Mobilities, Bodily Crossing, and Becoming-(M)other in Jen Sookfong Lee's Novels

Bringing mobility studies into dialogue with relevant theories such as psychogeography, the new materialism, borderlands studies, and nomadic feminism, this thesis examines the intersection of mobilities with racialized politics, queer sexuality, pursuit of art, embodied interracial crossings, and motherhood and mothering in Chinese Canadian writer Jen Sookfong Lee’s two novels The End of East and The Better Mother. I argue that through representations of multi-faceted, differential, and heterogeneous mobilities and immobilities in her novels, Lee develops a mobile, minoritarian, and minutial mode of thinking that questions, problematizes, and subverts the dominant ideologies and attitudes—racism, sexism, heteronormativity, and heteropatriarchy—that tend to immobilize the marginal, the minority, or the non-normative in certain social spaces and roles in Canadian society. This thesis incorporates psychogeography and the new materialism into racialized mobility politics, thereby making the latter a molecular perspective on the adverse impact of racialized politics upon the mobilities of young Chinese Canadian immigrants. Racialized mobility politics is then complicated by its intersection with queer youth mobility. Drawing on an embodied emotional geography of homosexuality, the thesis explores how embodied emotions such as familiarity, banality, and boredom are central to Lee’s queer Chinese Canadian characters and their mobilities, as they search relentlessly for a mobile, nomadic mode of homing. The thesis’s analysis of the transgressive nature of racialized mobilities is coupled with a scrutiny of mobilities as enacted in interracial bodily contact, interaction, and integration. Lee’s non-essentialist thinking on mobilities is demonstrated to the fullest in her ruminations on the construction of a nomadic, minoritarian mode of mothering, or what I, drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “becoming-woman” and “becoming-other”, attempt to theorize as “becoming-(m)other”, a process of becoming a mother while also becoming-other. This thesis contributes to scholarship on Lee’s literary fiction and on literary mobility studies. More importantly, this study answers the call for more attention to mobility studies in the arts and humanities by contributing to the emerging field of mobility studies in Anglophone Chinese Canadian literature, and even literatures by the Chinese diaspora and other diasporas in general. Keywords: Jen Sookfong Lee, mobilities, bodily crossing, becoming-(m)other, queer, nomadism

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