Abstract
Coming to terms with the personal meaning of one’s ethnicity can be challenging during late adolescence and early adulthood for daughters born in the society to which their parents immigrated. Given these challenges that I’ll discuss at the start of this paper, I am interested in how Canadian-born university undergraduate women whose parents immigrated to Canada understand and think about their ethnocultural heritage. Given the demands and pressures of gendered socialization within immigrant families across diverse ethnocultural communities, some young women may de-emphasize and/or redefine the role of their ethnocultural heritage in their self-definition. In the second part of this paper, based on comments from interviews with undergraduate women from immigrant families, I propose that this approach does not represent denial of one’s roots but may, in some circumstances, reflect an adaptive approach to constructing one’s identity.
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Dion, K.K. (2015). Negotiating Identity for Young Adult Women from Immigrant Families: Expectations, Opportunities and Challenges. In: Espín, O.M., Dottolo, A.L. (eds) Gendered Journeys: Women, Migration and Feminist Psychology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137521477_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137521477_13
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