Programme
Ram Mahalingam
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology
University of Michigan
E/ ramawasi@umich.edu
Chair, "Cultural Psychology of Gender and Psychological Well-Being of Tamil Immigrants"
- "Super Amma": Idealized Representations of Tamil Motherhood Among
Tamil Immigrant Women
(w/ Sundari Balan)
- "Pure" Woman ideal and the Silencing of Sexually Abused Women: Clinical
Implications
(w/ Shanta Kanukollu)
- Brown Masculinities and the Contours of Resistance to Hegemonic White
Masculinities: Implications for Psychological Well-being
(w/ Jennifer Yim)
This panel explores three areas (1) beliefs about manhood and womanhood,(2) gender role conflict and(3) sexual abuse in Tamilnadu and among Tamil immigrants in the United States, with a specific focus on psychological well-being. Using interviews and survey research, these papers examine how differences in Tamils' versus Whites' understanding what it means to be male or female affect the psychological well-being of men and women. Although anthropological and feminist research on gender has examined how factors such as globalization have shaped the construction of Tamil notions of ideal womanhood and manhood, very few psychological studies examine how Tamil immigrants to the US come to have such beliefs, and how these beliefs affect their lives. These three papers focus on how Tamil immigrant men and women revise their ideas of the ideal man and the ideal woman and how this process of reconstruction affects their psychological well-being (e.g., risk taking, coping and help seeking). These papers investigate how the hegemony of “Whiteness” shapes the experience of gender at the intersections of ethnicity and social class.
The first paper examines how, dominant culture (White) ideas about what it means to be a man shape second generation Tamils' ideas about their own maleness, and how these 'brown masculinities' negotiate, challenge and resist White notions of manhood. Balan and Mahalingam's paper looks at how Tamil immigrants adopt positive stereotypes of Asian American men and women to create a positive group identity. Kanukollu and Mahalingam's paper contrasts and connects the idealized beliefs of Tamil womanhood that valorizes the "pure" Tamil woman with how sexually abused women are silenced and set apart within the larger Tamil immigrant community. All three papers will discuss the mental health consequences of internalizing idealized beliefs about masculinity and femininity for Tamil immigrants.
_____
Prof. Mahalingam’s research primarily focuses on how the relationship between
social marginality and intersecting social identities shape psychological well
being. He is particularly interested in the relationship between gender and
immigration. His recent publications include "Essentialism, culture and power:
Representations of social class" in Journal of Social Issues 59:4
(2003), and Cultural Psychology of Immigrants (forthcoming).