“We Don’t Sleep Around Like White Girls Do”Family, Culture, and Gender in Filipina American Lives

Abstract

This chapter talks about the relationship between Filipino immigrant parents and their daughters. It argues that gender is a key to immigrant identity, and a way for racialized immigrants to claim cultural superiority over the dominant group. The author uses epigraphs, or statements, by a Filipina immigrant mother and her second-generation Filipina daughter. These suggest that the virtuous Filipina daughter is partially constructed on the concept of White women as sexually immoral. The chapter also shows that their enforced “morality” and the sexuality of women are essential to the structuring of social inequalities. These narratives indicate that racialized groups also criticize the morality of White women as a resistance strategy, or a means of asserting a morally superior public face to the dominant society. The chapter is primarily concerned with understanding the actions of immigrant parents instead of the reactions of their second-generation daughters.

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