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Announcements
 Last
day to submit extra
credit papers!
 Potential
courses next
quarter:
ASIAN 300
 ASIAN 459

 Final
Exam: Tues 12/17,
10:30 to 12:30am in this
classroom
Bring BLANK blue book for
exchange
 questions?

+
Making Home & Identity
Self-Making & Positionality
+ Who’s American?
Defining what it means to be
American & Asian is a
powerful social, historical,
political & economic process
Whiteness
Masculinity
Civilization
Progress
Brown-ness
Emasculation
Savagery
Backwardness
• nation  race  gender & sexuality
• cultural representation = power
+
DOMINANCE
MASCULINE
FEMININE
SUBMISSIVENESS
+
Re-Definitions

However, counter-definitions of
what it means to be Asian can be
just as powerful and divisive.

Example 1: The Good Filipina

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Example 2: Internalized Racism


Philippines/Filipinas are NOT
(sexually) available
Filipinos can & should be
“American”
Example 3: The Rigidity of
Radicalism

All Filipinos MUST practice the same
type of politics
+ The Process of
Identity

“Cultural identity is a matter of
‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being.’ It
belongs to the future as much as to
the past. It is not something which
already exists, transcending place,
time, history and culture. Cultural
identities come from somewhere,
have histories. But, like everything
which is historical, they undergo
constant transformation.” (Stuart Hall)

Identity as process AND struggle

Identity as representational/cultural
AND political/consequential
Who is Asian? Who is American?
Who gets to define/identify it?
Who gets to be at home and who
is made homeless?
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Becoming Filipino

“The multiple subject positions of
second-generation Filipino
Americans remind us that identities
are not fixed or singular, but
multiple, overlapping, and
simultaneous and that they reflect
events both in the United States as
well as in the ‘home country.’
Filipino immigrant children thus
live with paradoxes” (204)

Identity itself is a paradox

never fully Filipino, never fully
American

always arriving, never arrived

resisting, creating, acting
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Identity & Action

How we negotiate identity
affects and is affected by the
values we embrace and the
actions we take

Identity Politics  you act
because of who you are
(assumed to be)

Politics of Identity  you
define yourself through your
actions

Situational Political
Mobilization  a group
defines itself through its
cooperative action that is
called for by a situation
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Immigrant Identities

“immigration and citizenship
restrictions – enacted to regulate
the membership of the national
community – send a powerful
message that the US conceives of
itself as singular, predominantly
Euro-American, Englishspeaking culture” (209)

“Because Filipino and other
Asian Americans are discursively
produced as foreign, they carry a
figurative border within them”
(211)

Immigrant identities &
homemaking reveal the failures
of US rhetoric & citizenship
+ The Border is Everywhere

“the border is everywhere. These borders within – bolstered
by political and cultural mechanisms designed to restrict
the membership in the national community – set clear but
imaginary boundaries between who is defined as a citizen
and who is not” (211)

What divides? What keeps a person from counting fully as
human? What renders a person “homeless”?

race/ethnicity?

class?

gender?

sexuality?
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nationality?

religion?
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Self-Making
“Cultural identities, then, are not an
essence but a positioning: ‘the names
we give to the different ways we are
positioned by, and position ourselves
within, the narratives of the past.’…
identities are unstable formations
constituted within webs of power
relations structured along the lines of
gender, race, nationality, subculture,
and dominant culture” (215)

How will we position ourselves? How
will we act? How will we define our
identities? How will we make home
for ourselves and for others?