Criminalized Mothers, Criminalizing Mothering





Price: $34.95

Page Count: 422

Publication Date: February 2015

ISBN: 978-1-926452-01-2

As the fastest growing prison population worldwide, more and more women are living in cages and most of them are mothers. This alarming trend has huge ramifications for women, children and communities across the globe. Empathy for mothers behind bars and concern for criminalized mothers in the community is in short supply. Mothers are criminalized for their vulnerabilities and for making unpopular but difficult choices under material and ideological conditions not of their own choosing. Criminalized Mothers, Criminalizing Mothering shines a spotlight on mothers who are, by law or social regulation, criminalized and examines their troubles and triumphs. This book offers a critical and compassionate lens on social (in)justice, mass incarceration, and collective miseries women experience (i.e., economic inequality, gendered violence, devalued care work, lone-parenting etc.). This book is also about mothers’ encounters with systems of control, confinement, and criminalization, but also their experiences of care.

“There is no doubt that criminalized mothers are under studied, and this book adds new and important insights to our understanding of this important topic and group of mothers. Moreover, because Minaker and Hogeveen enlarge and complicate our understanding of “criminal mothers,” i.e., both mothers who are incarcerated and those who are viewed criminally, this book also makes a valuable and timely contribution both to our understanding of criminal mothers specifically and contemporary motherhood generally.”
—Lynn O’Brien Hallstein, Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Boston University

“Criminalized Mothers, Criminalizing Mothering tackles the myriad ways in which mothers are criminalized and how their experiences with various societal institutions impact on their mothering, their being and well-being (or not), and their children. This book privileges the voices of mothers who are typically silent in academic research and in government, agency, media, and popular discourses. The interdisciplinary and international nature of the contributions in this book make it a must-read for anyone interested in women’s studies, mothering studies, crime and deviance, class, political economy, feminist methodology, history, race and ethnicity, or colonialism. Beyond a collection of academic pieces, this book is a call to action for anyone interested in social justice praxis.”
—Jana Grekul, Associate Professor, Sociology, University of Alberta

Introduction

Part One, Criminalizing Discourses and Practices

Poem, For My Kids
By: Melissa Bigstone
Canadian
creative

Treasures: Multiple Economies of Reproduction at the Beulah Rescue Home, Edmonton, Alberta, 1909-1963
By: Amy Kaler
Canadian
scholarly piece

Settler Colonialism and Carceral Control of Indigenous Mothers and their Children: Child Welfare and the Prison System
By: Laura C.L. Landertinger
Canadian
scholarly piece

Theorizing Soft Criminalization and Surveillance in the Saskatchewan Child Welfare System: Analyzing Re S.F.
By: Josephine Savarese
Canadian
scholarly piece

Mothering Outside-In: Confined Children and Mothering Under State Paternalism
By: Michelle Hughes Miller
American
scholarly piece

Criminalizing Motherhood: Examining the Hague Convention on International Child Abduction
By: Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich
Canadian
scholarly piece
Race, nation and citizenship in ‘mothers who kill their children’: The case of Rie Fujii
By: Hijin Park
Canadian
scholarly piece

Legal and Medical Maneuvers: The Attitude of the Legal and Medical Systems to Ellen Harper Who Murdered her Infant Daughter in 1878
By: Tamar Hager
Israeli
scholarly piece

Pregnant Incarcerated Adolescents: A Feminist Perspective
By: Keri O’Neal and Wendy Watson
American
scholarly piece

“Do you have my son?:” criminalization and the production of (un)relatedness in Brazil
By: Hollis Moore
Canadian
scholarly piece

Part Two, Maternal Narratives

“(M)othering with HIV: Resisting and Reconstructing Experiences of Health and Social Surveillance.
By: Saara Greene, Allyson Ion, Dawn Elston, Glady Kwaramba, Stephanie Smith and Mona Loutfy
scholarly piece
Canadian (all authors)

Mothering at the Margins: The Case of Incarcerated Women in Trinidad and Tobago
By: Talia Esnard and Kimberly Okpala
Trinidadian
scholarly piece

Mothering in the Context of Domestic Abuse and Encounters with Child Protection Services: From Victimized to ‘Criminalized’ Mothers
By: Caroline McDonald-Harker
Canadian
scholarly piece

Marginalization and Hope: Personal Narratives of Previously Incarcerated Mothers
By: Renita L. Seabrook and Heather Wyatt-Nichol
American
scholarly piece

‘Something worth living for’: Young Criminalized Mothering
By: Bryan Hogeveen and Joanne Minaker
Canadian
scholarly piece

My Mothering Story: A mother, a daughter, a fighter
By: Melissa Bigstone
Canadian
Personal essay