Resistance or Complicity? Chinese Canadian Men Negotiating Whiteness and Masculinity in the Canadian Prairies

Abstract

In this essay, I critically analyze the practice of masculinity negotiation based on data collected through a qualitative study of hegemonic masculinity. Reflecting some dynamics of the historical subordination of Chinese masculinity in Canada, the Chinese Albertan males who participated in the research framed a somatic white masculinity, via which they discursively displaced themselves from the domain of the masculine. Some of them employed sport-participation to negotiate their masculine statuses. Underscoring whiteness as a material aspect of masculinity that cannot be performatively constructed by Chinese men, I argue that masculinity negotiation does not constitute an equitable means of resistance, as the very practice entrenches an archetypal masculine subject with whiteness at its centre. Through this discussion, I wish to incite conceptualizations of resistance in more critical terms.