by Meenaski Gigi Durham
Construction ‘New Ethnicities’: Media, Sexuality, and Diaspora Identity in the Lives of South Asian Immigrant Girls, written by Meenakshi Gigi Durham is actually a publication I was assigned when I was in college a few years back. The article presents thoughts about the role that the media plays on sexuality. Using a group of South Asian adolescent girls as her subjects, Durham argues that the shows which the girls watch on television have an impact on them and their parents. While the girls feel that they can separate the shows from their real lives, the parents feel the shows influence the girls. Ultimately, Durham’s experiment reveals that the shows do have an impact on the girls – one that they don’t even realize.
Durham uses the term “cultural hybridization” to describe the process of how these girls’ cultural identity is conceptualized. She goes on to explain that globalization has taken programs watched in America, throughout the world. This globalization has helped to blend the culture of adolescent girls who can watch an American show like Friends in far-away countries, such as India, which has historically been less open about sexuality. Durham uses first-generation immigrant girls to see what their cultural identification is and how the media plays a role in that identification.
I found this idea of cultural identification an interesting one because I am a third-generation immigrant and I have noticed some of these same concerns arise for my mother during my upbringing. My mother, just like the South Asian girls’ mothers in the article, tried to hold to all the traditions of our native country. My mother saw American girls as too liberal. As a young adolescent, eager to fit in with my new friends and new surroundings, I followed the TV shows to construct my “new ethnicity.” At one point, I did not even want to speak my native language. As our generations progressed, from my grandmother to my mother to me, I see that each generation has adopted many American ways. This globalization has embedded itself so deeply within my own family heritage that my own daughters now feel completely American and don’t identify with our Latino heritage. As parents of each new generation, we tend to ease up on the strict rules and traditions of our native culture. Durham concludes that adolescence is a social construct and I tend to agree with her because I know the huge impact media had on constructing my “new ethnicity,” and subsequently saw it do the same in my daughters.
In my estimation, Durham proves her argument because I have witnessed some of her conclusions in the lives of my family and other immigrants that I know. Immigrant parents of the first generation try very hard to hold on to their traditions and pass them on to the next, but due to the influence of American media, the rules become more relaxed.