“Maternal Melancholia”: Reading Diasporic Asian Canadian Motherwork in the Fictions of Kerri Sakamoto, Hiromi Goto, and Madeleine Thien
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What does it mean for an immigrant to be a “good” mother? Asian immigrants in Canada experience pressures to assimilate to a “normal,” homogenous ideal of Canadian culture—to erase aspects of their own cultural identity as well as their diasporic history. Asian mothers specifically are subject to mothering ideologies that depict white, middle-class, happy mothers as the norm. This thesis examines literary depictions of this phenomenon in novels by Kerri Sakamoto, Hiromi Goto, and Madeleine Thien. Each of these authors offers representations of motherhood that counter racialized and gendered ideals of mothering, and that refuse to ignore the sometimes traumatic effects that diaspora can have on immigrant families. Through David Eng and Shinhee Han’s notion of “racial melancholia”, I argue that the mothers in these novels conduct “maternal melancholia,” a form of motherwork that subverts dominant ideologies of mothering, resists assimilation, and sustains losses incurred through racialization and diaspora.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".