Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 17, No.

38, 2002

An Ambiguous Juncture: Racism and the Formation of Asian Femininity

JULIE MATTHEWS

Introduction 1 Feminist theorists, cultural theorists, race theorists and postcolonial theorists alike have demonstrated the social constructedness of race. According to Stuart Hall, who makes his argument with respect to being black in Britain, we have reached the end of innocence, or the end of the innocent notion of the essential black subject What is at issue here is the recognition of the extraordinary diversity of subjective positions, social experiences and cultural identities which compose the category black; that is, the recognition that black is essentially a politically and culturally constructed category, which cannot be grounded in a set of xed transcultural or transcendental racial categories and which therefore has no guarantees in Nature.2 This article is concerned largely with articulating some of the possibilities and pitfalls of constructivism in relation to what Cornell West calls the new cultural politics of difference. Such a politics consists of creative responses to the precise circumstance of our present moment,3 and in relation to the situation of Asian4 young women, it brings us to an ambiguous juncture. A juncture at which it is necessary to acknowledge that: (a) while race and ethnicity5 might be acknowledged as socially constructed, their racialising effects are no less damaging; (b) the effects of racialisation are various and contradictory, which means that they are oppressive and powerful and also able to be subverted; (c) notions of femininity6 often privileged in feminist debate are challenged by a consideration of racialisation. Based on the comments and views of Asian young women at a co-educational Australian high school,7 this article highlights the ways that Asian girls work both with and against the material and symbolic circumstances of their everyday lives. Paying particular attention to racialised distinctions and separations, I argue that Asian young women redeploy the discursive strategies and tactics of racialisation and in doing so contribute to the formation of Asian femininity. I do not want to suggest that Asian young women are active agents, vanguard resistors or, for that matter, passive victims. Rather, I seek to show that Asian young women are variously embroiled in processes that work with and against a complex nexus of racialised
ISSN 0816-464 9 print/ISSN 1465-330 3 online/02/020207-13 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/0816464022014797 9

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and sexualised material circumstances and cultural symbols. On the one hand, racialising and sexualising discourses can be seen to promote discriminations, exclusions, and abuse; but on the other they can also be used to rework separations and distinctions which produce old and new versions of raced/sexed identities. This article suggests that agency is not invariably tied to active intention or purpose but works more problematically in precarious ambivalence. By paying attention to the range of discursive strategies and tactics that comprise the everyday actions of minority students it is possible to regard Asian young women as both products of, and contributors to, an Asian femininity that is syncretic and culturally hybrid.8 Cornell West quite rightly observes that one of the key issues in the modern black diaspora is the problem of invisibility and namelessness. Black people commonly lack the power to: present themselves to themselves and others as complex human beings, and thereby to contest the bombardment of negative, degrading stereotypes put forward by White supremacist ideologies.9 West refers here to a racialising process that carves out the social locations of black people regardless of their actual presence or absence.10 Let me illustrate this with a narrative: I bumped into a teacher I was acquainted with in the grounds of the university. He was doing some further studies and was sitting with a woman who was also on his course. They began to talk about the video they saw in class when the woman commented on how strange it was to see a Chinese on TV, speaking English so well. I blanked, as I often do in circumstances where I would like someone to be not therewhere I would like them to be invisible. A curious response, as it probably contributes to the making of my own invisibility, which is perhaps why the woman turned to the teacher and said, I know you are Italian background, and, looking at me added, and you are Asian background. It amazes me that you speak English so well. I looked at the teacher who also seemed disinclined to spell out his diasporic circumstances and we both smiled politely. In this racialising interchange the teacher and I were interpolated or called into difference. I was reminded that in Australia, Asianness resonates with foreignness and accented voices to signal disassociation and inability to be assimilated into Australianness. Without being overtly racist the woman also racialised herself. Racialisation is a process that uses biological and quasi-biological discourses to legitimate subjectformation, inclusion and exclusion, discrimination, inferiorisation, exploitation, verbal abuse, and physical harassment and violence.11 Although it is the basis of racist practice, its exibility indicates that racism, or white supremacism is not so monolithic or hegemonic as West assumes.12 Indeed, as indicated here, the visibility of marginal people can serve to unsettle racialising and Orientalist projections so that their very presence troubles and to a large extent challenges these discourses. Later in this article, I explore similar sorts of ambivalence in the narratives of Asian young women. The incident also demonstrates the mobility of Asian femininity, a position that offers multiple and unexpected points of alliance and division. It is worth noting that apart from this teacher, I align my position with Cornell West (a black American male academic), Stuart Hall (a black English male academic), and various feminist and postcolonial theorists (who I have yet to mention). I want to emphasise that while alignments and associations are crucially tied to corporeal difference, they are not xed

