Diasporic Women Research Articles

‘I am what feeds me’: food as subversive voice in Padma Lakshmi’s love, loss and what we ate (2016)

ABSTRACT Diasporic women maintain links to the homeland by recreating traditional recipes. They also assimilate and adapt through their foodways. The diasporic food memoir has emerged as a unique medium for redefining and renegotiating the domestic and professional roles of women. Food is used in a multitude of ways, by women, in order to exercise power, control, and agency. Padma Lakshmi’s Love, Loss and What We Ate delves into the complexities of navigating through and reminiscing about life vis-à-vis the food one eats. Lakshmi gives voice to her bodily struggles, experiences with racial prejudice and showcases how being a celebrity chef has enabled her to create food content that problematizes simplistic understandings of both American and Indian cuisines. This paper argues that food gives Lakshmi a subversive voice to explore the biases and stereotypes implicit in being an Indian-American celebrity chef. It investigates how the culinary space facilitates a nuanced conversation regarding exoticization and marginalization of women from the Indian diaspora. Food enables Lakshmi to explore and enunciate femininity and individuality. Using feminist food criticism, we illustrate how food and recipes become a metaphor for the diasporic self and showcase the evolution of an Indian-American woman.

Home in Han Suyin’s 'Till Morning Comes' from the Perspective of New Cultural Geography

Viewed through the lens of new cultural geography, a geographical landscape is a symbolic system showing the beliefs and values of society, as in the case of the home landscape. The article employs Mike Crang’s concepts of landscape and home to examine different homes in Han Suyin’s Till Morning Comes (1982). From leaving homes, searching for homes to returning homes, Stephanie, an American woman in diaspora, is exposed to different cultures, experiencing a sense of home in China, a sense of homelessness in both China and America, and a sense of being between worlds. In the process of searching for a home, Stephanie constructs her identity as a Chinese and eventually as a world citizen. The home in the novel is more than just a dwelling place; it is a place signifying cultural identity and a meaningful space that influences the identity transformation of a diasporic woman. The article therefore uses a textual analysis approach to explore how homes are represented and how a diasporic woman’s identity is affected by the home landscape she experiences in Till Morning Comes. This novel’s exploration of home illuminates the unique experience of a diasporic woman, highlighting the importance of re-evaluating Han’s work within the framework of contemporary cultural geography.

Factors Affecting Diasporic Women's Quality of Life: A Systematic Review.

This literature review assesses the factors that influence the quality of life of migrant women in the diasporic with the goal of improving their quality of life and creating more supportive social adjustment in the public health field. The systematic review was conducted in accordance with the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. We searched the databases of Scopus, PubMed, SAGE journal, Springer, and Google Scholar for scientific articles on the quality of life of diasporic and migrant women. We screened and removed duplicates, analyzed the full text of the articles to identify potentially relevant studies, and extracted data from matched articles. The literature search yielded 34 articles. Only 10 articles that met all inclusion criteria were included in the systematic review after peer review. The literature shows that the quality of life of diasporic women is influenced by four main factors: sociodemographic predictors, social adjustment predictors, health-related predictors, and psychological predictors. Identifying them is important to improve quality of life and find the right solutions to improve the quality of life of marginalized groups in society. To improve the quality of life for diasporic women, I suggest implementing government policies such as language education, vocational training, stronger protection laws, and better healthcare access. Additionally, establishing cultural exchange and networking programs is crucial for fostering cultural understanding.

Disease and Creativity in the Diasporic City: A Gendered View on Two Atypical Transnational Novels

The topographical turn in literary and cultural studies has shed new light on the deeply symbolic significance of the natural and urban places where stories unfold. This focus on spatiality is particularly evident in the South Asian literature by contemporary women writers, where locations acquire a personality and significantly contribute to the shaping of gender identities. Although most of these narratives portray female protagonists who develop strategies of resistance and sisterhood within traditional domestic spaces, the widely praised transnational novels Brick Lane and The Mistress of Spices show that women can also achieve independence and self-realization in the bustling urban environment. Drawing on cultural geography as well as gender and social studies, this essay argues that the global dimension of the city offers diasporic women the opportunity to forge new empowered selves in the above-mentioned books. First, the article maintains that London and Oakland, CA, where the main characters live, exert a centripetal force on women, thus triggering change and mobility, both in physical and psychical terms. Second, it claims that the two cities are gendered “heterotopias”, i.e., heterogeneous spaces where border-crossing women, like those featured in the two novels at hand, can overcome alienation and develop creativity, resilience, and self-confidence. In conclusion, urban spaces serve as “safe houses” for immigrant women, where they can cure their emotional and physical diseases and become figures of adaptive hybridity.

