15 AAPI Feminists Everyone Should Know

Boss bitches on deck.

The Asian American feminist movement encompasses a range of intersectional race, class, and gender issues in the United States.

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Here are some badass Asian American women artists, writers, politicians, and activists who have broken barriers, contributed to our history, and continue to inspire us today.

1. Yuri Kochiyama

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Born and raised in San Pedro, California, Kochiyama's political awareness began after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when her bedridden father was arrested and detained in a hospital with a sheet wrapped around the bed marked "prisoner of war." He died within the year. Shortly after, Kochiyama and her family were sent to a concentration camp for two years.

In the early 1960s, Kochiyama moved to Harlem, where she rallied with Asian American, Black, and Third World movements for a variety of human and civil rights causes such as Jim Crow and the Vietnam War. She strived to link Asian American and Black political movements for liberation, noting that "Racism has placed all ethnic peoples in similar positions of oppression, poverty, and marginalization.”

Kochiyama met Malcom X in 1963, and the two remained close friends until he was shot; he died in her arms.

2. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay

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Kamala Harris wasn't the first political Kamala. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay (did you know Harris's family nickname is Devi?) was an Indian social rights activist who fought to overturn racism, classicism, patriarchy, and the caste system in India. Chattopadhyay played a major role in uplifting the role of women in Indian society by pioneering cooperative craft production efforts to support female economic liberation. She also toured the US to speak with Black leaders about Indian independence and anti-imperialism. Chattopadhyay was instrumental in harnessing international support for Indian independence through her speaking tours, relationships with other civil rights leaders, and "colored cosmopolitanism," which linked Third World liberation with Black civil rights.

3. Karin Aguilar-San Juan

Macalester College

Karin Aguilar-San Juan is a Professor of American Studies at Macalester College and author/collaborator of several prominent AAPI nonfiction works. The Brown University PhD's interview with legendary activist/philosopher Grace Lee Boggs was featured in Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies. She has written and/or collaborated on books such as The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s, The People Make the Peace: Lessons from the Vietnam Antiwar Movement, and Little Saigons: Staying Vietnamese in America. As a member of the Asian American LGBTQ community, Aguilar-San Juan champions LGBTQ AAPI causes and wrote the foreword to Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire.

Currently, Aguilar-San Juan is writing and directing a short documentary film titled Rice: A Filipino Love Story.

4. Asa Akira

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Asa Akira may be an unconventional person to put on a list of female rights activists, but the porn icon has helped make leaps and bounds for women and Asian American women in reclaiming our sexuality. Writer, anal queen, and my personal #WCW, Asa Akira has navigated an impressive decade-plus career in an industry that sells racial stereotypes. Currently, the new mother helms Pornhub as a brand ambassador and hosts The Pornhub Podcast. As a sex worker and Asian American woman, Asa has led the way for representation in Asian female bodily autonomy and normalizing sex work.

5. Senti Sojwal

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India-born, NYC-bred reproductive justice advocate and writer Senti Sojwal has been fighting for equity in sexual health and AAPI representation in the feminist sphere for nearly a decade. Sojwal cofounded the Asian American Feminist Collective as a forum for AAPI women to voice their issues and create solidarity with other POC groups and causes. The Asian American Feminist Collective states their mission on its homepage: "Asian/American feminism is an ever-evolving practice that seeks to address the multi-dimensional ways Asian/American people confront systems of power at the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, religion, disability, migration history, citizenship, and immigration status. We are indebted to ways Black feminist thought and Third World feminist movements enable us to think and act critically through our own positionalities to address systems of anti-Black racism, settler colonialism, and xenophobia."

6. Patsy Mink

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Patsy Mink holds many incredible firsts: the first woman of color elected to the US House of Representatives, the first Asian American woman to serve in Congress, the first Asian American to run for US President...

Born and raised in Asian Pacific dominated Hawaii, Mink was shocked at the discrimination she faced when she went to college at the University of Nebraska (where all students of color were not allowed to live in white dormitories) and for her interracial marriage when she met and married John Mink while attending the University of Chicago law school. When Hawaii became a US state in 1959, Mink immediately began her political career, first in the Hawaii State Senate in 1962 and then in the US House of Representatives. Throughout her decorated political career, Mink wrote and pushed for legislation promoting gender and racial equity such as Title IX, the Women's Educational Equity Act, and the Early Childhood Education Act.

7. Kalpana Chawla

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Kalpana Chawla was an American astronaut, engineer, and the first Indian American woman to go to space. Her first space mission was on the Space Shuttle Columbia in 1997 as a primary robotic arm operator and mission specialist. In 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia spacecraft fell apart when re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, and Chawla died along with six other crew members. Chawla was awarded many posthumous honors such as the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, and many institutions, streets, and universities have been named after her in light of her achievements.