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by, or within, them. Before proceeding any further, I would like to qualify my use of the term Asian. Asian Many studies of Asian or Indo-Chinese groups assume that such categories are de nitive geographical or genealogical terms that distinguish discrete racial, cultural, ethnic or national groups. As such, they are often taken to refer to essential, homogeneous and pre-given identities and realities. The malleability and historical speci city of the term Asian is demonstrated when one considers its different usage in Australia, America and Britain. In Australia, Asian generally refers to those from Southeast Asia (Burma, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor and Vietnam) and Northeast Asia (China, Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan). In America, it also includes those of Japanese, Indian and Pakistani background while in Britain it refers almost entirely to those of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan backgrounds and to Asians who previously lived in East Africa. The term Indo-Chinese is common in Australian education literature but the students I encountered never used the term. The unpopularity of this category is perhaps to do with its political roots in colonialism when it denoted the South East Asian peninsula between India and China consisting of Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Malaysia. The young women in this study were of various cultural, linguistic and sociogeographical backgrounds.13 Their choice of identity markers such as Asian, Australian, Vietnamese, Chinese and other identity categorisations14 tended to depend on where they were and to whom they were talking, and yet they struggled with understandings of difference that conformed to the idea that cultures were fundamentally discrete. Students tended to distinguish themselves as Asians from others who were Australians. Thus, their use of Australian served to demarcate anyone who could not be identi ed as Asian, a distinction that correlated with ethno-racial corporeality. Regarding the term Australian as simply inclusive of both Anglo and non-Anglo backgrounds implies that those who do distinguish Asians from Australians are misinformed or even politically incorrect, but taking Australian to include Asian does not necessarily make it so. Unfortunately, the desire to celebrate a happy ideology of multi-cultural liberal pluralism can overlook the ways broader structural relations are networked by discourses of racism.15 The assumption that Australia is multicultural also lends credence to the idea that ethnic or cultural differences are quite distinct and separate from racial differences. Because pluralist and multiculturalist views tend to overstate ethnic, cultural and national differences, they risk establishing ethnic absolutist or culturalist positions which actually reinforce the idea that such differences are authentic, unassailable and absolute and thereby approach the dynamics of race, ethnicity and nationality from the same assumptions as new-right racism.16 As Mary Kalantzis observes, af rmation of ethnicity is a two-edged sword: a resistance to racism and domination yet itself potentially conservative and racist.17 To put it boldly, our desires for inclusivity and authenticity should not distract us from examining the ways that multiculturalism can parallel racism in the production of absolute cultural differences. Questions like, Where do you come from? or incredulity at Asian students claims to be Australian, serve as constant reminders of their observable, embodied difference. Ien Ang argues that such positionings contribute to the production of Asian women as foreign, alien and placeless. In Angs view this is not a temporary, aberrant or straightforward practice of dispossession, but a process of

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othering undertaken in the light of liberal discourses of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is thus unable to contest or thwart the routine process of othering that marks ethnic Asianness as the outside of Anglo-Celtic centredness.18 While the category Asian has popular currency and is useful, it is also immensely problematic because it overwrites or disregards differences of gender, nationality, religion, ethnicity and class. My use of the term is not intended to secure, clarify, verify or authenticate a core (or essential) racial, ethnic, cultural and/or national difference. But I am aware that, despite my intent, Asian is a category that operates to erase and homogenise differences. It is for this reason that I use the term Asian to work out the effects and limits of ethno-racial corporealityto work out of a difference that must be both acknowledged and called into question.19 I would now like to discuss some of the racialising processes that comprise the commonplace experience of Asian young women in school. Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones But Words Will Also Hurt Me Even if racism is not overtly manifested in school, it is a knowledge experience that is brought to school and an experience that demarcates Asians as outsiders. Most of the young women I spoke with were able to recall out-of-school racist incidents. These often involved verbal abuse, racial slurs or being told to Go back to your own country. During 1994, there were a number of racist marches and rallies in the city centre of Adelaide. Zoahn20 described the time when she came across a National Action rally: Zoahn: Once I was in town and there was this group in front of Parliament House, theres this group of Neo-Nazis. They were just standing there just giving a speech on how to stop the Asians and showing all these pictures and that. And they were just like saying all these things and like and no Asians were there, and they were like really mean standing there with their arms folded and me and my friend were standing there. We didnt know what it was, and we were just standing there listening to it and they just looked at us, and we nally realised and we walked away with them all staring at us. Media coverage of neo-Nazi activities and the appearance of stickers and graf ti reading Stop the Asian Invasion on walls, at bus stops and on street furniture had an enormous impact on the students. In addition, members of National Action began to distribute racist literature to school students in the area. Mya said, Its everywhere, its always on fences and everything, on bus stops, like pamphlets stuck on the wall. I feel sorry for the people who have to keep painting them. In addition, members of National Action began to distribute racist literature to school students in the area. Apart from being angry, many young women were offended, hurt and embarrassed: Julie: Is there anything that you really would ght for, that you really feel angry about? Ahlee: I would rip off all those stickers by that guy. Ahnje: Michael Brander. Ahlee: Hes only a uni student, yeah. Ahnje: Hes on everything like all bus stops, Get rid of Asians. Everyone reads it at the bus stop and I feel so embarrassed standing there, they like, look at me. Julie: What does it say?

