Reflexive Journal Entries

 

Interview with LL

“My interpretation of LL's response reveals my tendency to construe social relations and identities in the light of power relations and privilege, which is particularly palpable in the framing of my question "what I’m gathering is that you value achieved status more than ascribed status. Is that accurate?". My inclination to ground discussions in power dynamics most likely stems from my previous liberal arts and sociological experience in discussing gender, race, belonging, and ideology from the perspective of identity politics and power dynamics. For example, I wrote on how power dynamics shape the moralization and habituation of pornography for my Philosophy of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality class; I wrote on how alienation comes from imbalanced power relations for my Cultural Studies class; I spent a semester exploring how the relationship of dominance and compromise shaped the history and contemporary experience of democracy in the United States. The more I dived into different disciplines the more phenomena of power dynamics I perceive. My sense-making process is deeply entangled with my preconception of power as a fundamental construct of human experience, which once again shaped the framing and interpretation of my interview with LL.”

 

 

 

Interview with MW

My interpretations of this particular interview are deeply influenced by Beverly Tatum's work on identity politics, especially her essay The Complexity of Identity: Who Am I. 

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"Whether one succumbs to the devaluing pressures of the dominant culture or successfully resists them, dealing with oppressive systems from the underside, regardless of the strategy, is physically and psychologically taxing”. 

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My understanding of identities is embedded in an intersectionality. My tendency to use intersectionality as an analytic tool in understanding the complexities of social issues stems from my own life experience. It is hard for me to think of just one incident where intersectionality affected my life. Ever since I left home and moved to Singapore and later the States, I needed to grapple with intersectionality in almost every aspect of my life, be it college application, social circles, school performance, political orientation, and even spiritual beliefs. Applying to colleges in the US was one of the most transformative experiences in my life that really brought the concept of intersectionality to the fore front of how I think about myself and social justice. “You are Asian so you have to have the perfect SAT score”. "You are Chinese. Top US schools don’t like Chinese students.” “You are not American. Don’t get your hopes up.” “No one in your family ever went to a top university in the US. You have no connections there.” Every day I was bombarded with people telling me why a certain part of my identity will disadvantage me in process of college application.” It was emotionally exhausting to never know whether people value or not value you because of who you are as a person or because of all the identity labels that society enforced upon me. Sometimes, no matter how hard I try, I may not be able to do certain things simply because of my race, nationality, and family background. Complaining is not a luxury that I can afford. 

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I need to survive, and I need to thrive no matter how much society wants to define me based on my identity labels. Rebelling against all the stereotypes is emotionally and physically tasking, but I has made me into the person that I am today. It’s not an easy life, but it’s certainly a wonderful life. Intersectionality is such a powerful tool that has allowed me to understand my own life experience, which inevitably drives me to look at human experience from the same theoretical framework. I tend to use intersectionality to examine specifically how power dynamics is created within an individual and among individuals, which is once again shown by my interpretation of MW's interview. 

 

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Interview with DB

This interview was particularly hard for me. The interviewee was someone that I loved very much and have held dear to my heart. He is a nice person, and he does treat everyone equally and like he said he really is not a racist. What saddened me the most was the moment when privilege became so palpable that I felt almost helpless in wanting to explain the legitimacy of an issue to someone whose experience of privilege, which was not really his own fault either, creates a huge obstacle in conveying the underside experience. 

While I did not impose my opinions on DB as I tried to remain a detached human research instrument rather, my internal emotional reaction revealed how I perceived myself on the spectrum of privilege, speaking to the frustration that I only felt when people in a position of relative privilege failed to understand the hardship that people in position of relatively less or little privilege, like myself, experience. Furthermore, the fact that privilege was the first factor that registered in my mind during my conversation with DB once again reflects my tendency to situation human experiences in the concept of power and power dynamics, as it was shown in my interpretation of LL's interview.

