Brown Girls, White Worlds:

Adolescence and the Making of Racialized Selves*

MYTHILI PAJIVA SaintMary's University

Jusqu'A r6cemment, les recherches sur les femmes venant de l'Asie du

Sud portaient presque entibrement sur les immigrantes de premi6re
g6n6ration; cependant, les chercheurs commencent A explorer les dif-
f6rences qui existent entre les immigrantes de premi&re et celles de
deuxi6me g6n6ration. Ce qui reste peu clair, c'est comment l'Pge, en
tant que relation de puissance, se manifeste dans le contexte d'une
diaspora. Par exemple, quel est l'apport de l'exp6rience occidentale de
l'adolescence dans le processus identitaire ? L'auteure s'appuie sur le
concept de Twine appel6 , 6v6nement frontalier-,", qui s'adresse sp6ci-
fiquement h l'exp6rience de racialisation de l'adolescente. Elle se penche
6galement sur la culture des pairs et enfin sur les familles et les com-
munaut6s particulikres pour 6valuer comment celles-ci r6ussissent h
convaincre les jeunes filles de deuxi&me g6n6ration de leur exclusion
permanente de la normalit6.
Until recently, research on South Asian women has focussed almost exclu-
sively on the immigrant experience; however, scholars have now begun
to explore the differences between immigrant and second-generation
identities. What remains unclear is how age, as a relation of power,
asserts itself in diasporic contexts. For instance, how is modern Western
adolescence a key period of racialized identity development? Building
on Twine's concept of the "boundary event," I analyse second-generation
South Asian girls' stories of difference making during adolescence,
examining the work done by peer culture, friends and even family/com-
munity to remind girls of their racial and cultural difference.

OVER THE LAST TWENTY YEARS, there has been a substantial amount
of research on South Asian immigrant women's attempts to build a sense of
community in an alien (and often hostile) culture and their experiences
of both everyday and systemic racism in terms of education, jobs, housing,

The author would like to thank the CRSA reviewers for their very helpful comments on earlier versions
of the paper, Simone Taylor for translating the abstract, and Tarun Gandhi for his assistance during
the final editing process. This research was made possible by a doctoral fellowship from the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. This manuscript was first submitted in
September 2004 and accepted in January 2006. Contact: mythili.rajiva@'smu.ca.
166 CRSA/RCSA, 43.2 2006

etc. (Ralston, 1991; Srivastava, 1993; Dua, 1992). Notwithstanding its

importance, this scholarship has, to a large extent, overlooked the experi-
ences of second-generation women born and/or raised in Canada, who have
experienced immigration only indirectly, through their parents' struggles.
However, in the last ten years, Canadian scholars have been influenced by
work coming out of the United States and Britain, which examines the new
forms of diasporic identity being shaped by young South Asians (Das Gupta,
1997; Puar, 1995). This research argues that, despite the absence of specif-
ically immigrant problems (i.e., language barriers, job credentials, and so on),
second-generation women are still constructed as "inappropriate national
subjects" (Chuh, 1996: 105). According to scholars such as Aujla (2000) and
Handa (2003), subjects growing up in diasporic landscapes are saddled with
tremendous identity confusion, where their attempts to make sense of who
they are and/or want to be are governed by pressures to belong originating
in areas that range from peer culture to popular culture. This raises a central
question that has not been explicitly theorized in the second-generation
literature: how does age as a relation of power intersect with race, gender,
class or ethnicity to produce certain kinds of racialized subjectivities?
The following discussion argues in favour of a more serious treatment
of age as a distinguishing factor in first- and second-generation experiences
of racialization among South Asian women. As Lee and Chen point out,
although age is recognized-as a factor in individual adaptation, most studies
continue to be conducted among adult immigrants (Lee and Chen, 2000:
765). Including age as a meaningful social category in raced identity for-
mation requires recognizing differences between childhood, adolescent and
adult experiences of racism, and how these differences produce particular
kinds of subjects within the nation. While age may well play a part in
immigrant women's experiences of Othering, their adult status on arrival
means that their primary experiences of identity construction have been in
a country where they have some recognizable claim to belonging within the
national imaginary.' Conversely, Otherness for second-generation subjects
is directly connected to the non-adult contexts in which they learn to see
themselves as different.
The paper will focus specifically on South Asian girls' experiences of
adolescence, a developmental period in modern Western societies that has
been constructed and lived as a crucial stage of identity formation. If ado-
lescence is all about "cbecoming somebody," an inextricable part of this project
also involves "belonging somewhere." For both dominant and marginalized
subjects, this entails a process of identifying, policing and/or negotiating
the boundaries around belonging. To begin unravelling the relationship
between girls' attempts to become someone, while trying to belong some-
where, I use Twine's concept of the "boundary event" as a framework to

1. It must be noted that these countries have their own politics of exclusion, couched in different dis-
courses of Othering, often related to ethnic, religious, regional andfor classlcaste differences.
Brown Girls, White Worlds 167

analyse excerpts from qualitative interviews that I conducted with second-

generation Canadian South Asian girls and women.2 However, I want to
expand Twine's concept to look at moments where the subject herself
makes narrative choices around belonging in response to a situation; I also
want to ask what boundary work is done by South Asian family/community
members to remind subjects of their difference from dominant notions of
Canadian girlhood. I conclude by pointing out the possible significance of
adolescent boundary processes in terms of second-generation women's
racialized identities in adulthood; that is, how adult women narrate their
past experiences of racism in terms of their present selves.

