{"title":"Disidentifying from the “model minority”: How Indian American women rearticulate dominant racial rhetorics","authors":"Nisha Shanmugaraj","doi":"10.1080/00335630.2022.2147581","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This study examines how second-generation Indian American women negotiate the “model minority” stereotype within their everyday rhetorical practices. Conducting a close reading of three extended case studies drawn from a larger qualitative interview study, I argue that though the model minority identity is perpetuated within families as an enactment of social fitness, felt contradictions with normative raced and gendered expectations can create space for Indian American women to disidentify from conditioned identities. Specifically, this study demonstrates how Indian American women can construct counterstories to reimagine reductive racial narratives in ways that channel the privilege of the model minority positionality towards socially transformative ends. These counterstories contain four themes: threats of racial failure, gender slippage, disidentification from internalized identities, and colonial constructions of empowerment. By interrogating the discursive effects of racialization on minoritized individuals, which permeate but do not wholly contain an individual’s lived experience, this study calls for rhetoricians to further explore how marginalized rhetors actively participate in their own race remaking, at once sustaining and disrupting dominant racial meanings.","PeriodicalId":51545,"journal":{"name":"Quarterly Journal of Speech","volume":"1982 1","pages":"109 - 131"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3000,"publicationDate":"2022-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Quarterly Journal of Speech","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2022.2147581","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"COMMUNICATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
ABSTRACT This study examines how second-generation Indian American women negotiate the “model minority” stereotype within their everyday rhetorical practices. Conducting a close reading of three extended case studies drawn from a larger qualitative interview study, I argue that though the model minority identity is perpetuated within families as an enactment of social fitness, felt contradictions with normative raced and gendered expectations can create space for Indian American women to disidentify from conditioned identities. Specifically, this study demonstrates how Indian American women can construct counterstories to reimagine reductive racial narratives in ways that channel the privilege of the model minority positionality towards socially transformative ends. These counterstories contain four themes: threats of racial failure, gender slippage, disidentification from internalized identities, and colonial constructions of empowerment. By interrogating the discursive effects of racialization on minoritized individuals, which permeate but do not wholly contain an individual’s lived experience, this study calls for rhetoricians to further explore how marginalized rhetors actively participate in their own race remaking, at once sustaining and disrupting dominant racial meanings.
期刊介绍:
The Quarterly Journal of Speech (QJS) publishes articles and book reviews of interest to those who take a rhetorical perspective on the texts, discourses, and cultural practices by which public beliefs and identities are constituted, empowered, and enacted. Rhetorical scholarship now cuts across many different intellectual, disciplinary, and political vectors, and QJS seeks to honor and address the interanimating effects of such differences. No single project, whether modern or postmodern in its orientation, or local, national, or global in its scope, can suffice as the sole locus of rhetorical practice, knowledge and understanding.