Reflexive Storytelling As Asian American Feminist Method: Learning from the Political Lives of Young Asian American Women in Chicago

Background and purpose:

For young Asian American women negotiating their own racialized and gendered experiences and political commitments in the wake of widespread racial and decolonial reckonings, foregrounded is the need to identify sites of possibility for fostering their critical consciousness while tending to their wellbeing and healing. This study engaged group storytelling methods to explore how young Asian American women have been politicized to address the conditions of inequity that shape their worlds. Drawing on methodological insights from group storytelling workshops with participants, we spotlight the affordances of reflexive storytelling as Asian American feminist method in social work research.

Methods:

Grounded in an Asian American feminist praxis, this project brought young Asian American women together to engage in reflexive storytelling and dialogue on their experiences of politicization in group workshops. These workshops were designed to be attuned to the contexts, histories, and systems of power in which their stories emerge and are shaped–including a “Where I’m From” guided poetry exercise and the sharing of personal narratives via Story Circles. 36 participants (18-29; Asian American women or people socialized as women; with experience in organizing, activism, or other political work; in the Chicagoland area) shared narratives of how their political journeys have been shaped. Methodological insights emerged from qualitative analysis of workshop recordings and transcripts focused on the affordances and challenges of reflexive storytelling, including workshop debriefs with facilitators, flexible coding, and analytic memo-writing.

Results:

We highlight how reflexive storytelling facilitated Asian American feminist practices of embodied self-articulation that allowed participants to share the depth and breadth of their political lives, while interrogating dominant narratives that truncate and depoliticize their lived experiences as Asian American women. The complexities within and across narratives acted as counterstory, providing insight into how intersecting systems of White supremacy, misogyny, and imperialism structure our social worlds and ways we can transform them. Embodying an Asian American feminist reckoning with difference, participants expressed that storytelling facilitated a connected space of mutual care and support, in which the heterogeneities, tensions, and complexities of their lived experiences were embraced rather than flattened. Care played a significant role in co-creating shared spaces of intimacy, mutuality, and authenticity through which to talk back to power as Asian American women and illuminate sites of possibility for political awakening in our communities.

Conclusions and implications:

We follow in the growing lineage of social work scholars utilizing reflexive narrative methods to explore with participants what it means to live in their bodies in their worlds, and to activate critical reflection on how to make these worlds more livable. We emphasize how feminist inquiry with Asian American women and gender expansive people that value their stories, insights, and visions can seed spaces of possibility in the social work field to disrupt systems of power—through community care, organizing, social movements, and other political engagements that allow young people to envision a just world they have yet to see but yearn to build.