Methodology

The excerpts that I use throughout this paper are drawn from unstruc-
tured qualitative interviews3 that I conducted with 10 second-generation
South Asian girls and women in Ontario between 2001 and 2004.4 1 chose
a small sample in order to get an in-depth, biographical account from each
subject about growing up as a minority and the specific experiences that
shaped her sense of racialized self. Subjects were found through a network
of friends, family and acquaintances and, also, by asking interviewees to
provide me with contacts. While I sacrificed regional differences (all my
subjects were of Pakistani or Indian origin), I was able to find religious
diversity (Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Jain and Christian), and a fairly even
spread in terms of class (upper-middle, middle, lower-middle and working
class). My primary concern was getting a diversity of age: subjects' ages
ranged from 16 to 34, with three adolescent girls, four women in their early,
mid or late twenties, and three women in their early thirties.
My method of analysis combines poststructuralist, feminist and nar-
rative conceptions of the discursive and "storied" nature of everyday life.
According to poststructuralists, it is through language that we become
embedded in social relations: cultures create shared meanings, which
become private through what poststructuralists call processes of subjectifi-
cation (Davies, 1993). Discourses are created through language and symbol,
and contain a myriad of stories or narratives. Using the term "narrative"
alongside discourse highlights the subjective and even "fictional" quality of
both individual and group accounts of self and society (Smith, 1987). As Liz
Stanley (1993) points out, our lives have beginnings, middles and endings;
they are characterized by major events, turning points and so on. Subjects
understand the world and their place in it by drawing upon a variety of

2. Events in which a rupture occurs between a subject's prior unracialized identity in childhood and her
realization at puberty that she is different (Twine, 1996: 211-17).
3. The interviews were guided by a general topic (adolescence and racism), with a set ofprompts (general ques-
tions) about the role played by a subject's family,friends, community and peer culture during adolescence.
4. Researchers commonly use the category "South Asian" (which includes India, Pakistan, Bangladesh
and Sri Lanka), but this grouping was not used by the subjects-that I interviewed. They chose, instead,
to identify through country of origin, region andfor religion.
168 CRSA/RCSA, 43.2 2006

familial, community and cultn-al narratives that shape how they perceive
themselves and how they are perceived. However, dominant or hegemonic
narratives construct ideals that are not attainable for certain subjects.
The discrepancy between these stories, images or devices and the realities
of everyday existence produces a particular form of reflexivity, where the
subject recognizes her exclusion from these narratives while at the same
time tries to accommodate them.
Unlike Britain (oi; to a lesser extent, the United States), work on
generation and the South Asian diaspora is still relatively new in Canada.
In addition, the complex colonial history of this diaspora and its multiple
internal differences (of religion, country, region, class and caste), offer an
exciting terrain for sociologists interested in questions concerning race,
belonging and identity. Finally, there has been little work done specifically
on second-generation girls. Voice is a central issue in feminist theory,
method and practice; as such, one of my aims in this paper is to clear a
space for subjects to speak about their experiences of growing up as Other
in Canadian society.
The choice of both subjects and excerpts reflects the arbitrary decisions
that researchers are always forced to make during the interpretive phase of
their research (Reay, 1996).' But I do not use the excerpts as "proof" of
what all subjects with similar identity positions feel or experience. Instead,
I offer these fragments as starting points for further reflection on the
under-theorized links among race, gender, generation and age.

South Asian Women in Canada:

A Brief History

As both Ralston and Dua point out, the history of South Asians in Canada
is a Tacialized narrative that is also distinctly gendered (Dua, 2000;
Ralston, 1999). This history is located within a broader framework of
nation building that, during the first half of the 20th century, defined all
non-European foreigners as undesirable subjects (Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis,
1995). During the period from 1850 to 1920, South Asians (along with
Chinese and Japanese workers) were only allowed entrance as temporary
workers; they were unable to vote, denied naturalization and legally for-
bidden to own certain kinds of property (Dua, 2000: 110). Furthermore,
Asian men were not allowed to bring wives and children into the country,
for fear that they would settle down in Canada and create an ethnic com-
munity whose existence would undermine the building of a (White)
Canadian nation (Dua, 2000; Ralston, 1999).
Both the political mobilizing of South Asian men and Canada's changing
economic needs led to significant changes to immigration policy in the
1960s (Buchignani, Indra and Srivastava, 1985). This altered the face of the

5. 'Pseudonyms are used for every subject.

