Reproducing Motherhood: Between the Poles of Natality and Maternity
Description
At a time when any strides that may have been made towards reproductive rights have been thrown into serious question, motherhood—its lived reality, its spectre, and its implications for theory—remains a fraught and undertheorized field. As Adrienne Rich put it in 1976, “we know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than we do about the nature and meaning of motherhood”—and this statement continues to be true nearly fifty years later despite the proliferation of media, both fictional and nonfictional, that takes motherhood as its object. The very definition of “motherhood” continues to be contested even as its boundaries expand and encompass an increasing number of subject positions and relational modes. At the same time, the fact of natality, or our arrival in the world as “newcomers” (Arendt), is often eclipsed, when it is considered at all, by birth scenes that do not adequately account for the non-experiential, non-subjective aspect of being born. Motherhood possesses, it would seem, a kind of representational gravity, pulling into its experiential orbit even that which cannot be experienced and obscuring the aspects of natality that cannot be absorbed into the discourse of maternity. If death gives us a direction for living, then the facticity of birth remains opaque, as natality continues to be conceived as a condition that exceeds the limits of memory. Furthermore, there persists a complex culture of biological reproduction—amalgamating class, race, gender, nationality, and economic status—that remains largely unknown and whose effects remain underdescribed. Motherhood, natality, and biological reproduction each comprise a part of this difficult theoretical nexus.
This panel seeks to address representations of reproduction, natality, and motherhood in fiction, the visual arts, and other aesthetic forms. What is the relationship between natality and motherhood? What do biological reproduction and the presence of birth mean, and to whom? What critical power do these concepts hold, and in what ways do they need to be critiqued? What does it mean when mothers and mothering are unconventional, antinormative, or radically detached from biology or even subjectivity? What does it mean not only to reproduce but to reproduce the very concept of motherhood? And what discursive and aesthetic forces are involved in this reproduction? We welcome papers that address, but are not limited to, the following topics:
-motherhood as origin/creation
-infancy/childhood/coming-of-age
-orphanhood/motherlessness/adoption
- abortion/miscarriage/unbecoming mothers
-collective/queer/BIPOC/AI/transhuman mothering
-birth and death
-birth-regret/anti-natalism
- eugenics/selective birth/gene editing/reproductive technologies
-motherhood and love/intimacy/violence
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Miranda J. Brady is an Associate Professor in Communication and Media Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa. Her work explores the intersections of media, motherhood, and critical autism studies. She is co-author with John M.H. Kelly of the book We Interrupt this Program: Indigenous Media Tactics in Canadian Culture (UBC, 2017) and Mother Trouble: Mediations of White Maternal Angst After Second Wave Feminism (UTP, 2024). She is mother to two human children and a doodle dog.
Speaker Bio
Katie Fitzpatrick teaches writing and literature at the University of British Columbia. She holds a PhD in American literature from Brown University and currently teaches multidisciplinary writing courses focused on the theme of "Reproductive Justice." Her writing has appeared in Post-45, Twentieth-Century Literature, The Nation, Public Books, The Chronicle Review, and elsewhere.
Speaker Bio
Amanda Greer (she/elle) is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University. She received her PhD in Cinema Studies from the University of Toronto. Her book project, Curricula of Girlhood, theorizes postwar American girlhood films as pedagogical technologies of normative gender. Her work has been published in Camera Obscura, Film Criticism, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Sound Studies, and Teaching Media. From 2018-22, she served as Assistant Production Editor for JCMS.
Speaker Bio
Naomi Morgenstern is Chair of the Department of English at the University of Toronto. She specializes in psychoanalytic, post-structuralist and feminist critical theory and teaches courses in American literature. She is the author of Wild Child: Intensive Parenting and Posthumanist Ethics (Minnesota, 2018) as well as recent essays on Ward's Salvage the Bones and Villeneuve's Arrival. She is currently working on reproductive ethics and maternal sovereignty in contemporary fiction.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Brenda Austin-Smith is a Professor in the Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media at the University of Manitoba. She teaches courses in Cult Film, Cinephilia, Film and the City, Documentary Film and Canadian Film, among others. Among her publications are articles and essays on melodrama, emotional spectatorship, Joaquin Phoenix, the films of Hal Ashby, the autist in "Stranger Things," the films of Mina Shum, cult film and gender, Lars von Trier, Gene Hackman, and Patricia Rozema.
Speaker Bio
I’m a third-year PhD student in Hispanic and Italian Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, specializing in comparative studies of Korean and Spanish-language literatures and cultures (Spain and Latin America).
Speaker Bio
Abby Lacelle is a third year PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. Her research centres contemporary American literature, feminist and queer theories, and reproductive justice.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Gil Anidjar is Professor in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. His most recent book is On the Sovereignty of Mothers: The Political as Maternal (Columbia UP, 2024). He is continuing to write on mothers, most specifically on alma mater and the current state of the university, that poorly understood mother.
Speaker Bio
Nicolette Bragg is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Swarthmore College. Her research and teaching interests include feminist theory, critical theory, writing studies, and world literature. She is the author of The Ruins of Solitude: Maternity at the Limits of Academic Discourse (punctum books), and her articles appear in Cultural Studies Review, Feminist Theory, and the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy.
Speaker Bio
Rachel Shields is a recent graduate of McMaster University's doctoral program in English and Cultural Studies. Her dissertation, entitled After Bersani; On the Scandal of Mothers Without Maternity, was a study in "antisocial" forms of maternity in the wake of the queer theorist Leo Bersani. Her work has been published in such journals as The New Centennial Review, American Journal of Play, and Body & Society.
Speaker Bio
Destry Maria Sibley is a literary scholar, oral historian, and media producer. Across disciplines, Destry’s work is broadly concerned with contemporary narratives of the domestic and social: the forms of human relationality that organize social life and the stories we tell about them. She holds a PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center, where she is currently a Visiting Scholar with the Committee on Globalization and Social Change.