Seeking Liberation, Facing Marginalization: Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders' Conditional Acceptance in Hip-Hop Culture

Using interview data with Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) hip-hop participants, we analyze how respondents construct hip-hop as a liberating space where they can circumvent limiting racial and ethnic stereotypes. However, an intersectional lens reveals the constraints that hip-hop's hypermasculinity places on AAPI men as well as the ethnosexualized expectations that AAPI women must negotiate. The experience of AAPI men and women in hip-hop due to their unique position in racial and gender hierarchies interacts with stereotypical notions of AAPI people in wider society to relegate these participants to the margin rather than center of hip-hop culture. Thus, we find respondents' constructions of hip-hop less an indicator of hip-hop culture's openness than a statement of how constricting the mainstream U.S. culture is for AAPI Americans, rendering hip-hop's conditional acceptance preferable by comparison.