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Interview with CE

Again I sensed myself gravitating towards the discussion of power dynamics employing a framework of intersectionality.  As I've discussed in my other reflections, this tendency was shaped by my prior life experience and academic interest. Embodying fragmented and multidimensional identities that are simultaneously dominant and subordinate (Asian, female, non-Christian, abled, socio-economic status, straight...) myself, I constantly experience how labels, or identity constructs, give me or strip me of power, where who I am as a whole and what I do independently of my identity labels lose their significance under the constructed images of identities. This further shapes my philosophical bent on how values and knowledge and human experiences are essentially social constructs and social constructs were created to maintain power inevitably underlies my perspective and interpretation of what people do, say, and feel. My preoccupation with the concept of power dynamics largely frames my research and the focus of my discussion of race and identity.

 

 

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Interview with BM

Initially I wrote my initial interpretation of moral panic and gaffe largely in passive voice. As I read through my interpretation, I started to question why I, almost subconsciously and automatically, resorted to passive voice. Here is a snippet of the initial reflection I wrote:

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"...BM’s response revealed the moral panic when a gaffe is made visible. Episodes of moral panic probably occur because of the burst of moral illusion...When a gaffe is said and becomes publicly noticed, the illusion that one is moral and civic-minded is disrupted. Disruption leads to discomfort and realization...When symbols of racial inequality, that people often pass as innocent gaffes, are swept into the eye of public scrutiny, people who believed that they have been on the moral high ground might experience doubt, frustration, disappointment, fear, and uncertainty, which eventually culminate in episodes of moral panic."

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By using moral panic and gaffe as the subjects, my passive voice inevitably obfuscated the subject that made gaffes and micro aggression visible as well as the person who experiences moral panic. I decided to rewrite it because my intention was to shed light on the experience of moral panic, and obfuscating the person that this embodied  experience belongs to seems counter-productive. 

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My initial usage of passive voice further reveals a logical or argumentative weakness in my thinking and writing. I realized that sometimes in order to conform to the perceivably desirable standard of objectivity, I tend to use passive voice to deemphasize the subjective aspect of a concept , such as a specific person, event, or individual experience.

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Reflecting on Methodologies

I chose this specific post because I was initially overwhelmed by the glut of generic and positive affirmations in the comment section. While I was deeply moved by her message too, I had my reservation and skepticism about the representability of those comments. I must confess that I firmly held the belief that the comments on the post might obfuscate the different voices that people with different backgrounds and experiences actually have, which stemmed from the vastly different conversations I’ve had with different people, some of whom were skeptics, some cynics, some outright racists, some cosmopolitans, and some liberals. I came in with this belief that there must be a spectrum of attitudes towards racial issues like microaggression, and was hoping to use my research to test my belief. 

 

I purposefully selected my interviewees who I believe could represent as many different races, genders, religious backgrounds, and sexual orientations as possible. I postulated that people with different social backgrounds and different social identities would be more likely to have different opinions on race. This further reflected my belief in social constructionism, that centers on the notion that meanings are developed in coordination with others rather than separately within each individual. I believed that social constructs, power indicators and power relations in particular, defined reality, and different social constructs that come with diverse identities and experiences would yield a more diverse set of opinions on race, which I think is social construct itself.

 

I designed my website in the format of a website due to two considerations. One specific what that Chronicle of a Summer dealt with reflexivity was to deliberate the arrangement of questions and interviews into one piece. As I asked myself which person I would like to present before the other and why I would do so, I could not come up with any justified answer because I figured all responses and emotions, regardless of whether they are expected or unexpected, orthodox or subversive, should not dictate whether I should give it priority or more attention . As long as I present my interviews in a linear order that I intentionally engineer, there always exists my positionality behind what I find valuable, unexpected, or interesting. Diving into the positionality would be one way to go, but since the aim of this ethnographic portfolio is to navigate the power of reflexivity, I wanted this experience of navigation to be engaging in that it could also stimulate reflexivity from the reader. A website creates a lot of latitude as to how one can navigate different parts of the portfolio, rather than confining my portfolio in a linear arrangement. I chose this format, therefore, in hope that it could allow the reader to reflect on what they find interesting and disruptive, through which they  could dive into intro-section of their own preconceptions, beliefs, world views, and values.

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