Brown Girls, White Worlds 169

Canadian nation in some key ways, allowing large numbers of non-

European immigrants to enter Canada over the next 40 years; however,
South Asian immigrant women were still subordinated by the gender bias
of these laws, which viewed them as little more than wives, mothers and,
thus, dependents. Ironically, their status as breeders, which had hitherto
worked against them, was now the primary reason for their entrance into
Canada, through the "dependent wife and family reunification" category
(Ralston, 1999: 34). In addition to these structural limitations, first-
generation women have had to struggle against everyday forms of racism
that are gendered in particular ways. Their proficiency in English has been
questioned; the education and job skills acquired in their home countries
have been dismissed; their cultural symbols of dress, food and ritual have
been ridiculed. Bannerji and Srivastava point out that dominant stereotypes
of South Asian women position them as invisible in the social landscape,
except as objects of pity, contempt and disgust: "Passivity, docility, silence,
illiteracy, smell of curry and fertility are some of the common-sense things
that the dominant culture 'knows' about us" (Bannerji, 1993: 147).
Regardless of the number of years they have spent living in Canada, they
are still seen as eternal foreigners.
Current discourses on South Asian womanhood are not the same as
they were during the 1920s debates over the "Hindu woman's question";
citizenship and immigration laws have also changed radically. As well,
there are now many women of South Asian descent who have no direct
experience of migration and resettlement difficulties, but whose lives have
also been shaped by questions of race, nation and belonging. Recently, the-
orists studying second-generation South Asians in Britain, the U.S. and
Canada have argued persuasively that generation as a concept should not
be ignored in favour of an ethnic identity model that collapses the distinction
between being an immigrant and being "ethnic." However, this research
does not explicitly theorize age as a potentially important structuring
element in social relations. For instance, according to Min and Kim, second-
generation "ethnics" are less likely to face the same systemic barriers as
their immigrant parents (Min and Kim, 2000: 754). Changing historical
contexts coupled with a stronger comfort level in the dominant culture
means that this generation may find it easier to succeed on the job market
and integrate socially into mainstream Western culture (Min and Kim,
2000: 754). But if immigrants have more disadvantages in the labour market,
and more unpleasant job experiences than their Western-born counter-
parts, the latter have higher levels of insecurity and self-doubt (Min and
Kim, 2000: 750-55). Their identities are seemingly more fragile and more
open to confusion.6 For the second generation, belonging is no longer pri-

6. Similarly, Waters (1996), in her study of immigrant and second-generation Caribbean American girls,
points out that the former are proud of their cultural backgrounds; many planned to return home after
high school, whereas those born and/or raised in the United States are more ambivalent because they
are more aware of what it means to be Black in the context of American race relations.
170 CRSA/RCSA, 43.2 2006

marily about citizenship or economics. It is not about hostile immigration

officers or being forced to work at degrading jobs because one's foreign edu-
cation is deemed worthless "here." Instead, it is the awareness of difference
as a second skin that has shaped your entire life story. For young "ethnics,"
there was never "a time before" (before the loneliness of non-belonging).
There is no glorified past to reference, no prior social space where you were
once, at least racially, an insider. There is only "the ego chill" (Portis, 1985:
463) of never having belonged anywhere. As one of my respondents points
out, despite sharing commonalities of experience, interest or national pride
with the dominant majority, second-generation minorities are still not rec-
ognized as Canadians:

Ritu: I'm not Canadian. I love hockey, I can drink beer... I love actually
the clean cold winter ... but I'm an Indian. Because people here will
never accept what I am (Ritu, 24, Hindu Indian, born/raised in
Afississauga, Ont.).

Belonging is, thus, not simply predicated on citizenship, birthplace,

language skills, job skills and even a complete immersion in the dominant
culture. Ritu's framing of the Canadian symbolic imaginary emphasizes
her own ambiguous location in this landscape. If loving hockey and winter
is quintessentially Canadian, why does she not belong? What experiences of
growing up have created this Othered identity? While differences between
immigrants and their Canadian-born children are obviously generational,
they are also very much tied to the experience of becoming racialized during
childhood and adolescence, two periods when a subject's identity is
developing. This key difference between immigrant and second-generation
subjects has not been explored meaningfully in either the more general
literature on diaspora and identity, or the research on second-generation
South Asians in Western societies.

Racing through Adolescence

The common assumption in much non-academic and academic research is

that both children and adolescents live in racially neutral universes
(Roman and Stanley, 1997). While childhood is an important arena for
identity work, my focus on adolescence reflects a concern raised by some of
the critical youth scholars: the naturalizingof adolescence by experts and
non-experts alike as a biologically driven period of intense physical, psy-
chological and emotional self-development that is experienced in a similar
fashion across culture and history. In reality, although notions of youth did
exist in medieval and pre-industrial Europe (Gillis, 1974), Western adoles-
cence in its modern incarnation is not a natural, universal or transhistorical
phenomenon; rather, it is an "invention" that is directly tied to social,
economic and political changes in Europe and North America (Lesko, 2001;
Brown Girls, White Worlds 171

Best, 2000). Moreover, the history of adolescence is heavily embedded in

racist imperial projects of control, surveillance and subordination.
According to Lesko (2001), adolescence as a discourse emerged in Europe
and North America during the early part of the 20th century, and was con-
structed as a crucial "turning point" or dividing line between rational and
civilized (White bourgeois) men who would continue the evolution of the
race; and the more emotional and naturally inferior Others, namely primi-
tives, women and children (Lesko, 2001: 55). This history continues to
inform contemporary understandings of adolescent peer culture and hier-
archies. As Lesko argues:

When I state that adolescence was raced, I mean that it carried ideas of
proper and mature human beings that stemmed directly from middle
class white perspectives. Thus adolescence was a technology of whiteness
that supported white boys and white men as superior... [and] today con-
tinues to be defined by the.., tensions of its history (Lesko, 2001: 46, 50).

