Welfare Queens and Tiger Mothers: Racial and Gender Formation in Late Modernity

From anxieties about Chinese bachelor societies to Daniel Patrick Moynihan's description of the Black family as a "tangle of pathology," the production of race works through ideas about (im)proper gender and kinship. In this course we will examine this dynamic in the post-1960s U.S., where African-Americans are represented as the pathological absence of these social forms – and Asian-Americans as their celebrated presence. We will explore how racial tropes like welfare queens, model minorities, and tiger mothers express transformations in the economy (from industry to service), state (from welfare to mass incarceration), higher education (from public to private good), and geopolitics. Finally, we will ask how African- and Asian-Americans reproduce and revise these scripts in pursuit of national belonging, interracial solidarity, and other horizons. (BLST 0101 or BLST 0201 or BLST 0301 or instructor approval.)