I ain’t your f*cking Model Minority! Indexical orders of ‘Asianness’, class, and heteronormative masculinity

Abstract

Abstract By inscribing and ascribing particular indexical signifiers to people while ignoring and/or dismissing actual individual performative enactments and self-identifications, neoliberal multicultural discourses, in claiming tolerance and acceptance, frame racialized people as “an essentialized and totalized unit that is perceived to have little or no internal variation” (Ladson-Billings, Gloria. 2000. Racialized discourses and ethnic epistemologies. In Norman K. Denzin & Yvonna S. Lincoln (eds.), Handbook of qualitative research, 2nd edn., 257–277. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage). In doing so, these discourses supposedly celebrating ‘diversity’ disregard the complexities, hybridities, and differences that constitute and are constitutive of any individual. Thus, in drawing on the ethos of tolerance and acceptance, ‘multicultural’ discourses paper over societal conflicts, internal divisions and oppressions, and homogenize racial, linguistic, and cultural identities ignoring the complex identifications people may perform and hold in any given interactional situational context. In this critical autoethnography, I illustrate how an indexical order of ‘Asianness’ in its ‘model minority’ variety has been shaped and subverted at times by my situated appropriations of various enregisterments (Agha, Asif. 2007. Language and social relations. Cambridge University Press) of a working-class heteronormative masculinity in interactional contexts. These enactments illuminate how an indexical order of an Asian American male has continually shifted and reacted to such positionings in a white supremacy society.