Threads of Connection–Sorry/Not Sorry: Confronting mother (and other) blame–healing & resistance in contemporary culture and beyond
St. Petersburg, Florida & Online
March 22-24, 2024
CFP – Deadline, Dec. 15
The Museum of Motherhood is calling all scholars, artists, and community members for presentations and papers on the subject of mother (and other) blame, shame and pain, with a focus on resistance and healing.
Blame and shame can be self-imposed or projected by dominant social narratives that hyper-focus on the performative nature of motherhood as reinforced by unrealistic hegemonic constructions. This can be true for adult children reviewing familial relationships as well.
This international call for papers invites artists, sociologists, maternal psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists, women’s sexuality and gender professors, masculinity studies experts, birth-workers, doctors, researchers, students, and lay-people to share their work.
We encourage presenters to unpack the sociocultural domain of mother (and other) blame and the psychological, personal, professional, and media environment within which this topic is situated. Who is harmed by blame, and whom does it serve? How are oppressive systems reinforced or even sustained? How can we resist or dismantle these systems in large and small ways? What forms of resistance, peace-making, and healing can help improve our relationships?
The conference will serve as a site of resistance and empowerment as we deconstruct, reframe, and affirm the complex landscape of care-work and the ongoing labor within family systems everywhere. We recognize the scale, variance, and duration of these passionate debates and hope this conference will contribute to the body of knowledge on this subject.
Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
- Mother blame, regret, anger, and pain
- Normative constructions of gender in motherwork, pregnancy and birthing
- Biomedical and cultural discourses of motherwork, pregnancy, and birth
- 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
- Art as healing and activism as visible resistance
- Embodied resistance to socially constructed conventions about motherwork, pregnancy, and birth, including as they are contextualized within marginalized positionalities
- Motherline/Matrilineal connection/disconnection and ambivalence
- Mothering and the media
CONFERENCE: The Annual Academic MoM Conference is in person and online in 2024. We welcome individuals and roundtables conducting research, making art, working in therapeutic, medical, university, and birth settings, as well as auto-ethnographic perspectives by mothers, family members & students.
FOR ALL CONFERENCE SUBMISSIONS: Abstracts must include a title and bio. Submissions for the conference are due December 15, 2023. These include all submission types (e.g. performance, media, music). Questions: JourMS@gmail.com / 877-711-6667 / To submit: go to https://jourms.org/submit/
JOURNAL OF MOTHER STUDIES (JourMS): All submissions for the 2024 conference should also consider submitting to the Journal of Mother Studies, an academic, peer-reviewed, hybrid digital humanities journal devoted to Mother Studies published annually. Final submissions for the Journal are due by May 30th (midnight).
If you have difficulty submitting, please send abstract to JourMS@gmail.com, write JourMS@gmail.com, or call 877-711-MOMS (6667)
