| Critical intercultural communication (CIC) scholarship on hybridity emphasizes the necessity of examining hybrid performances within their cultural, political, and interpersonal contexts. Though telling, it overlooks a significant piece of the puzzle in understanding hybrid lived experience: how one feels in relation to an interaction, societal structure, or circulating discourse. This dissertation seeks to build an interdisciplinary bridge between CIC and affect theory with the purpose of emphasizing the importance of embodiment in the exploration and interpretation of hybrid performance. To do this, I will draw upon what Manning (2013) terms affective attunement, which accentuates how each lived moment is particular to its historical, interpersonal, sociopolitical and embodied contexts. Furthermore, I develop embodied narratives of location as a complementary methodological counterpart that highlights the necessary inclusion of embodied context in scholarship that examines everyday experience. In this study, I examined the embodied narratives of location of five Arab- American women. My findings mark a critical turning point in liberating formulaic representations of Arab-Americans by putting forth more complex and processual understandings of Arab-American performances as ongoing and embodied. Ultimately, I illuminated how positioning "feeling" as the primary analytical frame moves CIC scholarship toward more unscripted and emergent explorations of experience. |
