"The Days Now Is Very Hard for My Family": The Negotiation and Construction of Gendered Work Identities Among Newly Arrived Women Refugees

Abstract

Recent studies of second language learning and language contact in bilingual and multilingual communities have been informed by feminist poststructuralist approaches to the study of language, gender, and identity (Cameron, 1997; Cameron, Frazer, Harvey, Rampton, & Richardson, 1992; Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 1992; Erhlich, 1997; Norton, 2000; Norton Peirce, 1995; Pavlenko & Piller, 2001). Viewing gender as a composite of social and economic relations as well as a set of discursive practices, such research focuses on the various ways that ideologies (of language and of gender) mediate those social and economic relations. I utilize such frameworks to analyze the multiple and complicated ways that identities are constructed, negotiated, and deployed within specific situations and circumstances. Examining data from long-term participant observation and recorded interviews, I ask how individual refugee women who have recently arrived in the U.S. are positioned and position themselves as language learners and as immigrants with particular gendered work identities within specific contexts.

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