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This dissertation examines representations of motherhood in literature, film, and media to interrogate how notions of motherhood are constructed and maintained, with particular focus on works featuring marginalized maternal embodiments. Drawing from phenomenology, disability studies, and new materialist theory, it analyzes the entanglements between human and non-human elements to conceptualize maternity, kinship, and care work outside frameworks of compulsory able-bodiedness. In doing so, it aims to expand understanding of reproductive capacity and the maternal beyond dominant social and medical models, with implications for how we theorize gender, the family, and human-technology relations.
The reading list is composed of texts that inform an examination of motherhood in literature, film, and media. The specter of maternity travels throughout the investigation of the elusive ‘mad mother’ that haunts contemporary society (Morrison; Faulkner). The dissertation starts by asking how motherhood has become both a literary and cultural figure during the 20th century. Through investigating the relationships between power, media, literature, and technology the ethereal figure of the ‘mad mother’ is exonerated (Atwood; Shelley). This dissertation employs an interdisciplinary methodological approach drawing from queer phenomenology, crip theory, cyberfeminism, new materialism, and disability studies to examine changing representations of motherhood across literature, film, and media. Weaving between these perspectives, it analyzes four key themes - maternal absence, technological transformations, virtual motherhoods, and transformative maternal embodiments - through an intersectional lens attentive to race, gender, ability, and sexuality. In doing so, it brings together the work of theorists such as Robert McRuer and Alison Kafer to investigate norms of reproduction through a lens of compulsory able-bodiedness. Drawing from Aimi Hamraie's notion of "crip technoscience," it engages new materialist conceptions of pregnancy from thinkers like Donna Haraway, Margrit Shildrick, and Karen Barad to explore embodiment as intra-actively biological and technological. Furthermore, borrowing from David Mitchell's negotiation of disability, materiality, and affect, it examines maternal subjectivity beyond dominant social and medical models. By reading texts spanning different historical moments through this intersectional methodology, the dissertation aims to conceptualize reproduction, kinship, and carework in ways that expand beyond a deconstruction of the maternal body. The proposed first chapter, entitled "Phantom Wombs: The Specter of Maternity", investigates the haunting presence of motherhood depicted across various literary and artistic works. Through examining absent, neglectful, and even destructive mothers, it explores how maternal absence becomes a powerful narrative force shaping both individual and collective experiences. This chapter will analyze Toni Morrison's Beloved to examine how the legacy of slavery continues to haunt conceptualizations of motherhood. It will also draw from William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying to examine his alternate portrayal of a rejecting mother. References to Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection and Jean-Luc Nancy's concept of being-with will aid the investigation of the "ephemeral absence of self" that informed early 20th century ideas of maternity. Certain works in the dissertation bring up issues of racial melancholy and intergenerational trauma passed through absent maternal figures. Silko’s Ceremony illustrates intergenerational trauma passed through absent maternal figures. Pedro Almodóvar’s film All About My Mother explores becoming a mother amidst remembering one's own childhood abandonment. Terese Marie Mailhot's memoir Heart Berries provides a powerful account of the haunting of not being able to become a mother. Preston Singletary's artwork Raven and the Box of Daylight, featured in an exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian, also depicts mythological maternal figures through bold forms and colors. This section analyzes how Singletary's pieces contribute to conceptualizing maternity and the transformation from darkness to light. Together, these works unpack how maternal phantoms shape understanding of self and community across different eras. The second chapter "Wombs of Iron: The Mechanization of Motherhood" analyzes how maternal roles and experiences of motherhood were transformed during industrialization and the accompanying technology. It explores the ‘mechanization of motherhood’ through examining a range of literature and film from different eras that speak back to the processes at work during this era. Frankenstein, Brave New World and The Awakening will explore anxieties around changing gender norms and technologies of birth. The reading list includes works that inform examinations of motherhood while also complicating notions like "pro-choice." For example, Brave New World reveals how choice itself is constructed, questioning what choice actually means in debates around abortion and eugenics. Aliens also depicts the maternal body as a site of radical political potential through the figure of the Alien who represents an alternative to dominant futurity. The third chapter is tentatively titled "The Holographic Hearth: Virtual Liminality in the Digital Age." examines how digital technologies have led to new conceptualizations and portrayals of motherhood and the "maternal space". It explores how the rise of virtual environments, artificial intelligence, and online connectivity has transformed understandings and performances of maternity. Through analyzing the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence, the television programs WandaVision and Dead Ringers, the chapter considers how AI, virtual reality, and depictions of emerging biotechnologies shape human-machine relationships and caring roles. The show Dead Ringers in particular depicts twin doctors experimenting with innovations in childbirth and fertility, raising questions about the medicalization and commodification of reproduction related to debates in reproductive futurism. Analyzing through the lens of "virtual liminality", the chapter seeks to uncover new meanings of home, parenting, and reproductive freedoms emerging at the intersection of physical and digital realms, with a focus on issues of ethics, control, and what constitutes "natural" vs technologically-mediated motherhood raised by works like Dead Ringers and futurist theories around an accelerated integration of the biological and artificial. The proposed fourth chapter, “Transformative Motherhoods,” analyzes works that feature diverse forms of non-normative motherhood outside traditional frameworks. This chapter examines how LGBTQ+, non-biological, and other alternative models of maternity depicted in texts and media productions such as Raised by Wolves, The Argonauts, and Future Home of the Living God challenge dominant conceptions of parental roles and family structures. Through exploring stories centered on queer mothers in films including Good Manners and alternative family structures as they are mediated across temporal, technological and biological bodyminds, in Conceiving Ada, the chapter argues they expand understanding of maternal identities and responsibilities as lived experiences. The complex space between maternal responsibility, pro-choice, and pro-life rhetoric is focused on through a crip material feminist lens using films such as Serial Mom and Berube’s memoir, Life as We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child. Analyzing these through a lens of "transformative motherhood," the chapter explores how diverse maternal narratives offered in works including School for Good Mothers and Ceremony offer renewed perspectives. It suggests representations of non-traditional mothering depicted in the specified works can create discursive space for more inclusive and justice-oriented understandings of care work, dependence, and who constitutes a "parent." These texts can also open pathways to rewriting narratives that limit the collective imagination and praxis of parenthood. Film & TV & Art (10 selections)
Literature (25 books)
Theory: (25)
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