Civic Compositional Literacies of Indonesian American Girlhood

Abstract

This paper examines how, in a virtual critical literacy community, Indonesian American girls took up invitations for civic composing. While these young women face intersecting barriers in the White supremacist, heteropatriarchal, and anti-Asian public sphere, scant research has considered how they use composing as a tool to navigate those oppressions in critical literacy spaces. This paper thus foregrounds three focal girls’ “civic compositional literacies.” Stemming from the youths’ civic identity formation processes as intersectionally situated diasporic actors, these were composing practices and textual creations through which they addressed democratic inequities in their (trans)national lifeworlds. Discussing two findings pertaining to youths’ composing, the paper deepens conceptions of Indonesian American girls’ civic compositional literacies as well as how critical literacy education can nurture them. It also builds knowledge of Asian American girls’ civic compositional literacies as the situated, cross-border forms of theorization and action through which these youth are reshaping public life.