Overview
Motherhood is one of those roles that assumes an almost-outsized cultural importance in the significance we force it to bear. It becomes both the source of and the repository for all kinds of cultural fears. Its ubiquity perhaps makes it this perfect foil. After all, while not everyone will become a mother, everyone has a mother. When we force motherhood to bear the terrors of what it means to be human, we inflict trauma upon those who mother. A long tradition of bad mothers thus shapes contemporary mothering practices (and the way we view them), including the murderous Medea of Greek mythology, the power-hungry Queen Gertrude of Hamlet, and the emasculating mother of Freud’s theories. Certainly, there are mother who cause harm, inflict abuse, act monstrously. Mothers are human. But mothers are also a favourite and easy scapegoat. The contributors to this collection explore a multitude of interdisciplinary representations of mothers that, through their very depictions of bad mothering, challenge the tropes of monstrous mothering that we lean on, revealing in the process why we turn to them. Chapters in Monstrous Mothers: Troubling Tropes explore literary, cinematic, and real-life monstrous mothers, seeking to uncover social sources and results of these monstrosities.
Full Product Details
Author: Abigail L. Palko ,
Dr. Andrea O'Reilly
Publisher: Demeter Press
Imprint: Demeter Press
ISBN: 9781772583335
ISBN 10: 1772583332
Pages: 300
Publication Date: 01 December 2021
Audience:
College/higher education
,
General/trade
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
,
General
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
This collection asks us to do a hard thing: to look at, not away, from the monstrous mother. In probing essays, the contributors and editors ask readers to consider what conditions create the monstrous mother, and if so-called monstrous mothers really are monstrous. Products of the patriarchal construction of motherhood, victims of neoliberal privileging of the individual over community (and lack of societal supports), as well as personal variables create the monstrous mother, and all such mothers in this collection are deserving of another look, and often, our empathy. An important collection for those who study mothers, and those who wish to see social growth and change in the promulgation of empowered mothering. - Nicole L. Willey, Professor of English, Kent State University // Monstrous Mothers: Troubling Tropes is a difficult read, but that is only because the authors in this edited volume challenge readers to hear the stories of mothers who have been deemed irredeemable, transgressive, incomprehensible--in short, monstrous. In each chapter the authors trouble this narrative as they expose readers to maternal violences of loss, abandonment, ambivalence, abuse, and murder in historical and contemporary texts and media. The deeper we engage these rich, diverse analyses the more we come to understand that the horror is not the monstrosity of the mothers, but their scapegoating as bad mothers. By showing us who the mothers are, by unpacking the context within which they have mothered, the authors in this volume ultimately expose the unsustainable, nay, monstrous lies we have been told about motherhood itself. - Michelle Hughes Miller, Professor of Women's and Gender Studies, University of South Florida // Monstrous Mothers peers into the dark cavern of mothers who are too often shunned without exploration or nuance. - Katie B. Garner, Executive Director, IAMAS
Author Information
Abigail L. Palko is the Director of the Maxine Platzer Lynn Women's Center at the University of Virginia. Her teaching, research, and writing focuses on representations of mothering practices. She is the author of Imagining Motherhood in Contemporary Irish and Caribbean Literature (2016, Palgrave Macmillan) and co-editor of Mothers, Mothering and Globalization, Cultural Representations of Breastfeeding (2017 and 2018, both Demeter Press), and Feminist Responses to the Neoliberalization of the University (Lexington Books, 2020). The joy of her life is raising a strong feminist daughter with her partner. Dr. Andrea O'Reilly is Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies at York University, founder/editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Motherhood Initiative and publisher of Demeter Press. She is co-editor/editor of twenty books including Feminist Parenting: Perspectives from Africa and Beyond and The Routledge Companion to Motherhood and author of three monographs including Matricentric Feminism: Theory Activism and Practice. She is twice the recipient of York University's Professor of the Year Awardâ for teaching excellence and is the 2019 recipient of the Status of Women and Equity Award of Distinction from OCUFA (Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations).She is the mother of three adult children.
