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Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
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Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Tapia, Ruby C. "Conceiving Images: Racialized Visions of the Maternal," University of California, San Diego, June 2002.
This dissertation examines the intertextual relationship between apparently separate sites of visual production to examine the “pieces of imaged objects that make the popular and institutional witnessing of maternal bodies, and the experience of motherhood always, already racialized. Focusing on different media forms-including photo-journalism, film, and the visual media components of a teen pregnancy prevention initiative each chapter analyzes the role of the visual in eliciting public sentimentality and affect around U.S. national(ist) configurations of “proper maternity.” The first chapter contextualizes the posthumous circulation of images of Diana Spencer within a cultural history of racialized sentimentality that has its roots in the late 19th century. By first illuminating the ideological material through with “The Queen of Our Hearts” (Diana) is “resurrected” as an ideal mother in U.S. popular journalism, this discussion sets the stage to investigate this material as it is intertextually, dialogically produced with other visual forms. Chapter 2 focuses on the 1998 film Beloved and considers whether or not the film’s attempts to convey alternative experiences and meanings of the maternal are successful, given the racialized discursive terrains within which the construction and reception of its visual narrative occurs. This chapter also considers how the media personality of Oprah Winfrey impacts the sentimental racial cues through which the film’s productions of history, memory, and motherhood are read. The third chapter incorporates the formulations developed in the rest of the dissertation to illuminate the relationship between popular visual and state institutional productions of maternity. This chapter focuses on a local (California) public health education initiative that, between 1996 and 2000, drew on “citizens” concerns about changing racial demographics, immigration, and non-traditional family structures to racialized the visual rhetoric of the “teenage pregnancy” problem. The dissertation as a whole demonstrates that the co-constitutive role of seemingly disparate visual configurations of maternity to institutional (re)productions of national culture and identity.
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