Few words are as steeped in beliefs about gender, sexuality, and social desirability as “motherhood”. Drawing on queer, postcolonial, and feminist theory, historical sources, personal narratives, film studies, and original empirical research, the authors in this book offer queer re-tellings and reexaminations of reproduction, family, politics, and community. The list of contributors includes emerging writers as well as established scholars and activists such as Gary Kinsman, Damien Riggs, Christa Craven, Cary Costello, Elizabeth Peel, and Rachel Epstein.

Interdisciplinary and intersectional in emphasis, the Routledge Companion to Motherhood brings together essays on current intellectual themes, issues, and debates, while also creating a foundation for future scholarship and study as the field of Motherhood Studies continues to develop globally. This Routledge Companion is the first extensive collection on the wide-ranging topics, themes, issues, and debates that ground the intellectual work being done on motherhood. Global in scope and including a range of disciplinary perspectives, including anthropology, literature, communication studies, sociology, women’s and gender studies, history, and economics, this volume introduces the foundational topics and ideas in motherhood, delineates the diversity and complexity of mothering, and also stimulates dialogue among scholars and students approaching from divergent backgrounds and intellectual perspectives. This will become a foundational text for academics in Women's and Gender Studies and interdisciplinary researchers interested in this important, complex and rapidly growing topic. Scholars of psychology, sociology or public policy, and activists in both university and workplace settings interested in motherhood and mothering will find it an invaluable guide.

New Maternalisms”: Tales of Motherwork (Dislodging the Unthinkable) explores the perceptions of those who engage in and/or research motherwork or the labour of caregiving, and how mothers view themselves in comparison to broader normative understandings of motherwork. Here, the anthology serves to deconstruct motherwork by highlighting and dislodging it from maternal ideology, the socially constructed “good mom” (read as “sacrificial mom”) and feminized hegemonic discourse. The objective of the edited volume, then, is to critically explore how we experience motherwork, what motherwork might mean, and how motherwork impacts and is impacted by the communities in which we live. Such an examination involves contesting dominant ways of thinking about motherwork.

The 2nd edition includes a new preface that considers how matricentric feminism in positioning mothering as a verb affords a gender-neutral understanding of motherwork and allows for an appreciation of how motherwork is deeply gendered and how this may be challenged and changed through empowered mothering The book argues that the category of mother is distinct from the category of woman, and that many of the problems mothers face are specific to women's role and identity as mothers. Indeed, mothers are oppressed under patriarchy as women and as mothers. Consequently, mothers need a feminism of their own, one that positions mothers' concerns as the starting point for a theory and politic of empowerment. O'Reilly terms this new mode of feminism matricentic feminism and the book explores how it is represented and experienced in theory, activism, and practice.

Exploring the intersections of gender, sexuality, and kinship within the context of Latter-day Saint theology and history, this book contains elements that can be reinterpreted through a queer lens. Taylor Petrey reexamines and resignifies Mormon cosmology in the context of queer theory, offering a fresh perspective on divine relationships, gender fluidity, and the concept of kinship itself. Petrey's work draws together queer studies and the academic study of religion in new ways, providing a nuanced understanding of how religious narratives and doctrines can be reimagined to include more diverse interpretations of identity and community.

Images, representations and constructions of mothers have historically shaped and continue to shape the way we imagine the institution of motherhood and the experience of mothering. The various contributions included in this volume consider the diversity of maternal images and narratives that circulate in literature, the arts and popular culture and analyse how they reflect on and influence the cultural meaning of motherhood in the contemporary era. Mindful of the fact that the images of motherhood that we see in popular media, on television, and in literature are not mere background noise to our daily lives, the various chapters explore how they influence our understanding of what it means to be a mother, affect our expectations of motherhood and of mothers, frame our experience of mothering, and even inform our reproductive decisions. Including insights from media studies, cultural studies, literary studies, and the performing and visual arts, this book explores how engaging with diverse representations of mothers and mothering contributes to a broader and deeper interdisciplinary understanding of how motherhood is constructed in our time. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Women: A Cultural Review.

Essential Breakthroughs: Conversations About Men, Mothers, and Mothering thinks from the nexus of gender, essentialism, and care. The authors creatively blend the philosophical and the personal to collectively argue that while gender is essential to our social and theoretical definitions of care, it is dangerously co-opted into naturalized discourses, which limit particular identities and negate certain forms of care. The perspectives curated in Essential Breakthroughs illuminate how care, as a respected and productive cultural ethic, is neither inherent nor instinctual for any human, but is learned and fostered. The chapters are informed by feminist, queer, and trans politics, wielding post-structuralist methodologies of unlearning and deconstruction, while maintaining the maternal lens as a credible feminist analytical tool and not as a gender-essentialist practice.