"In global politics, women's bodies are policed, objectified, surveilled, and feared, with particular attention paid to both their met or unmet procreative potential. By illuminating and interrogating representations and narratives of maternity, this volume shows how practices of global politics shape and are shaped by the gendered norms and institutions that underpin motherhood. The guiding theoretical idea in this volume is that motherhood matters in global politics. However - as with so many political phenomena coded 'female' in the binary cognitive architectures of the West - the diverse ways in which performances and practices of motherhood are constituted by and are constitutive of other dimensions of political life they are frequently obscured or assumed to be of little interest to scholars, policy makers, and practitioners. Featuring innovative and diverse interrogations of the politics of motherhood as an institution, this collection shows that maternality is troubled, complicated, and heterogeneous in global politics and thus performances and practices of motherhood warrant closer and more sustained scrutiny"--

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.

From the author of How Should a Person Be? (“one of the most talked-about books of the year”—Time Magazine) and the New York Times Bestseller Women in Clothes comes a daring novel about whether to have children. In Motherhood, Sheila Heti asks what is gained and what is lost when a woman becomes a mother, treating the most consequential decision of early adulthood with the candor, originality, and humor that have won Heti international acclaim and made How Should A Person Be? required reading for a generation. In her late thirties, when her friends are asking when they will become mothers, the narrator of Heti’s intimate and urgent novel considers whether she will do so at all. In a narrative spanning several years, casting among the influence of her peers, partner, and her duties to her forbearers, she struggles to make a wise and moral choice. After seeking guidance from philosophy, her body, mysticism, and chance, she discovers her answer much closer to home. Motherhood is a courageous, keenly felt, and starkly original novel that will surely spark lively conversations about womanhood, parenthood, and about how—and for whom—to live.

The question of maternity is crucial for feminists, to whom it represents both challenge and inspiration, as it is for many thinkers engaged with the issues of agency, corporeality, and ethics. This examination puts forward the idea of a 'maternal performativity', drawing on the work of Judith Butler and numerous other feminist theorists, to offer new ways of looking at 1970s and 1980s literary texts by ten German-speaking women writers, including Barbara Frischmuth, Elfriede Jelinek, Irmtraud Morgner, and Karin Struck. It argues that as yet, maternal agency has not adequately been theorized - a project which is urgent, given the traditional view in Western culture of the mother as passive - and suggests that Butler's notion of performativity can assist in this task. It proposes a performative conception of both mothering and literature, and links both of these to the question of ethics, which is understood as involving embodiment and relationality. To different extents, all of the texts examined depict mothers as marginal, abject, or insane, thus demonstrating the operations of exclusion, and the need for a maternal agency to be developed and enacted. The idea of maternal performativity is refined in five chapters, which focus, respectively, on community, corporeality, the mother-child relationship, the family, and discursive production. The conclusion explores the ethics of literary practice and knowledge production, and argues that in the light of the developing fields of new reproductive technologies and genetics, it is imperative that we seek new understandings of embodiment, community, and care, a task to which this study aspires to contribute.

"Cigars all around"( LOUISE URE, SHAMUS AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR) for the new Maternal Instincts mystery series. First-time mom Kate Connelly is bringing up baby- and bringing down a killer. Kate Connelly may have found the perfect work-from-home Mommy job: private investigator. After all, the hours are flexible, she can bring the baby along on stake-outs, and if you're going to be up all night anyway, you might as well solve some crimes. But when a body is pulled from San Francisco Bay that may be her brother-in-law, Kate must crack the case faster than you can say "diaper rash" in order to keep her family together.

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 mytholog.