Let the racism tell you who your friends are: The effects of racism on social connections and life-satisfaction for Multiracial people

Multiracial people in the United States do not fit into traditional racial groups and are thus thought to be at increased risk of social isolation. The current study examines the contributions of racial and Multiracial-specific discrimination in predicting Multiracial people’s social connections to people of various racial groups. Also examined is whether relationships between these types of discrimination and life-satisfaction are explained by friendship and community satisfaction. Results indicated that racial and Multiracial-specific discrimination each related to decreased feelings of commonality and acceptance among White people. As Multiracial people experienced more racial discrimination, they generally reported having more in common with, but less acceptance from, racial groups of color. As Multiracial people reported more racial or Multiracial-specific discrimination, they reported lower proportions of White friends and higher proportions of Multiracial friends. Relationships between racial discrimination and life-satisfaction were partially explained by community satisfaction whereas relationships between Multiracial discrimination and life-satisfaction were fully explained by decreased community satisfaction.     

Queer Marxism in Taiwan

Abstract

This paper refutes the dominant assumption that Taiwan, unlike Mainland China, has developed a greater degree of tolerance for non‐normative sexual expressions as a result of its democratization. Recent legal and cultural changes indicate that Taiwan’s democratization consists of tendencies and repressive countertendencies. At the same time, this contradictory development has uniquely enabled a body of indigenous Marxist writings that mobilizes different senses of ‘queerness’ to demonstrate that the official celebration of diversity and human rights has actually further alienated and disempowered sex workers, promiscuous homosexuals, gay drug‐users, and other social subjects that are considered to be a threat to the liberal‐democratic order. I offer a reading of the critical writings of Josephine Ho, Yin‐bin Ning, Ding Naifei, and Wang Ping since the 1990s to explain why Queer Marxism in Taiwan is founded on a strong a‐statist discourse. I argue that a Queer Marxist intellectual practice emerged in Taiwan because liberal pluralism, institutionalized in what these critics call ‘state feminism,’ has failed to redress effects of social exclusion that (1) persist not despite of, but precisely because of, post‐martial law liberal reforms, and that (2) diverge in significant ways from individual experiences as members of officially defined minority groups (women, aborigines, migrant workers, or homosexuals). If social structuration is not always synchronic or isomorphic with state‐engineered legal changes, this difference also provides the occasion for Queer Marxists to interrogate the intellectual division of labor between feminism, assumed to be the analysis of gender as a non‐pluralizable category, and queer theory, assumed to be the analysis of sexuality as a non‐singular but personifiable category. Only by distinguishing between social relations and social identity can we comprehend how the rise of the Taiwanese Independence Movement played a key role in the naturalization of homosexuality as a fictive ethnicity, to which Queer Marxism developed as a historical response. As a geopolitically specific analysis of the aporia of substantive personhood, the Queer Marxism in Taiwan I re‐historicize is also a significant contribution to Marxist critique of liberal formalism that is of use to readers across the globe.     

A critique of critical acculturation

This critique is divided into three sections. The first section is a review of my positions on three core issues regarding the nature of the human sciences (particularly cross-cultural and acculturation psychology) that have been raised throughout these articles. Knowledge of these positions is essential background to understanding my comments in the second section. In the second section are some comments on specific claims and assertions about my work that have been made in the articles. I believe that many of these assertions do not represent my views, nor my empirical research, on acculturation. Of necessity, I have had to select certain themes among all of these assertions. Although the special issue is a critique of acculturation theory and research in general, the majority of the comments are addressed to my work in the area. Hence, I have concentrated on criticisms directed at my own work, rather than attempting to address the field as a whole. However, my comments likely have more general import for the field of acculturation psychology as a whole. I invite readers to consider these very contrasting sets of views about how we are to understand individual human beings within the context of cultures, and of culture contact and change. A third section returns to some of the basic issues regarding the nature of the scientific enterprise. I advocate a dual approach, accepting both the natural sciences and cultural sciences ways of advancing our knowledge of human behaviour in context. I argue that dismissing the positivist traditions of the natural sciences, and replacing them with social constructionist concepts and methods is a regressive step in our search to improve our understanding of acculturation. Moreover, I have found little in these articles that advances our knowledge of acculturation, or our potential for making applications for the betterment of acculturating individuals and groups.     

