This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Citation Map Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via HighWire Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Pyke, K. D. Articles by Johnson, D. L. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                   What's this?

Asian American Women And Racialized Femininities

"Doing" Gender across Cultural Worlds

University of California, Riverside

Denise L. Johnson

University of Washington, Seattle

Integrating race and gender in a social constructionist framework, the authors examine the way that second-generation Asian American young women describe doing gender across ethnic and mainstream settings, as well as their assumptions about the nature of Asian and white femininities. This analysis of interviews with 100 daughters of Korean and Vietnamese immigrants finds that respondents narratively construct Asian and Asian American cultural worlds as quintessentially and uniformly patriarchal and fully resistant to change. In contradistinction, mainstream white America is constructed as the prototype of gender equality. Hence, Asian American and white American women serve in these accounts as uniform categorical representations of the opposing forces of female oppression and egalitarianism. The authors consider how the relational construction of hegemonic and subordinated femininities, as revealed through controlling images that denigrate Asian forms of gender, contribute to internalized oppression and shape the doing of ethnicity.

Key Words: gender • race • Asian Americans • femininities • ethnicity

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    What's this?

This article has been cited by other articles:

				E. W. Morris "Ladies" or "Loudies"?: Perceptions and Experiences of Black Girls in Classrooms Youth Society, June 1, 2007; 38(4): 490 - 515. [Abstract] [PDF]