Two recent novels speculate about alternative realities for women as mothers. In When Women were Dragons (2022), Kelly Barnhill imagines an alternate history set in 1950s America where women asserted agency outside of the mothering role by becoming literal dragons and abandoning their families and responsibilities. Women such as sisters and nieces take on the role of mother, but also feel constrained by the responsibility of motherhood that has been thrust upon them, The novel ends hopefully when dragons and women form cooperative communities to care for each other. While Barnhill imagines a kind of maternal utopia, The School for Good Mothers (2022) by Jessamine Chen creates a dystopian future where women are punished for failing to be good mothers. In The School for Good Mothers, women who face losing custody of their children, are given the choice to attend a school to learn to become good mothers who are worthy to earn their children back. Featuring surveillance and robot children, the school is a no-win proposition, but desperation to be reunited with their children propels the mothers to continue in the school. This presentation interrogates anxieties around motherhood in society that these two novels reflect. While Chen explores the consequences of surveillance culture particularly for mothers from marginalized groups, Barnhill looks to the past to imagine an alternative, more hopeful result of second wave feminism, but to become free, women have to literally become something else.These novels reveal twenty-first century family and motherhood concerns by examining “bad” mothers.

The present paper examines the ecocritical capaciousness of the maternal imaginary of Canadian author David Huebert’s short story “Cruelty”. Propped up by the critical leverage of Greg Garrard’s and Catriona Sandilands’ theorizing of ferality as a conceptual slide in the biopolitical calculus of domesticity and wildness, I read the story’s maternal experience of pest invasion as reflective of the ethical contradictions of the female Anthropocene subject caught up in the vicissitudes of raising a child in conditions of ecological disturbance. Inherent in the narrative’s yoking of the mother to the material-affective dialectics of human/nonhuman, pest/exterminator, sanitation/corruption, pollution/purgation, and pleasure/pain is the legacy of heteropatriarchal (and thus anthropocentric) thought, which in arrogating to the mother the cultural value of Nature simultaneously binds her to associations with leaky orifices, bodily fluids, (sexual) filth, and the abject qualities of animal life. This ambiguity magnifies the ethical stakes of pest control in Huebert’s story: the structural homologies which highlight the shared vulnerability of human and animal bodies speak of the verminous side of the human-run global economy, on the one hand, and the feral displacement of the individual subject, on the other. Folded into this double register of motherhood, as Huebert shows us, is our ultimate uncertainty about the boundaries of home, self, and care.

Institutionalised motherhood demands of women a strong sense of maternal 'instinct' more than reason, absence of self more than self-fulfilment, and belonging to others more than self-creation. If a mother doesn't fit the ideal image portrayed by society, she runs the risk of becoming a "monstrous mother", whether metaphorically or, unfortunately, in some cases, in reality. This paper will adopt a double lens in relation to the examination of the figure of the monstrous mother within the French and Francophone context. In the first section, the study will identify and reveal the specificities of the concept of the monstrous mother across media and web texts. For this part of analysis we will use the Sketch Engine and Leipzig Corpora Collection corpora, whose databases contain texts from online sources.

We will try to show:

1. In what context is the monster mother most frequently discussed?

2. What are the culturally coded expectations of motherhood?

3. How do these potential expectations affect the behaviour of monster mothers?

In the second part of the study, we will focus on depictions of the monstrous mother in contemporary literature and film. We will try to tease out the main differences between the media and the artistic representations and demonstrate a culture of maternal blame in the former in contrast to an attempt to understand the deviant mother in the latter.

This study explores how lesbian mothers-to-be discuss in/equalities and their future motherhoods during their transition to first-time-parenthood in Sweden. The couples are situated in a context where gender equality discourse for long have dominated public narratives and political decisions about families. As such, debates and policy-makers have focused on the challenges of motherhood in relation to fatherhood and couple-inequalities as due to gender differences. Against this background, this study asks questions about how lesbian couples navigate their transition to first-time-motherhood. Drawing on interviews with 40 lesbian mothers-to-be, key issues from the gender equality discourse are explored, such as meanings of motherhood and within-couple in/equalities. The findings suggest that gender equality, as a hegemonic discourse and dominant narrative, shape what available interpretations there are for understanding coupledom and in/equalities, also among lesbian mothers-to-be. This discourse further facilitates an expectation that they, as two women, should act as true equals. The findings also suggest that sharing motherhood, which these women are about to do, might come with unexpected challenges from claiming the same role while not experiencing the same thing. These types of challenges are however not easily recognized due to the lack of available frameworks for understanding two-mother-families.