An Ambiguous Juncture Ahlee: In big words it goes, Vote for Michael Brander and Stop Asian Invasion.

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At this time the girls sense of security and normality was shaken (as was my own). Garon worried that she would be deported. She said, It feels like we are going to get kicked out. Zoahn was frightened, she felt conspicuous and vulnerable. The girls found themselves in the paradoxical position described by Iris Marion Young as one of being indiscernible and marginal while at the same time eminently observable, stereotyped and hailed as different.21 Racism made many girls feel conspicuously different, exposed and placeless. Although words can also hurt as effectively and penetratingly as physical attacks22 we should not assume that all those who are the targets of verbal abuse, racial slurs and mimicking of accents are similarly affected. Those students who had attended primary school in Australia stressed the psychological distress, helplessness and anger that was a consequence of their experience. Mya had been teased in primary school about her accent and her Ching Chong eyes. She said that she didnt feel like she knew enough to stand up for herself you cant really stand up for your rights or anything. Tactical Manoeuvres on a Raced Terrain Racism is not simply frightening or distressing. Its capacity to frustrate and alienate has a powerful effect on the identity formation of young people. Insults and abuse serve to create a community of us, where the demarcation of them distinguishes those who do not belong. Kafee told me that her response to someone who approached her saying Go back to your own country was to think Im going, Im going. Unfortunately, Kafees diasporic circumstances give her no place else to go. She was told that she did not belong in Australia but she knew that she did not belong in the place of her birth. Importantly, Kafees lack of belongingher Asiannessgave her access to a place of her own making. She belongs to a heterogeneous community of Asian girls and boys. This is the place that she goes to. From the point of view of many Asian young women, the maintenance of Asian friendship groupings was a separation that increased the girls sense of belonging, their sense of security and their chances of educational success. I will say more about educational performance later in this article. Social segregation is an important response to racism. Many young women did not encounter much racism in school because they mainly hung around with other Asian young women. The social and spatial separations of Asians from non-Asians thus worked to obstruct and defer confrontations with people who cannot be trusted not to have racist opinions. In this sense, Asian young women anticipate and avoid various features of everyday racism.23 The girls interactions in mainly Asian girls groups work as self-defence tactics that reduce the chances of their encountering racism: Tsuze: Well I used to hang around with a lot of Australians, but now its more Asians. Sometimes they could be nice to me, but they would still be racist, they could stillthey think Im kind of Australian because of likeI muck around with them, but theyll turn aroundthey can muck around with me ne, and they can turn around and just be another person, and theyll go, Wow they are such dorky people. Sometimes that hurts me as well cos its like talking about me kind of because Im Asian as well. If they can say it to another Asianits like the same thing, but they dont really notice that.

