Carrie Schultz, “Teaching 1950s American Motherhood through Food” Rocio Palomeque Recio, “Vegan, Mom, Influencer: From Intensive Mothering to Political Activism” Nicola Waldron, “Fighting for Our Lives: Eating Disorder as Patriarch and the Power of the Mother Bear”
Asmi Basu, “Ungrateful Mothers: Understanding Mothers Beyond Motherhood with Reference to Selected Indian Films of Late 20th and 21st Century” (online?)
Marta Miquel-Baldellou, “Revisiting the Multiple Identities of the Monstrous Mother through the Patriarchal Gaze in Matt Sobel’s Goodnight Mommy” (online), Sarah Knor, “Interrogating Maternal Rhetorics (online)
Shabeera Kolakkaden, “Conceptualizing Postpartum: Agency, Care and Sexuality among the Mappila Muslim Mothers of Malabar” Suvarna More, “Resisting Dual Burdens: Dalit Women’s Challenges to Patriarchy and Caste Oppression” Lorina Alfred, “The Invisibilization of Peasant Women in Haitian State Health Policies”
Julye Bidmead, “Monstrous Mothers and Demonesses in the Ancient World” Bronwyn DiPeri, “Unpoisoning the Well: Interrogating Internalized Mother-Erasure in Western Fairy Tales” Laura Lafrance, “‘The Greatest of Arts’: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Complex Maternal Psyche in ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ and Herland (online)
Madhurima Guha, “‘Ae Hero Dega? [Hey Hero! Wanna give it to me?]’: Understanding the New Language of Dissent of the Vulnerable Grotesque Grandmother in Devashish Makhija’s Ajji (2017)” Katherine Wardi-Zonna, “Theorizing and Narrativizing the Motherline” (online) Soulafreda Hantes, “Behind the Crisis: A Historical Analysis of Maternal Employment and Childcare in the United States”
Jessica Samples, “Beyond Self-Care: Relational Mindfulness Circles for Maternal Well-being” Sarah McCarthy, “A ‘Meitheal’ for Mothers: Maternal Communal Singing as a Conduit to Social Connection and Empowerment” (online) Heather K. Olson Beal, “Snapshots of (Un)Wellness: An Exploratory PhotoVoice Study on Barriers to Health and Wellbeing for Mother-Educators”
Please join Nicole Graev Lipson at the registration desk. She will be signing copies of her AMAZING book, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters.
* * * What does it take to escape the plotlines mapped onto us? Searching for clues in the work of her literary foremothers, Lipson untangles what it means to be a girl, a woman, a lover, a partner, a daughter, and a mother in a world all too ready to reduce us to stock characters. Whether she’s testing the fragile borders of fidelity, embracing the taboo power of female friendship, escaping her family for the solitude of the mountains, grappling with what to do with her frozen embryos, or letting go of the children she imagined for the ones she’s raising, Lipson pushes beyond the easy, surface stories we tell about ourselves to brave less certain territory.
As Lipson journeys through this thorny terrain, literature becomes her lodestar. Kate Chopin’s erotic story “The Storm” helps her reckon with the longings stirring below the surface of her marriage. Watching her son absorb the stifling codes of manhood, she finds unlikely parenting inspiration in Philip Roth’s most cartoonish overbearing mother. Summoning Gwendolyn Brooks, she asks, Can destroying one’s frozen embryos be understood as a maternal act? And accompanied by Shakespeare’s gender-bending heroine Rosalind, she seizes on the truest meaning of loving her oldest child.
Risky and revealing, nourishing and affirming, rigorous and sexy, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters is a shimmering love letter to our forgotten selves—and the ones we’re still becoming.
McKenna Middleton, “The Phantasmagoria of Maternal Memory in Carmen Martín Gaite’s Lo raro es vivir” Karisa Shiraki, “A Labor of Love: Memory Work and Storytelling in the Home” (online) Mariona Visa, “Voices of a Silenced Generation: Older Women’s Untold Stories of Motherhood”
Giverny Lewis, “Mother(Fucker): Exploring Women's Experiences of Sexual Subjectivity in Matrescence” Rainbow Goddess, “Overdue Interconnections: Linking the Transpersonal with Matrescence” (online) Katie Flemming, “Motherhood and Mental Health: A Crisis” Claudia Zucca, “Unstable Mothering: the Effects of Mental Illness on Mothers and Daughters”
Jennifer Eva Sirel-Pillau, “Matriarchy, Mothering, and the Communal Hearth: Roots-to-Branches Social Transformation for People and Planet” Coralie Raffenne, “The Mother Earth Figure and Legal Personhood: The potential and Limits of Rethinking Nature’s Rights Through Maternal Imaginaries” Moona Fazal and Ali Ab UI Hassan, “Ripples of Creation Visualizing Motherhood Through Motion and Light” (Video)
Anna Kennedy, “Mother and Work Identities – Complement or Conflict: How Identity Meanings Influence Action to Address Role Strain” (online) Jennifer Heisler, “‘Can I still email you?’ Faculty Memories of Students’ Comments about their Pregnancy and Leave” Grace Love, “Birthing Futures: Co-conspiring with the Great Cosmic Mother” (online)
Jillayna Adamson, “The First Lesson of a Collective Dream: Moms are Dreaming their Way to Basic Needs, Envisioning a Future that Supports Mothering” MJ Cortes, “I Came Here with Books You’ve Never Heard of: On being a Latin American Feminist in a Canadian Women’s Studies Graduate Program”
Lynn O’Brien Hallstein, “Contemporary Motherhood and Politics: Making Sense of Mayor Michelle Wu’s Maternal Politics” Ginger Bihn-Coss, “Empathy for the Shooter? Exploring Matricentric Feminism’s Offerings in Response to the Public Reaction of the Murder of United HealthCare CEO” (online) Susie Fishleder, “Leading Like a Mother: Matricentric Leadership as a Revolutionary Framework”
Katie Bodendorfer Garner, PhD focuses on motherhood, childcare, and labor equality via her PhD in English and is the executive director of IAMAS. Katie is currently writing The Illusion of Choice, which incorporates interviews with 100 U.S. mothers. She has recently published two... Read More →
