Abstract
Background/Context
It may appear a simple question for a 12 year old girl to ask: “what should I wear today for school?” But simplicity is deceptive when the possibilities are many and each carries with it a specific and dangerous weight. In this paper I start with a Hmong girl in Ban Rongrian, Thailand, as she faces forms of identifications commonly used for herself and her parents: “the dangerous communist insurgent,” “the good Thai student,” and “the colorful and peaceful ethnic minority.” Interestingly, these identifications are not only made public through speech, but through styles of dress as well.
Purpose
Building on the concerns raised by Michel de Certeu and his problematics of enunciation, as well as Judith Butler's attempts to understand agency and subjecthood within the constraining possibilities provided by language, I examine how Hmong students tell themselves and others who they are, not only through their speech acts, but also through the practice of dressing.
Research Design
In particular, by analyzing two case studies compiled during a two and a half year period of ethnographic research, I demonstrate the ways in which some young Hmong girls struggle to understand the social relations that obtain between the Hmong and the Thai and the ways they creatively appropriate different styles of dress and speech in an attempt to play with the identifications that structure their lives.
Conclusions
I conclude by showing how it is through these practices that Hmong girls enact a present and give us a sense of how they imagine futures for themselves in which they have greater control over the representational systems that seek to identify them.
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