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Magy agreed that Asian friendship groupings reduce the risk of being verbally abused: Magy: Theres not much [racism] here you know because theres a lot of Asians here and we always hang out in a group and I donttheres not muchbut then if you are by yourself or something they are always calling you names or they go Ching Chong or something like that. The presence of more Asian students in a school reduces the chances of racial harassment because non-Asian students are more likely to fear repercussions. Social segregation and minimising contact with non-Asians is not the response of all Asian girls. Joze had Asian-Australian and Anglo-Asian boy and girl friends. On one occasion she described an incident that made her aware of the extent of her AngloAustralian friends racism. She learnt that they thought she was a special Asian, a more Australian Asian, or even a non-Asian.24 They may even have assumed that she would be attered by their inclusion of her into their anti-Asian us group. But Joze knew that their abuse of Asians could not possibly exclude her: Joze: At the school, I got put down in front of some guys [Australian boys]. Julie: Where? Joze: Just down near that canteen place where they were saying some stuff about Asians how they are stupid and all this and they bash them. Right in front of me, and thats the part where I got really upset because I was an Asian, and I was sitting there with them, and I didnt think they were like that. Julie: It was a shock? Joze: Yes I was shocked. When you nd out that people say things in front of you and dont realiseits bad isnt it, and you are friends and you thinkyes okay. Julie: Did that happen recently? Joze: Yes just recently but Im still friends with them. Julie: How did you feel at the time? Joze: I was angry and wanted to call them names back and I knew it was not going to work, you cant really get away with it. Julie: Did you say anything at the time? Joze: I said it is not only Asians that are stupid, Australian people can be stupid too, not only Aboriginal people, all different cultures. Theres some nice people and some bad, thats what I just said, and I was trying to explain itbut they kept on saying, Oh if I saw an Asian walking I would smash them. Joze did not feel that she belonged to an Asian community, although her girl friends were Asian she had a number of Anglo-Australian boy friends. Joze made a point of emphasising her actively antagonistic response to racism and yet she did not believe there was much else she could do about the racism of these Anglo-Australian boys. Joze found it dif cult conceptualise her responses to racism (and sexism) with positive self-regard, unless she was able to show an immediate direct and antagonistic resistance action. The main shopping mall was a popular meeting point for Asian young people and it was here that Kele was racially abused: Kele: Thats what happened to us in town, were you there when those Nazis came past me and T, they said, Yellow Monkeys and me and T just turned around and laughed and walked off. Joze: This man who was vested up, football uniform turned around and started calling me Nip. I turned around and was going to bash him and there was

An Ambiguous Juncture only me and like he was really older than me I was going to hit him but my sister grabbed me.

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Kele considered it appropriate to laugh derisively at the unknown assailant. By refusing to take the abuse seriously, this response sets the abuse in the realm of the trivial, absurd and idiotic. However, the subtlety and shrewdness of this tactic means that its importance as a resistance strategy is easily disregarded. Like Joze, quite a number of the Asian young women I spoke to advocated, or were prepared to return, violence with violence and abuse with abuse, a response that falls into step with traditional notions of immediate and direct resistance. Acceptance of the idea that physical violence is a suitable and effective response to verbal violence has important implications for our understanding of femininity. First, it contradicts the stereotyped notion of Asian femininity as a form of hyper-femininity where Asian women are represented as being more passive, subservient and compliant than Anglo women. Second, it focuses attention on the androcentrism of conventional understandings of resistance and its privileging of direct confrontation and violence. Resistance for Asian young women is a far more nuanced and complex affair. Interacting in Asian friendship groups and interacting in non-Asian friendship groups are forms of resistance, as are violence and other more oblique responses to racial abuse. Although I emphasise that Asian girls manufacture the discursive resources needed to make sense of, and respond to, their situation, I do not mean to imply that they are necessarily able to perceive or assert their resistance as worthy or admirable. Neither can we assume that Asian girls are more or less able to conform to traditional notions of femininity. Rather, we need to realise that femininity is racialised and resistance is masculinised. This is why it is important to pay attention to the particular circumstances of Asian young womens lives. To read the circumstances of Asian young womens lives for dissidence enables us to see that even though they are the targets of racialisation and sexualisation, they are neither hapless victims nor vanguard resisters. It enables us to see that identity is made possible through local engagements with racialised and sexualised social relations and discursive systems. Resisting and Refusing Another response to racialising discourses involves becoming more like them. This is not just a case of assimilation and acculturation, where minority cultures adopt or adapt to features of the majority culture, but a process that contributes to the manufacture of a particular con guration of Asianness. Lilee believed that only Asian young women who are different are picked on and those who are less Asian are left alone: Julie: Do you think they [Asian young women born in Australia] get picked on? Lilee: No they wouldnt cos they hang around with the Australians and they are everything like Australian cos they were born here, so when people ask, do you know anything about your own country they say, No, so that the way they do and act would be everything like Australian, so nobody would pick on them. If the Asians swear they would de nitely get friends here, like when the ones who are born overseas dont swear and does normal things like that, thats the ones the Australians would pick on. I have already observed that girls who take Anglo-Australian friends are generally aware that this relationship is hazardous because racism may intrude when it is least expected. But it is also the case that by making friends with Anglo-Australians, by showing that

