Abstract
Author, activist, and performance artist Staceyann Chin uses her various platforms to express the complexities she faces as a Jamaican-Chinese lesbian immigrant living in New York. Chin recently expanded her repertoire to include a ten-part guest column for the national U.S. online newspaper, Huffington Post, in which she describes her journey to motherhood as a single, immigrant lesbian. Her column raises critical questions regarding what is considered “legitimate” motherhood, who counts as family, and what constitutes home, providing an important challenge to deeply entrenched, but understudied, Western domestic rhetorics. Using feminist rhetorical criticism, I examine the ten articles that comprise Chin’s guest column. Drawing on and adapting Royster and Kirsch’s notion of strategic contemplation, I demonstrate that Chin deconstructs the universality of maternal identity and reimagines what it means to be a mother by engaging in an unfolding process of looking outward and inward, activating what I call a contemplative voice that illuminates the discursive limitations of her environment. In addition, I argue that Chin affirms new forms of attachments as she reconceptualizes home and family by creating her own meaningful transnational intimacies of choice. As she breaks down dominant discourses, she also reifies them, employing timeworn stereotypes regarding Western femininity and reinforcing global consumerism, which suggests the limits of her critique. By tracing these lines of inquiry, I demonstrate that Chin’s discourse presents productive challenges to Western domestic rhetorics while gesturing toward important, if overlooked, discursive terrain for scholars of public discourse.
