Relocating Maternal Subjectivity: Storytelling and Mother-Daughter Voices in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the advent of recuperation of mother commencing in the 1970s, one of the heated inquiries underlying the development of feminist maternal scholarship is a preoccupation with maternal subjectivity and the mother-daughter relationship initiated by one of the keynote feminist maternal theorists, Marianne Hirsch, in the late 1980s. In tandem with such a feminist concern, this paper seeks to investigate how maternal subjectivity, filtered through a psychoanalytic feminist contention of intersubjectivity as elucidated in Jessica Benjamin's The Bonds of Love, can possibly be envisioned, articulated and synthesized in the mother-daughter voices delineated in the literary creativity of Tan's The Joy Luck Club. Locating Tan's The Joy Luck Club within a feminist matrilinealism in connection with a Chinese American matrilineal tradition and a white Western matrilineal discourse, I attempt to demonstrate the resourcefulness of the Amy Tan phenomenon in providing an alternative to a feminist approach to maternal subjectivity. Viewing the use of storytelling between mothers and daughters in Tan's The Joy Luck Club as a trope for matrilineal reclamation, I also interpret it as a site of substantiating Benjamin's intersubjective theory. While Benjamin's theoretical premises illuminate an interactive and constructive reading of Tan's text, I also argue that the mother-daughter stories and voices, as mapped out in Tan's experimentation with femininity and creativity, re-examine, expand and even challenge Benjamin's theoretical topos in The Bonds of Love.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".