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underneath you are just like them, you can make yourself known as a person, and thus avoid being discriminated against: Zoahn: I dont think there is much racism in this school, well, maybe to other Asians, but a lot of people know me and it is really hard to be racist to your friends. If you are picked out and picked on because you are different, making yourself less different means you are less likely to be abused. Asian girls can also wear pale make-up, dye their hair, or even change their name. Zakhe said that changing her name enabled her to avoid the embarrassment of constantly having to repeat, what was to others, an unfamiliar sound. Additionally, it reduced the chance of her being insulted by those who rhymed her name with English terms of abuse. Changing your name to a more memorable English one has the advantage of making you more visible and less forgettable because it increases the likelihood of teachers and other students remembering it, and decreases the likelihood of being overlooked in the classroom. Reductive explanations that assume that gestures of image, body, and style are merely expressions of the desire to be white, acculturation or Westernisation are limited because they overlook the effects of racialised femininity. The imperatives of Western femininity, colonial discourse and commodity fetishism are of crucial signi cance. Western femininity evokes passivity and submission as well as objectifying racialised standards of beauty and sexual allure such as those associated with being blonde, light skinned, thin and tall. Asian femininity does not meet the racialised dictates of Western femininity. Moreover, the exoticisation of Asian women ampli es the passivity traditionally associated with Western femininity. Western colonial depictions of the Orient as contaminating and dangerous are thus managed through the exoticisation and eroticisation of Asian women.25 Because Asian femininity is differently feminised we can expect its consequences and resistances to vary as well. The white working-class girls described by Angela McRobbie resist the idealised nice-girl stereotypes of femininity by cheeking the teacher and ghting, and they use femininity and preoccupations with fashion, jewellery and boys to resist school culture.26 That is not to suggest that assertive, fashion-conscious Asian girls who streak or dye their hair and work hard at school cannot also be regarded as working within and against femininity, provided we understand that femininity itself is a racialised discourse, as well as being class speci c. Resistance to Asian femininity is necessarily complicated because it entails using racialised Western femininity to gain access to the aesthetics, pleasures, rewards and political-economic resources of whiteness.27 Western femininity offers spaces of resistance to Asian femininity; for example, being assertive and fashion conscious challenges the idea that Asian women are traditional, docile, oppressed by men and always willing to please. But because discourses of femininity, independence and aesthetic self-enjoyment are necessarily entangled in the commodi cation of whiteness, such resistance can also be explained as a desire for whiteness and submission to the dictates of white racialised femininity. Likewise, taking a Western name has certain political rewardsit increases your visibility and removes a possible site of abuse but, again, it can be read as a desire for whiteness, a lack of self-/cultural worth, or simply a case of acculturation and Westernisation. Culturalist explanations for the positive response of Asian girls to school fail to consider the effects of racialisation and sexualisation and are unable to theorise the relationship of educational success to the formation of Asian femininity.

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According to Brian Bullivant, Asian migrant success is caused by a strong culture-based work/success ethic. Asian students educational achievements are enhanced because Asian cultural values are the very same values that are sancti ed by Western education systems.28 Many of the Asian young women I spoke to realised that it was because they lived in Australia, because they were newcomers, because they were identi ed and identi able outsiders, that they had to be academically successful. Education is a path to employment, nancial reward, social status and respect. Importantly, education is also a way of proving your worth and challenging assumptions of racial inferiority and not simply a cultural or economic imperative.29 It is worth noting that racial stereotypes identifying outsider groups as inferior and subordinate stand in stark contrast to the stereotypes of Asian students as educationally successful. This disparity is important for it enables Asian young women to articulate the stereotype alongside that of Asian femininity to enhance their chance of education success and resist racialisation and sexualisation. For example, Judis experience of racism was fuelled by the desire to prove that it was not Asian young women but their abusers who were dumb: Judi: And if they [Asians] achieve a high grade, the Australian people, they cant look down on you. Garon: Yes, they dont look down to them. I think Asian people, they want to prove to them, theyre not dumb, theyre not stupid, that theyre the same. Judi: Even if they are a different colour. In a racialising climate that disregards and debases visible minorities, educational success is an assertion of self-worth and visibility. Rather than being a consequence of passive Asian femininity or the cultural dictates of a particular work/success ethic, the positive orientation of Asian girls to education can be seen to work within and against their outsider position. Instead of demonstrating their passive accommodation to an oppressive educational regime, or their failure to understand the structural constraints of racism or sexism, Asian girls can be seen to mobilise Asian femininity to secure long-term economic success. Becoming Asian, female and educationally successful is the nal account of your merit and the means by which you can attain status and respect, regardless of your difference. Asian Femininity Racialisation is a common feature of Asian young womens lives and it in uences the formation of Asian femininity in complex and unpredictable ways. Racialising discourses in uence the construction of both the category Asian and the material circumstance of Asian young women. A focus on racism in terms of discrimination, exclusion, violence and abuse is problematic because it tends to amplify victim status. An emphasis on racialisation is more productive because it traces the effects of a process that generates multiple and contradictory responses such as aggressive antagonism, insecurity, the sense that you are being scrutinised, lack of belonging, fear of failure, and the need to prove your worth. In highlighting the creative responses of Asian young women to their contemporary social circumstances, I have argued that to be Asian and female is to be in a position that generates surprising alliances and solidarities; it is not, therefore, a position that can be xed into a perpetual state of marginality. Arguing that identity categories are terms

