At a time when any strides that may have been made towards reproductive rights have been thrown into serious question, motherhood—its lived reality, its spectre, and its implications for theory—remains a fraught and undertheorized field. As Adrienne Rich put it in 1976, “we know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than we do about the nature and meaning of motherhood”—and this statement continues to be true nearly fifty years later despite the proliferation of media, both fictional and nonfictional, that takes motherhood as its object. The very definition of “motherhood” continues to be contested even as its boundaries expand and encompass an increasing number of subject positions and relational modes. At the same time, the fact of natality, or our arrival in the world as “newcomers” (Arendt), is often eclipsed, when it is considered at all, by birth scenes that do not adequately account for the non-experiential, non-subjective aspect of being born. Motherhood possesses, it would seem, a kind of representational gravity, pulling into its experiential orbit even that which cannot be experienced and obscuring the aspects of natality that cannot be absorbed into the discourse of maternity. If death gives us a direction for living, then the facticity of birth remains opaque, as natality continues to be conceived as a condition that exceeds the limits of memory. Furthermore, there persists a complex culture of biological reproduction—amalgamating class, race, gender, nationality, and economic status—that remains largely unknown and whose effects remain underdescribed. Motherhood, natality, and biological reproduction each comprise a part of this difficult theoretical nexus.  

This panel seeks to address representations of reproduction, natality, and motherhood in fiction, the visual arts, and other aesthetic forms. What is the relationship between natality and motherhood? What do biological reproduction and the presence of birth mean, and to whom? What critical power do these concepts hold, and in what ways do they need to be critiqued? What does it mean when mothers and mothering are unconventional, antinormative, or radically detached from biology or even subjectivity? What does it mean not only to reproduce but to reproduce the very concept of motherhood? And what discursive and aesthetic forces are involved in this reproduction? We welcome papers that address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

-motherhood as origin/creation

-infancy/childhood/coming-of-age

-orphanhood/motherlessness/adoption

- abortion/miscarriage/unbecoming mothers

-collective/queer/BIPOC/AI/transhuman mothering

-birth and death

-birth-regret/anti-natalism

- eugenics/selective birth/gene editing/reproductive technologies

-motherhood and love/intimacy/violence