Mobilities, Bodily Crossing, and Becoming-(M)other in Jen Sookfong Lee's Novels
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".