“But What are You, Mama?”: Gendered Migration, Epistemic Injustice, and Feminist Resistance in Domnica Rădulescu’s Dream in a Suitcase (2022)

Abstract Domnica Rădulescu’s (1961-) memoir, Dream in a Suitcase, is about her journey from communist Romania to the United States. Without bothering much about ‘political correctness,’ Rădulescu offers her readers an intimate account of her life that is filled with gendered and epistemic dimensions of displacement. By critically engaging with the memoir, we intend to discuss how Rădulescu navigates and negotiates the oppressive patriarchal structures of her homeland, i.e. Romania, and the host land, i.e. the United States, that subjugate women through cultural exoticization, economic precarity, and academic exclusion. The essay is divided into several subsections. The first section uses Miranda Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice to analyse how Rădulescu resists both testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. By taking a feminist approach, the second section situates migration with other interconnected issues such as gendered labour, precarious citizenship and the racialised migration dynamic to show how patriarchal oppression cuts across national boundaries. Lastly, the third section explores Foucault’s concept of heterotopia as an analytical framework to examine how the memoir itself can be seen as a subversive counter-space that counters hegemonic power structures, dismantles many stereotypes regarding Eastern European women, and recuperates migrant female agency in translational contexts.