Failing mother: honoring the inheritances of Asian American feminism

Abstract

This article reflects on the feminist inheritances that have transmitted from Asian American mothers to daughters across the diaspora, while reconceiving of matrilineality as an intra- and interracial condition of political possibility. I stake out the different barriers to connection and mobilisation for Asian American women and other women of colour despite a shared lineage of experiencing state, military, institutional, and/or sexual violence on both local and global scales. Particularly for Asian American women, I explain that this history of violence becomes excusable through their interpolation into the model minority myth, culturally essentialist narratives, competing loyalties to seemingly mutually exclusive Asian American and feminist causes, and their tendencies toward historical erasure and dismissal.