ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the recurrence of diverted mothering in late 1980s-early 1990s filmic representations is homologous with a larger, contemporaneous cultural phenomenon: the increasing domestication of the initially activist concept of multiculturalism, so that the cultural productions of racial/ethnic Others are now appropriated as life-enhancing 'enrichment' for whites sensible of their group's decline. While diverted mothering is a documentable social fact of long standing in the United States, its cultural manifestations are more difficult to characterize. The uneasy assemblage of contradictory discourses in these three texts, feminist and Orientalist, resisting and accommodating, cultural nationalist and American patriotic, betrays an effort to assert agency within the caregiving framework and to arrest and reclaim diverted mothering. Even with racial/ethnic writers' works less subject to mass cultural tastes than films, and even when racial anxieties associated with the group are weaker than for blacks, 'ideological caregiving' and 'multiculturalist' appropriative moves are at work.
