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Organization, Regulations, and Courses 2023-24


ENGL 63.12 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

WGSS 66.17

Degree Requirement Attributes

Dist:INT or LIT; WCult:NW

The Timetable of Class Meetings contains the most up-to-date information about a course. It includes not only the meeting time and instructor, but also its official distributive and/or world culture designation. This information supersedes any information you may see elsewhere, to include what may appear in this ORC/Catalog or on a department/program website. Note that course attributes may change term to term therefore those in effect are those (only) during the term in which you enroll in the course.

Department-Specific Course Categories

Junior Colloquium: Course Group III