Price: $39.95
Page Count: 280
Publication Date: January 2027
ISBN: 978-1-77258-616-9
Maternal Subjectivities is both intellectually rigorous and deeply human. This collection refuses to treat motherhood as marginal or sentimental; instead, it shows how maternal experience can be a powerful site of knowledge, creativity, and resistance. Across disciplines and national contexts, the contributors explore the tensions, contradictions, and quiet solidarities that shape contemporary maternal life. What makes this volume especially compelling is its insistence that mothers are not merely subjects of study, but thinkers and meaning-makers in their own right. Insightful and moving, Maternal Subjectivities will resonate with scholars and readers alike who are grappling with how care, work, and identity intersect.
- Lindsey R. Barr, American University.
Maternal Subjectivities enters an expanding feminist, postcolonial, and
poststructuralist tradition engaging with the motherhood and maternity as a
concrete and historically grounded positionality with contemporary cross-
disciplinary interventions. The anthology’s strengths lie in its cohesive exposure
and exploration of the tension between the desire for maternal empowerment
and structural constraints, in a way that is both politically and affectively
grounded in the concrete experiences of women. It reveals how abstract
narratives of maternal heroism, self-sufficiency, and sacrifice, even when taken
up by women and mothers themselves, can diffuse the revolutionary potential of
the complex and untidy reality of their lived experience. This volume serves as a
significant resource for scholars, graduate students, and readers engaged in
gender studies, care ethics, and philosophy.
— Nour Abu Husan, Philosophy PhD candidate, University of Guelph
Introduction
Motherhood and Identity: Personal Experiences
Chapter 1 - Mui Vuong – A Voyage of Two Worlds: A Mother’s Journey through War and Refuge
Chapter 2 - Jasleen Kaur – Patriarchy
Chapter 3 - Savannah Dali and Dr. Lisa Rosen – I’m a Mother, Then I’m a Body: Redefining Mothers’ Experiences of Body Image
Chapter 4 - Blair Donohue – “The Politics of Postpartum: An Interview”
Chapter 5 - Ivana de Oliveira Eugenio de Souza Moura – “Contemporary Representations of University Maternity: Between Threads and Knots”
Chapter 6 - Margo Levine – “Divorce Mothering: Arts-Based Autoethnography”
Mothering and Care: Socio-Political Context of Ethics, Labor and Interpersonal Relationships
Chapter 7 - Alana Fontenelle – “Motherhood and Care: A Necessary Distinction”
Chapter 8 - Jill Weigt, PhD and Colleen Janey – “I just want us to have a normal life”: An Exploration of Hope, Aspirational Capital, and Neoliberalism among U.S. Mothers in Poverty
Chapter 9 - Caterina Pan – “Mater Operosa: Charlotte Smith’s Motherly Labour as Authorial Legitimisation”
Chapter 10 - Heather Dillaway and Ashi Arora – “The Stress of Living Here”: Women’s Negotiation of Mothering at a Homeless Shelter”
Chapter 11 - Ana Carolina Eiras Coelho Soares – “Current Profile of Graduate Programs in History in Brazil (2020-2023): A Study on the Impacts of Motherhood on Training and Academic Productivity”
Maternal Representation in Culture and Media
Chapter 12 - Alina Nunes – “Lesbian Mothers” (1972): Representations of Lesbian Motherhoods in Feminist Imagery
Chapter 13 - Elaine Muniz Pires – Mothers of the World, Unite! Activism in Brazilian Mommy Blogs
Chapter 14 - Ana Luiza de Figueiredo Souza, Simone Evangelista and Beatriz Polivanov – “Influencer Mothers: Performative Scripts in Motherhood Monetization Rituals”
Chapter 15 - Faith Blackhurst – “Maternal Regret and Misogyny in Fernanda Melchor’s Temporada de huracanes”
Chapter 16 - Lynn Deboeck – “Postpartum Perspectives: The Last Stage of Maternal Subjectivity Formation Represented in Dramatic Literature”
Conclusion
Dr. Lynn Deboeck is an Associate Professor of Theatre and Gender Studies at the University of Utah. Her research interests include gender performance, the representation of motherhood and advances in pedagogy. Most recently, her book chapter “The Momboy: Maternal Tomboys on Stage” in Reclaiming the Tomboy: The Body, Representation and Identity was published in 2022 and she co-edited (M)Other Perspectives: Staging Motherhood in 21st Century North American Theatre & Performance, which came out in 2023.
Dr. Ana Carolina Coelho is a Brazilian historian, feminist scholar, and associate professor at the Federal University of Goiás. She holds a PhD in Political History from UERJ and completed postdoctoral research in Anthropology and History. She is a CNPq Productivity Fellow. Her work focuses on gender relations, feminisms, motherhood, affective histories, and the pedagogies of emotions, with strong engagement in public history and academic activism. She coordinates research groups and national working groups on gender, supervises graduate research, and publishes widely. She's also mother of two, writer and poet, committed to social justice, care, and knowledge production.
Sami I. Harb is a doctoral student in clinical psychology at York University. His research interests include motherhood studies, health psychology, psychosocial oncology, psychosis, couple and family identity, couple and family therapy, and critical-decolonial perspectives in mental health.
