(Re)Constructing Maternal Performance in Twentieth-Century American Drama [Hardcover]

Looking at a century of American theatre, McDaniel investigates how race-based notions of maternal performance become sites of resistance to cultural and political hierarchies. This book considers how the construction of mothering as universally women's work obscures additional, equally constructed subdivisions based in race and class.Introduction: If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother? Race, Sex, Class and "Essential" Maternity 1. New Woman (Re)Production: Progressive Era Eugenics in Rachel Crothers' "Feminist" Mother 2. Ethnic Anxieties, Post-Modern Angst, and Maternal Bodies in Philip Kan Gotanda's The Wash and Fish Head Soup 3. Race and the "Domestic" Threat: Sexing the Mammy in Tony Kushner, Alfred Uhry, and Cheryl West 4. Queering the Domestic Diaspora, "Enduring" Borderlands: Cherr?e Moraga's Familia de la Frontera Conclusion: Nurturing Performance, Raising Questions

To come.

L. Bailey McDaniel is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Oakland University, USA.