2026 Theses Doctoral

Filling the Hollow of Ethnic Identity: Emotion and the (Re)production of Chineseness

Wang, Charlotte Xue Lian

This dissertation examines ethnoracial “becoming” projects amidst intensified public discourse about ethnic and racial identities. Through interview and ethnographic research, it traces how Chinese and Taiwanese Americans grapple with ethnic and racial identities in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the concomitant rise of anti-Asian sentiment across the US.

Using 83 life history interviews with Chinese and Taiwanese Americans and two and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork on trips and events centering Chinese identity, I analyze the emotional, relational, embodied, and imaginative ways people make their ethnoracial identities more salient and stable over time. I draw on theories of emotion, race-making, and symbolic interaction to build a framework for understanding how emotion is involved in the reproduction of racial subjectivities. Moving beyond analyses of the political and institutional processes of ethnic boundary-making, my research offers novel insight into how emotions circulate to invoke and reify Chineseness, maintaining ethnicity’s salience even generations after immigration.

I examine how individual and collective emotions are involved in forming ethnic subjectivities and producing categorical belonging across diverse settings; how embodied experiences and practices mediate ethnic self-understandings; how ethnic identities mobilize imagined pasts and futures; and how individual trajectories of ethnic becoming are shaped by structures of labor, aging, institutionalized racism, and culture. I argue that the “hollow” categories of ethnoracial identity are made to feel meaningful and sincerely held through the mobilization of emotions around the signs and “surfaces” of ethnoracial identity.

Chineseness in the US—and the myriad meanings attached this category—serves as my case. However, these insights into the emotional and interactional construction of ethnoracial identities offer more nuanced understandings of racialization, selfhood, and belonging at all scales of social life, with applicability to identity research more broadly.