“We Are the Mothers”: Reestablishing an Ethos of Motherhood to Include Incarceration

This article uses Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s theory of rhetorical agency in combination with Lindal Buchanan’s Woman/Mother continuum to identify how incarcerated mothers use their maternal attributes to construct moral identities in the texts they submit to the American Prison Writing Archive. My analysis reveals that incarcerated mothers uphold traditional ideologies of motherhood and frame their incarceration within the context of motherhood to reverse the malign agency of criminal labeling. I argue that, in merging their maternal and criminal subject-positions, incarcerated mothers reestablish an ethos of motherhood that includes incarceration. In doing so, this article offers a new strategy for ethos construction and provides implications for prison pedagogy scholarship.