Abstract
This qualitative study sought to understand how East Asian American women navigate conflict in their important relationships; what roles culture, gender, and race play in this navigation; and their impact on their experience of authenticity. Eleven East Asian American women in emerging adulthood provided narratives about conflict navigation and authenticity through semi-structured interviews. Participants’ narratives were analyzed using critical feminist narrative analysis. The women demonstrated changes in their strategies of conflict navigation over time. First, they appeared to primarily use self-silencing to maintain relational harmony, as learned from their cultural and familial contexts. They then began to explicitly self-advocate, as learned from White/European American contexts. Finally, they appeared to attempt to integrate the two strategies as a part of the process of integrating their gendered cultural and racial identities. Their conflict navigation influenced their experience of authenticity in their relationships, which was also context dependent.
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