Societal understandings of youth continue to normalize the exclusionary

practices of adolescence: teasing, bullying, cliques, obsessive concerns with
style, popularity, heterosexist assumptions around dating and desire, and
intense preoccupations with friendship. The underlying suggestion is that
race/racism is only incidental to many of these struggles around becoming
and belonging; in fact, such struggles may be part of a longer process of
racializing subjects within the nation. Using this lens, I attempt, in the
next section, to theorize the connections between adolescence (with its age-
specific social statuses and power asymmetries), and the development of
South Asian girls' racialized identities.

Daughters of the Diaspora

South Asian girls are both seen and come to see themselves as members of
a racial and cultural minority group in Canadian society. But beyond
phenotypical criteria, it is not clear how this difference making actually
happens. As a starting point, we should consider how "growing up" different
shapes girls' identities. How is age a salient factor in girls' experiences of
racialization? In the following section, I will analyse subjects' narratives
of adolescence in order to identify racializing "turning points," moments or
processes implicated in Othering, and the family/community work of
difference making, even when girls have not been racialized by their
peer group.

Boundary Events
One of the underlying assumptions of narrative theory and methodology is
the importance of retrospection in subjects' accounts; that is, the retelling
and reinterpreting of past events or experiences. As Sarup points out, the
172 CRSA/RCSA, 43.2 2006

past does not exist in some tangible way: we interpret past events and in
the process create histories (1996: 46). It is through both the making and
telling of these histories/nairatives that we (re)produce the self (1996: 46).
For racialized subjects, both recent and distant memories are often reference
points for their experiences of cultural alienation. Furthermore, because
adolescence is a crucial site of complex and sometimes failed negotiations
with belonging, subjects often distinctly remember "boundary events":
experiences where subjects were "named" by their peers and went from
seeing themselves as unracialized to an awareness of their difference
(Twine, 1996).
Autobiographical accounts of South Asian girlhood 7 contain such
boundary events where girls were "spoken into difference." Such experi-
ences are what narrative theorists call "transformations": reversals,
changes and/or actions and events that fundamentally alter the storyline
(Ricceur, 1991: 106; Franzosi, 1998: 521). The vivid description given by
Handa below would qualify as a boundary event:
I walk through the hallway in school ... people walk by me, crowding the
corridors. I am one of them. I dress like them, I talk like them, I even
swear to be tough with them. I am involved in the scene, caught up in the
gesticulations of a twelve year old. "P-A-K-I," someone screams .... For
me the scene has stopped... I move through white people, only following
motions. I feel as if someone has blown my cover. All eyes are on me now.
The intruder has been identified (Handa, 1990: 41).

Such turning points are Althusserian moments of interpellation,

where the subject gets called into being as the despised Other. For Handa,
this "identification" profoundly changes her from one who does belong, to
an "intruder," the enemy within. There are two different identities in this
account: the subject before ("I am one of them"), and the subject/object
after this racist event ("I feel as if someone has blown my cover").
Therefore, the question is whether, without these types of racializing
events, subjects would come to recognize themselves as Other.
Some of the subjects that I interviewed identified similar events that
ruptured their sense of sameness or belonging. For example, Ritu, men-
tioned earlier, describes adolescent experiences of Othering that cannot be
interpreted as anything other than racializing turning points:

When I went to high school, it was tangible, the racism.... I was walking
down the hallway one day and I was a little geeky girl, so I wasn't both-
ering anyone, and there was this group of skinheads... in my grade...
the guy saw me, he took a sip of water... and then whoosh, spat it all in
my face .... Once we were in the car, me, my mom and my grandmoth-
er and a group of drunk white guys pulled up to us at the stoplight and
they were like "Heh Paki dot! Heh Paki! Can I have your dot?" . . . that
was horrible. And at school, sure, um, some people didn't want to sit next
to me in class, because I smelled, like curry, they said .... Every single day

7. I am modifying Davies' concept of being "spoken into existence" (1993).

Brown Girls, White Worlds 173

there'd be this one guy named Dan... "Ooh you stink! Go back to
...
your country! Ooh what's that smell!" . . . that was really bad for me
because I was really shy already so that just made it worse . . I: As a
child, did you experience racism? Was it more in adolescence?8 As a child,
I probably wasn't aware that it was racism, and the kids did not know to
be racist either, it was more after the whole, I guess, I don't know, puber-
ty stage? That the White people went into their White group? Yeah, high
school's always like that, right? People get into their groups right? Like
the boys, the White guys .... I'd known these kids from grade two to
grade six . . . but once they hit puberty (Ritu, 24, Hindu Indian,
bornlraised in Nlississauga, Ont.).