Crossing Borders, Shaping Identities: Exploring the Diasporic Experiences of Arab Women in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Arabian Jazz

This paper discusses the different and multiple types of oppression that affect Arab diasporic women’s life in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Arabian Jazz (1993). The paper traces Arab women’s resistance to patriarchy in their native culture, and the challenges of adaptation to new countries. The paper also comes across the significance of ethnic and gendered homeland–memory in molding and expressing Arab diasporic women’s identities, and the impact of these homeland–memories on the sustainability of violence in the host country. Moreover, the term “Reversal Tension” which is a new term, is used to refer to the effects of the Arab community's counter-attempts in the diaspora to prevent Arab women from assimilating into the host countries’ culture.

Beyond individual responsibility towards healthy food choices: A qualitative study among Pakistani women in Hong Kong

While biomedical understandings of food and diet coupled with discourses on individual responsibility towards healthy food choices are nowadays prominent, other social and cultural meanings attached to food and diet are largely devalued. The limits of such a reductionist approach are more evident when related to the experiences of migrant and ethnic populations, whose alternative knowledge(s) and practices about food and health are especially neglected. A multicultural city with a public healthcare system inherited from the British colonial times and largely shaped by biomedical ideas of health, Hong Kong offers a lens into the limits of such a reductionist approach. Due to their vulnerability in the context of Hong Kong as shaped by intersecting social identities, 72 women from Pakistan were recruited to be our community partners in a community-based participatory action research project to investigate their health needs and concerns. 12 focus group discussions were conducted, exploring their experiences of “healthy” food and overweight especially related to their encounters with the Hong Kong public healthcare system, as these issues emerged as key health concerns within the community. Four major themes emerged: unmet expectations of care, health is beyond the individual, constraints to a healthy diet in the context of migration, and beyond health: food as care for diasporic women. This study highlights the limit of a reductionist approach to healthy food as merely based on nutrition and individual responsibility. It stresses the need of a counter-discourse in the field of public health, emphasizing not only alternative cultural ideas of health and food, but also enlarging the field of health in biomedical terms to embrace “care” and acknowledging the structural constraints shaping migrant and ethnic population's vulnerability in making “healthy” food choices.

‘Currying Identities’: A Literary Re-Crafting of South-Asian Identities through Diasporic Women’s Cookbooks

Food has been an enduring presence in the construction of collective identities of migrant communities. From honing cooking techniques and selecting ingredients and tools to developing cultures of consumption and appreciation, diasporic communities seem to hold food as one of the primary markers of identity. Women writers from the diaspora not only emblematized their identities by writing about food but also opened feminist methodological opportunities for writing resistance. These ‘culinary fictions’ have since been mined to delve into the gendering of migrant identities. The genre of cookbooks shares a significant overlap with ‘culinary fiction’ in terms of its scope by stabilizing ‘authentic’ identities. However, it surgically punctures the romantic appeal of food imagination, shifting its focus instead to the labor that produces the sensory stimulation of culinary memory. This article uses this overlap and this gap as incentives to read select cookbooks published in the heydays of culinary fiction. Reading cookbooks against the metrics of labor provides a certain intimacy of engagement that offers entry into complex negotiations of uncertain migrant identities. Affective labor and its postcolonial entanglements have been used as catalysts in the article to read into the multilayered understanding of the politics of women writing about food in the diaspora. To this extent, it will challenge the stabilized ways of reading culinary identities and open food writing to more robust negotiations of gendered writings of food.

