Mother-daughter relationships are usually fraught with tension, which is intensified by the cultural and social conditions under which the mother and the daughter live in culturally diverse societies. Immigrant mothers affect their daughters’ identity formation as they simultaneously nourish and hinder their initiation into the societies they reside in. Through adopting Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject as a psychoanalytic critical framework, the study examines the extent to which the ambivalent feelings the daughter usually shows towards her mother are embodied in the conflicting feelings she experiences towards the two cultures forming her identity as a second generation immigrant. This is done by analysing the connection between the mother-daughter relationship, the diasporic daughter’s identity and the cross-cultural relations she forms in a culturally diverse setting as manifested in four short stories written by four ethnic-American writers: “Everyday Use” by the African American Alice Walker, “Two Kinds” by the Chinese American Amy Tan, “Aunt Moon’s Young Man” by the Native American Linda Hogan and “How I Became My Mother’s Daughter” by the Arab American Laila Lalami.

The murder of Matthew Shepard, in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998, was the traumatic event that inspired Moisés Kaufman to write The Laramie Project. The author travelled to Laramie and built the play based on interviews with the townspeople. This essay examines the connection between verbatim theatre and biographical writing and the ways in which these connections and touching boundaries can be a valuable strategy in the depictions of personal and collective trauma, as well as forms of institutionalized and structural violence. The essay will explore the community’s relation to the hate crime committed and make clear the relation of the community with questions regarding homosexuality and homophobia. Through the analysis it will aim at rendering visible the community’s dealing with the shadow of intolerance cast over them and not just those directly involved in Matthew Shepard’s murder, while trying to distance themselves from a collective identity of brutality. The theoretical considerations carried throughout result from the attention to challenges that non-normativity poses on both individual and collective levels.

Henry James’s critics suggest numerous form-conscious reasons for his serpentine meaning-making aesthetics. Seeing the undecidability of James’s proto-modernist narrative on a par with that of the baroque aesthetics, this paper cites the inscribable essence of the female body in James’s materialism as one undiscussed reason. In the theories of écriture feminine or feminine writing, the female writer’s integrity with her body serves as the source of logic for the writing practice that revolts against phallogocentric conventions. In search of a concrete example for this assertion, I celebrate the content-conscious contemporaneity between James’s What Maisie Knew and New Woman writing in light of four common motifs: the psycho-ethical analysis of (1) the protagonist’s melancholic mother-daughter relationship and (2) her quest for truth paves the way for the essentialist insight into (3) the privilege of feminine aesthetics and (4) the emancipated motion of the New Woman’s body. The secondary objective of this paper is to celebrate the ideological return of the baroque in James’s proto-modernism through such topoi as imperfect beauty, motion, and madness so as to introduce the meaning-making role of the body in his impressionistic integrity of subject and object.