New Directions in Motherhood Studies

This article surveys scholarship on motherhood and mothering published over the past decade. Academic scholars and writer-activists have written about mothers and mothering in a diversity of genres and a with broad range of disciplinary and theoretical approaches. Work on motherhood is wide-ranging and fragmented, but taken as a whole, this work simultaneously insists on the particularity and specificity of motherhood while at the same time rejecting any notion of a fixed or essential aspect of maternal experience, desire, or subjectivity. The article argues that academic feminism has marginalized and neglected both mothers as mothers and the study of motherhood more generally. This essay endeavors to bring this literature to the attention of academic feminists and to argue for the necessity of including motherhood in a broader feminist movement.