Triple Selves at Work: Immigrant Muslim Women Navigating Careers in America

Introduction

The quote above is from Vera, a 38-year-old Muslim woman, who narrated how her diverse identifiers posed a significant challenge in navigating jobs. Referring to her intersecting identities, Seema, a 47-year-old engineer also talked about having “three other negatives” on her behalf that led to exclusion from a White male dominant network of opportunities in corporate America. When hyphenated in intricate ways as these excerpts suggest, identities often prove complicated to assume and sustain. Living on the hyphen is indisputably a frequently jarring experience for individuals with numerous intersections in their ways of beings. For the mainstream, this process often appears to be so subtle that those living at the intersection are often unaccompanied in negotiating their intertwined selves and ensuing experiences. For many with contested identities, living in a post-modern, post-colonial, and post-cold-war era that features a multicultural sentiment, a rhetoric on global connectedness and openness may demonstrate limited power in resolving complexities stemming from structural and societally entrenched barriers (Ali, 2001; Esses et al., 2001). Endorsement of a multitude of identities is undoubtedly self-rewarding, culturally enriching, and inspiring for many. Living at the hyphen of diverse selves is also characterized by tension, conflict, distress, and struggle that emerge as vital parts of the experience (Sirin & Fine, 2008; Zaal et al., 2007).

In this collective story of Muslim immigrant women, we set out to shed light on the experiences of a group of them to understand the issues complicated by their diverse identity markers. We intend to explore how individual selves and experiences are often crafted and recrafted by virtue of diverse identities in a social-relational context characterized by competing discourses on immigration, multiculturalism, and cultural conflict. Narrowing the focus on the workplace and career realm as microcosms of the general society, we aim to show how immigrant Muslim women are redefining, negotiating, and reconciling seemingly disparate and allegedly mutually exclusive categories of being in and belonging to different social arrangements (e.g., ethnic or religious community, American society) through their work and career endeavors. This work represents a humble attempt to convey the stories of these women and bring their voices closer to the meso level or the relational forum to help readers gain an experience-near perspective on a group of individuals highly stigmatized with their “triple markers”. The current study is significant given that career research is limited in applying career theory to diverse populations and there is often a “lack of attention to the inner motivations, personal constructions, and the way in which people make meaning of working” (Blustein, 2006, p. 66). Despite useful conceptualizations of the self and identity in recent contextualist theories (e.g., Blustein et al., 2004), research has yet to explore the actual lived experiences of those with contested identities, such as the women that have contributed to the current study.