Arab San Francisco: On gender, cultural citizenship, and belongin

This dissertation traces processes of self-reinvention among second generation Arab Americans during a post-1967 historical juncture in which Arabs and Muslims have come to occupy some of the most transnational of cultural locations. In addition to exploring the gendered and racialized processes by which the Arab Muslim Other appears within the discourse of U.S. multicultural nationalism, this dissertation investigates a similar, yet modified process that I refer to as Arab cultural re-authenticity. Against the forces of assimilation, acculturation and racism, Arab cultural re-authenticity emerges as a discourse that polices imagined community boundaries by articulating Arabness as the "good" morally superior self and Americanness as the "bad" morally inferior Other. Underwriting Arab cultural re-authenticity is a politics of gender and sexuality in which women, specifically in terms of their sexuality, are configured according to the masculinist logic of "Arab virgin/American(ized) whore." Men's bodies, while governed by the masculinized demands of marriage and family, are both empowered and constrained in terms of their sexuality, with access to different women's bodies differentially.;By tracing the oral histories of young Arab Americans who actively and differentially negotiate who they are at the intersections of multiple, competing narratives of "Arabness" and "Americanness," this dissertation exposes the historical constructedness, situationalness, and porousness of racial and cultural boundaries. These oral histories indicate that while Arab cultural re-authenticity invokes sameness and fixity, it is inflected with paradoxes of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion and nation. These paradoxes ignite critical cultural expression and social transformation. Focusing on marginalized Arab American youth who contest the regulatory ideals of Arab cultural re-authenticity and hegemonic U.S. multicultural nationalism within a transnational, neocolonialist context, this dissertation highlights individual acts of resistance, such as forbidden marriages and organized social movements that are transnational in scope, including "Queer Arab," "Muslim First-Arab Second," or "Arab American Feminist." As embodied cultural practices that shape identities, these cultural alternatives enable global, inter-communal, and multi-racial formations of resistance. In mapping transnational gender struggles and resistance within and between Arab San Francisco, this dissertation contributes to the literature on transnational multi-racial feminist practice while rewriting self-definition into the process of cultural citizenship.