Afro-Asian solidarity and the “capital” question: looking beyond the last frontier

The argument in this paper is a continuation of an argument that I have been making for some time, which questions the universal history of capital, crucial to which are assumptions regarding its historical necessity. Capital is not only understood to be a historically unavoidable condition but one that has already colonized the world such that there is no outside to it. In developing my argument regarding the “outside” to capital, where I find Kalyan Sanyal's work very useful and significant, I claim that much of the problem with theorizing capital today has to do not with the beast itself but with the inherited paraphernalia of western theory and philosophy. After a survey of the passive revolution debate in India, which I read as a sign of the actual impossibility of “capitalist” development across different parts of the world, I move on to argue that both “capital/ism” and the “logic of capital” (accumulation) are misleading concepts concealing an essential “emptiness,” which I work out through the idea of “dependent arising” taken from Buddhist philosophy.     

Black self-concept: An individual/collective analysis

The study of the self-concept of African-Americans has been approached in two major ways: studies have sought either to measure personal self-concept, excluding attitudes and feelings towards race, or they have sought to measure racial self-concept excluding attitudes toward the personal self. Failure to integrate the two approaches has proven to be a critical hindrance to the development of a theoretical framework for systematic analysis of the self-concept of African-Americans, which can account for attitudes towards the personal self and the racial self. Offered is a framework for the analysis individual/collective self-concept of African-Americans. The individual/collective self concept is comprised of two inseparable but distinguishable components: the experience of the unique individual (the I) and the accumulated experiences of the racial group (the We). It is characterized by the personal affirmation of, and the identification with one's own personal experiences and the collective experiences of one's racial group. Any imposed disassociation of the components by individuals or theoretical approaches is viewed as problematic.     

Storying a Social Drama: How Discourse and Practice Prevent Transformation Through Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

In a sociohistorical moment during which racism has become more widely accepted as a social fact, U.S. scholars and practitioners of education continue to struggle with how schooling might participate in its eradication. In suburban, elite, Midwestern Pioneer City Public Schools, a series of initiatives I refer to as “the transformation” aimed to eliminate racial predictability in standardized test scores through efforts (a) to redistribute children from a racially and economically isolated elementary school across the district's four elementary schools, and (b) to train all district staff in a particular brand of culturally relevant pedagogy. In this article, I argue that Pioneer City School District was unable to address the transformative goals of culturally relevant pedagogy—in part because of irresolvable tensions between an explicitly anti-racist theory and the authoritative discourses suggesting that racism is a thing of the past.     

Shifting spaces,frozen frames: trajectories of queer politics in contemporary India

Abstract

This paper is a comparative reading of two Malayalam films The Journey (Sancharram, 2004) and The Wandering Bird Does Not Cry (Deshadana Kili Karayarilla, 1986) as representative of differing trajectories of queer politics in the Kerala public sphere. It uses an analysis of the representative strategies of these two films, to interrogate the limits of a universal language of sexual identity politics. The paper places the two films in the different historical contexts in which they are produced, and deploys a film from an earlier time period to problematize some of the assumptions of contemporary queer politics. For this purpose it undertakes a close reading of the cinematic codes of both these films, especially the spatial arrangements in the films. I argue that the location of Sancharram in the LGBT discourse in India and abroad makes it so enmeshed in setting up an established meaning for the term ‘queer’ that the process of queering becomes one of stabilizing a chosen form of desire as the ideal one. In this process of setting up a stable trajectory for queer desire, it also freezes the spatial and social terrains of Kerala. The process of queering that Deshadana Kili Karayarilla undertakes is not one that attempts to set up a particular subject position as the queer subject position. It sets out to trouble the naturalized construction of the heterosexual couple and injects a sense of instability into the social sphere itself. The paper examines how some of the taken‐for‐granted assumptions of transnational queer politics, like the celebration of visible bodies, gets radically questioned when we turn to non‐metropolitan sites of analysis. It aims to look at how cultural texts can embody different modes of sexual politics, as activists struggle to coin strategies to articulate the political possibilities of non‐normative sexual practices in Kerala today.     

