(Un)Necessary Toughness?: Those "Loud Black Girls" and Those "Quiet Asian Boys"

Abstract

This article examines the process of identity construction and its relationship to discursive and representational acts in producing students as academic and social beings. Drawing on Judith Butler's work on gender performativity, I focus on two student populations—black females and Southeast Asian American males—and analyze the symbolic and material effects of the production of them as racialized, gendered Other through the repeated stylization of their bodies and behavior. The materialization of the students as "loud black girls" and "quiet Asian boys," however, opens up the potential for disrupting the hegemonicfbrces of regulatory norms.