The Butterfly Dilemma: Asian Women,Whiteness, and Heterosexual Relationships

Critical Whiteness theory explores Whiteness as a form of power and privilege that originated in Western countries and has been dispersed globally. Its form is particular to location and its interaction with race, ethnicity, nationality, class, and gender. Two ways it has operated historically is through making the norms of Whiteness universal and the marker of reason and rationality. This article examines Whiteness through two lenses, the colonial-era opera, Madame Butterfly, and three recent therapy case studies involving White American husbands and Asian immigrant wives. Although the women in these therapy cases have emigrated from different Asian countries and cultures, the treatment toward them suggests that colonial-era images and stereotypes of Asian women still resonate in contemporary White American culture and are impervious to national or cultural boundaries. A comparison of the opera’s themes with those of the therapy cases suggest how historical and social constructions of Whiteness continue to promote inequality in heterosexual relationships comprised of White American males and Asian females. Feminist, multicultural analyses of the therapy cases are provided to highlight more egalitarian treatment of the women in therapy, in their families, and in the broader society. The intersectionality of gender with ethnicity and culture is discussed for these Asian women who experience the homogenization of their identities in spite of having immigrated to the U.S. from distinct cultures.     

Enacted Identities of Immigrant-Origin Emerging Adult Women in Online Contexts: Capturing Multiple and Intersecting Identities Using Qualitative Strategies

Using a multiple intersecting identities enactment framework, and a qualitative methodology, this article examined the multiple and intersecting identities immigrant-origin emerging adult women enacted online and explored the meanings they ascribed to these identities (N = 14, M age ≈ 20; 57% = second-generation immigrant). Thematic analyses of 84 narratives revealed that the immigrant-origin emerging adult women enacted a range of identities online including: personal/individual, relational/social, gender, ethnic, civic, student, occupational, and athletic. Personal/individual and relational/social identities were enacted most frequently, and intersected most often. First-generation and second-generation immigrant women were somewhat similar in the rate with which they enacted their identities online. Results showed that second-generation immigrant women enacted their personal/individual, ethnic, and civic identities as well as their intersecting identities online most often. Findings have implications for theory and research about online enactment of multiple and intersecting identities among immigrant-origin youth.     

Shifting Sexual Boundaries: Ethnicity and Pre-marital Sex in the Lives of South Asian American Women

Immigrants and their children engage in several forms of boundary making as a means of developing a sense of belonging in America. Second-generation Americans are at the crossroads between meeting their parents’ cultural expectations and selecting new ethnic options that may conflict with ancestral traditions. Women’s sexuality has often been a site for contesting and conforming to ethnic boundaries. This article examines a case study of second-generation South Asian American adult women’s pre-marital sexual behavior to understand how cultural expectations about sex shapes the ways in which they construct ethnic boundaries. Much of the literature on women’s sexuality in immigrant communities in America has focused on married women or constraints placed on women’s virginity. This study highlights a nuanced perspective for understanding how migration to the U.S. creates cultural shifts in ethnic communities by examining how the American born daughters of immigrants define their ethnicity through their pre-marital sexual encounters.     

Counting on Whiteness: Religion,race, ethnicity,and the politics of Jewish demography

American Jews have long been an anomaly for scholars concerned with understanding how they fit into extant social scientific or historical categories. Sometimes they seem best described as an ethnic group, other times as a religious one. This ambiguity has also vexed Jewish communal leaders whose desire to comprehend their communities has largely been underwritten by their intention to protect it. This intersection of sociological methods and schema and Jewish communal concerns has resulted in decisive omissions regarding how best to account for the racial and ethnic diversity of American Jews. An analysis of survey instruments used in 175 American Jewish population studies and community portraits conducted since 1970 reveals a focus on questions of religious practice and an avoidance of those about race and ethnicity, resulting in a “religio-racial formation” of American Jews as White. This approach to studying American Jewish life has marginalized or excluded non-White Jews while ensuring ongoing Jewish communal access to Whiteness without having to claim it explicitly.     

