Abstract

The current study, which approaches the motif of motherhood in three short stories by American minority women writers from the perspective of postmodern feminism, rebuts the claims of feminist orientalism that mothering experience is homogeneous and universal. Instead, it argues that the discourse of motherhood is as heterogonous as the mothers’ social and cultural backgrounds. The fictional mothers in Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” (2007), Amy Tan’s “Two Kinds” (1989), and Suzan Darraj’s “Nadia” (2007), the study maintains, are represented as incubators of ideological, social, and nationalist activisms. As authoritative mothers, they expect their daughters to absorb and incarnate whatever values passed on to them. Any failure of compliance and commitment to the mothers’ teachings and wishes would result in a generational and ideological conflict according to the study.