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| author | Alexa Mei Young |
| title | Mom's the Word: Constructions of Single Motherhood in 1970s and 1980s Popular Fiction |
| abstract |
This project analyzes Stephen King's Carrie (1974), Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place (1982), and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985) to
uncover their mapping of 1970s and 1980s debates around single motherhood. American culture of the 1970s and 1980s produced new, and often racialized,
discourses about single motherhood that complicated the discursive ripples of the past. The fiction of King, Naylor, and Atwood synthesizes many of the
feminist and anti-feminist debates, offering distinct narratives of single motherhood that affirmed, complicated, and resisted contemporary conditions
of the maternal subject. This project tries to unpack these narratives using Kristeva's theory of horror and abjection, black feminist theory of exclusion,
and Foucault's theory of power. While the single mother's destabilizing potential threatened the New Right's conservative values, second-wave feminism
failed to name single motherhood as a salient site of emancipatory potential that would unpack structures of domination that subjugated all women. of
these texts' relationship to single mother subjectivity can reveal spaces for redemptive self-definition and empowerment.
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| school | The College of Liberal Arts, Drew University |
| degree | B.A. (2018) |
| advisor | Wendy Kolmar |
| committee | Shakti Jaising
Jinee Lokaneeta |
| full text | AMYoung.pdf |
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