‘Real Italians and wogs’: The discursive construction of Italian identity among first generation Italian immigrants in Western Australia

We explore the discursive construction of Italian identity among a bilingual sample of Italian‐born Western Australians. Focus groups were held with two groups: Italians who had migrated to Australia as children and a group who had migrated as adults. We found intra‐ and inter‐individual differences in identity construction, with much discourse devoted to demonstrating Italian authenticity and negotiating ethnic category boundaries. Shared markers of authenticity included language, heritage and food. The groups varied in their selection of referent groups to make authenticity claims, with the child migrants drawing upon the shared Australian stereotype of ‘wogs’ to construct and authenticate their Italian‐ness. In contrast, adult migrants constructed Italian identity through comparisons with the dominant Australian ethnic group and in relation to a broader ‘migrant’ identity. The findings highlight the fluid and complex nature of ethnic identity and the need for further exploration of how it is constructed in talk. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Photovoice,claiming visibility,and women's farming identities in Australia

Despite an abundance of research on and growing social recognition of women's contributions to farming around the world, in many countries women farmers and their experiences are still relatively invisible to society. Museums Victoria's Invisible Farmer Project, the largest ever study of Australian women on the land, attempted to give voice to women farmers largely through a curated Facebook page. Our research, carried out between 2016 and 2018, examined the posted photographs and text as photovoice, supplemented by qualitative interviews, to understand the farming identities of participating women. Our analysis shows how these photovoices can represent a claim to visibility as farmers and can illuminate how women experience their own farming identities in relation to the landscapes of their farms and their perspectives on farmwork. We highlight the importance of emotional connections and carework in the women's identities. This study contributes to scholarship on emotional geographies by emphasizing the centrality of emotion in how women participating with the Invisible Farming Project construct and experience their farming identities. The importance of this finding lies in how greater visibility of women's farming identities might re-frame social understanding of farming as a relational and not just productive endeavor.     

Being German,Paraguayan and Germanino: Exploring the Relation Between Social and Personal Identity

Despite people’s claims, their national, ethnic and other identities are not ubiquitously relevant, they are rather situationally evoked and performed. Such is the case with the German, Paraguayan and Germanino identity in the municipality of Nueva Germania, in Paraguay. Recognising such contextual epistemic permissibility allows us to form a de-essentialised understanding of groups and individuals. One of the challenges that emerge from this approach, is to understand how a person can perform different identities, which differently define who they are, while remaining certain of being a continuous and persistent person. The objective of this article is to provide a theoretical grounding for theories of social identity in theories of personal identity. It allows us to analytically accommodate the situational and multiscalar character of identities, while recognising their existential importance for personal identity (for the Self).     

Teaching the College “Nones”: Christian Privilege and the Religion Professor

Working with undergraduate students invites teachers into relationship and conversation with young people at a time when they are emerging as adults and forming their identities. Faith is one area of identity formation often attended to by scholars, college professors, and their institutions. But within that, little attention has been paid to those who do not identify as religious. Additionally, “the overwhelming presence of Christianity at American institutions maintains it as the spiritual norm on campus. … Those within the spiritual norm gain a level of privilege that is often unconscious” (Seifert 2007, 11). This has an effect not only on nonreligious students but on any student who identifies as anything other than Christian; and it has a unique effect on teaching and learning in the religion classroom. In this article, I will explain what Christian privilege is, why it is a unique problem in the undergraduate religion classroom, and what teachers of religion might do in response to it. In the end, I argue that educators need to better understand the effects of Christian privilege in our classrooms and become allies to the nonreligious in particular by using pedagogies that include and support all students, in their many religious affiliations and unaffiliations.     

Crossing National Boundaries: Social Identity Formation Among Recent Immigrant Women in Australia From Former Yugoslavia

For both individuals and communities, crossing national boundaries involves managing personal and social identities in new social settings. This process is facilitated by social, cultural, and economic features of both the country of origin and the country of destination as well as the personal skills of the individuals who migrate. In-depth interviews with women in Australia from former Yugoslavia reveal how they draw ethnic boundaries and maintain a native ethnic identity in their private lives, partly in response to the difficulties they face in crossing other boundaries in Australian society, such as the labor market, educational institutions, and relationships with the Australia-born population. Women's previous and current socioeconomic status, and their ethnic and educational background, interplay in developing new identities in the new social setting that cannot be reduced to native ethnicity. In this article we deal with women's practices in their private lives that symbolize immigrants' identity formation within a given social context.     

