Taking the tea and quilt as an assemblage, this paper will argue how the thing power of tea and quilt interact or cooperate with mother-daughter relations. Specifically, considering the thing-power of tea and quilt, we can see that the mother-daughter relation completes the identity construction of Li-yan, Haley and Dee, and Maggie and their mother; What’s more, with the intra-action of mother-daughter and tea and quilt, the creativity of ethnic minority women and the inheritance of female power has been manifested. Finally, this specific mother-daughter relation, affected by the cultural properties of tea and quilt, embodies the combination of traditional culture and modern ideas. Furthermore, drawing on the thing theory, it helps to free things from the subject-object dualism and allow them to exert their thingness in reconstructing character identities, mother-daughter relationships, and other aspects.

Xi Chen. “Tea and Quilt”: The Study of Thing-Power in the Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane and Everyday Use. Academic Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences (2025), Vol. 8, Issue 12: 95-99. https://doi.org/10.25236/AJHSS.2025.081215.

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