Guest Lecture with Dr. Miliann Kang: Mothers as Others: Race and Reproductive Politics in Asian America

Challenging the mythology that mothers share natural bonds—not only with their children but with each other—Mother Other exposes motherhood as far from a global sisterhood. While focusing on Asian American mothers, Mother Other interrogates motherhood broadly as a fraught identity and institution defined by entrenched social divisions—ranging from xenophobia to racism, misogyny to transphobia, ableism to class privilege. These divisions not only arise among mothers, but are produced and reproduced by them, yet can also be resisted and reimagined.

Miliann Kang is Professor in Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies and affiliated faculty in Sociology and Asian/Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of The Managed Hand: Race, Gender and the Body in Beauty Service Work (University of California Press) and is completing her next book, Mother Other: Race and Reproductive Politics in Asian America.

Thanks to event co-sponsors: Dean’s Challenge Grant, Asian American Studies, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Sociology & Anthropology