A Response to "Of Being an Arab Woman Before and After September 11"

          In " Of Being an Arab Woman Before and After September 11: The Enactment of Communal Identities in Talk," Witteborn (2004) contrasts interviews of Arab women before and after September 11, asking them about their use of identity labels and then investigating the associtions relevant to these labels. She finds that Arab woman, before September 11, used to identify themselves as Arabs, tie that to family values and respect, and label themselves as Arab Americans only in the public sphere. However, after the tragic event, they tended to use national labels to associate their respective identities with their national histories and cultural richness.

           In the analysis of these data, the writer draws in her analysis on the Communication Theory of Identity of Hecht et al., namely two assumptions of it: that identities have individual, social, and communal properties and that they are codes that are expressed in conversations and define membership in communities (85-86). She also makes use of the enactment frame," which ‘‘focuses on the messages that express identity [as] identity is enacted in social behaviors, social roles, and symbols’’ (Hecht et al., 2003, p. 236). The analysis of the interviews yields results that reinforce some of these theories and challenge others. The most prominent suggestion that adds to the enactment frame is that speakers do not only express identities but also enlivened and performed, through reported speech, examples, and verbs of emotions, which her participants used. Nonethless, I see that the term given to the theory already entails performance as a way of expression as the word "enactment" denotes: " An instance of acting something out" (Oxford Dictionary).

         In my perspective, I think that it generally does not contribute much to my curiosity as a reader, yet I appreciated some parts of it,. For one thing, I was intrigued to learn about the shift to specific national labels after September, 11. I think that such a discursive act is not only meant to inform the interlocutor that Arabs are not all the same (i.e., they are not all Saudis like those involved in the tragic event). It somehow deploys a specificity that naturally evokes visibility of the humanity of stereotyped communities—Arabs in this case. One of the participants actually mentions the word "visible" in her justification of the use of national labels, which evoked in my mind visibility as a fascinating rhetorical technique that is employed even in visual art. For instance, Norman Rockwell's depicted specific details of everyday life of African Americans during the Civil Rights Movement to help viewers attain a visibility of the humanity of a marginalized community.

         Although I found that aspect of the quoted interviews interesting, I still found that the writer could have utilized the data better by trying to pose questions like: why did the participants use the label "Arab American" only as a part of their public persona before September, 11? Does that indicate a sense of disconnection that was perpetuated even before the attack? After the attack, why didn't they try to emphasize the American aspect of their "Arab American" identity to counteract the resulted "othering"? Could this sense of disconnection be linked to their being "first-generation" immigrants? How does sociolinguistics of gender and the gender-related preconceptions about Arab women play in these identity enactments? All in all, I think that this article provides a initial look at the representation and performance identity of Arab American women in speech, and provokes many more questions for further research and investigation.