WGSS 66.17 Labors of Love: Mothering in Chicanx/Latinx and Asian American Communities
The practice of mothering is too often deemed a universal, innate experience that binds women together across time and space. Yet motherhood shares an intimate relationship with shifting, culturally specific histories of colonialism, nationalism, militarism, and more recently, globalization. Motherhood, and social reproduction more broadly, has served as a critical domain of power and knowledge production in these contexts. Because the experience of mothering connects the intimate experiences of individuals to larger structures and forces, and because reproduction is such a fundamental (if varied) biological and social experience, the topic lends its especially well to comparative analysis.
This specific course employs the framework of mothering to compare the experiences of two communities constructed as “foreign” to the United States: Chicanx/Latinxs and Asian Americans. In situating motherhood as an ideological and cultural construction rather than a universal or natural phenomenon, we will compare closely affiliated histories of miscegenation, transracial adoption, domestic migrant labor, and assisted reproduction across the Americas and the Asian diaspora. How are these phenomena given especially potent life in Chicanx/Latinx, Asian American, and Asian diasporic cultural representations such as literature, documentary film, and television? In analyzing major scholarship and theories about mothering alongside these cultural texts, we will learn how differing notions of motherhood have been constructed, contested, and negotiated.
Cross Listed Courses
ENGL 63.12