Chapter 25 Further Reading: Race, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Desire

Primary Sources and Essential Reading

Rudder, Christian. Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity — What Our Online Lives Tell Us About Our Offline Selves. Crown, 2014. The book that brought OkCupid's racial preference data to wide public attention. Rudder is a journalist and data analyst, not a sociologist, and his analysis is more descriptive than structural — but the data is compelling and the book is accessible. Read it alongside critical commentary on its framing limitations. Chapter 9 ("Race and Attraction") is the most relevant.

Feliciano, Cynthia, Belinda Robnett, and Golnaz Komaie. "Gendered Racial Exclusion Among White Internet Daters." Social Science Research 38, no. 1 (2009): 39–54. A rigorous sociological analysis of explicit racial exclusion in online dating profiles, finding that a majority of White men and women on Yahoo! Personals stated preferences that excluded Black partners. The use of explicit stated preferences (rather than inferred behavioral patterns) makes this analysis distinctive and methodologically important.

Lin, Ken-Hou, and Jennifer Lundquist. "Mate Selection in Cyberspace: The Intersection of Race, Gender, and Education." American Journal of Sociology 119, no. 1 (2013): 183–215. An analysis of racial hierarchy in online dating that gives careful attention to gender asymmetries within racial groups — particularly the different positions of Asian men and Asian women in cross-racial desirability patterns. Essential for anyone who wants to move beyond aggregate analysis.

Philosophical and Theoretical Foundations

Zheng, Robin. "Why Yellow Fever Isn't Flattering: A Case Against Racial Fetishes." Journal of the American Philosophical Association 2, no. 3 (2016): 400–419. The most important philosophical treatment of racial fetishism currently available. Zheng carefully distinguishes between the individual moral question (is the fetishizer a racist?) and the social question (what are the effects of racialized preferences?), and argues that the "preference or prejudice?" framing is a false binary. Essential reading.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color." Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–1299. The foundational text of intersectionality theory. Crenshaw demonstrates how the compounding of race and gender produces forms of harm and disadvantage that neither framework can capture alone. The applications to desire and desirability in this chapter draw directly on this framework.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. Grove Press, 1952/2008. Fanon's psychoanalytic account of how colonialism structures the inner life — including desire — of both colonized and colonizer subjects. Chapter 3, "The Man of Color and the White Woman," is most directly relevant to desire and racial hierarchy. Demanding but essential for a structural understanding of how colonial history operates inside individual psychology.

Empirical Research

Bruch, Elizabeth E., and M. E. J. Newman. "Aspirational Pursuit of Mates in Online Dating Markets." Science Advances 4, no. 8 (2018). A network analysis of messaging behavior in a large dating platform showing that aspirational partner selection (messaging users rated more desirable than oneself) is nearly universal — and that the aspirational structure itself reflects racial hierarchy. Methodologically sophisticated.

Hersch, Joni. "Profiling the New Face of Poverty." American Economic Review 98, no. 2 (2008): 469–473. Documents the earnings premium for lighter skin tones among immigrants to the United States — evidence that colorism operates across economic domains, not only romantic ones, and that it is structural rather than purely perceptual.

Memoir, Testimony, and Cultural Criticism

Hong, Cathy Park. Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. One World, 2020. An essential collection of essays that includes powerful accounts of racialized desire, fetishization, and the experience of being seen-and-not-seen as an Asian-American woman. Not a social science text but indispensable for understanding the phenomenology of racialized desire from the inside.

Marchetti, Gina. Romance and the Yellow Peril: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction. University of California Press, 1993. The definitive historical analysis of Asian and Asian-American representation in Hollywood cinema, tracing the construction of the "lotus flower" and "dragon lady" archetypes. Essential background for understanding the media history that produced contemporary fetishization patterns.

For Further Exploration

Students interested in the political economy of app design and racial bias should explore Safiya Umoja Noble's Algorithms of Oppression (2018) for an analysis of how search and recommendation systems encode racial bias, and Virginia Eubanks's Automating Inequality (2018) for a broader account of algorithmic discrimination. Neither focuses specifically on dating apps, but both provide crucial context for understanding how digital systems reproduce structural inequalities.