According to Knowles (1999), we do not know the full extent of the

traumatic effects of racism on identities and mental health. Through the
defining gaze of the adolescent peer group, Ritu becomes an object of disgust
and ridicule; she herself suggests that "before puberty," her social interac-
tions were not so overtly determined by race and difference.
My interview with Rose suggests some of the same connections:
although Rose's encounters with racism were not even directly hers, they
still had a profound effect on her identity, in a sense, honing her sense of
non-belonging within the Canadian national imaginary:

I remember one time, we were going to an Indian function and my moth-

er was wearing a sari and these guys were walking by and they yelled
something. I: What did they yell? I don't remember. You know, just like
stuff about "go home" or whatever. That was upsetting, like it made me
feel embarrassed.

Just in terms of feeling ashamed .... I remember when like sometimes

at school, people would make comments about Indians, not to me, but
about Indians, in front of me, and when I heard those things, it used to
make me feel so awful inside. So awful... I just didn't want to be asso-
ciated with it. It's that whole thing... being seen as different, I just did-
n't want anyone to know (Rose, 33, Christian Indian, born/raised in
Brampton, Ont.).

It may be that second-hand experiences do not qualify as boundary

events, but Rose's narrative challenges this interpretation. There is often
a blurring of the I/We distinction in marginalized communities, what Smith
describes as "the inextricable relationship between an individual's sense of
'self and the community's stories of selfhood" (1987: 150-51). Rose is
painfully aware of this blurring; according to her, "being Indian... if you're
a minority.., people will make assumptions about your culture, based on
what you do." Rose's identity is bound up in a larger history of exclusion
that characterizes the South Asian experience in Canada. Although there
was no direct assault on her project of becoming/belonging, Rose's boundary
events are about realizing that in order to belong to mainstream peer culture,
she must deny her South Asianness.

8. The "I:" stands for Interviewer.

174 CRSA/RCSA, 43.2 2006

Boundary Moments
Alongside direct and event-driven experiences of boundary making (e.g.,
racial epithets, laughter, ridicule or indirect comments), there may also be
more open-ended and subtle processes of difference making. Making a dis-
tinction between events and moments entails recognizing when a subject
does not focus on one particular experience or action taken, but references
several connected events, actions or choices where a major shift in identi-
fication (an identifying moment), was in the process of taking place.
This might also include pointing out something that does not happen, thus
closing down the subject's chances of belonging (hence, the word "event"
is a misnomer).
For instance, although the boundary moments in Sarah's account are
ostensibly about friendship, rather than race, difference is still an underlying
theme. In sharp contrast to Ritu's narrative, race, in Sarah's story, plays a
much different part, positioning her at various points as both antagonist
and protagonist in the drama of difference. Rather than any specific event,
there is a conflicted process of making certain choices that are then read
through Sarah's own subsequent interpretation of these choices. I would
like to link together the following three moments of boundary-making in
Sarah's story:

When I was at elementary school, there was a big group of us ... really
good friends ... Then we got into high school ... me and my best friend
moved away from that group, and made new friends and I guess now
when I look back on it I try and underst.and why I did that... wanting
to belong to the popular group and never having ever experienced that
.... when I had the chance... it seemed like the best thing.... I don't
know why it's such a big issue. I think for myself... the fact that I'm
like an Indian girl and in my school, there's a very small number of
Indian people .... When it got to the point like in Grade 11, and some
guys liked you ... you're like "Oh my god, like white guys actually like
me? Like what?

... one night... we'd gone to a pary... a week after we found out about
him [her father] drinking again .... I told them "Just please don't like,
please don't get drunk" . . . especially at this time in our lives . . . it
wouldn't be respectful and my best friend came back drunk and my mum
totally knew .... I remember talking to my friends that night and I just
totally broke down and I told them everything... that was a real step-
ping stone for me, to let it out, 'cause it had always be6n hidden. And
then it also kind of helped me realize who were my true friends. I: What
about your best friend?. . . after that night, it changed our whole friend-
ship .... We don't talk anymore... eventually I like went back to the
friends I'd had before... those are the girls that I'm still friends with
now .... They're actually like real love friendships ... not just about
superficial things .... like popularity anymore.
Brown Girls, White Worlds 175

There are times when I feel slightly different, like in my whole group of
friends, there's me ... another Indian girl. . . 10 of us girls and the rest
are all White .... The guys we hang around with, like they're all White...
not that I don't feel comfortable around all these White people, but
sometimes I will notice that like I'm different .... I: Do you feel accept-
ed? Yeah, like I feel accepted ... but I know that there's a difference...
but I don't think it's a negative thing, I just think it's something that
they know I know (Sarah, 17, Hindu/Sikh Indian, bornlraised in Ottawa,
Ont.).