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whose meanings change over time and place, Gayatri Spivak reminds us that marginality is never constant or unchanging. Marginal identities are as much a production as a state of being different: Marginality, as it is becoming part of the disciplinary-cultural parlance, is in fact the name of a certain constantly changing set of representations that are the condition and effect of it.30 It is because cultural and racial identities are in a constant state of ux, of construction and transformation that Stuart Hall suggests we should regard them as narratives and representations. 31 In short, be they related to race, colour, culture, ethnicity, nation or political discourse, identities are changing cultural recon gurations that have no necessary political belonging:32 We have the notion of identity as contradictory, as composed of more than one discourse, as composed always across the silences of the other, as written in and through ambivalence and desire. These are extremely important ways of trying to think identity which is not a sealed or closed totality.33 Asian women are united and divided by a matrix of multiple identity claims. Identities, as Trinh Minh-ha observes, are complex arrangements of fragments that have no uni ed subject or authentic centre that can be revealed by carefully peeling back the distinct layers. It is precisely because they are evocative of fragmentary constructed/social and/or essential/originary features of birth, race, ethnicity, nationality, sex or class that they can be used strategically to work with, and across, xity.34 I have in this article shown how self-identi cations, alliances and divisions are worked according to who and where we are, where and to whom we are speaking. Representation Before closing this article, I would like brie y to clarify my feminist postcolonial stance by addressing the vexed question of representation as it relates to this research. The work of Ien Ang, Homi Bhabha, Rey Chow, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Cornell West, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Gayatri Spivak and Trinh T. Minh-ha are valuable for the attention they pay to the peripheral, marginal and dynamic particularities of meaning making. They assert the importance of strategic subversions that arise from the complex matrix of discriminations associated with cultural displacement and marginality in the West.35 Representation is a key point of contention. How can we write about others in a manner that doesnt simply either collapse or fortify their distinction from our own? For those like myself, for whom hybrid conditions of living are commonplace, the complexity of our identi cations makes writing about others a fraught and almost disabling self-conscious exercise.36 In light of expectations of, and desires for, authenticity and the real thing, I squirm at my own in-authenticity. My diasporic Asian/ Western hybridity is invariably too Western to be Asian and too Asian to be Western. Like other feminist researchers, I struggle to make sense of situations that have been traditionally regarded as explainable through impartiality, distance and outsider status. Feminism is important because it rejects the idea of objectivity and impartiality as an idealist ction that simply legitimates the authority of a predominantly androcentric academy.37 Following Foucault, feminist poststructuralism focuses on the nexus of power and knowledge to analyse technologies of subjugation and strategies of resistance.38 Feminism therefore validates my inclination to make sense of Asian femininity by

