REPRODUCTIVE LANDSCAPES- Undoing m/otherhood; who has the right to talk about motherhood, who claims that status, and how do we create words, art, and scholarship moving forward?
St. Petersburg, Florida & Online / March 24-26, 2023 / Museum of Motherhood
Deadline for Abstracts Nov 30, 2022
Calling all scholars, sociologists, maternal psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists, women’s, sexuality, and gender professors, masculinity studies experts, birth-workers, doctors, motherhood and fatherhood researchers, artists, students, and performers: This conference call is for papers, performances, conversations, and art, focused on new gender identities and discourse. Included in this call is an invitation to explore political policy positions relative to Roe vs. Wade, psychological manifestations of maternal neonaticide, infanticide, and filicide, well as the naming and rewriting of works, art, and scholarship around mothers, mothering, and motherhood. How do we approach this? Who gets to say what? How do we make visible these topics in mainstream articulations? How are those with (dis)abilities and other marginalized positionalities heard and made visible? In what ways does inclusivity threaten the status quo? How can we complicate binary viewpoints and assertions situated in a fear-based cultural reality? We rely on previous scholarship, now framed within the context of changing times. What now will we make of ourselves together and separately? We are, after all, the future!
We encourage presenters to unpack the sociocultural domain and the medicalized environment within which these debates are often situated as we embrace and analyze meaning-making, in the area of maternal health, identity, experience, and well-being. What is good for whom and how does that impact everyone else?
We intend the conference to serve as a site of resistance as we deconstruct, reframe, and affirm the complex landscape of embodied mother-work, pregnancy, birth, identity, care-work, and the ongoing labor and experience of those within family systems everywhere. We recognize the scale, variance, and duration of these passionate debates and hope to support and empower those who need support the most.
Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
Intersectional identities
Normative constructions of gender in motherwork, pregnancy and birthing
Biomedical and cultural discourses of motherwork, pregnancy, and birth, including issues related to marginalized identities, fertility treatment, gender identity, and intersex identities
Motherwork, pregnancy and birthing with (dis-)abilities, illness, and children with special needs
Child and maternal psychology interventions, alternative therapies, and results
Breastfeeding ambivalence, obstacles, and outcomes
Future wombs, including transplants, artificial constructions, cloning, and surrogacy
Art as healing and activism as visible resistance
Embodied resistance to socially constructed prescriptions and conventions about motherwork, pregnancy, and birth, including as they are contextualized within marginalized positionalities
CONFERENCE: The Annual Academic MoM Conference is in person and online in 2023. We welcome individuals and roundtables conducting research, making art, working in therapudic, medical, university, and birth settings, as well as auto-ethnograpic perspectives by mothers, family members & students.
JOURNAL OF MOTHER STUDIES (JourMS): All submissions for the 2023 conference should consider submitting to the Journal of Mother Studies, an academic, peer-reviewed, hybrid digital humanities journal devoted to Mother Studies published annually. Works may also be submitted for the conference only.
FOR ALL SUBMISSIONS: Abstracts must include a title and bio. Abstracts must be submitted by Nov 30 (midnight). Notifications sent Dec. 15 and early bird registration begins $165. Regular Registration starts Jan 15th $180 and closes Feb 15th. Full submissions for the conference are due March 1st, (after acceptance to the conference). Full submissions for the Journal are due by May 30th (midnight). These include other submission types (e.g. performance, media, music). Go to https://jourms.org/submit/
Download PDF Version CFP
CFP DEMETER PRESS
The Mother Wave: Matricentric Feminism as Theory, Activism, and Practice
Edited by Andrea O’Reilly, Victoria Bailey, and Fiona Joy Green
In Matricentric Feminism: Theory, Activism, Practice (2021) Andrea O’Reilly argues that the
category of mother is distinct from the category of woman and that many of the problems
mothers face—social, economic, political, cultural, psychological, and so forth—are specific to
women’s role and identity as mothers. Indeed, mothers are oppressed under patriarchy as women
and as mothers. For women who are mothers, mothering is a significant, if not a defining
dimension of their lives, and that, arguably, maternity matters more than gender. Consequently,
mothers need a matricentric mode of feminism organized from and for their particular identity
and work as mothers. Indeed, a mother-centred feminism is needed because mothers—arguably
more so than women in general—remain disempowered despite sixty years/six decades of
feminism. Matricentric feminism positions mothers’ needs and concerns as the starting point for
a theory and politic on and for women’s empowerment.
Please send 250 word abstract and 75 word bio by November 1, 2022 to aoreilly@yorku.ca;
f.green@uwinnipeg.ca; vjbailey@gmail.com. Full downloadable CFP
Gone Feral: Unruly Women and the Undoing of Normative Femininity
Edited by Andrea O’Reilly and Casey O’Reilly-Conlin
Published by Demeter Press
The Oxford Dictionary defines the word feral “as being in a wild untamed
state, especially existing in or returning to an untamed state from domestication;
and of, or suggestive of, a wild animal; savage.” A feral creature is one who was
once wild, then domesticated, and who has reverted back to a natural or untamed
state once again. Theorizing the concept of Feral Feminisms, Kelly Struthers
Montford and Chloë Taylor position the feral as “a provocative call to untaming,
queering, and radicalizing feminist thought and practice today.”
This collection probes the concept of ferality in relation to traditional, patriarchal
concepts of womanhood and femininity and asks what does becoming or being
feral mean for women?
Please send 250 word abstract and/ or submission proposals and a 75 word bio to
Andrea O’Reilly aoreilly@yorku.ca by January 15 2023. Full downloadable CFP