Sarah's initial choice to break with her old friends and be part of a
popular crowd is indirectly connected to being different: wanting to be pop-
ular for her was about overcoming her own sense of being a racialized subject.
Despite the fact that she has never encountered direct racism, she herself
suggests that her concern with difference was the motivating factor; at
another point, she also talks about female competition within this popular
group specifically through the language of race:

There was always that thing that I felt ... I'm an Indian girl ... they're
White guys ... There was this one girl, Lindsey ... the guys would go
crazy over her and I'd be like... "She's not that pretty, she's not a very
nice person.. .. Why do all these guys like her?" .. . she looks like a typi-
cal beautiful White girl .... I didn't wanna think about it that way but
it was at the back of my mind. Maybe it was just like being popular that
I was able to overcome that. And it actually doesn't matter if I was Indian
or not, like I could still be popular, guys will still like me.

While adolescent cliques are not direct representations of larger societal

relations of power, Lesko and others point out that the discourse of popu-
larity is very much driven by an implicit recognition of hegemonic norms
surrounding race, class, gender and sexuality (Lesko, 2001; Best, 2000;
Lim, 1993). Sarah's aesthetic privilege (she is light skinned and, according
to her, has often been mistaken as Middle Eastern), offers her the option of
what Puar describes as "bargaining with racism."9 Some minority girls per-
form eroticized representations within a racialized economy of desire; but
this strategy, while it offers a certain seductive promise of belonging, is a
far cry from being the "ideal girl," who is still presented in racially hege-
monic terms.
As a result of this initial attempt to belong, Sarah chooses friends
whose concerns with mainstream'teenage activities are prioritized over her
requests for familial respect. The second moment-although it is directly
informed by her dad's alcoholism and has nothing to do with race--is still

9. Puar argues that in order to belong, British South Asian girls and women often adopt dominant codes
of behaviour, dress and manner, as well as drawing on eroticized notions of female Otherness (the sen-
suous, seductive or licentious South Asian woman) (1995: 28-35). The other end of this continuum is
what Bannerji (1993: 147) describes as the stereotype of the "dirty, ugly and smelly" South Asian
woman.
176 CRSA/RCSA, 43.2 2006

narratively bound up in her initial choice: it is an indirect consequence of

her desire to belong to the mainstream White peer group that is considered
popular in the social organization of her high school. The third moment,
where she discusses her difference from her friends returns us almost in
a loop-like fashion to her first decision (to be popular), which allowed her,
at least temporarily, to belong in a mainstream context. This decision
is a boundary moment because it is a crucial turning point in her becom-
ing/belonging that she must later come to grips with, when she returns to
her old friends and confronts the inescapability of her difference. As she
points out, her present peer group is still very mainstream and predomi-
nantly White. The original attempt to whiten herself by becoming part of
the "popular crowd" and an object of statused White male desire has, to
some extent, been only partially successful since, in her current friendship
circle, she remains "different."

Boundary Work
The third form of difference making that I would like to explore is located
outside both the peer group and the subject's own understanding of herself
as different. Parents, siblings and the community gaze often participate in
what I will call boundary work: the active positioning and "management"
of second-generation girls as outside the parameters of North American
adolescence:"°

When I turned sixteen, oh this was traumatic... it was like the turning
point of my friggin life! ... there was this guy... we ended up going to
the mall... Some 'Auntie" saw me, some lady in our community... me
and my parents get carted off to this Auntie's house, who decides she's
going to help me and tell my parents that apparently I'd been dating
some guy and I'd been caught with him .... That's when I realized how
retarded our culture was (Aleena, 25, Muslim Pakistani, born/raised in
Ottawa, Ont.).

I don't think I went through... that whole dating stuff and kissing, you
know,your first boy and all that stuff that my friends went through when
they were probably what, like 16?... I was resentful, I mean, I, it's not
like I didn't like boys.., there were boys that liked me ... Mom is over-
ly concerned with maintaining a proper Indian girl's reputation and that
means no dating. Because my mom still believes in arranged marriages...
if the community gets wind of the fact that you've dated... that can ruin
your chances along those lines (Asha, 29, Hindu Indian, born/raised in
Ottawa, Ont.).

According to both Aleena and Asha, it was the family/community gaze

that made cultural difference an issue. Aleena goes on to say that she never
experienced racism but her family and community were constantly reminding

10. I am drawingupon Proweller's (1998) discussion of boundary making between White and minority girls
at a private school and what she describes as people's active "patrolling" of race borders in identity.
Brown Girls, White Worlds 177

her of her difference. Similarly, Asha's comment suggests that her peers
were willing to "recognize" and include her in their space, but her mother
prevented Asha's participation in Western adolescent practices.'1
In immigrant families, power struggles between parents and daughters
are often generated by pressures from peer groups, whose criteria for
belonging is sometimes in complete opposition to family codes of conduct."i
Despite diverse religious practices, most South Asian communities have
social customs that are not compatible with Western notions of "normal"
female adolescent behaviour-working, dating, going out to parties, and so
on (Dwyer, 1999; Puar, 1995; Hennink, Diamond and Cooper, 1999; Handa,
2003). South Asian girls are regularly pressured by family/community to
maintain gendered cultural traditions that do not mesh with dominant nar-
ratives of girlhood. As symbols of the diaspora's future, they are expected
to maintain standards derived from potentially outmoded notions of South
Asian girlhood. The "museumizing" of culture (Das Gupta, 1997) that
takes place within immigrant communities creates a paradox where second-
generation girls must eschew the norms of Western adolescence to adhere
to norms that may not be at all relevant in their day-to-day lives. If the gaze
of the particular social context in which we find ourselves is, in large part,
what shapes us, how can girls be expected to successfully reproduce the
experiences of girlhood that are literally from another place and, some-
times, another time?

