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University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Open Access Dissertations 9-2012 Technologies of Racial Formation: Asian-American Online Identities Linh Dich University of Massachusetts Amherst, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Dich, Linh, "Technologies of Racial Formation: Asian-American Online Identities" (2012). Open Access Dissertations. 607. https://doi.org/10.7275/xs1t-3420 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations/607 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. TECHNOLOGIES OF RACIAL FORMATION: ASIAN-AMERICAN ONLINE IDENTITIES A Dissertation Presented by LINH L. DICH Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY September 2012 English © Copyright by Linh L. Dich 2012 All Rights Reserved TECHNOLOGIES OF RACIAL FORMATION: ASIAN-AMERICAN ONLINE IDENTITIES A Dissertation Presented By LINH L. DICH Approved as to style and content by: ______________________________________________ Donna L. LeCourt, Chair ______________________________________________ Haivan V. Hoang, Member ______________________________________________ K.C. Nat Turner, Member ___________________________________________ Joseph Bartolomeo, Department Chair Department of English DEDICATION To my supporters in this journey, my family, and my friends who are like family. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my advisor, Donna LeCourt, for her guidance, mentorship, and patience in this journey. Her timely encouragement and support have been critical to my thinking and development as a scholar. I would also like to thank Haivan Hoang and K.C. Nat Turner for their many contributions throughout my writing process. They have been and will remain excellent intellectual models in my life. I am grateful for the members in my scholarly community (near and far), especially Angela Haas, Mike Edwards, Joe Black, Leslie Bradshaw, Emma Howes, Morgan Lynn, Sarah Stanley, Liane Malinowski, Kathleen Baldwin, Denise Paster, and the dissertation group for their generous support and their continuous encouragement and feedback. Many times support also came into my life in different forms, and for this I would like to thank Jeanne and Earl Shumway for being amazing neighbors and friends and Hank Barstow for fixing my house and lifting my spirit when needed. I am indebted to the participants who have made this study possible. Their generosity and courage continues to be a source of inspiration. Their stories change lives and I hope this study can help others recognize the power of writing to transform, for the better, oneself and thus the world we all inhabit. They taught me that we see and come to understand ourselves in each other. I am most thankful to my family, close friends, and partner. This project was a collective effort and their love, support, and belief in me are the invisible pillars to these pages. v ABSTRACT TECHNOLOGIES OF RACIAL FORMATION: ASIAN-AMERICAN ONLINE IDENTITIES SEPTEMBER 2012 LINH L. DICH, B.A. ST. MARY’S COLLEGE OF CALIFORNIA M.A. BOSTON COLLEGE Ph.D. UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Donna L. LeCourt My dissertation is an ethnographic study of Asian-American users on the social network site, Xanga. Based on my analysis of online texts, responses to texts, and participants’ discussions of their writing motivations, my research strongly suggests that examining digital writing through participants’ complex and overlapping constructions of their community and public(s) can help the field reconsider digital writing as a site of Asian-American rhetoric and as a process of constructing and transforming racial identities and relations. In particular, I examine how community and public, as interconnected and shifting writing imaginaries on Xanga, afford Asian-American users on this site the opportunity to write, explore, and circulate their racial and ethnic identities for multiple purposes and various audiences. Race and ethnicity, as many scholars argue, are shifting and unstable concepts and experiences. Therefore, writing about race and ethnicity may be done best in environments that can accommodate complex and multiple acts of racial and ethnic formations. While my research demonstrates how participants “want to be heard” on their own terms, whom they imagine (or want to imagine) as listening/reading significantly informs their writing. That is, participants’ conceptions of their writing goals and their audiences are multiple and simultaneous—these racial and ethnic writing acts are often inflected by intersecting issues of vi gender, sexuality, class, culture, and intergenerational tensions—and, hence, traditional writing genres that limit such goals, audiences, and complexity do not always reflect how writers conceive of their own racial and ethnic experiences and their writing in the world. This study, then, examines Xanga as a flexible writing ecology that affords Asian-American users opportunities to compose their continuously transforming and complex racial and ethnic identities across multiple niches of representational sites and, specifically, in public and community spaces. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...................................................................................................v ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... vi LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................. xi LIST OF IMAGES ............................................................................................................ xii CHAPTER 1. NEW TECHNOLOGIES AND ASIAN-AMERICAN IDENTITIES .....................1 Introduction ..............................................................................................................1 Theoretical Framing and Definitions .......................................................................3 Where Have We Been? Challenging the Black-White Binary .............................11 The Asian American as Ambivalent Figure ...........................................................19 The Disciplined and Disciplining Subject: Bringing a Critical Race Perspective to Digital Scholarship .............................................................27 Research Site: Acts of Composing and Identity Formation Beyond the Classroom ..................................................................................................32 Project Overview and Chapters Outline ................................................................40 2. METHODS AND METHODOLOGY FOR STUDYING ASIAN- AMERICAN ONLINE RACIAL FORMATION ..................................................41 Beginnings .............................................................................................................41 Development of Research Questions .....................................................................42 Development of Research Site ...............................................................................44 Participant-Observer Role(s) .................................................................................49 Insider/Outsider Roles: ..........................................................................................54 Mapping the Culture ..............................................................................................60 Field Notes and Research Memos..............................................................60 Aggregate Data and Initial Patterns ...........................................................63 Evolving Community Contours .............................................................................67 Data Collection ......................................................................................................71 Participant Selection ..................................................................................72 Online Artifacts ..........................................................................................79 Surveys .......................................................................................................80 Interviews ...................................................................................................81 viii Data Analysis: Seeing the Forest Through the Trees and the Trees in the Forest..........................................................................................................87 Transcribing and Coding: Difficulties and Discoveries............................90 Seeing the Forest through the Trees: Making Sense of Data ....................96 3. “CLOSE-KNIT COMMUNITY” AND “COMMUNITY OF STRANGERS”: THE PRODUCTION OF ASIAN-AMERICAN IDENTITIES AND RHETORIC(S) AT THE INTERSECTION OF COMMUNITY AND PUBLIC IMAGINARIES ................................................102 Constructing Community .....................................................................................107 “We’re small and tight-knit”: Relationships as Community ...............................108 “Post Something Absurdly Racist”:

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