities that are tangible enough to be noticed with frequency. Otherness that is isolating, that develops a need to be a part of another identity focused on defining a collective and disjointed cultural experience. Hence, the birth of the “South Asian” – an identity focusing on the similarities of people from countries built and birthed within arm’s reach of each other. This “South Asian” collective identity does not exist within the region that is defined as South Asia. For the countries that make up South Asia, there are clear cultural and political divides that allow each individual identity within the region to remain distinct. Cultural nuances are more prominent here because they are lived experiences. The focus is on differences that bring out unique qualities of the lives lived in each region. This contrasts to being “South Asian” in the United States, where there is a larger focus on foundational similarity between immigrants from different countries in the region.  

“South Asian” people have built their own unique and distinct identity within the United States. There are Instagram accounts dedicated to South Asian pop art, fashion and clothing pages that promote brown attire, writing and literature expressing the difficulties of being “South Asian” in the US, the list goes on. The “South Asian” identity has become its own micro-culture within the larger immigrant culture of the United States, and there is significant power in this. Power in brown bodies laying the groundwork for their own representation in historically homogenous white spaces. But it is important to consider the type of platform being built, and how that platform may represent cultures in a region that we, as “South Asian” Americans, may not be familiar enough with to represent. 

Since “South Asian” culture in the United States is the result of a diaspora of gargantuan proportions, this identity exists in a vacuum. The identity is not self-explanatory and is difficult to carry outside of the United States. While a Pakistani born and raised in Pakistan may feel more comfortable carrying their identity around with them, the same cannot be said for a “South Asian” American. A “South Asian” American does not represent South Asian culture on the whole, because this geographic region does not have a collective culture. And as an American, there is very little understanding of the nuances that individualize each culture within the region. Therefore, building platforms for “South Asians” to act as representatives for the region of South Asia is a cause for concern. Because these regions are being explored by individuals who have not experienced enough to represent them accurately. More often than not, children of “South Asian” immigrants turn to their roots in an attempt to identify with something more, to draw themselves out of the discomfort that comes from diversity. But this identification does not give them enough insight to portray themselves as an accurate representation of the “South Asian” region identity.  

These are the children of immigrants who have never lived in the culture of their ethnicity. Whose experiences have been entirely distinct, who cannot speak to their ethnicity’s past and present using the eloquence woven into their mother-tongues. The children who wear saris and lehengas on TikTok and Instagram to sport their patriotism, who speak of brown skin and thick eyebrows as if these are cultural highlights rather than just a simplistic representation of identity. By only focusing on the tangible components of what makes them “South Asian,” they suggest that it is solely the physical qualities of a brown person that defines them. By diminishing everything but the physical, their representation of their own bodies results in a sexualized representation of brown bodies on the whole. In other words, a fetishization of who we are as people in the United States.

There is nothing wrong with showing and appreciating physical features – on the contrary, there is an empowerment in the normalization of the brown body. The problem here, stems from when the depiction of physical features is tagged as a “cultural representation” in isolation, without any deeper depiction of what the culture is in a non-physical sense. The ethnic body is not powerful in isolation – it is powerful because of what it represents underneath. By focusing solely on the body, they eliminate the value and significance of cultural traditions that are ever-changing, and that build our foundations as dynamic people outside of static qualities like skin color. As such, we lose our ability and our right to participate in the larger cultural experience. 

Identifying with a culture means more than parading around in traditional clothing and owning physicality. Identifying with a culture requires self-education – it requires us to recognize the interplay between history and politics in the countries of our ethnic origin. It requires us to dive into new and emerging musical trends and artistic movements. To support causes from the regions we identify with, and to bring those causes into public purview using the platforms that we have built for ourselves. Embracing a culture physically and not at all mentally contributes to the fetishization of that culture – a modern oppression of regions that have long been exploited by the white eye. When the physicality is not a representation of something deeper and more meaningful, there is nothing left but brown features used as a sexual asset rather than a cultural expression. And there is a stark difference between the two – because as a “South Asian,” I’d like to be known for more than my big eyebrows and my body in a sari.