A couple of years ago, it was bad .... I: What did you fight about? ... the
usual stuff, like Indian parent expectations (laughs). I mean, I wanted
more freedom, right? And they were all "No way" and "You're being
influenced by Canadian culture" .. . which is so annoying because like,
yeah, I live here! Like, what do you want me to do?.. .I.: So do you think
there are stereotypes of South Asian girls? Oh yeah, for sure, like know
your culture, be good in school, don't make trouble, don't talk back ....
I love my parents ... but sometimes they get to me, because like they
have these ideas ... about... what kind of daughter I should be .... She
and my dad are always telling us ... we're not like Canadian girls, we're
Goan and that means something different. I: What does it mean? ... you
have to know how to cook vindaloo (laughs)... you have to stay within
the community, marriage-wise, go to church regularly, stuff like that
(Mary, 16, Christian Indian, born/raised in Mississauga, Ont.).

Often, as a result of this familial/community pressure, subjects felt

more comfortable with South Asian peers precisely because they shared
common experiences of parental/community restrictions around White
Western peer culture:

11. Here, I am assuming that Asha means White boys; both minority subjects and mainstream subjects
tend to assume whiteness as the invisible marker of "normal."
12. These struggles are similar across a number of racialized, ethnicized communities. According to Lee
and Chen, within the Chinese Canadian community the second generation often perceives parental
demands as overly traditional, while parents and community elders are angered by what they see as
disobedience and cultural disloyalty (Lee and Chen, 2000: 769). This conflict often leads to children and
adolescents feeling intense anxiety, insecurity, loneliness and self-hate (Lee and Chen, 2000: 769).
178 CRSA/RCSA, 43.2 2006

All through high school I've had the same friends, my Muslim friends...
I: Why is that? You have more in common... the same problems with
parents . . . I: You relate more to them? Exactly (Shazia, 18, Muslim
Pakistani, born/raised in Ottawa, Ont.).

It's a comfort level ... we have similar values and we can relate to each
other... there's just certain things that you don't have to explain ....
If you just say "My dad's doing this or my mom's doing this today,"...
they'll understand... "Oh yeah, my parents tried that on me, and that's
just them being you know," whereas I find sometimes with non-Indian
friends, they don't necessarily always understand that (Asha, 29, Hindu
Indian born/raised in Ottawa, Ont.).

To varying degrees, all the subjects that I interviewed struggled with

culturally specific restrictions during their adolescence. Parental demands,
fears and expectations created pressures that complicated their projects of
belonging within the mainstream, even for girls whose White peer culture
was willing to accept them. Their negotiations with belonging were often
sabotaged by both implicit and explicit suggestions that they were not and
would never be "like everyone else," mainly because they were responsible
for reproducingdifference, the kinds of difference that diaspora communities
often struggle to hold onto in homogenizing contexts.

Looking Back in Anger:

The Power of Adolescent Experiences of Othering

In this final section, I return to the role of memory and retrospection in sec-
ond-generation accounts of (racializing) boundary events in adolescence.
Interestingly, while immigrants often reflect on the past with a rosy sense
of nostalgia, second-generation subjects talk about past experiences of
racism and exclusion that have shaped them as people. For instance, com-
pare the following accounts: in the first, an immigrant South Asian woman
talks about her life before coming to Canada; in the second, a second-gen-
eration South Asian woman looks back on her childhood and youth in
Canada:

I am a Canadian citizen... we have adapted.., you have to integrate if

you have children especially.... I would like to go back. It's our country.
... I like Montreal, it is nice. But in Sri Lanka, we loved to live. Here you
are living because you have to live (interview excerpt in Rajiva, 1997).

When I was younger, I hated my brown skin .... I was ashamed and
embarrassed of my Indian heritage .... I developed creative strategies of
denial and pretense to cope with and survive in a racist environment
(Aujla, 2000: 44).
Brown Girls, White Worlds 179

The above stories highlight a key difference in belonging between

first- and second-generation South Asian women that is directly informed
by the question of age: to arrive in a space where you are almost instantly
Othered leaves you with a desire to return to the place where you belonged.
To grow up in this Othering space means that there is no possibility of a
return. One does not look back longingly at this lost space; even if it is done
as a form of resistance, it remains a painful exercise of reinterpreting the
racism and non-belonging of the past. Furthermore, retrospection seems to
be a central component of adult second-generation subjects' accounts of
racism. Again, unlike their immigrant mothers' everyday encounters with
racism, the adult subjects that I interviewed did not discuss recent or ongoing
experiences of overt discrimination. Instead they talk about difference
through a narrative mode that inscribes the past as the major site of their
struggles with belonging:

