Mothers Mobility Narrative

<p><b>Shows how US literary representations of mothering across racial ethnic and LGBTQ communities challenge ideological prescriptions about motherhood and maternal love.</b></p><p><i>Mothers Mobility Narrative</i> pairs women-identified writers whose work illuminates a range of maternal practices in the face of egregious structural inequalities and obstacles. By using the critical lens of maternal feminism alongside recent theories of time space and memory Mary Jo Bona reengages the field of motherhood studies to explore linkages between motherhood and movement. Across genres Harriet Jacobs Willa Cather Toni Morrison Audre Lorde Kym Ragusa Carole Maso Cristina García and Rebecca Makkai develop maternal figures who in battling against institutional oppressions in eras of slavocracy colonialism dictatorship and pandemic expose the fundamentally intersectional nature of social categorization and disrupt traditional discourses of the maternal. <i>Mothers Mobility Narrative</i> rethinks maternality across a century and a half of literary expression in the United States compelling readers to embrace more capacious understandings of maternal subjectivity care and kinship.</p>