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drawing on my emotional connectedness to being Asian and female in a Western location. However, cultural and postcolonial theorists have put paid to the innocence of this standpoint, arguing that we need to explore and understand the politics of situated and embodied meaning making. As the author of a text that lays claim to knowing something and thus making meaning from the lives of visible minorities, I acknowledge the impossibility of representing a subaltern voice in a manner that is not implicated in impositional imperialising practices. The excavation of subjugated knowledges cannot be justi ed as any less de ling or colonising than the assertion of any other sorts of truths. Every standpoint submerges others. In the face of this incriminating paradox, my response has been to explore deconstructive ways of writing; ways of writing that lay open others claims to legitimacy and my own. It is in the light of these subduing self-doubts that I therefore stage my claims about Asian/female constructedness. My arguments are premised on the idea that in my life, and in the lives of the young women I discuss, racialising discourses are pivotal. They are a key feature of Western culture and are articulated in various ways by different peopleby those who reap the privileges of the centre and by those who are marginalised by it. I dont want to suggest that processes of racialisation affect all Asian young women in the same way, but neither are they only relevant to the local situation of a few students at one Australian school. I would like to close this article by suggesting that studies of femininity should not disregard the effects of racial discourse when considering the ways social and representational practices utilise particular sets of corporeal characteristics. A focus on local power arrangements in particular historical and social circumstances needs also to identify continuities, discontinuities and transformations if such accounts are not to contribute to manufacturing victims or maintaining the logic of racism and sexism. This means that feminism must necessarily work at an ambiguous juncture, a juncture that articulates the terms of racialisation and sexualisation in order to loosen the hegemony of their meanings and premises. NOTES
1. 2. 3. I would like to thank David Hollinsworth, Carl Matthews and the anonymous reviewers of Australian Feminist Studies for their critical commentary. Stuart Hall, New Ethnicities in James Donald and Ali Rattansi (eds), Race Culture and Difference (Sage) Newbury Park, 1992, p. 254 (emphasis in original). The new politics of difference focuses on the methodological (existential, intellectual and political) challenges encountered by intellectuals who work for social justice and who are necessarily co-opted by the very institutions and structures they seek to change. Cornell West, The New Cultural Politics of Difference in Cameron McCarthy and Warren Crichlow (eds), Race, Identity and Representation in Education (Routledge) New York, 1993, p. 11. Like the term race, Asian is often enclosed in quotation marks to stress that it is a socially constructed identity position and not a natural or biological condition. I will not continue this practice because I do not consider race or Asian to be any more or less a symbolic formation than other identity positions, such as those of ethnicity, class, sex or gender. Ethnicity is commonly distinguished from race on the grounds that it refers to cultural constructions such as shared traditions, language and history, rather than untenable biological distinctions. However, both the biological distinctions of race and the social distinctions of ethnicity are discursive constructions that play on embodied difference. Speci cally, they refer to differences premised on us and them binary conceptions where us is frequently premised on whiteness as a symbolic marker of the distinction. Femininity refers to the distinctive characteristics ascribed to women within the gender order. This study is based on a two-year association with 35 young women whose ages ranged from 14 to 21

4.

5.

6. 7.

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(eight were mature-age students). In 1994, the total school population was 637, with 43 Asian girls and 52 Asian boys. The material quoted here is derived from group conversations, some of which were taped. Homi Bhabha, The Commitment to Theory, New Formations, vol. 5, 1988, p. 13. Bhabha uses the term hybrid to refer to the disruptive and transformative point of articulation where a position arises that cannot be regarded as one thing or another but something else besides which contest the terms and territories of both (emphasis in original). Because hybridity involves the mingling, fusion and juxtaposition of culture and identity it fractures the idea of unitary subjectivity and destabilises binary oppositions. Nikos Papastergiadis, Debating Cultural Hybridity in Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood (eds), Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-racism (Zed Books) London, 1997, pp. 25781. West, The New Cultural Politics, p. 17 (emphasis in original). The self/other dualism is one of a range of binaries (others include subject/object, mind/body, feminine/masculine) that saturate Western philosophical thought. Binaries de ne or establish the limits of one term by reference to its counterpart and are thus unable to offer de nitive explanations of either. They also set one term up as the standard or norm and thus reduce the other term to a permanent state of peripherality. The subordinate term is inevitably neutralised because it can only be present when it is assimilated through the dominant term. Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (Routledge) London, 1990, p. 13. Ali Rattansi, Just Framing: Ethnicities and Racisms in a Postmodern Framework in Linda Nicholson and Steven Seidman (eds), Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics (Cambridge University Press) Cambridge, 1995, p. 258. West, The New Cultural Politics, p. 18. A scrutiny of practices of racialisation in relation to sexualisation challenges Wests view and it becomes possible to see that the struggle over images and representation is not entirely confrontationa l and combative but also nuanced and strategic. Of the 35 young women in this study, 26 were born in Vietnam, two in Laos, two in the Philippines, four in Cambodia and one in Malaysia. Twenty-one students claimed Vietnamese ethnicity, seven Chinese, three Chinese/Vietnamese, one Chinese/Cambodian, one Cambodian and two Filipino. They also regarded themselves as one and/or several of the following: Vietnamese, Chinese, Cambodian, Chinese-Vietnamese, Asian-Australian, Asian-Australian-Vietnamese, Cambodian-Chinese-Asian, Chinese-Asian and Vietnamese-Asian-Chinese. Mary Kalantzis, Ethnicity Meets Gender Meets Class in Australia in Sophie Watson (ed.), Playing the State: Australian Feminist Interventions (Allen & Unwin) North Sydney, 1990, p. 48. See Paul Gilroy, It Aint Where Youre From, Its Where Youre At The Dialectics of Diasporic Identi cation, Third Text, vol. 13, Winter 1990, p. 7; Fazal Rizvi, Children and the Grammar of Popular Racism: Race, Identity and Representation in Education in Cameron McCarthy and Warren Crichlow (eds), Race, Identity and Representation in Education (Routledge) New York, 1993, p. 127; and Vicki Crowley, Teaching Aboriginal Studies: Some Problems of Culturalism in an Inner City School, The Aboriginal Child at School, vol. 2, no. 1, 1993, p. 35. Kalantzis, Ethnicity Meets Gender, p. 51. Ien Ang, Im a Feminist But Other Women and Postnational Feminism in Barbara Caine and Rosemary Pringle (eds), Transitions: New Australian Feminisms (St Martins Press) New York, 1995, p. 72. See also Ien Ang, The Curse of the Smile: Ambivalence and the Asian Woman in Australia, Feminist Review, no. 53, 1996, p. 47. This point is borrowed from Colin McCabe who observes that Gayatri Spivaks work refuses to discount or to fully accept subject-positions. Colin McCabe, Foreword in Gayatri Spivak, In Other Words: Essays in Cultural Politics (Routledge) New York, 1987, p. xvi. Ien Ang is also of the view that we must work from a position that both af rms and undoes our identities. Ien Ang, The Differential Politics of Chineseness, Communal/Plural, vol. 1, p. 26. The girls names have been changed to ensure anonymity. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton University Press) Princeton, 1990, p. 60. G. Smithson-Donaldson and T. van-Dijk, Discourse and Discrimination (Wayne State University) Detroit, 1988. Philomena Essed, Everyday Racism, Reports from Women of Two Cultures, Cynthia Jaffe (trans.) (Hunter House) Alameda, 1990, p. 260. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other, Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Indiana University Press) Bloomington, 1989, p. 86, suggests that this sense of specialness, anaesthetises Asian women to the contradictions of their insider/outsider position. See also Ien Ang, The Curse of the Smile, p. 46, who regards the ambivalence of Asian femininity as both a pitfall and a source of power.