I don't... have very many happy memories of high school .... I was a
very bitter person... I felt very ugly .... Why is it Westerners ... seemed
to have a better life? . . . 'Well, they're better looking and they're taller
and they're just more superior in physical form' . . . . I still have that
hang-up in my head that somehow, unn, I'm not good enough for a
Westerner .... If you open up my drawer, I probably have about 600 dol-
lars of unopened stuff [makeup] ... it's quite sad .... I think it's a secu-
rity blanket for me, making up for high school just feeling so ugly and
even to this day, there are times when I look at myself and I still... it's still
something I'm fighting I: So, in other words, do you feel that those expe-
riences as a teenager affected you as a adult? Absolutely. I: More so than
childhood? Absolutely. I: Why? Because it affected your sense of self?
Definitely. Yeah, self-worth. Dignity (Anjana, 30, Hindu Indian,
born/raised in Ottawa, Ont.).

I: Do you think that the experiences of racism have affected you or your
identity in a significant way? For sure .... I've got a note stuck up some-
where .. . it says "Stop feeling inferior" ... racism has affected my self-
esteem... really badly actually... I hate White people and I'm afraid of
the big White guy, because I always associate it with, like the big White
guy is going to do something (Ritu, 24, Hindu Indian, born/raised in
Mississauga, Ont.).

According to Giddens, subjects require a relatively secure, stable envi-

ronment in which to develop a coherent and continuous narrative of self
(1991: 65). Experiences of shame and humiliation, if they are rendered
significant, often lead to a fragility of self. "Shame bears directly on self-
identity... anxiety about the adequacy of the narrative by means of which
the individual sustains a coherent biography... shame depends on feelings
of personal insufficiency, and these can comprise a basic element of an indi-
vidual's psychological make-up from an early age... it should be understood
in relation to the integrity of the self" (1991: 65). Not all racialized subjects
experience shame or, humiliation; however, we do need to explore further
180 CRSA/R'CSA, 43.2 2006

the ontological significance of racialized subjects' struggles with belonging

in a developmental period where the subject is "becoming somebody."
Ronald Fraser (1984) writes that a person is both formed and deformed by
the past."3 In a similar vein, Sarup suggests that: "... an incident which
occurred in the past can become a true present. There is a stagnation of
time, a dread, a fear that chokes the subject. The traumatic experience
becomes a style of being... The present strives to be the 'absolute present'
which oppresses the person" (Sarup, 1996: 38). Sarup's poignant description
is driven home by Handa, whose conscious race scholarship and activism
still cannot completely eradicate her ambivalence about the shameful expe-
rience of "becoming" different:

I do not remember when it began, me getting smaller than my body, the

darkness of my steps, the shallownessý of my voice, or the fear... of sit-
ting beside another South Asian in high school. This made my brown feel
darker and more inevitable ..... Those teenage years that still hover
within me are about not being Canadian enough, not being Indian
enough, not being White enough.., not being (Handa, 2008: 2).

In many of the above accounts, adult women narrate their racialized

pasts through strong emotions such as fear and shame, suggesting that
these experiences had a significant existential impact on their sense of
belonging and self-worth. We still do not know to what extent adolescents
experience racism as trauma, and how they cope with the potentially long-
term effects in adulthood. More research is needed on how particular kinds
of struggles of belonging in the past, end up being part of an "absolute
present" that continues to haunt women's narratives of self.

Conclusion

The literature on South Asian women in Canada has provided a valuable

analytic framework, as well as situating identity and experience in the his-
torical context of Canadian nation building. However, we need to push this
analysis further by exploring the differences between women within the
category "South Asian woman." To this end, generation scholars have
examined how the diasporic experience is interwoven with family relations
of power, peer group pressures and the loneliness of non-belonging for girls
and women who have never had another place to call home. Nevertheless,
even work that acknowledges the complexities of second-generation identities
overlooks the importance of age as a relation of power structuring racial-
ization.
My concern in this paper was to ask explicitly how the issue of belonging
is tied into the process of becoming a racialized self. I analysed interview

13. Ronald Fraser. 1984. In Search of a Past: The 3Manor House, Amnersfield, 1933-1945. London: Versa
(cited in Sarup, 1996: 22).
Brown Girls, White Worlds 181

transcripts through Twine's concept of boundary events in adolescence

where racializing takes place. I also suggested the importance of boundary-
making moments, as well as the work that family and community engage in
to remind girls of their difference. Finally, I looked at how second-generation
women locate their struggles with becoming racialized predominantly in
the past, referencing childhood and, particularly, adolescence as the sites of
their most difficult encounters with exclusion.
We still do not have enough information on some of the key ontological
moments when subjects learn to recognize themselves through discourses
of difference. As Knowles puts it, a great deal of work on race and identity
"places race beyond question" and, as a result, we do not know ".... how
lives acquire race through their social practices and living arrangements"
(Knowles, 1999: 110). If subjectivity is a process of becoming that intersects
with cultural forms of power, then we need to examine how "lives acquire
race" over time in order to understand the role of the nation in the making
of racialized subjects.
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Making of Racialized Selves
SOURCE: Can Rev Sociol Anthropol 43 no2 My 2006
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