The Unbearable Lightness of Being White

In this article I explore the relationship between feelings of superiority, White privilege, White guilt, and a denied White racial identity and how these dynamics are enacted in therapy between White therapist and client. I discuss the concepts of White privilege, White guilt, color-blind racial ideology, and the invisibility of Whiteness and their importance in understanding problems in White identity development. Throughout this discussion I draw implications for clinical practice and training. I conclude by suggesting a process for identifying the dynamics of privilege and power in cross-cultural interactions through the use of self-reflection.     

Gender Conscious

Integration has had a bad press in recent years. Feminists and spokesmen for racial and ethnic minorities express concern that the integrationist agenda requires women and members of minorities to divest themselves of features of their "identities" in order to approximate to a restrictive white male ideal which, they hold, should not be a requirement for fair treatment and social benefits. I argue that this concern is unwarranted and that "Integration" with respect to gender, as I shall understand it, is overall more conducive to the happiness of both men and women than what I shall call "Diversity".     

Intersecting identities of elite female boxers: Stories of cultural difference and marginalization in sport

ObjectivesThe project responds to calls for research that attends to issues of cultural diversity within sport and that facilitates expanded understandings of socially constructed identities. The intersecting identities of elite female boxers are explored in terms of how they shape experiences of marginalization and well-being within sport. Focus is on constructions of race and ethnicity, language, and religion.DesignAn intersectional lens grounded in social constructionism was integrated with a cultural sport psychology approach to espouse the complexity, fluidity, and multi-dimensionality of the athletes’ identities as the product of intersecting narratives.MethodsMandala drawings and conversational interviews were employed as open-ended data collection processes that enabled the participants to share their identities. Portrait vignettes were then developed as creative nonfiction to elucidate how identities dynamically intersect and shape sport experiences.ResultsFive portrait vignettes layer together to show issues of identity expression, oppression and White privilege within the boxing context. The stories provide contextual insight into the ways in which athletes continually construct and negotiate identities in relation to dynamics of difference and sameness. They move fluidly between identities that are valued and identities that are marginalized, moments of open expression and moments of concealment.ConclusionsThe research contributes to social justice missions within sport by illuminating how certain identities result in individuals being dis/advantaged, socially excluded, and discriminated against. Possibilities are revealed for challenging social inequalities and facilitating more inclusive sport spaces that resonate with who athletes are as holistic, multifaceted people.     

‘Pissed Off and Confused’/‘Grateful and (Re)Moved’: Affect,Privilege and National Commemoration in Aotearoa New Zealand

This article explores affect, colonial privilege, and the cultural politics of national commemoration in Aotearoa New Zealand. Based on focus-group interviews around two major national days, we examine means through which feelings and emotions are deployed in ways that enable the reproduction of social advantage. Situating affect within patterns of relationship, four interrelated affective-discursive practices are explored. In relation to Waitangi Day, agents tend to work under the rubric of anger and confusion. For Anzac Day, being grateful and moved shapes the interaction, although participants often indicate preferences towards “having a day off.” Given the colonial context in which these practices circulate, analysis observes the associated freedom and ease by which affective-discursive privilege is (re)produced. Often incongruent and rarely challenged, privilege allows associated actors to do what they want, when they want, however they want. This affective climate authorizes the ongoing reproduction of, and justification for, membership to a higher-status ethnic group of which unearned opportunities and entitlements remain its everyday, expected currency.     

The double bind of personal striving: Ethnic working class women in psychotherapy

Ethnic working class women's special responsibility for transmitting their heritage ties them, often painfully, to that heritage and to their traditional gender role. Psychologically, they experience a unique set of exodus stresses. When they seek psychotherapy the process can place them in a double bind in that their personal striving deeply threatens their ethnic and class ties. These women may leave treatment prematurely unless clinicians are willing to recognize the unique configuration of symptoms that derive in large part from their subcultures of origin. By challenging their own ethnic, racial and class identities, clinicians can open up new treatment possibilities to help strengthen positive group identity, enhance self-esteem and support personal striving in their patients and in themselves.     

