Contemporary maternal subjectivities on the page and on the screen – Call for Papers for an edited collection

Contemporary maternal subjectivities on the page and on the screen - Call for Papers for an edited collection

News > Call for Papers > Contemporary maternal subjectivities on the page and on the screen – Call for Papers for an edited collection

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We are seeking contributions for an edited volume that explore the complexities of maternal subjectivity in contemporary literature (broadly defined), visual art, digital media, video games, social media, AI as well as in film and on television. We invite interdisciplinary submissions anchored in literary and cultural studies that engage primarily with Anglophone contexts but we also welcome comparative analyses of motherhood in various cultures and backgrounds.

While cultural representations have tended to render the mother as a metaphor, a symbol, a repository of wisdom, or a figure who is only celebrated or reprimanded for her impact on her children, it has only been relatively recently that the mother as a person, as a subject has been at the forefront of art and theory. Concepts such as  Adrienne Rich’s motherhood as experience and institution (1976), Sara Ruddick’s maternal thinking (1989), Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s formulations of queered motherhood (2010), Andrea O’Reilly’s matricentric feminism (2016), Christina Sharpe’s notion of motherhood lived in the wake (2016), indigenous understandings of motherhood within the framework of Two-Eyed Seeing (Wright et al. 2019), Nicole A. Corley’s conceptualization of Black m/otherhood (2022), or Sadie K. Goddard-Durant’s proposal to decolonize Black motherhood (2022) have played a role in re-shaping notions of motherhood and in widening the scope of representation. Recognizing the importance of matricentric representation and theorizing, we are seeking contributions for an edited volume that explore the complexities of maternal subjectivity in contemporary literature (broadly defined), visual art, digital media, video games, social media, AI as well as in film and on television. We invite interdisciplinary submissions anchored in literary and cultural studies that engage primarily with Anglophone contexts but we also welcome comparative analyses of motherhood in various cultures and backgrounds. We invite proposals for scholarly papers addressing questions related (but not limited) to:
  • Post-millennial representations of motherhood and maternal subjectivities
  • Post-COVID perspectives on motherhood
  • Motherhood as/in nationhood
  • Embodiment and motherhood
  • Challenging the representational scheme of monstrous motherhood
  • Defying idealized portrayals and the concept of normative motherhood
  • The role of factors like race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, gender, ability, culture, language, religion, and nationality in shaping maternal subjectivity
  • Maternal subjectivities and autobiographic writing
  • Generational experiences in motherhood
 About the publisher
The collection will be part of HJEAS Books, a series launched by the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (University of Debrecen, Hungary) and published by Sciendo-De Gruyter Brill. The edited collection is to be published in an Open Access e-book format and will be available in Print on Demand (PoD) form, with global indexing/abstracting. No contributor’s fee will be charged.
About the editors
Zsuzsanna Lénárt-Muszka, Ph.D. is an assistant professor at the North American Department of the Institute of English and American Studies, University of Debrecen. The title of her dissertation as well as the topic of her upcoming monograph is Mothers in the Wake of Slavery: The Im/possibility of Motherhood in Post-1980 African American Women’s Prose. Her research on North American representations of embodiment, motherhood, and womanhood has been published in journals such as Short Fiction in Theory and Practice (2022), Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (2023), and Canadian Literature (2023). She has contributed chapters to edited collections such as Critical Insights: The Color Purple (Salem Press, 2022), Jesmyn Ward: New Critical Essays (Edinburgh UP, 2023), Normative Motherhood (Demeter Press, 2023), and Identity, Violence and Resilience in 21st-Century Black British and American Women’s Fiction (Peter Lang, 2024).
Zsófia Orosz-Réti, Ph.D. is an assistant professor at the Department of British Studies of the Institute of English and American Studies, University of Debrecen. Her dissertation focused on the popular culture and its cultural memory of the 1980s in Hungary. Her research has been published in academic journals such as The Journal of Gaming and Virtual Words, Studies in Eastern European Cinema, Studies in European Cinema, Acta Ludologica, The Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, and she has edited special thematic blocks and issues on various aspects of game studies in The Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (2023), Acta Philologica (2024) and Acta Ludologica (2025). Currently, her primary scholarly interest includes cultural memory and popular culture in general, and the problem of subject positions with limited agency in video games – including unheroic ludic narratives of civilians in war, or of faceless Everymen in dystopias. More recently, she works on maternal identities in games and new media.
Submission guidelines
Submit a structured abstract of no more than 300 words outlining the main arguments and theoretical background of the paper, and a brief bio (up to 150 words) containing your name, institutional affiliation, email address, and a brief biography by November 30, 2024. Submissions should be sent to Zsuzsanna Lénárt-Muszka (lenartmuszkazs@arts.unideb.hu) and Zsófia Orosz-Réti (reti.zsofia@arts.unideb.hu).
Notifications of acceptance will be due by 10 December, 2024. Completed papers (5000-7000 words, conforming to MLA in terms of format and citation style) are due by 15 March, 2025. All submissions will undergo a double-blind peer review process. Please note that acceptance will depend on the strength and fit of the final piece. Publication of the volume is expected in 2027.
Works cited
Corley, Nicole A., Britney Pitts, and Amelia Kirby. “Black M/Otherhood: A Content Analysis Exploring How Black Mothers Are Represented in Social Work Literature.” Affilia 37.4 (2022): 545-564.
Goddard-Durant, Sadie K., et al. “A Decolonizing, Intersectional, Black Feminist Approach to Young Black Caribbean-Canadian Mothers’ Resilience.” Journal of Family Studies 29.4 (2023): 1946-1966.
Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. We Can Learn to Mother Ourselves: The Queer Survival of Black Feminism 1968–1996. 2010. Duke U, PhD dissertation.
O’Reilly, Andrea. Matricentric Feminism: Theory, Activism, and Practice. Demeter Press, 2016.
Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood As Experience and Institution. Norton, 1976.
Ruddick, Sara. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. Beacon Press, 1989.
Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke UP, 2016.
Wright, Amy. L., et al. “An Application of Two-Eyed Seeing to Community-Engaged Research with Indigenous Mothers.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 18 (2019): 1609406919866565.