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This article examines violence against racialized women in North America and how this violence is obscured through liberal conceptualizations of violence. I focus on cases of interracial stranger attacks of Asian women and girls by men. I contend that these cases – that range from homicide, sexual assault, prowl by night, to tampering with a food product – are connected and are local manifestations of national and global power relations. I end by foregrounding how some of the non-Asian men targeting Asian women are men of colour. I argue that this violence is an assertion of the right to place and space in both national and global hierarchies informed by the neoliberal uplift of elite Asian men and capital, and western constructions of the Asia Pacific century. In highlighting the specificities of Asian gendered difference, the intent is less to include Asian women in theorizing on violence, and more to examine how an intersectional, relational, historically specific and structural analysis of gendered violence brings into clearer view the systems of domination that violence secures.

This paper examines the ambivalent positioning of difference in western multicultural nation-states in the neoliberal moment. It does so by analyzing the multiple and contradictory ways that the figure of Governor General Adrienne Clarkson, a Chinese Canadian woman, was utilized in the service of Canadian nation-building. Much heralded as the first racialized minority (and second woman) to be appointed to the highest public position in the land, Clarkson was chosen to represent and define the Canadian nation to itself and to the international community because of, and not in spite of, her difference. Drawing on media and government texts, this paper highlights the narratives that shaped the meaning of Clarkson's appointment as well as the narratives that were negated. The author emphasizes how gender, in addition to class, race and ethnicity, was central to Clarkson's appointment by analyzing how the disassociation between women and Asian capital was key to her ability to speak for us as one of us. In addition to Canadian government and corporate elite courting of Asian capital, gender was also key to the other narratives that could not be spoken, Clarkson's interracial marriage and discourses of miscegenation.

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