Call for Papers: MOTHER
Guest Editors: Nicole Cooley and Pamela Stone
We have entered a motherhood moment–from celebrity mom baby-bump sightings
to recent televised debates between “stay at home moms” and “working
moms,” from “welfare mothers” to “Alpha moms,” images of motherhood are
circulating in our culture as never before.
Motherhood demands a new look. As women push motherhood later and later, as
a larger share forego it entirely, and as mothering itself takes up a
smaller fraction of women’s lives, why is the fascination with all things
“mother” at an all-time high? What does it mean to be a mother when
motherhood is increasingly decoupled from biology? At a time when women’s
reproductive rights are vulnerable and the pro-choice movement on the
defensive, why is so much of the discussion about mothering framed in the
rhetoric of choice and agency? As the majority of mothers pursue both
family and paid employment, the “cultural contradictions” of intensive
mothering that sociologist Sharon Hays first identified over a decade ago do
indeed seem, to paraphrase writer/journalist Judith Warner, an ever more
“[im]perfect madness.”
This *WSQ* special issue invites feminist work that speaks to our current
historical moment in an effort to try to begin to construct a comprehensive
and critical overview of mothers, mothering, and motherhood. We welcome
academic papers from a variety of perspectives in all disciplines, from
theory, qualitative research, and empirical studies to literary studies. We
would also be interested in memoir and first-person essays, fiction, poetry,
art, and writing which blurs boundaries and crosses genres in its
exploration of mothering.
Topics to be explored include:
� Discourses around motherhood and how they are shaped by race,
ethnicity, immigrant status and sexuality
� Mothers in the workplace: The price of motherhood, “mommy
tracking” and “maternal wall,” “opting out”
� The “mommy wars”: Stay-at-home moms vs. working moms
� The paid and unpaid work of mothering and caregiving; the “second
shift”
� Motherhood, loss and grief: Infertility, miscarriage, stillbirth
and infant and child death
� Motherhood and disability/special needs
� Intensive mothering: Ideologies and practices around co-sleeping,
breastfeeding, homeschooling and unschooling, toilet-training, tutoring
� Mothers as consumers: The marketing of motherhood
� Pregnancy: The medicalization of and birthing practices,
representations of the mother’s body, assisted reproductive technologies
(ART), surrogacy, abortion and reproductive choice
� New models of motherhood: LGBT moms, young moms, single mothers,
stepmothers and blended families
� Men as moms: Stay-at-home dads, coparenting, single fathers
� Immigration and motherhood; global labor chains
� Childcare and domestic labor: Practices, issues and politics
� Motherhood and ecofeminism, explorations of “mother nature”
� Mommy lit as its own brand of chick-lit and the new “dad” books
� Mothers and digital media: The role of mommy blogs, list-servs,
message boards and social networking sites
� Adoption: Transnational and domestic, transracial
� Motherhood and public policy: From debates about FMLA to activist
groups such as MomsRising
� Mothering older children, mothering adult children, grandmothering
� Motherhood and Third Wave Feminism
� The experiences of women who choose not to mother
� Mothering in comparative, global and transnational contexts
If submitting academic work, please send abstracts by September 30, 2008 to
the guest editors Pamela Stone and Nicole Cooley at:
WSQMotherIssue@gmail.com. If accepted:
Full papers should be no longer than 22 pages, and will be due by January 1,
2009.
Poetry submissions should be sent to WSQ’s poetry editor Kathleen Ossip, at
ossipk@aol.com, by January 1, 2009.
Fiction, essay, and memoir submissions should be sent to WSQ’s
fiction/nonfiction editor, Susan Daitch, at sdaitch@hunter.cuny.edu by
January 1, 2009.
Art submissions should be sent to WSQMotherIssue@gmail.com by January 1,
2009. Please keep in mind that after art is reviewed and accepted, accepted
art must be sent to the journal’s managing editor on a CD that includes all
artwork of 300 DPI or greater, saved as 4.25 inches wide or larger. These
files should be saved as individual JPEGS or TIFFS.
—
Stacie McCormick
Administrative Associate
WSQ
at the Feminist Press
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016
212.817.7926
http://www.feministpress.org/wsq
