Contested motherhood: The politics of gender, ethnicity, and identity in contemporary Romanian-American literature and culture

In my dissertation I investigate women's reproductive agency in the context of their Romanian ethnicity and subject position as Eastern European immigrants in the US. My project moves beyond the critical commonplace that contemporary narratives in the Romanian-American diaspora simply offer representations of resistance to Romanian Communist totalitarianism. "Contested Motherhood" scrutinizes female characters' complex attitudes towards motherhood and the ways in which they subvert, transform, or complicate reproduction as it was sanctioned by Communism (1947-1989). Through different realist genres, Gabriela Adamesteanu, Cristian Mungiu, Domnica Raˇˇˇdulescu, Anca Vlasopolos, and Haya Leah Molnar create new narratives of motherhood, presenting alternative attitudes to state-mandated reproduction. These narratives also offer a unique portrayal of motherhood informed by a variety of Eastern European and Western feminisms; they interrogate ethnic identities, thereby demonstrating how issues of gender, motherhood, and reproduction are represented in a less visible ethnic subculture of the US. In so doing, the dissertation also argues for the introduction of Romanian-American literature in the category of ethnic literature in the US. While Adamesteanu and Mungiu are influential Romanian figures with an undeclared feminist agenda whose work is popular in the diaspora, Raˇˇˇdulescu, Vlasopolos, and Molnar are representative diaspora writers who left Romania during the Communist regime and came to the US in search for a better life. Their texts complicate the concept of hyphenated identity, attempting to answer a number of questions: What does it mean to be Romanian-American? What does it mean to be a woman in Communist Romania? What memories, uncertainties, insecurities, or strengths and survival tools are relevant in the representation of subjecthood? How does biological and aesthetic reproduction work in the diaspora? The authors underscore the need for the development of a new conceptual framework for feminist ethnic studies of literature from which engagements with diasporic settlement and transnationalism can be better examined.