Story Circles for Asian American Feminists

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 1:30 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Coming Home: Stories of Building Spaces for Asian Americans in Language and Literacies Education (Table 8)

Abstract

Objectives or purposes:
As a Korean American feminist who has been deeply impacted by the writings of women of color feminists, but who has encountered few Asian American feminist narratives, it is my hope to make the voices of Asian American feminists more broadly accessible and visible in education research. Toward this effort, I held an eight-week zoom story-circle study where a group of eight Asian American feminists gathered to share autobiographical narratives with one another, self-reflect, and theorize around our identities. By collaboratively engaging in autoethnographic self- and group-reflections (Chang, et al., 2013; Ellis, et al., 2011), we collectively demonstrated the vast complexity and heterogeneity of Asian American feminist life stories, and co-narrated our way towards healing and cultural evolution. Through this project I also hope to advocate for more community-based affinity learning spaces to enable other marginalized Asian Americans to collectively compose and narrate towards their cultural evolution and survivance, thereby fighting against our collective erasure.

Theoretical Frameworks
This study uses three theoretical lenses to analyze the narratives of a group of Asian American feminists: 1) women of color feminist theory (Collins, 2000; Combahee River Collective, 2015; Wing, 2003); 2) counterstorytelling (Chang, 1993; Delgado, 1989; Matinez, 2020); and 3) AsianCrit (Iftikar & Museus, 2018). These three theories underscore how identities of marginalization, gender- and race-based identities, critically and irrevocably shape Asian American feminist experiences in the world, to give us unique insights and perspectives on the social world and how identity-based power functions in the world. Using these three theoretical lenses, I analyze the unique epistemologies that surface when a group of Asian American feminists gather to share personal narratives with one another.

Methods:
This study is a narrative inquiry (Clandinin, 2022; Kim, 2016) study that was methodologically inspired by collaborative autoethnography (CAE) conducted by women of color scholars (Hernandez, et al., 2015). The broader methodological orientations of this study were also informed by a praxis of critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970; hooks, 1994) and community-centered practitioner inquiry research (Ghiso, et al., 2015), particularly in informing how I showed up as both researcher and participant observer in this study. The primary narrative inquiry format of this study, as well as the three other methodological threads are theoretically well-aligned with one another to honor the expertise and epistemological potential inherent in every individual.

Scholarly Significance:
Through this story-circle study, I document the inherently relational, social, and community-based nature of knowledge generation, and thereby argue for the need for more community-based affinity spaces that can serve as third spaces (Gutierrez, 2008) for radical learning, healing, and growth for marginalized peoples, like Asian American feminists. Furthermore, this story circle study showed the radical epistemic and healing potential of storytelling as a praxis and community spaces as a place for learning to build towards our communal remedy, repair, and liberation.

Author

• Ayoung Noh Lee, University of Pennsylvania