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9. 10.

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15. 16.

17. 18.

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20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

An Ambiguous Juncture
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26. 27. 28.

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30. 31.

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33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

See Ang, The Curse of the Smile, p. 37; Annette Hamilton, Fear and Desire: Aborigines, Asians and the National Imaginary, Australian Cultural History, vol. 9, p. 26; Jeanne Frances I. Illo, Fair Skin and Sexy Body: Imprints of Colonialism and Capitalism on the Filipina, Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 11, no. 24, 1996, pp. 21925; and David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism and Travel Writing (Duke University Press) Durham, NC, 1994, p. 179. Angela McRobbie, Working Class Girls and the Culture of Femininity in Women Take Issue: Aspects of Womens Subordination, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (Hutchinson) London, 1978, pp. 3749. Lewis R. Gordon, Critical Mixed Race, Social Identities, vol. 1, no. 2, 1995, pp. 38195. Brian M. Bullivant, The Ethnic Encounter in the Secondary School: Ethnocultural Reproduction and Resistance: Theory and Case Studies (Falmer Press) London, 1987. See also R. Birrell and A. Seitz, The Myth of Ethnic Inequality in Australian Education, Journal of the Australian Population Association, vol. 3, May 1985, pp. 5274; and Brian M. Bullivant, The Ethnic Success Ethic Challenges Conventional Wisdom about Immigrant Disadvantage in Education, Australian Journal of Education, vol. 32, August 1988, pp. 22343. See John U. Ogbu, Immigrant and Involuntary Minorities in Comparative Perspective in Margaret A. Gibson and John U. Ogbu (eds), Minority Status and Schooling: a Comparative Study of Immigrant and Involuntary Minorities (Garland) New York, 1991, pp. 333. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (Routledge) New York, 1993, p. 62. Stuart Hall, Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities in Anthony D. King (ed.), Culture, Globalisation and the New-World System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity (Macmillan) Basingstoke, 1991, p. 49. Ali Rattansi, Just Framing: Ethnicities and Racisms in a Postmodern Framework in Linda Nicholson and Steven Seidman (eds), Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics (Cambridge University Press) Cambridge, 1995, pp. 2567. Hall, Old and New Identities, p. 49. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other, p. 94. See Ang, Curse of the Smile, pp. 3649; Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (Routledge) London, 1994; Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Indiana University Press) Bloomington, 1993; Hall, New Identities, pp. 2529; Hall, Old and New Ethnicities, pp. 4168; bell hooks, Talking Back in Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Cornell West (eds), Out There: Marginalisation and Contemporary Culture (The New Museum of Contemporary Art) New York, 1990, pp. 33743; West, The New Cultural Politics, pp. 1123; Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism (Routledge) London, 1993; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (Routledge) London, 1990. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined Women, p. 1. Young, Justice and the Politics, p. 96. Jana Sawicki, Foucault, Feminism and Questions of Identity in G. Gutting (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (Cambridge University Press) Cambridge, 1994, pp. 286313.