Linguistic Capital, Intersectionality, and Masculinities: A Case Study of Immigrant Adolescent Boys' Identity Negotiation

• In Event: Immigration, Identity, and Pedagogy: Toward Asset-Based Approaches to Understanding and Working With Minoritized Students

Abstract

Purposes
This paper reports findings from an ethnographic case study of three immigrant adolescent male students in one U.S. high school, using a lens of intersectionality to examine their negotiations of masculinity and their investment in language learning.

Theoretical Frameworks
In response to Block and Corona’s (2014) call for an intersectional approach to identity research in language education, I drew upon the theories of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991), linguistic capital (Bourdieu, 1977, 1991), and hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1995, 2005) to examine how these immigrant young men negotiated their racialized, linguicized, and gendered positionings in the social ecology of one English as Second Language (ESL) classroom and the school. Block and Corona (2014) argue that the different dimensions of multilayered and complex identities cannot be dealt with in a singular framework, and a lens of intersectionality allows researchers to gain nuanced understanding of how different identity inscriptions (e.g., race, language, and gender) intersect with each other to impact individuals’ everyday experience.

Methods
This ethnographic case study focused on three ninth-grade ESL students in a suburban secondary school in one U.S. Midwestern state. Omar is a 15-year-old boy from Libya; Tiger is a 16-year-old boy from Taiwan; and Chris is a 15-year-old boy from Malawi.

Data Sources and Data Analysis
Data collection methods included participant observations, audiotaping and videotaping classroom interactions, interviews, and collecting documents and artifacts. I followed a procedure of inductive data analysis that included contrastive comparison analysis (Corbin & Strauss, 2014) and critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995; Gee, 2008, 2011), and featured an iterative process of interpreting what I learned from writing field notes, writing analytical memos, transcribing data, and data condensation (Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2014).

Results
My analysis indicated that, first, as a group these young men were marginalized in the school due to their status as immigrants and ESL students. Second, gender and race intersected in different configurations for each of the boys, impacting their school experiences. For example, Omar’s racial-ethnic background as a Muslim young man was gendered, and he was subjected to the discourses of Muslim males as “terrorists.” Third, the three boys experienced the school in different terms, due to their different racialized, gendered, and linguicized positionings. In particular, language proficiency became a form of linguistic capital differentiating their masculinity positions in the ESL classroom. Tiger’s accent and lower English proficiency level, coupled with his “lower academic achievement,” led to his marginalized status in the gender order of the ESL classroom. Omar, however, due to his more fluent English, his phenotype of light skin, and his stylish clothes, embodied the form of hegemonic masculinity in the classroom and enjoyed most popularity among the students.

Scholarly Significance of the Study
This study contributes to the research of immigrant learners and language education by providing evidence of “intracategorical complexity” (McCall, 2005) among immigrant adolescents. It informs us that language teachers need to attend to students’ multiple identities and be aware that their intersectional experience is greater than the sum of individual forms of discrimination.

Author

• Kongji Qin, New York University