Moral Subjectivities and Global Hierarchies in Transnational Migrant Women’S Narratives

DISCURSIVE (IN)STABILITY: MORAL SUBJECTIVITIES AND GLOBAL HIERARCHIES IN TRANSNATIONAL MIGRANT WOMEN’S NARRATIVES BY LYDIA HWA-CHE MEDILL CATEDRAL DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2018 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Rakesh Bhatt, Chair Professor Michele Koven Professor Marina Terkourafi, Leiden University Associate Professor Morgan Liu, Ohio State University ABSTRACT My dissertation considers the role of discourse in transnational migrants’ construction of moral and national identities for themselves, focusing on the case of women from Uzbekistan living in the United States. While research has highlighted how transnational movement destabilizes identity and communicative practice, I focus on the ways in which migrant women use discursive moves to (re)organize their social imaginary and to claim stability for themselves. I demonstrate that although migrants occupy a tenuous position in relation to the gendered and moral images of “ideal citizenship” promoted by both their country of residence and their country of origin, they continue to claim national morality and belonging for themselves – albeit often through language that reifies the same national ideologies that exclude them. As a secondary focus of this dissertation, I investigate the impact of the discursive (re)organization of the social imaginary on migrant bilingualism. I show how migrants at times represent their different bilingual and cross-cultural communicative competencies as operating in discrete and opposing social spheres, while at other times they represent these competencies as more hybrid and overlapping across the transnational contexts in which they reside. This work is ethnographic and my data come from participant observation at Uzbek American community events, the collection of public discourses and images circulating via Uzbek cultural groups on social media, and 47 hours of audio recordings of semi-structured interviews and casual conversations between Uzbek women living in the United States. Across these different contexts, I examine the use of evaluative language, voicing, deictics, various narrative structures, and code-switching between Uzbek, Russian and English to show how these women discursively (re)imagine the relationships between time-space configurations, national ii images of citizenship, moral norms for behavior, categories of immigrants, and their own migration trajectories and identities. In chapter 5, I demonstrate how the discursive construction of gendered images of citizenship and their relation to linguistic competence allows participants to claim belonging for themselves and others – in relation to both Uzbekistan and to Uzbek communities abroad. In chapter 6, I show how these women use linguistic practices to designate different scopes of generalizability, i.e. scale, to moral norms for speech associated with the U.S. and Uzbekistan, respectively, in order to bring coherence to their personal narratives and moral justification to their linguistic behaviors. In chapter 7, I show how the women I spoke with engage multilingual practices in order to rebrand themselves as more compatible with images of citizenship in both Uzbekistan and the United States, while differentiating themselves from the semiotics of “dangerous Islam.” In addition to describing the linguistic situation of an understudied community, this work informs a sociolinguistics of globalization through its attention to the polycentric nature of moral demands on the discursive representation of individual subjectivity, and the discursive strategies used to resist misrecognition as one moves across national boundaries. Further, by emphasizing the agentive potential of discursive (re)imagination for claiming national belonging, while also being attentive to how this imagination is constrained by and reinforces national ideologies of exclusion, this work engages with larger questions about the limits and possibilities of discursive action for reconfiguring social life. With respect to bilingualism, this dissertation examines the discursive links between multiple languages and national spheres that are both created and erased by migrants in order to show how debates about language hybridity vs. language discreteness might be informed by an understanding of the hybridity vs. discreteness of images of citizenship iii and their various component parts. Finally, this work is timely in addressing the experiences of Muslim migrant women, given the widespread misinformation about these communities in contemporary political discourse, particularly in the United States. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am indebted to my dissertation committee whose feedback, insight, teaching and encouragement have shaped this dissertation in profound ways. First of all, thank you to my advisor, Dr. Rakesh Bhatt who is a mentor in the true sense of the word, and who has encouraged me to accomplish things that far exceeded my own expectations for myself. For his teaching, advice, and enthusiasm for the field of sociolinguistics, I am truly grateful. Thank you to Dr. Michele Koven whose insights on theories of language, research methods, and the process of becoming a scholar have been an invaluable guide to me throughout the development of this dissertation. Thank you to Dr. Marina Terkourafi at the University of Leiden for incredible teaching both in and outside of the classroom, and for introducing me to the institutional processes involved in academic writing. Thank you to Dr. Morgan Liu at Ohio State University for his help in developing a greater awareness of the ethnographic context from which my data comes, and for his encouraging words and support in the process of developing this work. The Language and Society Discussion Group has transformed my understanding of what it means to be a scholar. My writing in general and this dissertation in particular would not exist in its current form without the support, feedback, criticism and joy I have received from this group. In particular – thank you to Staci Defibaugh and Itxaso Rodriguez for sharing with me “how it’s done” two steps ahead, and as a result, giving me a hopefulness and a vision. Thank you Kate Lyons for the moral support, the critical discussions, and for engaging me in the various processes of making our work matter. Thank you to Farzad Karimzad who has been such a great academic friend - for the strategic planning, the writing partnership, and the reminders of all the deadlines – thank you. I am also very grateful to my other professors and to my fellow v graduate students in the Linguistics Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. In particular, I appreciate the teaching, feedback, and institutional support I have received from Dr. James Yoon, Dr. Tania Ionin, Dr. Krystal Smalls, Dr. Ryan Shosted, Dr. Jonathan McDonald, and Dr. José Hualde. Thanks also to Amelia Kimball for the writing accountability. I also want to thank scholars at other universities who made this work possible. Thank you to Madina Djuraeva at University of Wisconsin, Madison and Dilrabo Tosheva at The University of Queensland, who have assisted with this dissertation in many ways, not least of all through connecting me with participants, discussing the sociolinguistic situation of Uzbekistan, and double-checking my understanding of Uzbek and Russian language data. In developing the various arguments in this dissertation I also benefitted from discussions with Dr. Jan Blommaert, Dr. Cécile Vigouroux and Dr. Agnes Bolonyai, for which I am grateful. Thanks also to Dr. Karen Adams and Dr. James Riding In, my undergraduate professors at Arizona State University who supported my early academic inquiry and who encouraged me to go to graduate school. To the women (and the few men) who participated in this research – I am extremely grateful. Your generosity in sharing stories, time, food, and insight with me made me feel a recipient of true generosity and hospitality. I am honored to have met you, become friends with some of you, and to have had the chance to write about your experiences, languages and stories. And to my family, Carl, Sara, Mom, Anna, Joshua, Nanay, Tatay, Alex, Dad, Tita Leova, Jason and Grace, Ah-Ma and Grandma, and friends, Matt and Natalie, Julie and Elias, Anna and Johann – thanks for keeping me grounded, for feeding me, and for providing me with lots of levity in this “dissection” process. vi Dedicated to my mom, Pei-Yun Hsieh, who in navigating belonging, has modeled for me how to put into practice what I love about theory. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................1 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW .............................................................................9 CHAPTER 3: BACKGROUND ........................................................................................26 CHAPTER 4: METHODOLOGY .....................................................................................37 CHAPTER 5: DISCURSIVELY CONSTRUCTING BELONGING FROM AFAR .......53 CHAPTER 6: DISCURSIVE SCALING IN CONTEXTS OF MORAL POLYCENTRICITY ..........................................................................................87 CHAPTER 7: DISCURSIVELY REBRANDING THE “ANTI-CITIZEN” ..................125 CHAPTER 8: CONCLUSIONS ......................................................................................158

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