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.

KEYWORDS:

• Asian American rhetorics
• race
• immigration
• intersectionality
• counterstory

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Stacey Sowards and the two anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback on this article, as well as Stephanie Larson for critical support provided at every stage of this project. In addition, this study would not exist without the time and honesty of the research participants to whom this work is dedicated. The author reports there are no competing interests.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Flores, Lisa, “Mobility, Containment, and the Racialized Spatio-Temporalities of Survival: National Communication Association Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture.” November 15, 2019. Baltimore Convention Center, Baltimore, MD. 23:47-51. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgHwM1YmkzI.

2 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2008), 69–96.

3 Karma R. Chávez, The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021); Ersula Ore, Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2019). Also see: Eric King Watts, Hearing the Hurt: Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and the Politics of the New Negro Movement (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012); Josue David Cisneros, The Border Crossed Us: Rhetorics of Borders, Citizenship, and Latina/o Identity (Tuscaloosa: University Alabama Press, 2013); Lisa A. Flores, Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of the “Illegal” Immigrant (State College: Penn State University Press, 2020).

4 I alternatively refer to the model minority as a trope, a stereotype, and an identity, a slippage that speaks to the discursive construct’s versatile functioning. I use these terms intentionally to refer to analytic, social, and experiential facets, respectively. Trope, a common theme or figure that undergirds dominant narratives, refers to the model minority’s argumentative function. Stereotype, socially-ascribed heuristics of identity used to read bodies in public, captures the social facets of the construct. A stereotype also offers minoritized individuals a recognizable identity, or legible way of being in the world accompanied by normative scripts and behaviors, thus capturing the experiential facets of the model minority. All aspects inform broader constructions of racial meaning.

5 Victor Villanueva, Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color (Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1993).

6 This not only justifies poverty as deserved but also occludes diverse socioeconomic realities experienced by Asian Americans. See: Eric Tang, “Collateral Damage: Southeast Asian Poverty in the United States,” in Asian American Studies Now: A Critical Reader (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010).

7 For more on racial formation, see Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2014), 109-15.

8 Lisa Flores, “Mobility, Containment,” 23:41-46.

9 Thy Phu, Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press); K. Hyoejin Yoon, “Learning Asian American Affect,” in Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric, eds. LuMing Mao and Morris Young (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2008), 292–322; Revathi Krishnaswamy, Effeminism: The Economy of Colonial Desire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999).

10 Lisa Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016), 4-24, https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2016.1183871.

11 Christa J. Olson, Constitutive Visions: Indigeneity and Commonplaces of National Identity in Republican Ecuador (State College: Penn State Press, 2013), 5. See, for example: Ralph Cintron, Angels’ Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and Rhetorics of the Everyday (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998).

12 All participant names are pseudonyms; I maintained usage of participants’ pronouns. Each participant gave signed consent to be interviewed for this research under the condition of anonymity. As a note on terminology: I use “second-generation” to mean American individuals of Indian ethnicity who were born in the United States or moved here by age 5 to ensure participants had experienced their formative years in the United States. The paper does not use the term Desi given debates over its exclusionary caste and region related connotations. See, for instance, arguments in the Facebook group “Subtle Curry Traits.”

13 José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

14 Aja Y. Martinez, Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory (Champaign: Conference on College Composition and Communication, 2020).

15 Raka Shome, Diana and Beyond: White Femininity, National Identity, and Contemporary Media Culture (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2014). See also LeMesurier’s theory of Asian Femininity: Jennifer Lin LeMesurier, “Race as Supplement: Surfaces and Crevices of the Asian Feminine Body,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 108, no. 3, (2022), 251-70, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2022.2088841.

16 Nazli Kibria, “The Racial Gap: South Asian American Racial Identity and the Asian American Movement,” in A Part, Yet Apart: South Asians in Asian America, eds., Lavina Dhingra Shankar and Rajini Srikanth (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 69–78.

17 Lisa Lowe, “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1, no. 1 (1991): 27, http://doi.org/10.1353/dsp.1991.0014.

18 Omi and Winant, Racial Formation, 109-112; Stuart Hall, The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), 32–33.

19 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 5-10.

20 Sheridan Prasso, The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls, & Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient (New York: Public Affairs, 2005); Anne Anlin Cheng, “Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman,” Critical Inquiry 44, no. 3 (2018), 415-46. https://doi.org/10.1086/696921.

21 Jennifer L. LeMesurier, “Uptaking Race: Genre, MSG, and Chinese Dinner,” Poroi 12, no. 2 (2017), 1-23, https://doi.org/10.13008/2151-2957.1253; V. Jo Hsu, “Containment and Interdependence: Epidemic Logics in Asian American Racialization,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 7, no. 3 (2020), 125-134, https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.7.3.0125.