8. Kim Coco Iwamoto

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Kim Coco Iwamoto currently is the highest transgendered political office holder in the US. The fourth-generation (yonsei) Japanese American Hawaiian politician and activist was one of the Democratic primary candidates for the position of Lieutenant Governor of Hawaii in the 2018 election and previously served on the Hawaii Civil Rights Commission and the Hawaii Board of Education. She's been recognized as a Champion of Change by President Barack Obama in 2013, and she was listed in Newsweek's 50 need-to-know pioneers for LGBTQ rights.

9. Helen Zia

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Distinguished journalist and author Helen Zia is one of the most prominent Chinese American journalists working today and an ardent fighter for women's rights, human rights, and LGBTQ issues (particularly in the Asian community). Her accolades include being a San Francisco Torchbearer for the Beijing Olympics — to great controversy — and being profiled in the PBS series Becoming American: The Chinese Experience. Her first book, Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People, was a finalist for the prestigious Kiriyama Prize and has received numerous awards for her groundbreaking essays, articles, and reviews. Her latest book, Last Boat out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao's Revolution, follows the lives of refugees and immigrants fleeing social and political conflicts in the 20th century.

10. Junko Tabei

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Junko Tabei wanted to be known as the 36th person to climb Everest, not just the first woman to scale the world's tallest peak and all Seven Summits. In her decades of climbing (she climbed until advanced cancer crippled her body), Tabei faced more than just physical challenges; she fought against rampant mid-20th-century sexism from male climbing groups who often refused her entry. The 4-foot, 9-inch climber worked her way up from Mount Fuji to the Matterhorn and founded a ladies climbing club in 1969, with which she became the first woman to summit Everest. She continued to be involved in environmental studies and activism until her death in 2016 at age 77.

11. Amazin LeThi

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Left in a Saigon orphanage, Amazin LeThi encountered many challenges in her life growing up, from relentless bullying due to her sexuality and ethnicity to later overcoming homelessness. To combat the bullying, Amazin started natural bodybuilding and competed for a number of years in her teens before becoming a respected strength and conditioning coach. Amazin went on to become a TV/film star, an entertainment executive, and the first-ever Vietnamese internationally published fitness and health author.

Amazin helped organize the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Act to Change anti-bullying campaign and assisted the Obama administration on the first Spirit Day collaboration with GLAAD.

12. Kaohly Her

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Born in Applegate, Wisconsin, to Hmong immigrants parents, Kaohly Her's family never gave up on their American dream despite having to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. They instilled in Her a deep appreciation for education as the way out of poverty and to foster independence and self-reliance.

Her holds degrees from University of Wisconson, Madison and Northeastern University, and is pursuing her doctorate from the University of St. Thomas. She is a member of the Minnesota DFL and represented District 64A in the Twin Cities.

13. Josefa Llanes Escoda

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Born in Dinbras, llocos Norte in the Philippines when it was still a US colony at the turn of the 19th century, Josefa Llanes Escoda became a prominent women's rights activist in the Philippines and America. In the Philippines, she fought for women's suffrage and founded the Girl Scouts of the Philippines. At the time, the Girl Scouts of America didn't have a chapter in the Philippines, despite the country being an American colony and girl scouts being organized by American servicemen in the Philippines as far back as 1918. After a stint in America, where she got a master's degree at Columbia University, she returned to the Philippines to establish the Girl Scouts of the Philippines and advocate for women's education and economic independence.

14. Zarina

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Born Zarina Rashid in Aligarh, British India, to intellectual parents, renowned Indian American artist Zarina began studying art in earnest after graduating from Aligarh Muslim University in 1958. She learned printmaking methods in Thailand and apprenticed under Stanley William Hayter in Paris and printmaker Toshi Yoshida in Tokyo.

Her art contributed to the minimalist movement and is known for themes of diaspora, displacement, and journey. Zarina served as a board member of the New York Feminist Art Institute in the 1980s and as an instructor of papermaking workshops at the Women's Center for Learning. Throughout her career, she promoted solidarity and consciousness of Third World women's issues and served on the editorial board of the feminist art journal Heresies.

15. Maxine Hong Kingston

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While her seminal work, The Woman Warrior, is widely criticized and debated for pandering to white feminism, there's no doubt that Kingston herself broke barriers for Asian American women — both in life and literature. Raised in the political hotbed of '60s Berkeley, Kingston came of age side by side with the burgeoning women's rights movement. As a writer, Kingston examines the female identity of Chinese American women in patriarchal cultures. Who isn't haunted by the opening story of a young woman who committed the crime of being noticed? The story rings true in my heart — from personal experience, I know that this bone-deep oppression of female bodies is what Chinese culture was like, and in many ways, is like.

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