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Giving Voice to Hmong American Women: Aural Media as Home in the Diaspora

Sat, November 19, 8:00 to 9:45am, HYATT REGENCY AT COLORADO CONVENTION CTR, Floor: Level 3, Mineral Hall G

Abstract

For Hmong in the diaspora who have no country or nation-state to call their own, the idea of “home” is a deeply troubled notion. Due to long histories of persecution and resettlement, the maintenance of Hmong histories, cultures, and language have come to stand in for a collective identity that traverses political and geographic borders in order to unite Hmong people. In this paper, I consider the way that audio media plays an important role in creating a Hmong collectivity that challenges a spatial understanding of home. In particular, I examine the role that Hmong American women have played in developing new forms of diasporic media. Although many forms of Hmong media remain dominated by men, Hmong American women have made notable interventions into the realm of broadcast radio, teleconference radio programs, and podcasts. The dearth of scholarship on these emerging forms of media offers a fertile area for considering the interplay between Hmong media practices and ideologies of gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, and nation.

This study is based on a larger qualitative examination of Hmong American media practices that includes interviews with over 60 interviews with media producers and consumers, as well as visits to 10 media production sites. I particularly focus on three nodes of participation—women who host their own radio programs on traditional broadcast radio; women who own their own teleconference radio stations; and women who create their own podcasts. The women included in these examples embody a wide range of identities in terms of age, generation, political affiliation, sexual orientation, and profession. Yet together they are clearly contributing to the development of Hmong diasporic media that can collectively address political issues such as domestic violence, international abusive marriage, assimilation versus the maintenance of Hmong gender norms, gender identity and expression, cultural citizenship, and many others. Given the diversity of women included in these discussions, we can see a wide spectrum of positions and a host of complexities that can make stymy efforts toward social justice organizing. We can also consider the different audiences for each platform and how Hmong women must shape their messages in order to be legible to their specific audience. But together we can see that Hmong American women are using these different media platforms to broadcast their voices and create a woman-centered notion of “home” that does not rely upon state-sanctioned or geographic boundaries. This study works toward explicating the cultural, social, and technological context for the creation of this aural community so that we can more clearly understand its potential for changing the shape—and sound—of belonging in the Hmong diaspora.

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