Disidentifying from the “model minority”: How Indian American women rearticulate dominant racial rhetorics

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.