Scandalous equivocation: a note on the politics of queer self‐naming

Abstract

This paper discusses the political and theoretical implications of the various performances of queer self‐naming (or the refusal of which) in the face of the ongoing backlash against unconventional or non‐normative genders and sexualities. It argues that, instead of a hasty call for the discarding of identity terms or naïve recourse to them, we could keep (re)using the signs without endorsing their normative meanings and line of demarcation. Through analysing some of the feminist counter‐discourses against the backlash, arguments for indigenous Japanese queerness, and a performance by a Japanese lesbian artist, Ito Tari, it shows that the queer gesture of equivocally assuming the scandalous ‘name’ may be one of the few effective survival strategies for those who have already been scandalously (mis)named.     

“I will not hate myself because you cannot accept me”: Problematizing empowerment and gender-diverse selfies

ABSTRACT

While selfies of beautiful cisgender women are declaimed by mainstream media as narcissistic and facile, some body-positive feminists and queer theorists argue that selfies can be empowering. They claim self-representation by traditionally stigmatized people can challenge normative presentations of beauty and gender. This article problematizes “empowerment” as a definitive and/or productive frame and argues instead for observation and analysis of “privilege” in situated practice. In this article I combine analysis of a collection of online cultural artifacts (including nonbinary selfies on Tumblr) and interviews with a small group of trans* social media storytellers to explore theoretical tensions between gender fluidity and identity fragmentation across multiple social media sites and practices. Gender-diverse digital self-representation encompasses both “consistent” androgyny, nonbinary, agender, and so on, and “emergent” presentations-in-flux. I assert that the ongoing iteration of self across social media—implied by self (re)presentation—can have simultaneous and contradictory political significance. I conclude that networked interpersonal complications frame understandings of empowerment, as perhaps they always have done.     

Identity Management and the Fostering of Network Ignorance: Accounts of Queer Iranian Women in the United States

This qualitative study explores the narratives of 12, first-generation, queer, Iranian-American women in an attempt to better understand the experiences of being both Iranian and queer, and to explore the various ways participants manage their sexual identities within their ethnic communities. Online interviews were analyzed using grounded theory analysis, which revealed that shame anxiety motivates the fostering of network ignorance. Feelings of fear and guilt, which together cultivate shame anxiety, motivate the identity management strategies of queer Iranian women as they attempt to foster ignorance of their sexual orientation within the Iranian community. Strategies include (co)-covering, deceiving and passing, and avoiding.     

More Than Goth: The Rhetorical Reclamation of the Subcultural Self

I argue that Calvin Schrag's performative notion of the "self after postmodernity" provides an innovative, multidisciplinary approach to the investigation of the rhetorical functions of spectacular subcultures. Focusing my discussion on the discourse, fashion, and demeanor of goth subculturalists, I argue that active human agents through their choices, decisions, and actions, rhetorically coauthor a degree of self-constancy. The rhetorical nature of self-identity, group identity, and subcultural ideology is the focal point of my work.     

Examining the World Around Us: Critical Media Literacy in Teacher Education

This article presents findings from action research conducted in a graduate level course with practicing K–12 educators. In this article, I consider the usefulness of critical media literacy in the graduate classroom as I engaged students in discussions about multicultural issues including race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. Through an examination of student presentations and field notes collected over the course of the semester, I found the graduate student participants were typically quite savvy at evaluating the messages they receive from media. Further, I found the incorporation of popular media into the classroom helped students grapple with typically foreign and often theoretically dense concepts like unconscious racism and heteronormativity, as well as theories like critical race theory, intersectionality, and queer theory. The graduate student participants were able to see deep connections between text/theory and media and often used various media to illustrate theory in quite complex ways. Lastly, engaging with texts of everyday life and using visual representations helped students interrogate the concepts explored in the course and provided students access to theory otherwise regarded as inaccessible.     

