A „jó” anya árnyékában

Zsuzsanna Lénárt-Muszka

IN: Partitúra Irodalomtudományi folyóirat, Volume XIX. , Issue 2, 2024, page 47-64 , ISSN 1336-7307

DOI: 10.17846/PA.2024.19.2.47-64

Abstract:

The paper addresses the representations of normative motherhood and respectability politics in the context of Black American motherhood in two contemporary short stories by African American women writers: Alice Walker’s “The Abortion” (1981) and Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s “Belles Lettres” (2018). After introducing the stories, I provide a brief historical overview of Black American mothers’ social status, which I frame within the prescriptive discourses of respectability politics and normative motherhood. After interrogating the stories’ treatment of four of the pillars of normative motherhood and the influence of race on the three textual mothers’ experiences, I argue that the intertwining of respectability politics and normative motherhood prompt the women in question to perceive motherhood as a performance carried out for the benefit of an external gaze. Furthermore, I examine the narrative consequences of prioritizing the figure of the ideal mother as well as consider the social and personal repercussions of either embracing or rejecting the imperatives of both discourses.

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Partitúra is a Hungarian literary journal published in Slovakia twice a year. The first edition was issued in 2006. From 2007 to 2014 its publishers were the Faculty of Central European Studies at The Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra in cooperation with Sambucus Literary Society. Since 2014 the Faculty of Central European Studies at the CPU in Nitra became the sole publisher.

The journal releases peer-reviewed scientific articles, literary studies and art reviews of both Hungarian as well as world literature. It is also a forum for essays on several other arts and intercultural relations. Furthermore, special attention is devoted to the Central European literature and literary studies; the magazine not only publishes the reviews of such studies, but also provides the arena for reflections about them. The journal aims to give an account of the contemporary Hungarian literature of the Hungarian minorities as well as to serve as a cluster for discourses.

As for the structure of the paper, it is usually divided into three main sections. The first part generally deals with the translation of an important foreign abstract literary study. It is followed by the heading of Scientific Studies and the Columns of Critical Analysis. Partitúra regularly publishes thematic abstracts by authors, genres, as well as a literary and artistic phenomenon in focus.