A dialogical appraisal of diasporic women’s work to impact change in Iran

How do women in the Iranian diaspora contribute to change in their homeland? Drawing on narrative accounts from activists and advocates, this paper offers insight into whether and how change occurs in relation to diasporic initiatives. The results highlight women’s perceived success in public education and awareness-raising activities that focus on procedural, discursive and legislative change. At the same time, despite enjoying freedom in the diaspora, diasporic women continue to face operational constraints like those in the homeland and must minimise risk. The findings are timely given the feminist uprisings that have engulfed Iran in 2022–2023, the coherence of which rests upon the patient and persistent work of those that have come before. This research holds significance for practitioners in diasporic communities, and researchers interested in agents and drivers of change in repressive operating environments.

An Overseas Chinese Author on Chineseness: A Study of Catherine Lim’s Novels

The objectives of this documentary research are to study Catherine Lim’s concept of Chineseness in the Chinese diasporic context as well as to investigate the identity and existence of the ethnic culture of the Chinese diaspora in the Straits Settlement. This study is analyzed through Lim’s three novels: The Bondmaid (1995), The Teardrop Story Woman (1998), and The Song of Silver Frond (2003). All the novels present stories of the Straits Chinese or the Chinese diaspora in the Straits Settlement, the territories under the British occupation in the age of colonisation. The findings reveal that Lim’s cultural and social upbringing in Straits Chinese society helped mold her as a female diasporic Chinese. Straits Chinese society in Lim’s novels is one that adheres to Chinese beliefs and cultural norms as well as their cultural roots. However, Lim still reflects how the context of displacement from the motherland becomes an important factor to dilute the sense of Chineseness among the Straits Chinese. Moreover, Lim also interestingly presents the images of Chinese diasporic women in various dimensions in her novels.

A Critique of Etaf Rum's A Woman Is No Man

Literature of diaspora has lately been widely acknowledged since the disporic generation embraces Homi Baba's belief that "nations are narrations". For them, displacement combines the notions of de- and re-inhabitation that are often regarded as related yet distinguishable processes of memory and identity formation. Not surprisingly, the displacement experience has given rise to their consciousness of the importance of constructing a counter-narrative. Most of the displaced resort to writing about their experience of migration or about the hardships they face in their new destination, especially in challenging the stereotypical image that has been "consciously" formed in the West. Arab- American diasporic women, in particular, have given rise to their voices in an attempt to overdue the injustice caused by the Western gaze to their cases. Literature has been their arena to call for presenting themselves and their own narratives to overdue the injustice caused by both the patriarchal and the Western discourse. Etaf Rum, an Arab- American writer, wrote a novel in 2019 depicting the lives of three generations of a daisporic family. She zoomed in the lives of the female characters while she was representing her own experience. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether Etaf Rum, in her 2019 – novel A Woman is No Man, corrected or reinforced the stereotypical image of Arab women constructed in the Western minds.

Drawing African Diasporic women anthropologists in dialogue: Decolonizing the canon

AbstractInspired by the use of naming and portraiture together in the Black artivism–such as that protesting the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor–this paper reflects on the use of portrait drawing as a practice of genealogy. While working on a project to raise the visibility of scholars and their works in the African Diaspora, specifically Francophone women anthropologists, I felt compelled to draw their portraits. Drawing African Diasporic women into dialogue from the archive attends to temporality, vision, and listening, elements centered within anthropological practice, but also implicated in the attachment of the discipline to colonial logics, particularly of allochronism, objectification and silencing. The multisensory, embodied and slow practice of drawing alongside reading scholars' works allows for diasporic time‐travel, shifting the gaze, and constructing a decolonizing “listening genre”.

Balancing Dualities and Fusing Opposites: Reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreters of Maladies

With a focus on Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, this research investigates the intricate existence of Indian women caught up in the conventional marginalization at the hands of patriarchy in their home country and repressions of otherness across new borders. By employing Gloria Anzaldua’s concept of “balancing dualities and fusing opposites”, I analyze Lahiri’s text in order to explore how, oscillating between displacement and resettlement, gendered identities are formed in the in-between space of acceptance across borders. Border crossing is mostly embedded in the experiences of displacement, alienation, and longing for belonging. Diasporic experiences are heterogeneous in articulating the loss and pains of dislocation, uprootedness, and struggles of immigrants to territorialize across new borders. This study explores the diverse experiences of diasporic women in the confrontation of the opposite borders of old and new and scrutinizes how they make their lives meaningful in their respective situations. In this paper, I argue that life across borders offers an in-between space for doubly marginalized women by resisting the hierarchical patterns at home and abroad and balancing these dualities in the liminal space between two cultures. Moreover, this cross- border life also strives towards fusing cultural opposites in the space of un/belonging through strategic resistance and resilience.

