Who Cares? : : Dependency and Domestic Labor in 20th- and 21st-Century US Literature

This dissertation studies the representation of domestic and care work and the women of color and immigrant women who perform it in American Literature from the 20th and 21st centuries, specifically from 1940s to the present. I study literary and film texts by Ann Petry, Toni Morrison, Lorraine Hansberry, Douglas Sirk, John Rechy, Patricia Riggen, Esmeralda Santiago, and Angie Cruz to cover the shift in this labor force from African American women historically to Chicana and Latina women today. I argue that in addition to the intersectional oppressions of race, class, gender, and citizenship that disenfranchise domestic and care workers, their association with dependency contributes to their social and economic marginalization. Because the discourse of individual liberal rights, founded upon Enlightenment principles, fails to acknowledge disabled and dependent persons as equal participants in the social contract, the necessary work of caring for dependents has also gone unrecognized historically. The US cultural obsession with independence, embodied by myths of the self-made man, do not recognize human interdependence. My research analyzes multiethnic US cultural texts, mostly written by people of color, about the labor conditions of maids, cooks, nannies, and caregivers during this period of history. I examine these texts through the lens of dependency and disability studies and a care ethic to reveal the limitations of independence-based models of care and to explore the alternative models of interdependence these texts presen