22 Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).

23 Jennifer Sano-Franchini, “Sounding Asian/America: Asian/American Sonic Rhetorics, Multimodal Orientalism, and Digital Composition,” enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture, 2018; Shui-yin Sharon Yam, Inconvenient Strangers: Transnational Subjects and the Politics of Citizenship (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2019); Morris Young, Minor Re/Visions: Asian American Literacy Narratives as a Rhetoric of Citizenship (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004).

24 United States. Immigration and Nationality Act, with Amendments and Notes on Related Laws (The Hart Cellar Act). 8 U.S.C. 1101.HR 2580, 82nd Cong., 1st sess. Introduced in House 15 January 1965. See point 3. Professions, the act clarifies, refers to white collar labor: “architects, engineers, lawyers, physicians, surgeons, and teachers … ”

25 Pawan Dhingra, “Racial Capitalism and (Im)Mobility: Asian Americans in the Contemporary Economy,” in The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream, eds. Robert C. Hauhart and Mitja Sardoč (New York: Routledge, 2021), 29-43.

26 For more on disability and immigration, see: Jay Timothy Dolmage, Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2018).

27 As a note on terminology, I use “U.S. American” throughout to avoid the imperialistic practice of reducing the American continent to just the nation of the United States. When describing racial-ethnic groups, however, I maintain colloquial terminological more conventionally used by these communities themselves (i.e., Indian Americans).

28 “Success Story of One Minority Group in US,” US News and World Report, December 26, 1966, 6.

29 Natalia Molina, How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 2–6, https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520957190.

30 Kibria, “The Racial Gap.” For counterexamples of political involvement of women in India, see: Patricia Jefferey and Anita Basu eds., Resisting the Sacred and the Secular (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1999).

31 Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 179.

32 Catherine Ramírez, Assimilation: An Alternative History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020), 12-15.

33 Doug Coulson, Race, Nation, and Refuge: The Rhetoric of Race in Asian American Citizenship Cases (Albany: SUNY Press, 2017), 45–74; Sucheta Mazumdar, “Racist Responses to Racism: The Aryan Myth and South Asians in the United States,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 9, no. 1 (1989), 48–50, https://doi.org/10.1215/07323867-9-1-47.

34 Karen Pyke, “What is Internalized Racial Oppression and Why Don’t We Study It? Acknowledging Racism’s Hidden Injuries,” Sociological Perspectives 53, no. 4 (2010), 551-72.

35 Omi and Winant, Racial Formation, 125.

36 See, respectively: Molina, How Race Is Made; Ricard Delgado, “Storytelling for Oppositionists and Others: A Plea for Narrative,” Michigan Law Review 87, no. 8 (1989): 2411–41, https://doi.org/10.2307/1289308; Martinez, Counterstory; Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and California’s Proposition 187 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 14-18; Cisneros, The Border Crossed Us, 32-33; Darrel Enck-Wanzer, “Decolonizing Imaginaries: Rethinking 'the People' in the Young Lords' Church Offensive,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 1 (2012), 1–23, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2011.638656; Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 138-183.

37 Cisneros, The Border Crossed Us, 83-107; Linh Dich, “Community Enclaves and Public Imaginaries: Formations of Asian American Online Identities,” Computers and Composition 40 (2016), 87-102, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2016.03.012.

38 Monisha Das Gupta, Unruly Immigrants : Rights, Activism, and Transnational South Asian Politics in the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

39 Muñoz, Disidentification, 11-2.

40 Exceptions include: Natasha Shrikant, “‘Yo it’s IST yo’: The Discursive Construction of an Indian American Youth Identity in a South Asian Student Club,” Discourse and Society 26, no. 4 (2015), 480-501; Rosalind S. Chou and Joe R. Feagin, The Myth of the Model Minority: Asian Americans Facing Racism, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2016).

41 Sunaina Maira, Desis In The House: Indian American Youth Culture In NYC (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002); Shalini Shankar, Desi Land: Teen Culture, Class, and Success in Silicon Valley (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).

42 Maira herself acknowledges this: Maira, Desis In The House, 67-69.

43 José Esteban Muñoz, “The Brown Commons” in The Sense of Brown (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 2-4.