Jasmine in the Search of Identity through a Postcolonial Diaspora Lens

Abstract Applying a postcolonial diaspora lens through Homi K. Bhabha’s theory of the ‘third space’ to Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Jasmine (1989), this paper aims to demonstrate how diasporic women negotiate for an identity in their struggle for a better life in the host land. Having ‘no home’ and ‘no host’, Mukherjee’s protagonist, Jasmine, whose life represents that of the postcolonial immigrant woman, finds an identity in the intercultural process, the ‘third space’. A discourse analysis of this novel and current knowledge of diaspora studies are applied to understanding immigrants’ challenges, postcolonial identity and diaspora-related cultural issues. The paper closely examines cultural hybridity, third space and women’s search for identity in these confrontations. It throws light on a widow’s life and how she tries to get away from the restrictions of home and redesign her identity in a third space in the context of feminism, diaspora and culture in a postcolonial and diasporic world.

Performing anti‐colonial military identities in the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, 1943–1945: War, diasporic women and decolonisation

AbstractThe processes by which diasporic colonised Indian women were constituted as anti‐colonial military subjects offer a valuable corrective to the neglected role of colonised women in the scholarship on decolonisation and war. This article addresses how female officers of the Rani of Jhansi Regiment staged and performed anti‐colonial gendered military identities across several novel sites. Reworking Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity, it investigates the punitive consequences and agential possibilities of militarised anti‐colonial performance of gender and considers how anti‐colonial military identities, performed through the body and emotion, reproduced and disrupted gender norms.

Editors' Note

Editors' Note Karen Powell Sears and Stacey L. Brown Recent public health, political, cultural, economic, and environmental changes have refocused public attention on women's intimacy, sexuality, family, and relationship experiences. While academic research in these areas increased in recent years, our understanding of Black women's experiences remains limited. Research and public discourse have often framed Black women's lives through a "problem and pathology" prism. In popular culture, a functional classroom to the masses, essentialist tropes of Black womanhood persist offering contemporary spins on historical notions of our sub-humanity reflected in exaggerations of our power, understatements of our vulnerability and denied evidence of our joy and pain. The storied history of academic research about Black women reflects patterns seen in the public sphere. Across disciplines Black women have been understudied and frequently misrepresented. The dearth of research about our organic needs and desires reflect the priorities of the gatekeeping power structures that define and govern the parameters of knowledge deemed scientific and worthy. We recognize that the opportunity to focus on Black women's experience- in the academy and in general social discourse- in ways that is celebratory and uninhibited is a rarely granted privilege. All too often definitions about what is worthy and valid knowledge reflects the same unequal power structures that question Black women's value outside of the academy. It has often been the case that "worthy science" reflects "outsider" imaginations at the exclusion of Black women's insider knowledge. Black and African Diasporic women continue to experience dramatic and rapid shifts in family/intimacy patterns worldwide. With global changes in Black and African Diasporic women's family and relationship formation patterns, discourse in sociology, psychology, Black Studies and Women Studies suggest a need for additional theoretical and methodological perspectives. [End Page 1] The need to engage these issues is of particular concern as crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, climate instability, and persistent anti–Black racism pose obvious threats to Black women's lives health and sense of wellbeing in the global context. This special issue attempts to respond to this need by exploring the nuanced experiences of Black women's sexuality, intimacy, and leadership from Black scholars from a range of fields including psychology, sociology, Black studies and women's studies. We are grateful for the courage and determination of academic pioneers, past and present, who have broken through erected institutional boundaries to share the insider stories of Black women's experiences. This volume is a collection of such pioneers, who offer new and renewed perspectives, illuminate social patterns that have been obscured and celebrate a range of Black women's humanity. The authors in this collection explore diverse meanings and constructions of intimacy, sexuality, relationships and satisfaction and contemplate Black women's vulnerability in ways that resist narratives of pathology and make visible offer powerful re-conceptualizations of Black women's humanity. [End Page 2] Copyright © 2023 James C. Wadley

