Racialized Motherhood: Mothering Hardships and Resistance in Little Fires Everywhere

Abstract

[eng] Hegemonic discourses of motherhood have perpetuated a restrictive yet idealized imagery of the maternal figure as white, middle-class, married within a nuclear family. Nonwhite, low- or working-class mothers, often unquestionably associated with singleness are consequently excluded from this dominant narrative. Analyzing Liz Tigelaar’s TV adaptation of Celeste Ng’s novel Little Fires Everywhere (2020), the aim of this paper is to demonstrate whether this exclusion is sustained by a series of social measures, namely structural differences, that could be argued to go back to social and political systems that dominated the period of colonial expansion. Alternatively, a woman who fails to comply with the patriarchal and controlling imagery of the “good” mother is at risk of being socially perceived as a “bad” mother. As the following analysis proves, this identification of nonwhite women as “deficient” mothers might derive into white, privileged mothers assuming the position and stereotype of the white savior, attempting to improve the circumstances of these mothers. Nonetheless, the present paper also reveals that the bond of sisterhood created between the two nonwhite, low-class mothers of the miniseries can be interpreted as an act of resistance against the oppression exerted by derogatory mothering discourses.