Disrupting Whitestream Measures of Quality Teaching: The Community Cultural Wealth of Teachers of Color

Discussions of teacher preparation, qualifications, and effectiveness are at the heart of increasing attacks on public education. In this article, we contribute to the growing body of literature that works to challenge the narrowing parameters of what is considered effective teacher pedagogy, particularly as it relates to the noted value of teachers of color. We argue that racial justice-oriented teachers of color—teachers who recognize structural racial inequities and strive for transformation—provide important, yet invisible labor in our nation's schools. Using a community cultural wealth (CCW) framework, we illuminate multiple strengths and contributions that racial justice-oriented teachers of color bring to the profession that go largely unnoticed by whitestream—Eurocentrism as a norm—measures of teacher quality. In an analysis of data from interviews, digital narratives, and questionnaires, we present counter-narratives—oppositional stories told from the vantage point of the oppressed—of women of color educators to show how their positionalities as teachers of color, community members, and activists, provide insights to the experiences and needs of students that often go unrecognized. This research expands our understanding of overlooked pedagogical characteristics that are foundational to serving students of color and should be incorporated into the way we prepare teachers and the educational administrators who evaluate them.     

“Is caste race?” Discourses of Racial Indianization

This paper investigates how the official discourse of race and caste are constructed in response to the Dalits’ claims that casteism is racism and caste should be included in the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, and Xenophobia (WCAR held in Durban in 2001). The research question driving this project probes into discursive strategies and logics, which deny any association of caste with race in the Indian context and the significance of race denial. The paper also questions whether the denial of association of race and caste is indicative of racial Indianization. I argue that in India, race lives through the category of caste as a form of racial Indianization.     

Queer cultural movements and local counterpublics of sexuality: a case of Seoul Queer Films and Videos Festival 1

Abstract

This study is an attempt to examine the ways in which popular culture can restructure the relationship between sexuality and power, through the case of Seoul Queer Films and Videos Festival, a cultural arena of newly emerged queer discourses in Korean society. In the past 10 years, queer discourses in Korea have undergone a rapid change. With heterosexual normativity being challenged and ‘queer’ being consumed as a cultural code, Korean spectators come to engage with a queer film festival in multilateral and sometimes contradictory contexts. This study will try to pose a controversial question to the heterosexual society by reading the complex interactions between film festivals, films and spectators while paying attention to the experiences of the participants in the Seoul Queer Films and Videos Festival and pointing at the political implications of queer films now in 2006. Through this, I try to look for possibilities of a queer cultural movement which rejects being co‐opted by the heterosexual society, constructs new ideas of social powers in relation with sexuality, and seeks alternative visions for such change in relations.     

Archiving queer feelings in Hong Kong

Abstract

This article argues for the revitalization of a productive tension between ‘queer’ and ‘theory’ and underscores its necessity for a study of ‘local queer theory.’ While there is an apparent lack of academic queer theory in Hong Kong, there are numerous examples of writings that advance theoretical positions, albeit in unfamiliar guises. The article analyzes three examples of queer writings by Hong Kong authors, penned between 1984 and 2000. Focusing on the texts’ archival effect and affective expression, the analysis demonstrates that these writings form an archive of queer feelings. As a repository of the discomfort and anxiety that are constitutive of queer lives, these writings can offer fruitful interventions into current theoretical debates. The article concludes with a call for more creative and irreverent – in short, queerer – ways of localizing the global phenomenon of queer theory.     

