In recent decades, trauma has become a common subject of exploration within a variety of literary genres. A common feature in trauma fiction is the focus placed on traditional family, sometimes as a source of traumatic experience, sometimes as a site of crucial social support during a victim’s healing process. This paper will focus on two novels from the United States and Sweden, Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones and Sara Stridsberg’s The Antarctica of Love, in order to demonstrate two different literary approaches to motherhood in the aftermath of traumatic sexual violence.

Sebold and Stridsberg both approach this subject through a shared fantastic premise: the narrators are girls or women who turn into ghosts after having been raped and murdered by strangers. Sebold’s protagonist is a teenage girl who spends her spectral afterlife violently longing for her mother’s return to the suburban nuclear family which she left after her daughter’s death. Stridsberg’s protagonist is repeatedly drawn back to Earth not only by a wish to be consoled by her distant mother, but also by her fear of having passed on a traumatic family inheritance to her own daughter. Both novels urge us to ask questions about the role of the mother-daughter relationship as a site of interpersonal support after traumatic experiences. Can intergenerational bonds persist after death? What may supportive relationships between mothers and daughters look like in a world plagued by gendered violence?

Background: Medical humanities is an interdisciplinary field of study that explores the intersection of medicine, healthcare, and the humanities. It seeks to understand the human experience of illness, health, and healthcare by drawing on insights from literature, philosophy, history, ethics, art, cultural studies, and other humanities disciplines.

Aim and methods: We aimed to unite different researchers from medicine, psychology, philosophy, and philology for an interdisciplinary approach to mothers' subjective experiences after preterm birth. Methodologically, our study combines empirical and theoretical/cultural/literary research to explore the lived experience of giving birth to and being a mother to a premature baby. This study has three distinct stages. The first stage consists of a prospective longitudinal study, which maps out the psychological and emotional experiences of such mothers and shall be done through medical questionnaires. The second stage comprises repeated (x2) semi-structured interviews where the mothers will describe their experiences of being mothers to preterm babies from their subjective perspective. Finally, the third stage concerns auto-ethnographic research into contemporary literary and filmic representations of preterm motherhood to see whether they correspond to the actual experiences (conceptualised based on the findings of the first two stages).

In conclusion, to our knowledge, it would be the first time combining medical questionnaires and interpretative phenomenological analysis investigating the subjective experiences of mothers of preterm babies from the medical humanities perspective to identify the most common postpartum risks in psychosocial well-being and to provide later help and support.

Child removal is an extreme action caused by the parental inability to take care of the child, abuse and neglect, addictions. This paper focuses on mothers with intellectual disability, whose children were removed. These mothers’ alleged inability to take care of a child contradicts to the image of a “good mother” and deviates from the norms of femininity. The paper uses the motives of the judge (Solomon) and the defendant (Medea), symbolizing mothers who are different and society with its oppressive institutional structure.

The aim of this paper is to explore experiences of mothers with intellectual disabilities whose children were removed with an emphasis on oppressive social, institutional and personal circumstances that led to the loss of their parental rights.

The semi-structural retrospective interview method was chosen for this empirical study. 13 mothers with intellectual disabilities who experienced removal of their children participated in the interviews.

We conclude, that the child protection system acts similarly to Solomon interfering into the decontextualized moment of their life: both judging and having the power to take the baby away. In a society akin to Solomon's era, the vital support lacking amidst the challenging circumstances faced by these mothers is one that acknowledges the unconventional and potentially unsettling portrayal of women with intellectual disabilities, much like the character of Medea. Thus, female-dominated social and health care systems fail to support mothers with intellectual disabilities, and then the male-dominated legal system crushes them by taking away their children, destroying their identity as mothers.

Indian feminist Jasodhara Bagchi asserted “Motherhood without the mother’s selfhood is not complete”. This study furthers the scholarship of matricentric feminist research in India by exploring mothering practices of a cohort of urban Indian mothers and how they are locating their feminist selves,thus challenging traditional mothering practices. There are gendered social structures which are prescriptive and meant to be followed and performed within familial roles to maintain social order of being a mother. However, as noted by Leela Dube, “It is within these limits that women question their situation, express resentment, use manipulative strategies, utilize their skills, turn deprivation and self-denial into sources of power, and attempt to carve out a living space”. A cohort of seven Indian heterosexual mothers of children below the age of ten years were engaged in unstructured interviews to unpack their lived experiences of mothering in today’s age in an urban landscape. Young children are more dependent on their mothers for daily functioning, which increases the amount of time and effort mothers put in to raise them. This dynamic creates a space in which mothers feel conflicted between providing the best nurturing environment for their children while trying to maintain a similar environment for themselves. Through this process of conflict and evolution, emerges a feminist mother. Three themes were identified from their narrations: recognizing one’s feminism and gaining agency; feminism for the future; and gender-neutral parenting. These along with the voices of the respondents are unpacked and discussed in the light of deconstructing patriarchy.