Mommy Angst

This revealing work looks at representations of motherhood from a wide range of pop culture sources to explore larger questions about the image and self-image of mothers in the United States. How has the popularity of Gilmore Girls influenced perspectives on teenage pregnancies? How did the mother-in-law assume such monstrous proportions? Did the Republicans' view of motherhood—and their continual hectoring of Hillary Clinton for putting ambition ahead of family—cost them the 2008 election? Mommy Angst: Motherhood in American Popular Culture considers questions like these as it probes our country's views on mothers, and how those views shape—and are shaped by—the habitually oversimplified portrayals of mothers in pop culture, politics, and the media. Mommy Angst gets at the heart of America's anxious ambivalence toward mothers—whether sanctifying them, vilifying them, or praising the ideal of motherhood while thoroughly undervaluing the complexities of their lives and their contributions to family and society. To highlight the many sides of motherhood, the collection contrasts the lives of a diverse range of real moms with their pop culture representations, including Jewish mothers, Cuban mothers, teenage mothers, mothers with disabilities, working versus stay-at-home moms, and more.

In recent decades, popular culture - from television and film to newspapers, magazines, and best-selling fiction - has focused an enormous amount of attention on mothers. Through feminist, psychoanalytic, sociological, literary, and cultural studies perspectives, the twenty chapters in this book examine an array of current and relevant contemporary topics related to maternal identities such as working, stay-at-home, ambivalent, absent, good, bad, single, teen, elder, celebrity, and lesbian mothers; and issues such as the mommy wars, self-care, pregnancy, abortion, contraception, infanticide, adoption, sex and sexuality, breastfeeding, post-partum depression, fertility, genetics, and reproductive technologies. Contributors from Canada, the United States, Britain, and Australia engage critically and theoretically with stereotypes perpetuated by popular culture media, and chart some of the provocative and liberating ways that we can use and interpret this media to encourage and promote alternative and transformative maternal readings, identities, and practices. Mediating Moms looks at mothers as imaged by and in the media; how mothers mediate or negotiate these images according to their historical, corporeal, and lived personhoods; and how scholars mediate the popular and academic discourses of motherhood as a way of registering, strengthening, and alleviating the tensions between representation and reality. Mediating Moms engages critically with stereotypes perpetuated by popular culture, while mapping some of the provocative and liberating ways that mothers can use the media to transform and reaffirm their identities. Contributors include Jennifer Bell (Alberta), H. Louise Davis (Miami), Irene Gammel (Ryerson), Nicola Goc (Tasmania), Fiona Joy Green (Winnipeg), Latham Hunter (Mohawk), Joanne Ella Johnson, Hosu Kim (Staten Island), Beth O'Connor (Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing), Debra Langan (Wilfrid Laurier), Sally Mennill (British Columbia), Stuart J. Murray (Ryerson), Kathryn Pallister (Red Deer), Maud Perrier (Bristol), Lenora Perry (Texas), Dominique Russell, Jocelyn Stitt (Minnesota), Stephanie Wardrop (Western New England), Imelda Whelehan (Tasmania).

This volume of essays provides a critical foray into the methods used to construct narratives which foreground antiheroines, a trope which has become increasingly popular within literary media, film, and television. Antiheroine characters engage constructions of motherhood, womanhood, femininity, and selfhood as mediated by the structures that socially prescribe boundaries of gender, sex, and sexuality. Within this collection, scholars of literary, cultural, media, and gender studies address the complications of representing agency, autonomy, and self-determination within narrative texts complicated by age, class, race, sexuality, and a spectrum of privilege that reflects the complexities of scripting women on and off screen, within and beyond the page. This collection offers perspectives on the alternate narratives engendered through the motivations, actions, and agendas of the antiheroine, while engaging with the discourses of how such narratives are employed both as potentially feminist interventions and critiques of access, hierarchy, and power.

This anthology explores the recurring trope of the dead or absent mother in Western cultural productions. Across historical periods and genres, this dialogue has been employed to articulate and debate questions of politics and religion, social and cultural change as well as issues of power and authority within the family. Åström seeks to investigate the many functions and meanings of the dialogue by covering extensive material from the 1200s to 2014 including hagiography, romances, folktales, plays, novels, children’s literature and graphic novels, as well as film and television. This is achieved by looking at the discourse both as products of the time and culture that produced the various narratives, and as part of an on-going cultural conversation that spans the centuries, resulting in an innovative text that will be of great interest to all scholars of gender, feminist and media studies.

Although Woody AllenÕs films have received extensive attention from scholars and critics, no book has focused exclusively on Jewishness in his work, particularly that of the late 1990s and beyond. In this anthology, a distinguished group of contributorsÑwhose work is richly contextualized in the fields of literature, philosophy, film, theater, and comedyÑexamine the schlemiel, Allen and women, the Jewish take on the Òmorality of murder,Ó AllenÕs take on Hebrew scripture and Greek tragedy, his stage work, his cinematic treatment of food and dining, and what happens to ÒJew YorkÓ when Woody takes his films out of New York City. Considered together, these essays delineate the intellectual, artistic, and moral development of one of cinemaÕs most durable and controversial directors.

Perhaps because of the wisdom received from our Romantic forbears about the purity of the child, depictions of children as monsters have held a tremendous fascination for film audiences for decades. Numerous social factors have influenced the popularity and longevity of the monster-child trope but its appeal is also rooted in the dual concepts of the child-like (innocent, angelic) and the childish (selfish, mischievous). This collection of fresh essays discusses the representation of monstrous children in popular cinema since the 1950s, with a focus on the relationship between monstrosity and "childness," a term whose implications the contributors explore.

Interdisciplinary and intersectional in emphasis, the Routledge Companion to Motherhood brings together essays on current intellectual themes, issues, and debates, while also creating a foundation for future scholarship and study as the field of Motherhood Studies continues to develop globally. This Routledge Companion is the first extensive collection on the wide-ranging topics, themes, issues, and debates that ground the intellectual work being done on motherhood. Global in scope and including a range of disciplinary perspectives, including anthropology, literature, communication studies, sociology, women’s and gender studies, history, and economics, this volume introduces the foundational topics and ideas in motherhood, delineates the diversity and complexity of mothering, and also stimulates dialogue among scholars and students approaching from divergent backgrounds and intellectual perspectives. This will become a foundational text for academics in Women's and Gender Studies and interdisciplinary researchers interested in this important, complex and rapidly growing topic. Scholars of psychology, sociology or public policy, and activists in both university and workplace settings interested in motherhood and mothering will find it an invaluable guide.