Price: $39.95
Page Count: 240
Publication Date: July 2016
ISBN: 978-1-77258-001-3
“This collection represents a significant contribution to the contemporary study of lone mothering, especially through perspectives that celebrate this experience and point out its unique parenting benefits, as well as those that reframe our understanding of single teen mothers. The essays in this volume lay the foundation for a more nuanced and multifaceted exploration of single motherhood in the 21st century.”
—Tatjana Takseva, Department of English and Women and Gender Studies
Program, Saint Mary’s University, Canada
“Maki Motapanyane brings together an outstanding collection of essays to explore our fastest growing family form: the lone parent — usually lone mother — family.
This exciting volume showcases a diversity of scholarly methods and disciplines — including media studies, women’s studies, auto-ethnography, sociology and policy studies — to analyse lone mothering. The stand-out contribution here is the emphasis on diversity and the associated critique of heteronormativity with reference to two-parent families, though also, more interestingly, in relation to lone parents themselves. Here we see lone mothers as an internally heterogeneous group. This volume is essential reading for all who are interested in the rise and diversification of lone mother families.“
—Petra Bueskens, Honorary Fellow, The University of Melbourne
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Motherhood, Mothering, and Lone/Single Parenting
in Contemporary Perspective
Maki Motapanyane
I: DISCOURSE, MEDIA, AND REPRESENTATION
Mothering in Dystopia:
Lone Parenting in a Post-Apocalyptic World
Nancy Bressler and Lara Lengel
Do Two a Family Make?
Hollywood Engages Intentional Single Motherhood
Katherine Mack
Every Child Needs a Father:
The Shield and the Postfeminist Desire for Single Motherhood
Dwayne Avery
Courageous Mothering:
Katniss Everdeen as Outlaw Mother in
The Hunger Games Trilogy
Danielle Russell
II: THE EXPERIENTIAL
Single Motherhood:
Mythical Madness and Invisible “Insanity”
Ellen Hauser
Single Mother Adoption:
A Sociologist’s Journey
Linda M. Burns
Great Lakes to Great Walls:
Reflections of a Single Mom on Young Motherhood
and Living Overseas
Natasha Steer
The Lone Ranger:
Single Mothering, Then and Now
B. Lee Murray
Single Lesbian Mothers
Lara Descartes
III: POLICY, RESISTANCE, AND ACTIVISM
Historicizing the Marginalization of Single Mothers:
An Australian Perspective
Christin Quirk
Single-Parent Families, Mother-Led Households,
and Well-Being
Rachel Lamdin Hunter
One-Parent Families in Spain:
Exclusions and Social Networks
Rosa Ortiz-Monera, Dino Di Nella, and
Elisabet Almeda-Samaranch
Escaping a Life in Violence?
Migrant Mother-Families in Germany:
Coping with Gender-Based Violence, Undermining Stereotypes,
and Claiming Agency
Lydia Potts and Ulrike Lingen-Ali
I Play, Therefore, I Am:
Resisting the “Work” of Single Motherhood in a
Culture of Labour-Intensive Parenting
Elizabeth Bruno
Scripting Stories of Resistance:
Young Single Parents and Theatre of the Oppressed
Deborah L. Byrd and Richard J. Piatt
Single Mothers’ Activism against Poverty Governance
in the U.S. Child Welfare System
Shihoko Nakagawa
About the Contributors
Maki Motapanyane is an Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies in the Department of Humanities at Mount Royal University. Her teaching is rooted in liberatory pedagogy, focused in courses on colonialism and de-colonization, global gender issues and transnationalism, environmental justice/liberation ecology, and Hip-Hop culture. Her research spans the fields of feminist theory, motherhood and cultural studies, with academic publications featuring a range of inter-related thematic interests including feminist theory, transnational feminist research methods, mothering and motherhood, racialized comedy in Canada, and gender in Hip-Hop culture. She is the editor of Mothering in Hip-Hop Culture: Representation and Experience (Demeter Press, 2012), and co-editor (with Roksana Badruddoja) of “New Maternalisms”: Tales of Motherwork (Dislodging the Unthinkable) (Demeter Press, 2016).
