Motherhood and the Global Maternal Body
N/A
Call for Chapters:
Motherhood, Religion, and Transnational Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century:
An Exploration of Identities, Maternal Practices, and Institutional Bodies through the “Global Maternal Body”
Edited Volume
Scope and Rationale
In the early decades of the twenty-first century, motherhood has increasingly emerged as a critical—yet persistently marginalized—site of feminist inquiry. While feminist theory has long examined motherhood as an ideological construct used to regulate women’s bodies and social roles, mothers themselves have often remained peripheral within feminist epistemologies. This edited volume responds to this gap by foregrounding matricentric feminism, which centers mothers as subjects of feminist theory, knowledge production, and political analysis.
The volume invites interdisciplinary contributions that critically examine motherhood as an embodied, relational, and socially situated practice shaped by intersecting structures of power across global contexts. Motherhood is approached not as a universal or homogeneous category, but as a historically situated and unevenly valued site of experience, regulation, and agency.
Theoretical Orientation
Matricentric feminism serves as the central theoretical and methodological framework of this volume. By centering maternal subjectivity and lived experience, this approach enables critical engagement with motherhood without idealizing, dismissing, or reducing it to reproductive function. Within this framework, religion is examined as one significant dimension—among others—that may shape maternal identities, practices, ethical frameworks, and institutional relations.
Religious discourses have often framed motherhood through narratives of care, sacrifice, purity, responsibility, and devotion, while religious institutions have, in some contexts, regulated maternal bodies, reproductive choices, sexuality, and family structures. At the same time, mothers may be positioned as agents of ethical formation, intergenerational transmission of belief, communal continuity, resistance, and transformation. Within this context, particular attention is given to religious conversion, transformation, and reorientation as lived processes that may—though do not necessarily—reshape maternal identity, caregiving practices, ethical commitments, and family life. Examining conversion through a matricentric feminist lens allows for a nuanced understanding of religion as embodied, relational, and negotiated within maternal experience. Throughout, the volume examines these dynamics while centering maternal voices and agency.
Central to the volume is the concept of the global maternal body, understood not as a universal figure, but as a historically situated, socially regulated, and unevenly valued site of embodiment. Maternal bodies are differentially protected, surveilled, sanctified, criminalized, or rendered disposable across cultural, political, and economic contexts. At the same time, they function as sites of care, knowledge production, memory, resistance, and survival.
This volume is explicitly attentive to forms of motherhood that are historically marginalized, pathologized, or rendered unintelligible within dominant social, medical, religious, and political frameworks. It foregrounds racialized, Black, queer, trans, disabled, chronically ill, poor, working-class, aging, non-reproductive, and otherwise stigmatized maternal bodies, examining how norms of “good” and “legitimate” motherhood are produced, enforced, and contested.
Attention is given to mothers whose bodies and caregiving practices are subject to intensified surveillance, medicalization, criminalization, or moral judgment—including sick mothers, mothers with disabilities, trans and gender-expansive mothers, and those navigating motherhood under conditions of violence, precarity, displacement, or institutional constraint. By centering these experiences, the volume challenges universalizing models of motherhood and insists on an intersectional, matricentric feminist analysis of maternal life as shaped by race, sexuality, gender identity, health, class, age, and geopolitical location.
Possible Themes and Areas of Inquiry
Contributions may address, but are not limited to, the following intersecting areas of inquiry (these themes are intended as overlapping and non-exhaustive):
-Matricentric feminism as a theoretical and methodological framework
-The global maternal body: feminist solidarities, care, and networks of care
-Religious mothers: lived religion and everyday maternal practices
-Queer mothers: marginal voices, visibility, and belonging
-Trans mothers and negotiations of legitimacy and social regulation
-Poor and working-class mothers: survival, agency, and politics
-Older, menopausal, and non-reproductive mothers: continuing maternal identity, legitimacy, and resistance to ageist stereotypes
-Academic mothers and the intersection of intellectual labor, care, and politics
-Religious conversion and maternal identity transformation: practices, meanings, and reconfigurations of motherhood
Mothers and narratives of silence, shame, and purity: incest, human trafficking and sexual exploitation
-Mothers experiencing gender violence: matricentric feminist perspectives on vulnerability, resistance, and the maternal body
-Child mothers and early or forced maternity: incest, coercion, and the denial of reproductive agency by religious, cultural, and/or economic frameworks
-Mothers in contexts of war, conflict, displacement, and exile: care, survival, resistance, and everyday negotiation
-Mothers of disappeared children as sites of memory, mourning, and resistance
-Intergenerational transmission of religion through maternal roles
-Maternal agency, resistance, and negotiation within religious communities, including maternal experiences of conversion to Islam
-Cultural representations of marginalized maternal bodies in media
-Comparative and transnational perspectives on motherhood beyond migration
-Models of the reproduction of motherhood: matrophobia, motherline, and socio-maternal transmission
-Good versus bad motherhood: normativity, maternal experience, and maternal subjectivity
-Sister motherhood, co-motherhood, and the global maternal body
-Black motherhood: care, labor, and classed experiences
-The homeplace as a feminist space: maternal power, resistance, agency, and political meaning
-Shared motherwork: fathers, grandparents, and community caregivers
-Beyond biological motherhood: adoptive motherhood, assisted reproductive technologies, and gender-expansive care
-Trans motherhood: legitimacy, maternal identity, and challenges to normative motherhood
-The embodiment of maternal experience: pregnancy, breastfeeding, and matricentric feminist perspectives
-Motherhood as a site of agency rather than oppression: antipatriarchal responses
-The institution of motherhood: normative motherhood, alternative motherhood, and maternal subjectivity
-Motherhood and the politics of neoliberal social reproduction
-Abortion and the cultural politics of empowerment: consent, persuasion, and maternal regret
-Maternal identity without motherhood: infertility, desire, and feminist recognition
-Motherhood without desire: imposed identity and feminist critique
-Intensive motherhood and the illusion of fulfillment: maternal self-sacrifice, exhaustion, and the -limits of maternal devotion
Methodological Approaches
The volume welcomes theoretically grounded and empirically informed contributions, including qualitative research, ethnography, narrative inquiry, discourse or textual analysis, historical approaches, and methodological reflections. Interdisciplinary, comparative, and transnational perspectives are particularly encouraged.
Submission Guidelines
Proposals should be submitted in English and include:
-Title of the proposed chapter
-Abstract (200–300 words)
-4–6 keywords
-Author’s full name, institutional affiliation, and email address
-Short biographical note (100–150 words)
-Full chapters should be 5,000–7,000 words, excluding references, and follow MLA 9 style.
-Submissions must be original and adhere to ethical standards of academic publishing.
Important Dates
Abstract submission deadline: May 1, 2026
Notification of preliminary acceptance: June 1, 2026
Full chapter submission: January 15, 2027
Notification of chapter evaluation results: July 1, 2027
Final revised chapters due: December 1, 2027
Review Process
Chapters will be reviewed by the volume editor and, when appropriate—particularly in cases of specialized subject matter outside the editor’s primary area of expertise—by external reviewers. The review process is designed to ensure scholarly rigor while offering constructive feedback.
Publication Details
The volume is intended for publication with an academic press. Final publication format(s), including digital and/or print options, will be determined in consultation with the publisher. Contributors will receive a copy of the volume according to the publisher’s standard practices.
Contact
For submissions and inquiries, please contact:
Marta Boris Tarré
University of Idaho
Email: martab@uidaho.edu
Subject line: Motherhood and the Global Maternal Body – Chapter Proposal
Marta Boris Tarré