Embodied inter-referencing: encounters with and among “Asian” students in the Australian classroom

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the pedagogical practice of referencing my experiences as a transnational Korean American woman in the classroom and considers how it opens up space for domestic and international students of East, Southeast, and South Asian backgrounds to reflect on their different identities, histories, and cultures. In particular, it focuses on how this practice enables Asian students to share their experiences of and insights about racial difference, racism, and whiteness in Australia and other parts of the world. Building on the concept of Asian “inter-referencing” from Chua Beng Huat (2015), I coin the term “embodied inter-referencing” to describe the strategic ways I use autobiographical narrative to create an inclusive, interactive, and mutually respectful learning space. I centre here on how some Asian students respond to this strategy by telling their own stories and in the process, create transnational, diasporic, and inter-Asian affective communities inside and outside the classroom.     

Networking Asia Pacific: queer film festivals and the spatiotemporal politics of inter-referencing

ABSTRACT

Expanding on the critique of Euro-America-centrism in knowledge production, this article examines three spatiotemporal hierarchies through the inter-referencing practices of Asia Pacific Queer Film Festival Alliance. First, through the analysis of the documentary short Lady Eva and its circulation, I look at how the network opens up the issue of Pacific indigeneity in the transpacific context, which has the potential to unsettle the existing epistemic structures that rest upon the binary of West/non-West or white/Indigenous. Second, I investigate how the queer film festival alliance serves as sites for the articulation of queer rights, which sometimes cast a progressivist temporal narrative based on a hierarchical arrangement of geographical places. Third, through the case of ShanghaiPRIDE Film Festival, I examine how anti-institutionalism in film festival organizing offers a critique of gay-male dominated queer film festivals and the capitalist developmental logic that emphasizes profit and financial viability. By doing so, I scrutinize how the spatiotemporal hierarchies embedded in the film festival network complicate the understanding of inter-referencing as citation, collaboration, and competition. At the same time, I use inter-referencing to further the discussion of spatial politics in film festival studies by highlighting the spatiotemporal hierarchies.     

On the continuing necessity of anti-Americanism

Abstract

In Hong Kong, even though the Bill of Rights Ordinance (the localized version of ICCPR), Sex Discrimination Ordinance and a series of legal reforms (such as the cancellation of marital exemption of rape and the recognition of sexual discrimination in criminal law) were enacted and introduced respectively since the 1990s, gender/sexual discrimination in the legal discourse still persists; for example: Chinese customary law which only recognizes the male’s right to build small houses in the New Territories remains an exception under the Sex Discrimination Ordinance; the government insists on not tabling an anti‐sexual‐orientation discrimination bill; the right to same sex marriage/partnership is still absent from any legal‐political agenda; and so on. Some politicians and academics argue that any attempt to transplant a Euro‐American individual‐centric perspective of gender/sexual equality/justice will violate the Han‐Chinese culture of harmony. In the paper, I will adopt a critical perspective in examining the above argument and examine why harmony politics becomes a meta‐narrative in Han‐Chinese socio‐legal culture and how human nature/subjectivity is re‐constituted in such a context. I will further argue that a culture should always be meticulously and critically represented and investigated in order to reproduce ‘gender/sexual justice’. I will also investigate the possibility of scrutinizing and exploring the spaces of resistance within the Han‐Chinese socio‐legal culture in Hong Kong, where foreign theory of gender/sexual justice/equality and related legal reforms can be engaged to politicize current discrimination and suppression.     

Symbolic bordering: The self-representation of migrants and refugees in digital news

ABSTRACT

In this article, I combine theorizations of the selfie as an aesthetic and technological practice of digital self-representation with a theatrical conception of spectatorship, inspired by Adam Smith, in order to argue that the selfie has the potential to operate as a significant ethico-political spectacle in the spaces of Western publicity. I exemplify my argument by using the remediation of migrant and refugee selfies in mainstream news as a case study of “symbolic bordering”—as a technology of power that couples the geopolitical bordering of migrants in the outskirts of Europe with practices of “symbolic bordering” that appropriate, marginalize, or displace their digital testimonies in Western news media.