Introduction

Introduction

On being a Black woman ‘Mzungu’ researcher

With limited inclusion of Black traveler experiences in tourism scholarship and given that gender and racialization occur across geographies, this article explores the ways in which positionality and embodiment influence a Black diasporic woman researcher’s experience in the cross-cultural context of Livingstone, Zambia. It further explores key player and researcher-participant relationships within the research context, where an autoethnographic approach and the creative analytic practice (CAP) of poetry are used as reflexive practices and to demonstrate the impact of researcher social identities (e.g. race, gender, nationality) on the research process. Aligning with the creative (re)turn in geography scholarship, the use of CAP demonstrates how similar methodologies can provide a more well-rounded view of participant voices, specifically that of Black people informing the production of knowledge. More importantly, the Blackness of diasporic researchers is valued, especially when coupled with mindful intentionality in the approach and assumptions of the research process.

Migrant mothers and neoliberal feminism: diasporic audience research on the Korean reality show strangers

ABSTRACT This study analyzes the ways in which media represent maternal femininity under the context of neoliberalism and migration, and how diasporic housewives rework such representations. By employing a mixed method that includes a textual and online audience analysis of the Korean reality show Strangers, we investigate how diasporic Korean women’s online communities (DKWOC) related to the show’s portrayal of Korean female migrants’ racialized and gendered everyday lives in the US as trailing wives. We found that, while a critique of gender politics and class-ignorance in Strangers already existed, overall diasporic women blamed themselves by constantly comparing their motherhood performance to that portrayed on the show, and justified their sacrifice and hardships using the logic of “migration as a family strategy.” However, the solidarity and comradeship among DKWOC built through positive psychology discourse easily diluted those critical reflections. We argue that a belief in resilience is problematic for the survival of trailing wives, since it casts a blind eye to their real experiences—which includes gender discrimination embedded in both public and domestic spaces—and legitimates backlash narratives, including the belief that the stay-at-home mother position is an active choice, rather than the result of unequal global, legal, and gender infrastructures.

Transnational Iranian poetics of resistance: the Green Movement and Iranian women’s agency in Sepideh Farsi’s Red Rose (2014)

ABSTRACT Mobilizing Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of “becoming-revolutionary,” this article aims to address the relative absence of film studies scholarship on Iranian diasporic women’s cinema and transnational Iranian poetics of resistance. More specifically, it examines the role of female agency during Iran’s 2009 Green Movement in Sepideh Farsi’s, arguing that Farsi’s portrayal of a young Iranian woman’s progressive politics and sexual emancipation foregrounds connections between Iranian national and diasporic politics and poetics of female resistance. Formally, the film interweaves videos of the Green Movement made by anonymous protesters with intimate fictional narrative, allowing the two modes of storytelling to coalesce in their use of politicized bodies resisting the hegemonic ideological discourses of the state. I argue that the film’s textual hybridity emphasizes the role of “raw” protesters’ footage as an example of “minor” video, in the Deleuzian-Guattarian sense, in an effort to encompass and preserve the fragmented yet assertive voices of the Iranian civil rights movement and struggle for democracy.

“Alphabets of Flesh”: Writing the Body and Diasporic Women’s Autobiography in Meena Alexander’s Fault Lines

ABSTRACT Ten years after the publication of Meena Alexander’s memoir Fault Lines (1993), she published a revised and expanded edition, including a new Coda where she confronts memories of a childhood trauma, that of being sexually abused by her maternal grandfather. While the original memoir is primarily concerned with her sense of diasporic displacement and the erasures it brings, the 2003 version is concerned with recuperating her lost childhood. What is common to both though are questions of embodiment and the fracturing of the female body. In both instances, writing the self through her body enables Alexander to cope with the fracture; what emerges then is the antithesis of the canonical Self – a deeply fragmented self that must write itself into existence, refashioning herself in new ways through her writing. Alexander’s autobiographical writings provide an opportunity to consider the intersections of location and embodiment is diasporic autobiography and the empowering role of writing in countering fragmentations of dislocation and abuse.