Approaches to Research on Intersectionality: Perspectives on Gender, LGBT, and Racial/Ethnic Identities

Intersectionality theories, or the recognition of multiple interlocking identities, defined by relative sociocultural power and privilege, constitute a vital step forward in research across multiple domains of inquiry. This special issue, which extends Shields (2008) contribution in Sex Roles, provides an opportunity to reflect on past, present, and future promise in intersectionality scholarship. To provide a common ground for this work, each paper in this special issue addresses the intersections of gender; lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT); and racial/ethnic identities and related experiences. In this introduction, we (1) provide an overview of definitions and conceptualizations of intersectionality, (2) discuss the various approaches utilized in this issue to conceptualize and assess gender, LGBT, and racial/ethnic identities, (3) describe how these conceptualizations and assessments were translated into analyses of intersectionality, and (4) close with a discussion of some additional approaches and considerations intended to advance intersectionality research.     

Art,Understanding, and Political Change

Feminist artworks can be a resource in our attempt to understand individual identities as neither singular nor fixed, and in our related attempts both to theorize and to practice forms of connection to others that do not depend on shared identities. Engagement with these works has the potential to increase our critical social consciousness, making us more aware of oppression and privilege, and more committed to overcoming oppression.     

"You're only as old as you feel": self-perceptions of age, fears of aging, and life satisfaction from adolescence to old age

We examined differences in subjective age identification from adolescence to old age and the relation between subjective age and fears about one's own aging and life satisfaction. Using a questionnaire format, 188 men and women from 14 to 83 years of age made judgments about how old they felt, looked, acted, and desired to be. Respondents also answered questions about their personal fears of aging and present life satisfaction. Results revealed that individuals in their teens held older subjective age identities, whereas during the early adult years, individuals maintained same age identities. Across the middle and later adult years, individuals reported younger age identities, and women experienced younger age identities than men across these adults years. Results also revealed that discrepancies between subjective and actual age were associated with personal fears of aging and life satisfaction, especially in younger men and women.     

The Impact of the Family Environment on the Ethnic Identity Development of Multiethnic College Students

In this qualitative study of 5 multiethnic college students, the findings indicate that family environment played a significant role in the participants' ability to develop secure ethnic identities. The participants who described their family members as supportive of their multiple ethnic backgrounds also felt confident about their ethnic identity, whereas the participants who described their family members as unsupportive of their multiple ethnic backgrounds maintained that they often felt insecure about their ethnic identity.     

Defining ‘Modern’ Malay womanhood and the coexistent messages of the veil

The gender constructions and performances of Malay women are often perceived by outside researchers as ‘shrouded under a veil’ of increasing Islamic conservatism. Urban Malay women, however, argue that women actively engage in the construction and performance of gender identities. Based on research conducted in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, during 2001 and 2003, this article argues that women advantageously alter, transform and utilise the constructs placed upon them by Islam, by ethnic identification and by conceptions of ‘modernity’. Often one image of ‘womanhood’ is presented and in public e an image that is socially accepted, honoured and respected e while less publicly alternative forms of ‘womanhood’ articulate individual goals and aims. Using an agent-oriented perspective, this article further includes an analysis of women's individual renegotiations of larger cultural constructs and the ways in which the tudong, or headscarf, has become a symbol by which individual women express their understanding of social position and personal freedoms in an industrialised Islamic context.     

“You are What You Eat”: Nutritional Norms,Maternal Deviance,and Neutralization of Women's Prenatal Diets

This article uses neutralization theory to examine women's responses to prenatal nutritional norms. Based on 55 qualitative interviews with pregnant women, I explore women's prenatal nutritional narratives, their talk about food and nutrition. Women link healthful eating in pregnancy with the good mother ideal and construct identities as mothers through monitoring prenatal diets. When they violate nutritional norms, they are subject to charges of maternal deviance and use techniques of neutralization to protect their self-concept. I explore the excuses and justifications women offer for violations of prenatal nutritional norms and demonstrate how mundane behaviors are endowed with moral meaning in pregnancy.