44 Ibid., 138.

45 This research was conducted under the author’s Institutional Review Board (Study2020_00000489). In the broader study, interviews lasted anywhere from forty-five to ninety minutes (seventy minutes on average) and took place via Zoom in January and February of 2021. In answering the recruitment call, participants self-identified as second-generation Indian American women. Though I relied on participants to raise their own salient identity categories in the interviews, an erasure occurs with a primary focus on race and gender. Namely, this project does not delve deeply into differences that exist with respect to class, ability, sexuality, and gender identity, among others. Though the category of woman invited gender fluidity (i.e., anyone who “identified as a woman”), this historically and politically loaded category still discounts the experiences of trans and non-binary individuals in ways that reinforce cisgendered and heteronormative depictions of Asian Americans. See: V. Jo Hsu, “Afterword: Disciplinary (Trans)Formations: Queering and Trans-Ing Asian American Rhetorics,” enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture, 2018.

46 Deborah Brandt, Literacy in American Lives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Also see Karma R. Chávez, Palestine on the Air (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2019).

47 Raymie E. Mckerrow, “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis,” Communication Monographs 56, no. 2 (1989), 91-111, https://doi.org/10.1080/03637758909390253.

48 Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991), 1241-99, https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039.

49 Kathy Charmaz, Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide through Qualitative Analysis (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publishing, 2006), 199, 231. Also see Small’s discussion of case study logic: Mario Luis Small, “How Many Cases Do I Need? On Science and the Logic of Case Selection in Field Based Research,” Ethnography 10, no 1 (2009): 24-25.

50 Flores, “Mobility, Containment.”

51 Pawan Dhingra, Hyper Education: Why Good Schools, Good Grades, and Good Behavior Are Not Enough (New York: NYU Press, 2020), 257-274.

52 Michel Foucault, “1 February 1978,” in Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College De France, 1977–78, eds., Michel Senellart, François Ewald, and Alessandro Fontana, trans. Graham Burchel (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2009), 87–114, 97.

53 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2015), 13-15.

54 Roxanne Mountford, The Gendered Pulpit: Preaching in American Protestant Spaces (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005); Cheree A. Carlson, Crimes of Womanhood: Defining Femininity in a Court of Law (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009).

55 Patricia Hill Collins. Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).

56 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979). For examples of how these feminizing discursive effects impact Indian American masculinity, see: Stanley I. Thangaraj, Desi Hoop Dreams: Pickup Basketball and the Making of Asian American Masculinity (New York: New York University Press, 2015); Ali Na, “#AzizAnsariToo?: Desi Masculinity in America and Performing Funny Cute,” Women’s Studies in Communication 42, no. 3 (2019): 308–26, doi:10.1080/07491409.2019.1639573; David Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).

57 Jenell Johnson, “‘A Man’s Mouth is his Castle’: The Midcentury Flouridation Controversy and the Visceral Public,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 102, no. 1 (2016), 1-20, http://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2015.1135506.

58 Muñoz, Disidentifications, 39.

59 Ibid.

60 Specific jobs omitted to preserve anonymity.

61 Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 1-19, 101-121.

62 Aimee Carrillo Rowe, Power Lines On the Subject of Feminist Alliances (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). For a specific case, see Vincent Pham, “Reviving Identity Politics: Strategic Essentialism, Identity Politics, and the Potential for Cross-Racial Vernacular Discourse in the Digital Age,” in Theorizing Digital Rhetoric, eds., Aaron Hess and Amber Davisson (New York: Routledge, 2017), 153-165.

63 Martinez, Counterstory, 21-31; Delgado, “Storytelling”; Daniel G. Solórzano and Tara J. Yosso, “Critical Race Methodology: Counter-Storytelling as an Analytical Framework for Education Research,” Qualitative Inquiry 8, no. 1 (2002), 23–44, https://doi.org/10.1177/107780040200800103.

64 Hilde Lindemann Nelson, Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 7-8.

65 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 101; Catherine Walsh, “Shifting the Geopolitics of Critical Knowledge: Decolonial Thought and Cultural Studies ‘Others’ in the Andes,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007), 224–39, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162530.

66 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 20.

67 R. Radakrishnan, “Ethnicity in an Age of Diaspora” in Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader, eds., Jana E. Braziel and Anita Mannur (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003), 119–31.

68 Collins. Fighting Words, 57.

69 Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). Also see: Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008) and more recently, April Baker-Bell, Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy (New York: Routledge, 2020).

70 Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization,” 21.

71 Cherríe Moraga, “La Güera,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, eds., Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015), 25.

72 Mao and Young, Representations, 21.

73 Martinez, Counterstory; Karma R. Chávez, “Beyond Inclusion: Rethinking Rhetoric’s Historical Narrative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 162–72, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2015.994908.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nisha Shanmugaraj

Nisha Shanmugaraj is a PhD Candidate in Rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon University. She is currently writing her dissertation on the communication tactics of Indian American women, probing how intersectional difference shapes the self within everyday rhetorical processes. Nisha’s research interests broadly include topics in Asian American rhetorics, racial rhetorical criticism, and antiracist composition pedagogy.