Making Visible Asians and Asian Americans in Introductory Women’s Studies Courses: The Personal Voice in Pedagogy, Making Feminist Connections across Diversity

The introductory course in women’s and gender studies (IWGS) first introduces, centers, and problematizes the concept of gender and sexuality to undergraduate students, and at a depth not offered in other disciplines. It requires a political and critical approach to rethinking our place in society across the gender spectrum as this intersects with diversity by race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, ability, class (and more), and the power relations implicated within and between these dimensions of identity. Such a course needs to be flexible and continuously redefined in theory, content, and pedagogy to continue to be relevant to the academic endeavor as well as to the (broadly defined) feminist one. Flexibility is important not only in principle, but also as a pragmatic strategy, where this course draws majors and minors to WGS, and concomitant institutional and financial support.¹ In principle, as well as strategy, including and high-lighting diversity variously serves to sustain WGS programs in general.

In this context, my article suggests a need for greater visibility for Asians and Asian Americans in IWGS courses, in choice of text, and in effective pedagogy. This fast-growing, vastly diverse minority in the US needs to find a greater voice—in terms of students’ awareness of how its issues intersect with issues of gender in an increasingly multiracial, multiethnic American society.² Although the introductory course first addresses various forms of intersectionality to students, I have found, at least at primarily white institutions such as Virginia Tech, where I teach, that a largely black-and-white model defines students’ understanding of racial and ethnic difference.

My incentives for writing this essay also stem from personal experience, as a first generation Indian immigrant and a naturalized US citizen. I have been called “black” (pejoratively) and mistaken for Hispanic. A well-intentioned white friend of long standing once told me that she finds it hard to see me as a woman of color at all, thus erasing my culture and history in a single stroke. After 9/11 it was, my family and I found, a frightening and unsafe time to be brown and Asian. We carried our new American passports with us even when we traveled within the US.

In 2006 the Asian American Student Union (AASU) at Virginia Tech invited me to speak at one of its events. I addressed the racist attacks in the US on diverse Asians in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, including South Asian Sikhs as well as Koreans and Japanese. Such incidents had also occurred locally, at both Virginia Tech and nearby Radford University. A lively discussion followed my talk, as an audience of some sixty students, variously Asian and other, spoke of their personal experiences of identity and conflict in the US. After the event, the then-president of the AASU asked if I could develop a course on Asian Americans where none such was available at the university.³ I did so, with active support at all levels of the university, and in 2011 Asian American Experience (AAE) became an official part of Virginia Tech’s core curriculum. Perhaps the events of April 16, 2007, when a Korean-American student shot and killed thirty-two students and faculty at Virginia Tech, facilitated the ease with which this happened, but also, Virginia Tech’s push for greater inclusivity, enshrined in its Principles of Community, helped create a climate receptive to courses like this one. I have taught the course annually each spring semester with good enrollments, which include a majority of diverse Asian students, among others. It is today a course offered in the Asia studies minor.

Although gender underlies some of AAE’s content, it is not central to the course, which, as the only one of its kind in the core curriculum, also includes topics such as the histories of various groups of Asians in the US, racist laws, activism, issues of identity and conflict for current generations, and, centrally, confrontation of the model minority myth. To address this lacuna, in fall 2011...