Duoethnography on the U.S. Gaze: Felt Conversations About Mobility, Race, and Gender as International Scholars
摘要
In this chapter, we collectively reflect on our embodied experiences of feeling and becoming international women and nonbinary scholars of Color in the context of U.S. higher education. We do so through duoethnography, a methodology involving a series of conversations between the two authors. We begin by sharing our personal migration experiences from our home contexts of South Korea and Taiwan to the U.S., contextualizing our migration experiences within the historical geopolitical power relationships between these countries. This includes an examination of the broader geopolitical landscape on sexism and queerphobia on an international scale. Through our stories, we argue that the university is an institutional space where our unique migration history is obscured, but simultaneously our bodies are constantly otherized as outsiders or foreigners. We recognize that our beings and research work are shaped by the “U.S. Gaze,” a term expanded from Toni Morrison’s White Gaze to describe, here, the pressures exerted by U.S. imperialism in higher education. We then discuss how our experiences as international scholars have shaped our views of race, racialization, and colonialism that do not neatly fit into the U.S.-centered epistemology of race, colonialism, gender, and sexuality. By problematizing the global and local binaries, we ultimately seek to examine the ways that U.S. imperialism racializes and exerts pressures on international scholars of Color to attend to issues within the U.S.